Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them

Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them PDF Author: Christopher Durang
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802194419
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
“[A] hilarious and disturbing new comedy about all-American violence” and other whip-smart political satires by the Tony Award-winning playwright (Ben Branley, The New York Times). Christopher Durang, who The New York Observer called “Jonathan Swift’s nicer, younger brother,” became one of America’s most beloved and acclaimed playwrights by marrying gonzo farce with incisive social critique. Now collected in Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and Other Political Plays are Durang’s most revealing satirical plays. Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them is the story of a young woman in crisis: Is her new husband, whom she married when drunk, a terrorist? Or just crazy? Or both? Is her father’s hobby of butterfly collecting really a cover for his involvement in a shadow government? Does her mother frequent the theater for mental escape, or is she just insane? Add in a minister who directs porno, and a ladylike operative whose underwear just won’t stay up, and this black comedy will make us laugh all the way to the waterboarding room. Also included in this volume are: Excerpts from Sex and Longing Cardinal O’Connor The Book of Leviticus Show Entertaining Mr. Helms The Doctor Will See You Now Under Duress: Words on Fire An Alter Boy Talks to God The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of Where Babies Come From

Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them

Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them PDF Author: Christopher Durang
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802194419
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
“[A] hilarious and disturbing new comedy about all-American violence” and other whip-smart political satires by the Tony Award-winning playwright (Ben Branley, The New York Times). Christopher Durang, who The New York Observer called “Jonathan Swift’s nicer, younger brother,” became one of America’s most beloved and acclaimed playwrights by marrying gonzo farce with incisive social critique. Now collected in Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and Other Political Plays are Durang’s most revealing satirical plays. Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them is the story of a young woman in crisis: Is her new husband, whom she married when drunk, a terrorist? Or just crazy? Or both? Is her father’s hobby of butterfly collecting really a cover for his involvement in a shadow government? Does her mother frequent the theater for mental escape, or is she just insane? Add in a minister who directs porno, and a ladylike operative whose underwear just won’t stay up, and this black comedy will make us laugh all the way to the waterboarding room. Also included in this volume are: Excerpts from Sex and Longing Cardinal O’Connor The Book of Leviticus Show Entertaining Mr. Helms The Doctor Will See You Now Under Duress: Words on Fire An Alter Boy Talks to God The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of Where Babies Come From

Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People who Love Them and Other Political Plays

Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People who Love Them and Other Political Plays PDF Author: Christopher Durang
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802145671
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The title play tells the story of a young woman who wakes up to find herself in bed with a man she does not know, and to whom she has apparently got married while drunk the previous night. And to make matters worse, it seems like he might be a terrorist.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike PDF Author: Christopher Durang
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802192726
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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Book Description
Tony Award Winner, Best Play: “Hugely entertaining...deliciously madcap...offers some keen insights into the challenges and agonies of 21st-century life.”—USA Today Nominated for six Tony Awards, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is one of the most lauded and beloved Broadway plays of recent years. Vanya and his adopted sister Sonia live a quiet life in the Pennsylvania farmhouse where they grew up, but their peace is disturbed when their movie star sister, Masha, returns unannounced with her twenty-something boy toy, Spike—and a weekend of rivalry, regret, and raucousness begins... Winner of the Outer Circle Critics Award for Best Play Winner of the Drama League Award for Best Production of a Play Winner of the Drama Desk Award for Best Play Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Production Winner of the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Play

Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater

Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater PDF Author: Christopher Durang
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802188893
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
A pair of plays from the comic genius who gave us the Tony Award-winning Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Baby and the Bathwater follows its main character from infancy to adulthood, in a confusing search for identity after an unusual upbringing. In Laughing Wild, two comic monologues evolve into a man and a woman’s shared nightmare of modern life and the isolation it creates. From her turf battles at the supermarket to the desperate clichés of self-affirmation he learns at his “personality workshop,” they run the gamut of everyday life’s small brutalizations until they meet, with disastrous inevitability, at the Harmonic Convergence in Central Park. The fiercely ironic dark comedy of Christopher Durang can be perfectly described by the quotation—by Thomas Gray via Samuel Beckett—that inspired one of these play’s titles: “Laughing wild amid severest woe.” “One of the funniest dramatists alive, and one of the most sharply satiric.”—The New Yorker

The Theatre of Christopher Durang

The Theatre of Christopher Durang PDF Author: Miriam Chirico
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474288936
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The Theatre of Christopher Durang considers the works of one of the foremost comedic writers for the American stage. From Durang's early success with the controversial Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (1974) to his recent Tony Award-winning play, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (2012), he has been an original theatrical voice in American theatre. Edith Oliver, long-time theatre critic for The New Yorker, described Durang as “one of the funniest men in the world.” Durang challenges traditional dramatic idioms with his irreverent comedies that are as shocking as they are prescient and compassionate. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of Durang's works and incorporates comedic theory to examine how laughter in performance subverts social conventions and hierarchies. Through a clear, detailed discussion of the plays, Miriam Chirico considers Durang's use of black comedy, satire, and parody to explode such topics as: western literature, religion, dysfunctional families, and American social malaise. Robert Combs and Jay Malarcher provide additional critical perspectives about Durang's works, detailing his use of alienation techniques and locating his place within the American parodic tradition. The book also includes a warm introduction by Durang's former student, Pulitzer Prize-winner, David Lindsay-Abaire. The Theatre of Christopher Durang, in demonstrating how Durang has shaped contemporary theatrical possibilities, offers a valuable guide for students of American drama and comedy.

The Motherfucker with the Hat

The Motherfucker with the Hat PDF Author: Stephen Adly Guirgis
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
ISBN: 9780822225485
Category : Addicts
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
THE STORY: Struggles with addiction, friendship, love and the challenges of adulthood are at the center of the story. Jackie, a petty drug dealer, is just out of prison and trying to stay clean. He's also still in love with his coke-addicted childh

Contemporary Farce on the Global Stage

Contemporary Farce on the Global Stage PDF Author: David Gram
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040014356
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Contemporary Farce on the Global Stage provides audiences and practitioners a detailed survey of how the genre of farce has evolved in the 21st century. Often dismissed as frivolous, farce speaks a universal language, with the power to incisively interrogate our world through laughter. Unlike farces of the past, where a successful resolution was a given and we could laugh uproariously at adulterous behaviour, farce no longer guarantees an audience a happy ending where everything works out. Contemporary farce is no longer ‘diverting us’ with laughter. It is reflecting the fractured world around us. With a foreword by award-winning playwright Ken Ludwig, the book introduces readers to the Mechanics of Farce, and the ‘Four Ps,’ which are key elements for understanding, appreciating, and exploring the form. The Five Doors to Contemporary Farce identify five major categories into which farces fall. Behind each door are a wide selection of plays, modern and contemporary examples from all over the world, written by a diverse group of playwrights who traverse gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Supplementing each section are comments, observations, and reflections from award-winning playwrights, directors, actors, designers, dramaturgs, and scholars. Designed specifically to give theatre-makers a rounded understanding that will underpin their own productions, this book will also be of use to theatre and performance studies students.

Torture and Eucharist

Torture and Eucharist PDF Author: William T. Cavanaugh
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631211990
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In this engrossing analysis, Cavanaugh contends that the Eucharist is the Church's response to the use of torture as a social discipline.

Edward Albee's The American Dream

Edward Albee's The American Dream PDF Author: Edward Albee
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 9780822223917
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
THE STORIES: THE AMERICAN DREAM. Mommy and Daddy sit in a barren living room making small talk. Mommy, the domineering wife, is grappling with the thought of putting Grandma in a nursing home. Daddy, the long-suffering husband, could not care less.

Walter Cronkite is Dead

Walter Cronkite is Dead PDF Author: Joe Calarco
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
ISBN: 9780822225522
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
THE STORY: A fierce thunderstorm has shut down airports up and down the East Coast. Two women, who appear to have nothing in common, are stuck in a waiting area at Reagan National Airport. Patty is a chatty southerner--a blue-collar woman from a red