In 2001, Victory Gardens Theater received the Tony Award for Regional Theatre and was hailed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the country's most important playwrights' theaters. This recognition helped the theater take its rightful place alongside Chicago's world-class local theaters. Nearly 250 plays have been produced at Victory Gardens since it was founded in 1974. More than half of these plays have been world premieres, many of which have gone on to national success. This theater's commitment to producing primarily new plays, most by Chicago authors, makes it a unique and exciting inst... View More...
"Don't use your conscious past. Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don't want you to be stuck with your own life. It's too little." "You must get beneath the words before you can say them. The text must be in you. It is your job to fill, not to empty the words. They can only be used if they come out of what you need to say." --Stella Adler From one the most celebrated and influential acting teachers of her time, of all time, whose generations of students include Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, Eva Marie Saint, Diana Ross, Robert De Niro, Warren B... View More...
"Twelve times a week," answered Uta Hagen, when asked how often she'd like to play Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like her, audiences and critics alike could not get enough of Edward Albee's masterful play. A dark comedy, it portrays husband and wife George and Martha in a searing night of dangerous fun and games. By the evening's end, a stunning, almost unbearable revelation provides a climax that has shocked audiences for years. With the play's razor-sharp dialogue and the stripping away of social pretense, Newsweek rightly foresaw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as "a brilliantly... View More...
New English versions of Lysistrata, The Frogs, The Birds, and Ladies' Day. Thanks to Dudley Fitts...we can appreciate Aristophanes' vigor, his robust style, his scorching wit, his earthy humor, his devotion to honesty and his poetic imagination (Brooks Atkinson, New York Times). Index.
Proof is the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.One of the most acclaimed plays of the 1999-2000 season, Proof is a work that explores the unknowability of love as much as it does the mysteries of science. It focuses on Catherine, a young woman who has spent years caring for her father, Robert, a brilliant mathematician in his youth who was later unable to function without her help. His death has brought into her midst both her sister, Claire, who wants to take Catherine back to New York with her, and Hal, a former student of Catherine's father who hopes to find some hint of Robert's ... View More...
Ayckbourn's 52nd full-length play is a tragicomedy in which people on all three levels of a house have fantasies and deep-seated misconceptions about each other and themselves. View More...
A scathing comedy of social striving in the suburbs, Absurd Person Singular follows the fortunes of three couples who turn up in each other's kitchens on three successive Christmases, to hilarious and devastating effect. In Absent Friends, Diana and Paul host a tea party for Colin, recently returned to England after the tragic drowning of his fianc"e. But Colin proves impervious to their awkward attempts to console him as he unwittingly touches every raw nerve in the troubled lives of his old friends. The action of Bedroom Farce unfolds simultaneously--and uproariously--in the onstage bedrooms... View More...
A scathing comedy of social striving in the suburbs, Absurd Person Singular follows the fortunes of three couples who turn up in each other's kitchens on three successive Christmases, to hilarious and devastating effect. In Absent Friends, Diana and Paul host a tea party for Colin, recently returned to England after the tragic drowning of his fianc"e. But Colin proves impervious to their awkward attempts to console him as he unwittingly touches every raw nerve in the troubled lives of his old friends. The action of Bedroom Farce unfolds simultaneously--and uproariously--in the onstage bedrooms... View More...
Queen Elizabeth II is dead. After a lifetime of waiting, her son Charles ascends the throne with Camilla by his side. As William, Kate, and Harry look on, he prepares for the future of power that lies before him. But how to rule? Winner of the 2015 Olivier Award for Best New Play, King Charles III is the "fresh, thrilling and fearlessly comic" (Entertainment Weekly) drama of political intrigue by Mike Bartlett, with sensational runs in London's West End and on Broadway. This controversial "future history play" explores the people underneath the crowns, the unwritten rules of Britain's democrac... View More...
The English National Opera Guides were originally conceived in partnership with the English National Opera and edited by Nicholas John, the ENO's dramaturg, who died tragically in an accident in the Alps. Most of the guides are devoted to a single opera, which is described in detail--with many articles that cover its history and information about the composer and his times. The complete libretto is included in both the original language and in a modern singing translation--except where the opera was written in English. Each has a thematic guide to the most important musical themes in musical n... View More...
'The most Pirandellish thing that ever existed' or else 'a wild farrago of reasonless absurdity': James Agate was unable to decide. But 'The Knight of The Burning Pestle' is both. It is a carnival celebration of London life and London theatre in which Francis Beaumont's comic genius is given free rein. A grocer, his wife and their two apprentices attending the theatre in holiday mood interrupt and finally replace a fatuous love comedy with their own heart's desire: exotic spectacle and sound English sentiment. This edition presents an accurate modern-spelling text, the first since 1908 to offe... View More...
Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature n 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death. View More...
Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature n 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death. View More...
