by David R. Slavitt and Palmer Bovie (1998)
"Aristophanes wrote most of his comedic masterpieces during the Peloponnesian wars, parodying the tumultuous politics and society of that time with trademark innuendoes and bawdy stagings and dialogue. [v. 1:] In these plays, Aristophanes brings every rhetorical stratagem into play to treat the reader to stories of one man's attempt to create a "war-free zone', the rescue of the imprisoned Peace on the back of a giant dung beetle, a satire of Euripides' sympathies for women, and the hustling and healing of a blind and destitute Wealth in order to redistribute the world's riches. [v. 3:] These plays contain, in turn, the sharpest political satire to be found in Aristophanes, a famous caricature of Socrates and the sophists, and the escapist fantasy of a city in the clouds."--Book jackets.
Oscar Wilde
This Victorian comedy of manners sparkles with Wilde's trademark repartee, epigrams, and witty dialogue. Arch-moralist Lady Windermere, shattered by the suspicion of her husband's infidelity, contemplates running off with a roue until her rival illustrates the difference between morality and its appearance. A comic masterpiece, studded with humorous quips and clever paradoxes.
Henrik Ibsen
Halvard Solness, a middle-aged architect whose ruthlessness in his business makes him a hardened individual, is reaching for love while clinging to a career that is on the verge of collapse. Affected by his ambitions are his wife and his colleagues, until a young woman shows up asking for a promised kingdom.
Sophocles
"Oedipus, the former ruler of Thebes, has died. Now, when his young daughter Antigone defies her uncle, Kreon, the new ruler, because he has prohibited the burial of her dead brother, she and he enact a primal conflict between young and old, woman and man, individual and ruler, family and state, courageous and self-sacrificing reverence for the gods of the earth and perhaps self-serving allegiance to the gods of the sky." "Echoing through Western culture for more than two millennia, Sophocles' Antigone has been a touchstone of thinking about human conflict and human tragedy, the role of the divine in human life, and the degree to which men and women are the creators of their own destinies. This exciting new translation of the play is extremely faithful to the Greek, eminently playable, and poetically powerful." "For readers, actors, students, teachers, and theatrical directors, this new translation of one of the greatest plays in the history of the Western world provides the best combination of contemporary, powerful language, along with superb background and notes on meaning, interpretation, and ancient beliefs, attitudes, and contexts"--Book jacket.
Kevin Kerr
"Photographer Eadweard Muybridge's life was filled with the events of Victorian melodrama: adultery, jealousy, betrayal, murder, and an abandoned child. Tried for the murder of his wife's lover, he was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide. However, these events, which predate his subsequent obsession with stopping time and freezing motion, become the ghosts that haunt Muybridge in the fictional world of Governor General's Award winning dramatist Kevin Kerr's new play, Studies in Motion."--BOOK JACKET.