Books in the Plays for Performance Series series

Chekhov's treatment of theatre and love against the background of a magical lake attempts to define the role of the artist in the modern world. Plays for Performance Series.

Treads a fine line between broad comedy and tragic melodrama.

Dorothy Louise's adaptation uses contemporary language to involve actors and audiences in Carlo Goldoni's great classic commedia dell'arte play. Plays for Perfomance Series.

A consummate farce in which a middle-aged man arranges a rendezvous in a seedy little hotel with the beautiful young wife of his best friend. Plays for Performance Series.

First published for private circulation in Vienna in 1900, Arthur Schnitzler's famous play looks at the sexual morality and class ideology of his day through a series of sexual encounters between pairs of characters. When published publicly in 1903, it became an immediate best-seller, scandalized Viennese society, and a year later was censored. Schnitzler was accused of pornography and worse. In 1922 Freud wrote to him that "you have learned through intuition-though actually as a result of sensitive introspection-everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons." By choosing characters across the social spectrum, La Ronde offers a powerful view of how sexual contact transgresses boundaries of class. Nicholas Rudall's new translation sensitively captures the language distinctions of the representative characters in the play while providing a remarkably playable script. New in the Plays for Performance series.

A fresh and contemporary translation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People by Nicholas Rudall.

Who is more unfaithful in love, men or women? This is the crux of Marivaux's lean story of love, desire, betrayal, and passion: a cautionary tale about the danger and intrigue of seduction.

Sacrificed to powers larger than himself, Woyzeck is one of drama's first anti-heroes. He serves a German captain and makes money by allowing a doctor to experiment on him, but his deeper morality leads him to a tragic end.

Medea, whose magical powers helped Jason and the Argonauts take the Golden Fleece, remains one of the strongest female characters ever to appear on stage. In the play she kills her own children. Plays for Performance Series.

The tragedy of Oedipus, who unknowingly slays his father and marries his mother, is one of the mythical cornerstones of Western civilization. Plays for Performance Series.

The mortal conflict of the sexes, traced here by Strindberg in the clash between an aristocratic young woman and her valet. Plays for Performance Series.

Sensual gaiety is at the heart of this comic masterpiece which continues the merry tale of the little barber of Seville, a clever common man whose wits overcome his superiors who would suppress him. Plays for Performance Series.

Ibsen's great social drama of a caged woman in the late 19th century explores her tormented desire for escape and her yearning for individual and spiritual freedom. Plays for Performance Series.

Ibsen's last work concludes the series of autobiographical dramas begun with The Master Builder which deal with the aging rebel, despairing of life and racked with guilt, who experiences an ambiguous victory at the moment of death. Plays for Performance Series.

As bleak and agonizing a portrait of war as ever to appear on the stage,The Trojan Women is a masterpiece of pathos as well as a timeless and chilling indictment of war's brutality. Plays for Performance Series.

Aristophanes' great anti-war drama, with comedic overtones, glorifies the power of fertility in the face of destruction. Plays for Performance Series.

Marlowe's classic treatment of the myth of man's greed and ambition has contemporary reverberations that make it compelling drama. Plays for Performance Series.

Von Kleist's last work and his masterpiece-a story of guilt, innocence, and moral righteousness involving a prince who violates his orders of battle when distracted by a beautiful princess. Plays for Performance Series.

A play of stinging contemporaneity-about religious and societal hypocrisy, guilt that feeds on innocence, the terror of the inevitable, and the battle between truth and darkness, freedom and constraint. Plays for Performance Series.

As bleak and agonizing a portrait of war as ever to appear on the stage, The Trojan Women is a masterpiece of pathos as well as a timeless and chilling indictment of war's brutality.

Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter in order to ensure the good fortune of his forces in the Trojan War is, despite its heroic background, in many respects a domestic tragedy. Plays for Performance Series.

The only play in which Ibsen denies the validity of revolt, The Wild Duck suggests that under certain conditions, domestic falsehoods are entirely necessary to survival. Plays for Performance Series.

Euripides' powerful investigation of religious ecstasy and the resistance to it is an argument for moderation, rejecting the lures of pure reason as well as pure sensuality. Plays for Performance Series.

The classic drama of a daughter's revenge of her father's murder, in a brilliant new translation for modern audiences. Plays for Performance Series.

By far Strindberg's most aggressive work. The Father is a feverish nightmare of the struggle he saw between defiant masculinity and the treacherous weakness of women. Plays for Performance Series.

Moliere's beloved comedy features a rising member of the middle class who lusts for social status and higher learning.