When you emerge from this impish comic playwright's glittering tribute to Molière, written entirely in verse, your head will be so dizzy with syncopated rhyme that you'll almost expect to find yourself speaking and thinking in chiming couplets...[Ives] add The truism that families come in all shapes and sizes is illuminated with haunting beauty...in this exquisitely wrought comedy-drama...a piercing portrait of the contemporary social architecture, in which the distance between people can be widened or collaps

A collection of some of Edward Albee's earliest and most acclaimed works.

This volume of plays contains Edward Albee's four most famous one-act works. They are Death of Bessie Smith, Zoo Story, American Dream, and Sand Box.

For use in schools and libraries only. American Dream and Zoo story: two plays

Sex, Gender, and Sexualities in the Plays of Edward Albee contains a general introduction and eleven essays by American and European Albee scholars on Albee’s depictions of gender relations, sexual relations, monogamy, child-rearing, and homosexuality. The volume includes close readings of individual plays and more general theoretical and historical discussions. Contributors: Henry Albright, Mary Ann Barfield, Araceli Gonzalez Crespan, Andrew Darr, John M. Clum, Paul Grant, Emeline Jouve, T. Ross Leasure, David Marcia, Cormac O’Brien, Donald Pease, Valentine Vasak

THE STORY: SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF is a one-man, three-character play in which the same actor portrays Louis Armstrong, the greatest of all jazz trumpeters; Joe Glaser, his white manager; and Miles Davis, who admired Armstrong's playing but disliked his onstage manner. It takes place in 1971 in a dressing room backstage at the Empire Room of New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where Armstrong performed in public for the last time four months before his death. Reminiscing into a tape recorder about his life and work, Armstrong seeks to come to terms with his longstanding relationship with Glaser, whom he once loved like a father but now believes to have betrayed him. In alternating scenes, Glaser defends his controversial decision to promote Armstrong's career (with the help of the Chicago mob) by encouraging him to simplify his musical style, while Davis attacks Armstrong for pandering to white audiences.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA Recently revived on Broadway in a production directed by Joe Mantello, starring two-time Oscar winner Glenda Jackson and Tony winner Laurie Metcalf Earning a Pulitzer and Best Play awards from the Evening Standard, Critics Circle, and Outer Critics Circle, among others, when it premiered, Edward Albee has, in Three Tall Women, created a masterwork of modern theater. As an imperious, acerbic old woman lies dying, she is tended by two other women and visited by a young man. Albee’s frank dialogue about everything from incontinence to infidelity portrays aging without sentimentality. His scenes are charged with wit, pain, and laughter, and his observations tell us about forgiveness, reconciliation, and our own fates. But it is his probing portrait of the three women that reveals Albee’s genius. Separate characters on stage in the first act, yet actually the same “everywoman” at different ages in the second act, these “tall women” lay bare the truths of our lives—how we live, how we love, what we settle for, and how we die. Edward Albee has given theatergoers, critics, and students of drama reason to rejoice.

The influential American playwright discusses his work, the nature of art, the role of the unconscious, American culture, and the theater.

THE STORIES: COUNTING THE WAYS. In a series of blackout sketches, He and She probe into the nature of their love for one another. Long married, but aware that time has wrought changes in their relationship, the two spar and thrust at each other

America's most important living playwright, Edward Albee, has been rocking our country's moral, political and artistic complacency for more than 50 years. Beginning with his debut play, The Zoo Story (1958), and on to his barrier breaking works of the 1960s, most notably The American Dream (1960), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1963), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance (1966), Albee's unsparing indictment of the American way of life earned him early distinction as the dramatist of his generation. His acclaim was enhanced further in the decades that followed with prize-winning dramas such as Seascape (1974) and Three Tall Women (1991), as well as recent works like The Play About the Baby (2001) and The Goat. (2002). Albee has brought the same critical force to his non-theatrical prose. Stretching My Mind collects for the first time ever the author's writings on theater, literature, and the political and cultural battlegrounds that have defined his career. Many of the selections were drawn from Albee's private papers, and almost all previously published material -- dating from 1960 to the present -- has never been reprinted. Topics include Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Sam Shepherd, as well as autobiographical writings about Albee's life, work, and worldview.