Bøger udgivet af BROADWAY PLAY PUB INC (NY)

Welcome to Karlovec, a small town that the Soviets had started to build a nuclear plant in, but it was never completed. Now in the post-Soviet era Western firms are desperate to take over and build the plant. They turn their attention to the town's mayor who finds himself courted on all sides. "... a drama of stripping away guilty secrets, of exposing lies and counterfeit identities, of discovering betrayal and of playing games of deceit ... Sutton's play casts a fascinating spell as it focuses on an idealistic mayor of a small city who finds himself courted by a rich refugee who has returned to his native land ... [as the play seizes] ... on a real problem, the fate of a Chernobyl-like nuclear power plant called Temelin." -Hartford Courant "The time is post-Cold War. The place is the small town of Karlovec, neighboring on the Soviet-built, but unfinished nuclear power plant, as Western industries compete for the lucrative contract to reconstruct the plant, they try to win the political support of the town and its mayor, Pavel Marek, who must weigh the safety of his people against the alluring promise of economic prosperity." -Harbor News

The often hilarious, bawdy, and adventuresome story of Celadine, coffeehouse proprietor, writer, and sometime spy, during the reign of Charles II in London. "CELADINE follows the timeless structure of Restoration comedy, with its concealed identity, ribald humor and courtly intrigue. The play has bright potential for regional repeats or perhaps an Off-Broadway run. And if Hollywood were still making those fanciful Technicolor swashbuckling frolics, it would be a dandy entry for a Saturday matinee at the movies." -Variety "The titular leading lady of Charles Evered's CELADINE runs a London coffee house, writes plays, occasionally does a bit of spying, and still looks fabulous well into her forties. Assisting her at the coffee house are Mary, a former hooker, and Jeffrey, a young hunk with a penchant for cross-dressing and for crawling under his boss's skirt. Completing Celadine's entourage ... are Elliot and Rowley, the former a handsome young actor, the latter an ex-lover. If Celadine's young daughter Marie were still alive, the lady would seem to have it made - the very picture of a modern 21st-century woman, right? Not quite. Celadine is in fact a woman of the '70s, the 1670s that is, and if you think that the late 17th century is hardly the setting for a smart, sexy soufflé of a play, think again ... Certain to entertain and short enough not to outstay its welcome, Evered's lively confection will likely send many audience members off to Google the Restoration, Charles II, and Aphra Behn - and that's more than enough to rate applause." -Steven Stanley, stagescenela.com "[A] bright and breezy hit comedy - splendid. Evered has created the type of heroine Hepburn adored playing. This has the spirit of an in-his-prime Neil Simon comedy." -The Star Ledger "CELADINE is simultaneously uproariously funny even bawdy and tragically touching. It has a tinge of the sweep of history and a taste of personal loss and reconciliation." -Home News Tribune

The Left is personified in Richard Nelson's idealistic and intellectual characters, whose fascinating friendships are as fraught as the political history through which they've lived. "You can't watch [LEFT] without thinking about Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and Diana Trilling. Richard Nelson ... hasn't brought the famous, undignified Hellman/McCarthy/Trilling feud directly onstage, but he invokes their noisy ghosts. They resonate. It's uncanny. Imagine I'M NOT RAPPAPORT with Simon Gray's wit and Doris Lessing's brains. We first meet Marianne, a retired college president, and Eddie, who writes essays on pornography for The New York Review of Books, in the Adirondacks. They are waiting for Elinor, an editor at a Manhattan publishing house, to arrive by motorboat and explain her memoir. In her memoir, Elinor savages her oldest friend, Marianne, as typical of a whole class of I'm-all-right-Jack Upper West side intellectuals who betrayed their youthful idealism in the dreary Cold War years. Eddie, an ex-husband as well as an ex-radical, has been deleted, even from Elinor's index. From the beginning of their ménage à trois, Eddie has always been the odd man out. [LEFT] is as much consumed by female friendship as it is by left history. Almost immediately, we flash back fifty years to their first visit to the Adirondacks, fresh from college politics in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, looking for money to start a magazine a lot like Partisan Review. We'll go back and forth the rest of the play, until all six of them, the pure of heart and their revised editions, are in the same room, at the same time, a crowd of regrets. These people talk about Joseph Stalin and the Sierra Club, Amnesty International and Saran Wrap, South Africa and skinny-dipping. What they're really talking about is friendship in history. If the person is political, how much so, at what cost and is there any forgiveness? I felt like a spy, switching sides so often in my sympathies." -John Leonard, New York Magazine

Set during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, the play takes place from March 24 to April 4, 1794, when Maximilien Robespierre was in charge of the Committee of Public Safety that, along with the Revolutionary Tribunal, condemned people to the guillotine. Guillotine victims ranged from those who were seen as too radical to those who were viewed as royalist sympathizers and even simply moderates like Danton. "Robert Auletta's adaptation of DANTON'S DEATH streamlined Büchner's epic romantic drama revolving around the passive, existential figure of Danton, a man who wishes to die in order to escape the horrors of the French Revolution. Auletta eliminated characters and combined scenes, but he did not change the story, omit the philosophical monologues, or minimize emotional elements. Danton's wife's suicide, Camille's wife's descent into insanity, and the contrast between Danton's passivity and his friend Camille's excitability all remain." -Ellen Halperin-Royer, Theatre Topics "It's not really a political but a philosophical play. The issues are timeless." -Robert Wilson "A political radical born the same year as Richard Wagner (1813), Georg Büchner was a student of the French Revolution from boyhood. Trained (like Chekhov) as a doctor, he wrote DANTON'S DEATH at age twenty-two as a way of financing his escape from arrest for revolutionary political activity. Reflecting his disillusionment with political action, the play was finished in only five weeks, but Büchner had to flee to France before it was published. He died in 1837 at age twenty-three years and four months. Unknown until the 1890s, Büchner influenced such modern literary movements as Naturalism, Expressionism, Social Realism, Psychological Irrationalism, Existential Theater, and Theater of the Absurd. The first of his only three plays, DANTON'S DEATH was not performed for some seventy years. But its classic status was instantly established in 1916 when the great Max Reinhardt staged it in Berlin. Orson Welles's Mercury Theater performed it in 1938." -William Albright, The Houston Post

This collection includes three full-length plays: MUMMERS, DANCIN' TO THE CALLIOPE, and SHOOTERS. MUMMERS: Every New Years the Mummers dress up in colorful costumes for the Mummers Parade in Philadelphia, one of the oldest folk traditions in America. MUMMERS is a sympathetic look at their attempts to cope with a changing world. DANCIN' TO THE CALLIOPE: A funny, zany, and strangely touching tale of two performers in a carnival sideshow who plot to assassinate a rural sheriff and then kill themselves. SHOOTERS: Lou and Barry work for the Russian mob as hitmen. The job happens to be the boss's daughter's boyfriend. But when Lou gets sentimental, Arlene and Molly enter the picture, commissioned to take the boys out for their failure to deliver, "I love this man's writing, though he must be quite flummoxed these days. His works, some of which I participated in readings (but sorrowfully not in performances), have done a marvelous job capturing the dark side of the American psyche. No matter how dark, that side always had an essential essence of sweetness to remind us of the America that was - up until 9-11. That sweetness is gone, if it ever existed. Unfortunately Jack will have to pick at many more scabs to keep pace with the new American dark side." -Ed Asner MUMMERS "Mr Gilhooley is ingenious in joining the reality of his engaging characters with the warring strands of American tradition that they represent ... haunting and effective ... the writing is most distinguished." -New York Times "A very American play has found a very American situation in Jack Gilhooley's MUMMERS ... This will be a long-lived, comedy-drama." -Washington Post "... wise, witty and touching." -Variety DANCIN' TO THE CALLIOPE: "This unusual story takes a straight look at twisted lives, and makes you laugh at things you'd never expect. If you never thought murder and suicide could be funny, then you haven't seen DANCIN' TO CALLIOPE." -Southern Theater "The bizarre work is (also) enormously entertaining ... Gilhooley has a keen ear for the rhythms of language and delightfully macabre sense of irony. His characters are eccentric, but they never cross the line into caricature, largely, one suspects because he truly likes and understands these people." -The Oxford Eagle SHOOTERS "Sometimes the old jokes are the best ones; and the adage is certainly true of Jack Gilhooley's SHOOTERS. He takes the simple premise of the absurdly unlikely (actually he takes several such premises), and shoves them together to make a wonderfully funny and black melange ... The denouement is as funny as it's blatantly sexist, and the whole thing has an insane logic to it that almost makes you question any and all moral standard." -Emer O'Kelly, Sunday Independent "... it is highly successful: pitched somewhere between the louche action of The Sopranos and Tarantino, the fast-paced existential wisecracking of GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS and Woody Allen's cerebral slapstick goofery." -Nadine McBay, Metro (Ireland) "The frothiest of amusing nonsense, spiced up with witty dialogue that continually evokes laughter." -Gerry Colgan, Irish Times

A black comedic look at the parents in Peter Pan. It is set in the present, in an upscale townhouse. Mrs Darling is a socialite and George Darling is a white collar criminal with the U S Attorney's Office closing in. George has decided that he must escape to Switzerland, but his wife refuses to believe that his problems are real. She goes off to receive an award for her work with "brownish" children. George then confides in Nana, his dog and drinking companion, his disappointment in the devolution of his marriage. Upon Mrs Darling's return, they notice that their children, Wendy Peter, and Michael to are missing - it takes them awhile, though, as they only speak to their children through the intercom. The Darlings proceeded to try to retrieve their children, each in his own way. In doing so, they explore their commitment to parenthood and to each other. "Haar fires up a hip satire and lets fly with scores of lines that hit the mark. It took fairy dust to get the children off the ground in J M Barrie's Peter Pan - In THE DARLINGS, Haar sprinkles on black comedy to achieve levitation." -Larry Parnass, Daily Hampshire Gazette "Susan Eve Haar takes the point of view of the parents of the lost children - with a distinctly modern twist. Haar's play is part literary joke, part social satire, and part sketch comedy. The satirical target is the lifestyles of the rich and narcissistic. These Darlings are parodies of a certain class of all-too-easily recognizable Americans - materialistic, solipsistic, self-satisfied but vaguely dissatisfied with the lack of human connection in their lives." -Chris Rohmann, W F C R (National Public Radio)

Jonathan Reynolds whips up an entire meal onstage while spinning funny and touching anecdotes about his parents, his jet-setting uncle, and his famous movie star cousin. The play explores everything from the role of food at the family dinner table to the eternal connection between food and seduction - a piquant mélange of performance, cookery and storytelling that can literally be described as "mouthwatering." "A spectacular, delicious, and perfect experience. DINNER WITH DEMONS is the best thing I have seen all year, and it is late in December. It was perfect. I want to get a pair of tickets for my mother-in-law. It was a perfect evening of theater. It was perfectly performed, the set was gorgeous, everything about it was magical." -Mario Batali "The recipe for a cooking show seems to be personal reminiscences induced by cooking, and philosophy induced by autobiography. So we have Jonathan Reynolds, playwright and culinary columnist, combining his two skills into DINNER WITH DEMONS, a dazzling display of cookery with polished palaver that is mostly witty or, at the very least, cute. For me, as a kitchen-illiterate, the array of fancy dishes dexterously prepared is breathtaking, and the reminiscing no less savory: dusted with the surreal, spiced with the apocryphal, but crisp or bittersweet or mellow to match the food it garnishes. The main characters are a domineering and resented mother, nicknamed the Warden; a divorced, remote, superrich, Don Juan-esque father; and dapper, civilized, always helpful Uncle Bus. Also a rogue's gallery of Mother's satanic associates, and Bus's angelically irresistible daughter, Lee Remick: 'I fell in love with her the way most people who met her did - at first sight, passionately, and like a sheepdog.' This when Jonathan was three, and Lee nine. The reason for the show's title is that 'if you can't exorcise your demons, you might as well have 'em over for dinner.' Some of these demons are long dead, some of them malevolent, but all coming to the scrumptious and memorious meal Jonathan is cooking up as he talks smoothly, manipulates food like a prestidigitator, and exudes the Reynolds charm." -John Simon, New York Magazine

It's Christmas Eve: a Desert Storm veteran with a herniated disk and a 19-year-old runaway heroin addict share the holiday in a filthy, rundown squat on New York's Canal Street. This unusual love story is grimly compelling, mixing gritty honesty with remarkable generosity and compassion, striking a delicate balance between the sweet and difficult moments in human interaction. "... a terrifically impressive British debut for new U S playwright Adam Rapp. Froggy and Baylis are two wrecked drifters in a New York squat ... BLACKBIRD could, in the hands of a lesser dramatist, be a crude mix of in-your-face grunge and sentimentality ... actually, the squalor here is both appalling and cryingly funny and Rapp has a brilliant ear for talk." -The Independent "There is a strange tenderness in Rapp's writing that marks him out as one to watch. Rapp has genuine Gorky-esque talent and loves his characters as all-consumingly as they do each other." -The Guardian