Four-time Tony Award-winning author Terrence McNally returns with a powerful new play about how far one will go for one's love of the theater. In a small upstate New York town, Lou, a speech and drama teacher, and Jessie, a dog groomer at The Dapper Dog, bring joy to their community through running an amateur theater company. They become obsessed with buying a derelict movie theater and turning it into Captain Lou and Miss Jessie's Magic Theater for Children of All Ages. The only obstacle in reaching their dream is Annabelle Willard -- a terminally ill and manipulative widow who owns half the town. Will these naive dreamers be able to grasp the brass ring, and at what cost?

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

Every life retells the hero or heroine's journey: a wondrous, sometimes painful but always necessary movement toward wholeness. What better way to understand our own experiences of growth and transformation than to hear from others who have gone before us? In "Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On" Helen Luke explores the inner life through dream and imagery, story and symbol. The first half of the book covers Luke's life from her earliest recollections until the age of seventy. It weaves together dreams and symbolic images from her inner life with accounts of personal events, including her seminal meeting with Jung. The book's second half is comprised of selections from the journals she kept during her last twenty years of life, offering a rare glimpse into a personal path of individuation.

For nearly sixty years, playwright Terrence McNally has been a force in American theater. His work, encompassing plays, musicals, teleplays, and opera, has been performed around the world. McNally is the consummate artist, delving into the human soul, fearlessly examining both the lighter and darker aspects of existence in an uncertain—and sometimes frightening—world. This book looks at McNally's life and work against the backdrop of a dynamic theatrical culture, tracing the ways in which an artist grows and responds to reality. Starting in the Off-Off-Broadway movement in the 1960s, McNally's work has continually reflected a changing culture, from opposition to the Vietnam War through the emergence of AIDS and the gay rights movement. Based on extensive interviews with McNally, it also features interviews with many of the artists—actors, designers, producers—with whom he’s collaborated, including Nathan Lane, Chita Rivera, Angela Lansbury, Audra McDonald, Swoosie Kurtz, John Glover, Joe Mantello, Arin Arbus, Paul Libin, and many more. A Man of Much Importance presents a warm and affectionate look at the people and the practices that are unique to theater and performing arts. It goes beyond a traditional biography and illuminates the evolution of anartist—not merely as an individual creative force but also within the context of a collaborative, interdependent community of artists who inspire one another and give voice and dimension to the creative process.

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

Editors Craig Pospisil and Danna Call compiled this new collection of more than fifty monologues selected exclusively from Dramatists Play Service publications from recent seasons. Inside these pages you will find an enormous range of voices and subject matter, characters from their teens to their sixties and authors of widely varied styles, but all immensely talented. These monologues represent some of the best writing in the American theatre today, and we are proud to bring them together in this new volume.

This remarkably illuminating portrait of Tennessee Williams lifts the veil on the heart and soul of his artistic inspiration: the unspoken collaboration between playwright and actor. At a low moment in Williams’s life, he summoned to New Orleans a young twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written him a letter asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on his behalf to find out if he or his work had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him. Among the more than seventy women and men with whom Grissom talked were giants of American theater and film: Lillian Gish, (“the escort who brought me to Blanche”), Jessica Tandy (the original Blanche DuBois on Broadway), Eva Le Gallienne (“She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper”), Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and many more. Follies of God provides dazzling insight into how Williams conjured the dramatic characters and plays that so transformed American theater.