Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
by Edward Albee
from NAL Trade
"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, neither audiences nor critics could 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 original work of art-an excoriating theatrical experience, surging with shocks of recognition and dramatic fire [that] will be igniting Broadway for some time to come."
The American Dream and Zoo Story
by Edward Albee
from Plume
The Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett: Volume III of The Grove Centenary Editions (Works of Samuel Beckett the Grove Centenary Editions)
by Samuel Beckett
from Grove Press
"I am always deeply puzzled when people say of Beckett, 'Oh, he's so difficult!'–or avant garde, or complex, or . . . ambiguous. It is the profoundest nonsense, for Beckett is perhaps the most naturalistic playwright I know of, as well as the clearest and least obscure. The 'obscurity' resides in the assumption of obscurity. I know that if Beckett's outdoor plays were set on suburban terraces, and the indoor ones just inside those terraces, in suburban living rooms, everyone would be the wiser, certainly the less puzzled. We are most comfortable with the familiar." — Edward Albee, from his Introduction.
The Zoo Story and The Sandbox.
by Edward Albee
from Dramatists Play Service Inc
A Delicate Balance
by Edward Albee
from Plume
Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning play--winner of the 1996 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play--is now available in a trade paperback edition. A dark comedy about unfulfilled lives, broken promises, and family jealousies, A Delicate Balance has just been revived to triumphant acclaim at Lincoln Center's Plymouth Theatre in New York City.
Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1958-1965
by Edward Albee
from Overlook TP
Overlook's three-volume Collected Plays of Edward Albee finally brought together all of Albee's works for the first time. Now, as the first book is released in paperback, the first stage of Albee's great career will be brought in full to an even broader audience. The first volume of this three-volume collection contains the eight plays written by Albee during his early years as a playwright, from 1958 through 1965. Those range from the four brilliant one-act plays with which he exploded on the New York theater scene--The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, and The American Dream--to his early masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Also included are two adaptations from notable American novels--The Ballad of the Sad Café and Malcolm--and Albee's mysteriously fascinating Tiny Alice. Ben Brantley of the New York Times has described him as "one of the few genuinely great living American dramatists." This book represents one of the most exciting and bold periods in the career of one of America's most popular and imaginative playwrights.
The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?
by Edward Albee
from Overlook TP
Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee's most provocative, daring, and controversial play since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Goat won four major awards for best new play of the year (Tony, New York Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle). In the play, Martin, a successful architect who has just turned fifty, leads an ostensibly ideal life with his loving wife and gay teenage son. But when he confides to his best friend that he is also in love with a goat (named Sylvia), he sets in motion events that will destroy his family and leave his life in tatters.
The playwright himself describes it this way: "Every civilization sets quite arbitrary limits to its tolerances. The play is about a family that is deeply rocked by an unimaginable event and how they solve that problem. It is my hope that people will think afresh about whether or not all the values they hold are valid."
Three Tall Women (Drama, Plume)
by Edward Albee
from Plume
Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for best play, as well as a number of other prestigious awards, Three Tall Woman has been called Albee's finest achievement. In his triumphant return to the New York and London stages, Albee demonstrates insight and vision with a moving look at mortality. "Stunning . . . nuanced and breathtaking."--Time.
The Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1966 - 1977
by Edward Albee
from Overlook TP
Edward Albee's many awards and recognitions--including three Pulitzer Prizes for Drama (a number exceeded only by Eugene O'Neill's four), three Tony Awards, the Gold Medal in Drama by the Academy if Arts and Letters, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the National Medal of the Arts--only confirm his tremendous talents and stature in the arts community.
Albee's oeuvre consists of more than twenty-six plays, the earliest of which were collected in Volume One of his Collected Plays. Volume Two contains the nine plays written by Albee in the period between 1966 and 1977, ranging from the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance to the brilliant and complex short plays Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung to his second Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Seascape, to the controversial Lady from Dubuque (hailed by Time magazine as "a major work...Albee's best since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?")
Seascape
by Edward Albee
from Overlook TP
On the heels of the success of Edward Albee's The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, Overlook brings back--in a stand-alone volume--one of Albee's most cherished plays, a fantastic story of what it means to be alive--winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
On a deserted stretch of beach, a middle-aged couple relaxes after a picnic lunch and converse idly about home, family, and their life together. She sketches; he naps. Then, suddenly, they are joined by two sea creatures, a pair of lizards from the depths of the ocean, with whom they engage in a fascinating dialogue. The emotional and intellectual reverberations of this bizarre conversation will linger in the heart and the mind long after the curtain falls--or the last page is turned.
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