THE STORIES: THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT. Wallace Cooper, a put-upon, unpopular child, is celebrating his tenth birthday when his father arrives home with bad news: His medical license has been revoked and he must stand trial on a charge of conducting una

THE STORY: Irving Berger, having reached a late-middle-aged crisis, has decided to leave his wife of twenty-two years and move in with Dawn Williams, an attractive young actress with whom he has been having a clandestine affair. Unfortunately Irvin

THE STORY: Begins in the mid-1950s at the institute in Rangeley, Maine, which the famed scientific innovator Wilhelm Reich has established after fleeing from Hitler's Germany. He is visited by a Dr. Andre, from the Sigmund Freud Archives, who wants

THE STORY: As the New York Times outlines, It is done almost as a comedy, yet it isn't quite. Jack Argue is the 'hero,' the middle-class man from Connecticut who works for Muzeeka, a piped-music company that inflicts its bland tunes on all America. He is the man who has made it, who tries to assuage his conscience through hypocritical verbiage. There is a series of episodes-Argue chanting a hymn to a penny, Argue loving his wife, Argue loving a prostitute, Argue fighting in Vietnam. If he could have been wherever he chose to be, he says, he would have chosen to be an Etruscan, one of those ancient people who came and went 'a million years ago,' 'a whole civilization danced out of the earth.' Mr. Guare has written with thought, craftsmanship and beauty. His allusions are poetic-the traffic lights, for instance, that make the streets go from grass to blood.

THE STORY: The place is the locker room of the Northshore (Minnesota) Otters, a Triple-A baseball club struggling through a lackluster season. It's the day of the annual Oldtimers Game, and several former Otters are on hand, including Old John La

THE STORIES: THE GROVES OF ACADEME. The scene is the cramped office of Bill Groves, an assistant professor of English at a prestigious university, where he is visited by Paul Morris, a rather quirky undergraduate who asks to be admitted to an honor

THE STORY: As described by New York critic Clive Barnes: Superficially the play is about the painter--famous, rich and lost--and his wife, who find themselves in a Tokyo hotel. The wife, wildly promiscuous, tries to seduce the Japanese barman in the

THE STORY: After a lifetime of working the rich Canadian farmland which he inherited from his father, Ken Purves, who expanded too quickly in the good years, now finds himself caught in a web of mounting debts and shrinking income. Several other lo

The moment her theatre critic husband returns from writing his opening night review Marcia knows that something is terribly wrong. And her fears are confirmed when, on the late news, it is announced that the theatre is dead-and her husband (thanks to his often caustic notices) has been accused of its murder. A prize-winning short comedy, first published in 1976.

THE STORIES: The first play, A WITCH'S BREW, takes place in the darkened basement of a remote farmhouse, where Daed, his sister Jule, and her boyfriend Tucker, nervously explore the macabre secrets of the shallow graves they believe to be there. Pe