First performed in 1773, "She Stoops to Conquer" is the timeless comedic drama by Anglo-Irish author Oliver Goldsmith. The play depicts the story of Charles Marlow, a wealthy young man who is promised in marriage to a woman, Kate Hardcastle that he has never met. While he is eager to meet her and is travelling to her home with his friend, George Hastings, Charles is quite shy in the company of women of wealth. He prefers those of a lower class and...

In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the "five hundred acres inclusive of lake" where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the Gothic style: "everything but vampires," as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later. Bernard...

Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (30 October 1751 7 July 1816) was an Irish-born playwright and poet and long-term owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. For thirty-two years he was also a Whig Member of the British House of Commons for Stafford (1780 1806), Westminster (1806 1807) and Ilchester (1807 1812). Such was the esteem he was held in by his contemporaries when he died that he was buried at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. He...

Marlene has been promoted to managing director of a London employment agency and is celebrating. The symbolic luncheon is attended by women in legend or history who offer perspectives on maternity and ambition. In a time warp, these ladies are also her co-workers, clients, and relatives. Marlene, like her famous guests, has had to pay a price to ascend from proletarian roots to the executive suite: she has become, figuratively speaking, a male oppressor...

Hilary believes fervently that consciousness is more than the sum of our biology. When she receives a position at a prestigious think tank, she develops a novel experiment to prove that humans are intrinsically altruistic, but the results are something she never anticipated. Includes a post-show discussion with Mark Tramo, a neuroscientist, neurologist, and musician who is a professor in the UCLA Schools of Medicine, Music, and Letters & Science. Recorded...

This delightful Broadway hit chronicles three Jewish sisters from Brooklyn as they gather in London to celebrate a birthday. Wasserstein's three sisters include a brilliant banker and single mother who has given up on romance, a suburban housewife who moonlights as a talk-show host and a travel writer who still wants to write her serious book. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Caroline Aaron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jay Paulson, Tony...

This collection of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett's dramatic pieces includes a short stage play, two radio plays, and two pantomimes. The stage play Krapp's Last Tape evolves a shattering drama out of a monologue of a man who, at age sixty-nine, plays back the autobiographical tape he recorded on his thirty-ninth birthday. The two radio plays were commissioned by the BBC; All That Fall 'plumbs the same pessimistic depths [as Waiting for Godot]...

“Red Sun” and “Merlin Unchained” are the most recent original stage works by one of the most acknowledged yet neglected dramatists of our time. “Red Sun” is a two-hander, tightly tethered within the classical unities of theme and space and the span of a single day. “Merlin Unchained” is an explosive, multitudinous epic, crossing continents and centuries and passing between worlds. Yet though technically so contrasting, both works speak...

Oscar Wilde created his final and most lasting play, comic masterpieces of all time, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, in 1895. Considered one of the greatest THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST is a farce, playing with love, religion, and truth as it tells the tale of two men. Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, who bend the truth in order to add excitement to their lives. Jack invents an imaginary brother, Ernest, whom he uses as an excuse to escape...

Henrik Ibsen (20th March, 1828 - 23rd May, 1906) is often referred to as the father of realism and ranked just below Shakespeare as Europe's greatest ever playwright especially as his plays are performed most frequently throughout the world after Shakespeare's. He was Norwegian and although set his plays in Norway, he wrote them in Danish and lived most of his professional life in Italy and Germany. His affect on the theatre is still evident today...