Plays

Beatrice Manely has selected 80 scenes from various Dickens classics, providing as well, background information, a discussion of the character's emotional temperament, and a short summary of events that lead into the selected scene. This book for the first time allows actors to play Dickens in the unmatchable original. It is a useful guide for the classroom as well as for the actor training to capture the magic of Dickens, whether in an audition, on the movie screen, or on the stage.

Harpagon, the most desperate, scheming miser in literature, starves his servants, declines to pay them, cheats his own children if he can save (or make) a few coins, and when his hoard of gold disappears, insanely accuses himself of being the thief. Dandin, in this rousing classic, not previously available in English for sixty years, is a man in a plight that everybody but him will find entertaining.

In one of Molire's most popular plays, Scapin, that monarch of con men, puts his store of ingenuity to work, getting two lovesick young men married to the girls they pine for and, along the way, taking revenge on their grasping old fathers. Closed down after its first, highly successful run because of opposition from powerful enemies of the playwright, Don Juan was performed in a bowdlerized version for almost two hundred years, until actors, directors and critics restored the original text, recognizing it as the most ambitious and mightiest of Molire's prose plays. Bermel's translations of the scripts as presented here have received rave reviews.

In The Doctor in Spite of Himself, Moliere's scalpel-sharp satire of the medical profession, Sganarelle's wife spreads the word the he is secretly a brilliant doctor who won't reveal his skills unless he is unmercifully punished. The Bourgeois Gentleman, Moliere's classic treatment of snobbery, presents Monsieur Jordain's obsessive desire to move up out of the ranks of the middle class and associate with the gentry.

The complete screenplay and credits with dozens of photos from the 1998 film. A carnival! A wonderland! A weekend with nine Friday nights! Terry Gilliam's lavish dreams are beyond those of mere mortals. - Harlan Ellison

Adventures, written by Rudolph Erich Raspe in 1785, became an instant best-seller, and was hailed as a comic sensation in the satirical spirit of Gulliver's Travels and Tom Jones. Terry Gilliam has now resurrected the Baron and his comrades in entirely new adventures.

Charles Marowitz casts a critical eye upon the highpoints of the last theatrical decade, in preparation for a new millennium. In a series of reviews, think-pieces, essays and commentaries culled from publications as varied as The London Times and Theatre Week magazine, Marowitz examines the work of such major playwrights as Mamet, Stoppard, Shepard, Neil Simon, Beckett, Gurney, Pinter, Kushner, Baitz, Shanley, Williams and McNalley. Marowitz dramatically captures the anger, anxiety, spectacle, and questionable correctness that characterized the past decade.

Finally, a monologue book for actors with a malicious sense of humor - and a ruthless sense of joie de vivre! This galling collection contains scenes drawn from the masters of French humor - Georges Feydeau, Fernand Raynaud, et al. - written directly for the popular French farce theatre world, as well as from works intended primarily for the printed page.

If there ever has been a groundbreaking edition that likewise returns the reader to the original Shakespeare text, it will be the Applause Folio Texts. If there has ever been an accessible version of the Folio, it is this edition, set for the first time in modern fonts. The Folio is the source of all other editions. The Folio text forces us to re-examine the assumptions and prejudices which have encumbered over four hundred years of scholarship and performance. Notes refer the reader to subsequent editorial interventions, and offer the reader a multiplicity of interpretations. Notes also advise the reader on variations between Folios and Quartos. The heavy mascara of four centuries of Shakespearean glossing has by now glossed over the original countenance of Shakespeare's work. Never has there been a Folio available in modern reading fonts. While other complete Folio editions continue to trade simply on the facsimile appearance of the Elizabethan look, none of them is easily and practically utilized in general Shakespeare studies or performances.