O'Neill - Complete Plays, 1932-1943 by Eugene O'Neill; Travis Bogard (Editor)

$25.00 NZD

Category: Drama | Series: Library of America Eugene o'Neill Edition Ser. | Reading Level: very good

The third and final volume of the first complete collection of Eugene O'Neill's dramatic writings (available exclusively from The Library of America) contains eight plays written between 1932 and 1943, when illness forced him to stop writing. They represent the crowning achievements of his career. O'Nei ll described Ah, Wilderness as "the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been." Set in the summer of 1906, it affectionately depicts the warm, close family of sixteen-year-old Richard Miller and the innocence with which he faces the trials of first love, strong drink, and sexual temptation. John Loving, hero of Days Without End, is split by his lack of faith into two selves: John and his Mephistophelian double Loving, who wears John's death mask and plots his destruction. Burdened by guilt but desperately wanting to love, John struggles with Loving's nihilistic hatred in what O'Neill termed his "modern miracle play." In A Touch of the Poet, Irish tavern-keeper Con Melody is drawn by his proud past as a Byronic cavalry hero of the Napoleonic Wars toward a fatal confrontation with his wealthy Yankee neighbors, the Harfords. Throughout More Stately Mansions, the idealistic yet cunning Simon Harford, his wife, Sara Melody Harford, and his mother, Deborah, continually shift roles and alliances as they engage in an eerie psychological and sexual battle for possession of each other and their own maddeningly elusive dreams. This volume presents the never-before-published complete text of the revised typescript for this unfinished play. The derelict inhabitants of Harry Hope's saloon in The Iceman Cometh find solace in their comradeship until their drifting calm is destroyed by the visiting salesman Theodore Hickey, who insists that they abandon all "pipe dreams" and face the truth about their lives. O'Neill carefully orchestrates the voices of over a dozen characters to form a chorus of overwhelming despair and surprising compassion. Hughie is a one-act dialogue between a reminiscing gambler and a weary hotel night clerk about the promise and loneliness of city life. Long Day's Journey into Night unsparingly dissects the pain, rage, guilt, and love that drive a wounded family apart and bind it together. In their summer home the four Tyrones--James, a proud actor haunted by poverty, his devout, morphine-addicted wife, Mary, and their sons, Jamie, a cynical drunkard, and Edmund, an aspiring poet--slowly unveil the truth about their lives until they can no longer hope either to save or to escape one another. Published and produced posthumously, it won O'Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize. In its elegiac coda, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jamie Tyrone seeks the peace that has long eluded him in the arms of sharp-tongued Josie Hogan. The volume concludes with "Tomorrow" (1917), O'Neill's only published short story. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. ...Show more

O'Neill - Complete Plays, 1920-1931 by Eugene O'Neill; Travis Bogard (Editor)

$25.00 NZD

Category: Drama | Series: Library of America Eugene o'Neill Edition Ser. | Reading Level: very good

The Library of America's collection of Eugene O'Neill's plays "displays O'Neill more thoroughly than any playhouse ever could," according to Time magazine. This volume, the second of three, contains thirteen plays written between 1920 and 1931, years in which O'Neill achieved his greatest popularity whi le experimenting with a wide variety of subjects and styles. In Diff'rent, The First Man, and Welded, egotistical characters have their illusions about love shaken by the force of other people's desires. All God's Chillun Got Wings depicts the web of racial hatreds and spiritual longings that surround the marriage of a black man and a white woman. The Fountain tells of Ponce de Leon's search for the fountain of youth. Marco Millions satirizes American materialism by portraying Marco Polo as a hustling businessman blind to the riches of Eastern culture. Lazarus Laughed shows its Biblical hero preaching love, laughter, and the defeat of death. The stoker Yank in The Hairy Ape, the architect Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown, and the minister's son Reuben Light in Dynamo all try to find a place for themselves in an increasingly soulless and mechanistic world. Yank believes that he "belongs" in his stokehold until a terrified heiress calls him a "filthy beast." His rage turns to despair as he encounters a brutally indifferent society onshore. The Great God Brown uses masks to depict the divided souls of its hero, his wife, and his alter ego, the successful businessman William Brown. Betrayed by his mother, Reuben Light forsakes the God of his father for the new electrical god of the dynamo but finds no escape from the sexual conflicts that O'Neill characteristically intertwines with his hero's religious doubts. Strange Interlude follows its heroine Nina Leeds through nine acts and twenty-five years of passionate and painful involvement with three men. Inspired by contemporary psychology, the novels of James Joyce, and the soliloquies of the Elizabethan theater, O'Neill uses spoken asides to reveal the shifting flow of his character's inner thoughts. His most commercially successful play, it won him his third Pulitzer Prize. Ephraim Cabot, the patriarchal farmer in Desire Under the Elms, believes in a God as hard as the stony ground he works. He takes as his third wife sensual Abbie Putnam, who covets both his land and his resentful son Eben, unleashing passions that move with stark inexorability toward their fulfillment. In Mourning Becomes Electra, murderous lusts and hatreds wreak havoc upon the proud Mannon family, leaving the survivors pursued not by the avenging Furies of Greek myth but by their own scourging consciences. Searching desperately for peace, they repeatedly confront the temptation to choose oblivion that will haunt many of O'Neill's last plays. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. ...Show more

Doctor Faustus and Other Plays - Doctor Faustus, A- and B-Texts; The Jew of Malta; Edward II by Christopher Marlowe; David M. Bevington (Editor); Eric Rasmussen (Editor)

$12.00 NZD

Category: Drama | Series: The\World's Classics Ser. | Reading Level: very good

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), a man of extreme passions and a playwright of immense talent, is the most important of Shakespeare's contemporaries. This edition offers his five major plays, which show the radicalism and vitality of his writing in the few years before his violent death. Tamburlaine Par t One and Part Two deal with the rise to world prominence of the great Scythian shepherd-robber; The Jew of Malta is a drama of villainy and revenge; Edward II was to influence Shakespeare's Richard II. Doctor Faustus, perhaps the first drama taken from the medieval legend of a man who sells his soul to the devil, is here in both its A- and its B- text, showing the enormous and fascinating differences between the two. Under the General Editorship of Dr. Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is a scholarly introduction and detailed annotation. ...Show more

Four Revenge Tragedies by Katharine E. Maus (Editor)

$12.00 NZD

Category: Drama | Series: The\World's Classics Ser. | Reading Level: very good

The Revenge Tragedy flourished in Britain during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The classic ingredients of the genre are a quest for vengeance, mad scenes, a play within a play, and carnage. Each of the four plays here subverts the genre, and deals with fundamental moral questions a bout justice and the individual, while registering the strains of life in an increasingly fragile social hierarchy. This edition includes Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, the anonymous The Revenger's Tragedy (variously ascribed to Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Middleton), The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois by George Chapman, and Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy. ...Show more

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

$6.00 NZD

Category: Drama | Reading Level: good

Beckett's first stage play portrays two tramps, trapped in an endless waiting for the arrival of a mysterious personage named Godot, while disputing the appointed place and hour of his coming. They amuse themselves with various bouts of repartee and word-play.

Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem by Henrik Ibsen

$12.00 NZD

Category: Drama | Reading Level: very good

This high-spirited poetical fantasy, based on Norwegian folklore, is the story of an irresponsible, lovable hero. After its publication, Ibsen abandoned the verse form for more realistic prose plays.

Two Plays by James Purdy

$55.00 NZD

Category: Drama | Reading Level: very good

The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays by Oscar Wilde

$10.00 NZD

Category: Drama | Series: Oxford World's Classics | Reading Level: good

Oscar Wilde was already one of the best known literary figures in Britain when he was persuaded to turn his extraordinary talents to the theatre. Between 1891 and 1895 he produced a sequence of distinctive plays which spearheaded the dramatic renaissance of the 1890s and retain their power today. The so cial comedies, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband, offer a moving as well as witty dissection of society and its morals, with a sharp focus on sexual politics. By contrast, the experimental, symbolist Salome, written originally in French, was banned for public performance by the English censor. His final dramatic triumph was his 'trivial' comedy for serious people, The Importance of Being Earnest' arguably the greatest farcical comedy in English. Under the General Editorship of Dr Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is a scholarly introduction and detailed annotation. ...Show more

The Complete Oxford Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

$55.00 NZD

Category: Shakespeare | Reading Level: very good

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. The Alexander Text by William Shakespeare

$45.00 NZD

Category: Shakespeare | Reading Level: very good

The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot by T. S. Eliot

$16.00 NZD

Category: Drama | Reading Level: very good

Plays and Stories by Anton Tchekov (Chekov)

$8.00 NZD

Category: Drama | Reading Level: good