Lady Windermere's Fan

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David R. Slavitt and Palmer Bovie

"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.

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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.

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Harold Pinter

Like Pinter's earlier plays. Pinter deals with bare essentials. There are only three characters -- a man named Deeley, his wife, Kate, and Anna, a friend of Kate's whom they have not seen in 20 years. Beneath the surface of their taut, witty conversation lurks suggestions of darkness, until the present is overwhelmed with intimations of some frightening past.

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Eric Bogosian

In his fifth, brashest solo show, Eric Bogosian again aims scorching social commentary at the contemporary urban and suburban scene. From subway panhandlers to barbecue-crazed millionaires. Bogosian reveals the hidden humor, fear, hypocrisy and rage of Americans - including, for the first time, "Eric Bogosian," a hyperaggressive standup comic. With this seductive element of self-revelation, he heightens the disturbing connections between his characters and, by extension, between us and the people we try not to see - and not to be - every day.