The one-act play stands apart as a distinct art form with some well known writers providing specialist material, among them Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill. Alan Ayckbourn, Edward Albee and Tennesee Williams. There are also lesser-known writers with plenty of material to offer, yet sourcing one-act plays to perform is notoriously hard. This companion is the first book to survey the work of over 250 playwrights in an illuminating A-Z guide. Multiple styles, nationalities and periods are covered, offering a treasure trove of compelling moments of theatre waiting to be discovered. Guidance on performing and staging one-act plays is also covered as well as essential contact information and where to apply for performance rights. A chapter introducing the history of the one-act play rounds off the title as a definitive guide.

The world according to David Ives is a very add place, and his plays constitute a virtual stress test of the English language -- and of the audience's capacity for disorientation and delight. Ives's characters plunge into black holes called "Philadelphias," where the simplest desires are hilariously thwarted. Chimps named Milton, Swift, and Kafka are locked in a room and made to re-create Hamlet. And a con man peddles courses in a dubious language in which "hello" translates as "velcro" and "fraud" comes out as "freud." At once enchanting and perplexing, incisively intelligent and side-splittingly funny, this original paperback edition of Ives's plays includes "Sure Thing," "Words, Words, Words," "The Universal Language," "Variations on the Death of Trotsky," "The Philadelphia," "Long Ago and Far Away," "Foreplay, or The Art of the Fugue," "Seven Menus," "Mere Mortals," "English Made Simple," "A Singular Kinda Guy," "Speed-the-Play," "Ancient History," and "Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread."

Filled with wry, dark humor, unparalleled imagination, unforgettable characters, and exquisitely crafted storytelling, Sam Shepard’s plays have earned him enormous acclaim over the past five decades. In these fifteen one-acts, we see him at his best, displaying his trademark ability to portray human relationships, love, and lust with rare authenticity. These fifteen furiously energetic plays confirm Shepard's status as our most audacious living playwright, unafraid to set genres and archetypes spinning with results that are utterly mesmerizing. Included in this volume: Ages of the Moon Evanescence; Shakespeare in the Alley Short Life of Trouble The Unseen Hand The Rock Garden Chicago Icarus’s Mother 4H Club Fourteen Hundred Thousand Red Cross Cowboys #2 Forensic & The Navigators The Holy Ghostly Back Bog Beast Bait Killer’s Head

THE STORY: The title character (who remains unseen) is the equine star of television's longest-running and most popular show, in which he is partnered with The Lush Thrushes, a cowboy troupe whose members bear the names of the various brands of booze they guzzle so copiously. The group makes a rare live appearance at the Houston Astrodome, only to flop disastrously, and then retreats to their hotel where each member then reveals his (or her) innermost thoughts in hilarious detail. When the hotel catches fire they are too far gone to notice, and the epilogue finds them all in heaven-dressed in white western finery, and lamenting the fact that Whiskey, who miraculously survived the inferno, is about to become the star of a new series.

Thirteen previously unpublished short plays now available for the first time.