When the playwright is Paul Rudnick, expectations are geared for a play both hilarious and smart, and THE NEW CENTURY is no exception. It is a provocative and outrageous comedy, featuring a collection of hilarious characters. In PRIDE AND JOY, Helene is a Long Island matron, the self-proclaimed "most loving mother of all time" to her three gay children, whom she brags about at the Massapequa chapter of Parents of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, The Transgendered, The Questioning, The Curious, The Creatively Concerned and Others (1 man, 1 woman). The flamboyant MR. CHARLES, CURRENTLY OF PALM BEACH is described by Mr. Rudnick as "an aging homosexual hounded out of New York City by younger gay men, who find his theatrical style a threatening throwback to an earlier, tougher time." Mr. Charles spends his exile in the company of the hunky Shane, with whom he produces a cable television show, Too Gay (2 men, 1 woman). In CRAFTY, Barbara Ellen is a Midwestern craftswoman and competitive cake-decorator who has lost a son to AIDS (1 woman). In THE NEW CENTURY, all of these hilarious and poignant people collide under surprising and comical circumstances, providing evidence of just where our new century might be heading (2 men, 3 women).

In his historic play The Melting Pot, Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) introduced into our discourse a potent metaphor that for nearly a hundred years has served as a key definition of the United States. The play, enthusiastically espoused by President Theodore Roosevelt, to whom it was dedicated, offered a grand vision of America as a dynamic process of ethnic and racial amalgamation. By his own admission, The Melting Pot grew out of Zangwill's intense involvement in issues of Jewish immigration and resettlement and was grounded in his interpretation of Jewish history. Zangwill, Anglo Jewry's most renowned writer, began writing seriously for the stage in the late 1890s. At the time, the negative stereotype of the so-called Stage Jew was still deeply entrenched in the theatrical mainstream, so much so that Jewish playwrights writing for the English-language stage avoided altogether the portrayal of Jewish life. Zangwill shattered this silence in 1899 with the American premiere of Children of the Ghetto―his first full-length drama, and the first English-language play devoted in its entirety to the depiction of Jewish life in an authentic and positive fashion. The play's groundbreaking production drew tremendous attention and generated heated debates, but since the script was never published, the memory of the passions it generated dimmed, and its whereabouts eventually became unknown. After more than a century, theater historian Edna Nahshon has discovered the original manuscript of this milestone text, as well as that of another unpublished Zangwill play, The King of Schnorrers, and the original version of The Melting Pot. Nahshon brings these three works together in print for the first time in From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot. Edna Nahshon's in-depth introduction to this volume includes a biography of Israel Zangwill that especially pertains to these works and situates them within the Anglo-American theater of the time. The essays preceding each play provide rich and hitherto unknown information on the scripts, their stage productions, and their popular and critical reception. While some issues addressed in From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot are uniquely Jewish, others are universal and typical of the negotiation of self-presentation by ethnic and minority groups, particularly within the American experience.

As their twenty-fifth anniversary approaches, Alice and Edgar, ever at each other's throats, find their mutual hatred at an all-time high. Their latest maid has just quit; their children have abandoned them; and they can't keep company with any of the locals on their remote island because they despise them. After twenty-five years, they can't abide one another either. Their miserable lives get a jolt when Alice's cousin Kurt arrives, newly stationed on the island. Kurt becomes the pawn used by Edgar and Alice to finally get the best of each other in what truly becomes a dance of death. Strindberg's 1900 masterpiece was the first naturalistic portrait of a marriage in modern drama, and the trail it blazed made possible Long Day's Journey into Night and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

"On the verge of death for the umpteenth time, Anna makes a shocking confession to her grown children: an affair from her past that just might have resonance beyond the family. But how much of what she says is true? While her children try to separate fact from fiction, Anna fights for a legacy she can be proud of. With razor-sharp wit and extraordinary insight, Our Mother's Brief Affair considers the sweeping, surprising impact of indiscretions both large and small." -- Page [4] of cover.

In POT BOUILLE, the well-known French novelist Émile Zola and dramatist William Busnach combine their talents to unmask the hypocrisy that hides behind the façade of a respectable and fashionable Parisian apartment house. The Josserands are struggling to make ends meet, and at the same time to marry off their two daughters to prosperous businessmen. At the heart of this broken family is a weak husband and domineering, spendthrift wife, who between them create two willful children who are doomed to unhappy lives. The sly and adulterous Berthe seduces a shop owner into marriage, and Hortense eventually runs off with the man she loves--knowing he'll never marry her. The result is an unflattering portrayal of a corrupt, immoral society at the heart of French life in the late nineteenth century. Based on one of the great novels of modern literature!

THE STORY: Anna, Ruth and Peter await the arrival of their newborn child, but first they must rid the crowded apartment of their three imaginary children.

Donald Freed's stage version of HAMLET (IN REHEARSAL) unearths a buried play within the play within the play in which a guilt-imprisoned, state-imprisoned, cosmically-imprisoned Hamlet lunges for and ultimately grasps the quietus of freedom. It is an explosively original, marvelously creative feat of Nabokovian intellectual acrobatics. Wonderful! Leon Katz, Leon Katz' Edition of the Notebooks of Gertrude Stein, Emeritus Professor, Yale University If Shakespeare had reawakened in the oppressed theater of the 21st century, read Beckett, watched C N N and had a stiff drink, this is the play he would have written. Adam Leipzig, producer & dramaturg Donald Freed has brought us a completely new concept of Hamlet and a brilliant one. Setting up a rehearsal play to take its place with Buckingham and Michael Frayn, he engineers a high level debate/conflict, funny and active enough to hold any audience tight. The central impression is of a director beset like Hamlet, and a Hamlet with a great deal of the director. They share a predicament, fight it out and the audience wins. Edward Pearce, Machiavelli's Children, The Great Man, The Guardian No actor with a pulse could read this play without wanting to get up and do it. Freed takes us into dark corridors between the lines of Shakespeare's play, creating a brilliant met-drama full of theatrical joy, startling epiphany and crackling-good language. Unique as can be. Ron Marasco, PhD, author of Notes to an Actor Donald Freed's HAMLET (IN REHEARSAL) is a revelation that rings so true, you will wonder why you never thought of it. Freed has trumped his own genius. Amazing! Lorinne Vozoff, Artistic Director, Theatre Group Studio

Tessa, Damon, and Keegan share the same band class and the same passion: their pets. When Tessa loses her beloved dog Joey, the event challenges and transforms not only the three children, but the adults in their lives as well. Heartwarming and humorous, Kindness sensitively captures the reality of children's feelings as they navigate the small and large events in their world. From Hurricane Katrina to everyday encounters in the school hallway, the play offers an unforgettable lesson in compassion.

The hero is a physicist who has been working on a military project and is brought up sharp with the pronouncement that he has acute leukemia and has only six months to live. The realization affects his relationship with his children and relatives, with the young woman who has fallen in love with him after his wife's death, and most importantly with his profession. Finally he decides to devote his remaining days to work with his son, who is a geneticist, in a world-wide effort to abolish further experiments in atomic weapons.

THE STORY: Take Charlene, a suburban mother who writes erotic screenplays for women in order to support her children; add Clyde, her funny, dangerously obsessive and estranged husband; toss in hormonally overcharged teenagers; and layer it all with

"A play about the power of books, muscles and human kindness. Josh (or Jo, since almost any role can be cast as male or female) is the children's librarian at a poor public library facing a huge budget crisis. He's also a power lifter, pumping iron in the library basement and running a video blog about young adult and children's books, weights and life. Kids flock to his unconventional story time and check out books by the dozens. All but one kid, that is - a loner named Mr. T (or Ms. T), who has the loud tics of Tourette syndrome. Slowly, Josh and Mr. T form a friendship, and Mr. T finally ventures to Josh's basement gym, where a friendship is born. The stakes go up when the town says the library needs to close for monetary reasons. This hits Josh and the kids hard and leads to them staging a '60s-inspired Read-In rather than letting their library be shut down. At the play's end, a Sixth Sense-like ending reveals the true identity of Mr. T. The World's Strongest Librarian will get kids pumped up to read, to work themselves into shape and especially to be kind to others."

A new play from critically-acclaimed young playwrights Clara Mamet and Jack Quaid. In The Solvit Kids , Bradley Phillips and Annie Wyatt are the stars of the world-renowned "Solvit Kids" movies - a series based off the popular children's books, the author of which dies just as he is finishing the last installment. Annie and Brad are then left with the rights to release it. However when something goes horribly wrong it is up to the former "Solvit Kids" to come up with a solution.

Crossing Jerusalem describes a day in the life of an Israeli family at the beginning of the latest intifada. The Golem is a children₂s version of the famous story, exploring what happens when a monster is constructed to defend his community. Year Zero is a bittersweet satire about Communists, Gaulists, and collaborators in the north of France, 1940s. Saint Joan sets the heroine against a sweep of world history, culminating in the Parisian National Front rally of 1995.

"You could do insane twenty-hour shifts in theatre. You could be mother of ten children. You could be toughest whore on the block. You contain all possibilities. You are the ultimate cliche of a young woman's incredible potential." "Promiscuous, pitiless and bored, six sexually entangled medical students restlessly wander in and out of a boarding house, cramming, drinking, taunting, spying. Freder sets about savagely experimenting with the young, pretty maid with half an eye on his former lover Desiree, a wild, disillusioned aristocrat. Petrell abandons Marie for the ruthless underdog Irene. Marie doesn't waste any time weeping - Desiree wants her." "Bourgeois existence or suicide. There are no other choices." "Vienna, 1923. A discontented post-war generation diagnose youth to be their sickness and do their best to destroy it." "Ferdinand Bruckner's Pains of Youth, in a version by Martin Crimp, premiered at the National Theatre, London, in November 2009." --Book Jacket.

“No scars at all. Which, when you think about it, is maybe not such a good sign” Catherine is fifteen years old, and was discovered in a state of almost total neglect. No one is even sure if she's ever left the room she was found in. She can't walk and can't speak. Her recovery seems impossible. But children can be shockingly resilient, especially with inspired medical care. Sponsored by a fundraising drive led by a tabloid newspaper, her only surviving relative has been able to get Catherine the best private medical care that money can buy. She responds well to the experimental treatment. But she seems to be getting more violent, and remains stubbornly resistant to language. Or is she? Soon, Catherine's doctors and great-aunt begin to discover what it is, exactly, that they've uncovered... Inspired by true events, Stone Face is Eve Leigh’s second full-length play at the Finborough Theatre.

Full-Length Play "Playful entertainment-Outstanding Production of the Year!" -Show Business North Atlantic is a uniquely affectionate and comic valentine to the classic style of Rodgers & Hammerstein, set in the land of igloos and ice! On a mysterious and remote island (somewhere on the opposite side of the globe from "South Pacific"), Honey Snodgrass and Melanie Fong, all-American members of the Ioway branch of the Teaching Corps, arrive to teach Eskimo children their 'modern ways.' As with any good R & H classic, the girls soon find unexpected romance, unintentional bigotry, and the dream ballet to end all dream ballets! With every ridiculous cliché thrown in for good measure, this charming family musical takes its origins and springboards into its own idiomatic lunacy. (Play: 5F, 5M, Ensemble)

As big-hearted patriarch David clings to a deal that could save both his ailing catering firm and his cherished standing in the Edgware Jewish community, his children are at loggerheads. "You must have heard him banging on about the long line of Rosenbergs, stretching back to the Bible. He reckons some ancient relative catered the Last Supper." While eldest son Danny fights for the Israelis in Gaza, his sister investigates war crimes in the same conflict. Their brother drinks and brawls and refuses to join their father's business. But when tragedy strikes, each family member is forced to confont head-on the clash between individual identity and the demands and expectations of community. The Holy Rosenbergs explores tribal loyalties, the culpability of family and the consequences of standing up for what you believe to be right.

"These seven amusing playlets, varying from three to five pages in length, are written for just two characters and cetner around holiday themes. Alexander includes no only the usual favorites--Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July, --but also features an April Fool's gorilla, a March lamb and lion, and a Valentine's Day giant and ogre. Props are household itmes, dialogue is short and snappy, roles are conveniently interchangeable for either boys or girls, and the author suggests that the offerings be springboards ot children's own dramatic creativity." --ALA Booklist