Bøger udgivet af BROADWAY PLAY PUB INC (NY)

"Nelson's brief play takes place in a tiny Italian village after the Allied victory in World War II. This village is the birthplace of Pinocchio, the puppet who became a real boy--a fact advertised on a huge billboard decorated with the toy boy's famous smiling face. But the billboard is dilapidated and defaced now; and the pretty town we remember from the opening frames of Walt Disney's movie has become a cesspool of corruption and poverty. Geppetto has been knocked off by black marketeers; Jiminy Cricket is squashed by a bored townsperson before our eyes; theft, abortion, and murder are common occurrences. Pinocchio, now an all-too-human grown-up U S O entertainer (like so many one-time movie stars), arrives at his birthplace with pockets full of U S dollars and cigarettes and dreams about America, where anyone can become a millionaire. Once easy prey for wicked foxes and donkey-boys, Pinocchio is still a gullible naïf, and he is soon easily victimized by various villagers. But underneath his easygoing exterior, he's also a dark and frightening figure capable, it is implied, of cruel violence. The script's peak is a long monologue in which Pinocchio tells a village girl about the American dream: becoming a millionaire. All you need is to be ruthless, dishonest, and hardworking. Pinocchio's lecture includes tips on working the night shift (so you can sleep when no one's looking), loan-sharking, cutthroat business practices, secret takeovers, and insurance fraud. This information is delivered with good-natured casualness as Pinocchio sweeps a barroom floor to pay off his debt--except, we notice, he doesn't really do any work, but spends all his time spinning his vision of success American-style...a study in ironic contrast between the surface brightness of Pinocchio's image and the underlying darkness of his reality." Albert Williams, Chicago Reader

From the author of BEIRUT, "a ROMEO AND JULIET of the boroughs", the story of a white, working-class family that resonates to this day. "Home comes the sailor, home from the sea, which in Alan Bowne's ABLE-BODIED SEAMAN means a hard-drinking lout of a swabby named Roy, showing up unannounced one summer morning at his walk-up in Corona, Queens, and shouting abuse at anyone within earshot. Roy is the kind of guy who may put on a dirty shirt for a visiting lawyer, but he won't go so far as to button it. He starts his day drinking Scotch, and sees no reason to switch to anything else, like food. His idea of conversation is to yell at Rita, his neighbor and sometime lover, or Manfred, a pet-shop owner and his best friend on land. But it is Roy's sixteen-year-old daughter, Fay, who gets the brunt of his rage. During Roy's latest six-month trip to sea, Fay has started an affair with a local loser named Bogart, whose ambition in life is to become a car thief. But Roy has a plan to put everything right and regain his daughter's alienated affection." Wilborn Hampton, The New York Times

This collection includes two one-act plays: DARLENE and THE GUEST LECTURER. In DARLENE a mysterious woman puts a strain on a suburban couple's marriage. In THE GUEST LECTURER, Mona runs a financially strapped regional theatre and is willing to take "diabolical steps" to keep the venue going. "Wild. Weird. Wacky. And rather wonderful. That's DARLENE & THE GUEST LECTURER. A R Gurney's new pair of one-acters. For the past fifteen years, Gurney has been a strong presence in the American theater. He's incisively exposed the feeling lurking beneath the stolid WASP exterior in such plays as THE DINING ROOM and THE COCKTAIL HOUR. He's shown he can write tenderly, too, in LOVE LETTERS, which details a friendship from childhood to death. He also demonstrated that he could be Neil Simon-funny in SYLVIA, in which a dog comes between a man and wife. Here, though, Gurney has gone out on a comic and dramatic limb--but one from which an adventurous theatergoer can enjoy the view. DARLENE takes place in the suburban home of Angela and Jim, who are mulling over a letter that was stuck under their car's windshield wiper. Jim is shocked by the explicit language and sexual innuendo, but Angela is titillated. She eventually admits that she wishes the letter had come from him. The extent of Jim's horniness, though, can be found in his horn-rimmed glasses. The play is a more civilized WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, mixed with a dash of Pinter's THE LOVER in which a husband and wife can only have sex if they pretend they're other people. But this view of two-empty-nesters who must admit to an empty marriage is as poignant as it is atypical. THE GUEST LECTURER, though, is where Gurney really lets his imagination soar. A regional theater that once had the resources to pay two dozen actors in YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU now finds that even the two-character THE GIN GAME is beyond its means. So it goes back to the bare bones that theater once was: a singular speaker, Hartley, who will lecture on drama. ...a nifty Twilight Zone-like subplot." Peter Filichia, The Star-Ledger

In this delightful comedy about the French aristocracy, told with Molière's signature wit, the atmosphere is frivolous, the morals are loose, the egos are larger than life and everyone is looking for love. Constance Congdon's verse version of this intelligent satire is both provocative and funny. "Love is all bad sonnets, big fluffy beds and silly preening in the first half of THE MISANTHROPE... Then the gloves come off...and the characters are fighting for their lives. Molière's 1666 comedy about yearning for truth and love in a world of self-serving hypocrites never falls out of fashion... The play is recast here in a tonic new verse version by Constance Congdon... This is a world...where words do all the damage. Playwright Congdon (TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS) has done an exemplary job of making that language count. Her rhymes are not as elegant as those in Richard Wilbur's standard verse translation, and that's the point. There's a lean angularity in her lines, a flashing sense of purpose." Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle

A mock 1930s farce in which hilarity reigns supreme. "...if you can believe that a play can be part ROOM SERVICE, part Das Capital and part His Girl Friday, you've got the premise of the wildly funny AN AMERICAN COMEDY. The play is such an accurate pastiche of the time, that some audiences have taken it for a genuine comedy written in the thirties. There's so many doors slammed, fires put out, trunks shut, typewriters ruined, disrobings, and darts thrown that at times you think you've wandered into a lost Marx Brothers comedy..." Diane Wright, The Herald

"An evening of considerable heat and no little roughshod beauty. The work, poetic in concept and symbolism, is set in the back yard of a Puerto Rican enclave in Patchogue, L I, but also in the recent mystic past of blood rivalries and macho Montague/Capulet feuds..." Jerry Tallmer, New York Post "José Rivera's provocative, intriguing THE PROMISE... But what's most impressive about THE PROMISE is its brazen insistence that theater can dare to be great in the old-fashioned meaning of the word. This play makes no apologies for the theater, never tries to imitate film or television conventions. It restores the stage to its transformative, religious, spiritual origins. It believes in the theater as the one, true sanctuary for our communal dreams, our social nightmares, our superstitious secrets. It keeps theater's promise to raise forbidden issues and explore taboo topics... THE PROMISE makes a vow in the first scene--to offer an exotic, lush weave of the surreal and the real--which it never betrays." Richard Stayton, Los Angeles Herald Examiner "José Rivera is out of the kitchen sink and into magical realism--that's the term the playwright uses to describe THE PROMISE, a modern-day tale of love, death--and love beyond it... THE PROMISE is about maturation, growth, about leaving superstition behind. It's also very concerned with the cultural genocide that's happening in Puerto Rico... They learn English in school, and the indigenous folklore is not taught..." Janice Arkatov, Los Angeles Times

"Wonderful...HUNGRY, a work in which nothing much happens beyond some contemplative pre-dinner chatter, may well be the most resonantly topical and emotionally engaging play of this election year." Ben Brantley, New York Times "[HUNGRY's] thousand acts of extreme daily realism, from chopping vegetables to the constant dance of interpersonal negotiation, amount to a kind of human politics, dramatizing, as many more 'dramatic' plays cannot, the historic conflict and consolations of living in our country right now." Jesse Green, New York Magazine "[Nelson] may just be quietly building a masterwork." Linda Winer, Newsday "If you want to understand the forces driving the current presidential election, pay close attention to this play." The Daily Beast "Richard Nelson's quietly incandescent play HUNGRY, a play that feels as fresh as if it was written this morning..." Jeremy Gerard, Deadline/Hollywood "...delivers the sort of intimacy rarely encountered on the stage." Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter

Liana and Marcus have a marriage others envy. Doré has grown accustomed to an isolated existence in her modest flat. After a surprise reunion on Marcus's 40th birthday, their worlds are shattered by an unexpected turn of events. NIGHT IS A ROOM is a searing exploration of love's power to both ruin and remake our lives. "In NIGHT IS A ROOM, Naomi Wallace's strange, surprising, often funny finish to her three-play residency at Signature Theater... ...about halfway through the play, Ms Wallace tosses a small bomb into her narrative, the audience, too, will be stumbling to find its footing. To say what causes the jolt would be to ruin one of the more audacious jaw-droppers in recent memory, so I won't, but it was fascinating to hear a crowd move from confused to startled to uncomfortable, yet game and curious. As the lights went up at intermission, I heard someone murmur, `What do you do after that?'..." Laura Collins-Hughes, The New York Times

"... this poignant new play is a welcome reminder of A R Gurney's gliding dialogue and structural elegance, as well as the troubled, rueful heart that informs all his work." Ben Brantley, The New York Times "A play that does everything right. The new drama by A R Gurney looks at who Americans were in the mid-1950s-a few Americans, anyway-and how they behaved out in those vast stretches of the world over which they had sway, and what their songs and movies and slang expressions and values were. The story centers on four U S Navy people (one a Navy wife) stationed at a base in Japan in 1954 and 1955...This subtle, tender play is, I think, Gurney's best work. It's John Cheever-meets-James Michener and it's a critical elegy for a long-vanished American view of life." Donald Lyons, New York Post "It is no coincidence that the movie playing at the overseas Officer's Club in A R Gurney's new play FAR EAST, is From Here to Eternity: the 1953 Pearl Harbor drama starring Burt Lancaster as a rugged Army sergeant who has a torrid affair with the restless wife of his commander ... [A] deliciously wry play ..." Amy Gamerman, The Wall Street Journal