The first British publication of a brilliant new Albee play If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive? In THE PLAY ABOUT THE BABY, a young couple who are madly in love with each other, have a child - the perfect family - that is, until an older couple steal the baby. Through a series of mind games and manipulations, they call into question both couples' sense of reality and fiction, joy and sorrow in this devastating black comedy which invites parallels with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. "You're unlikely to find a more intriguingly structured, provocative or entertaining new play" - Curtain Up "The Play about the Baby rockets into that special corner of theatre heaven where words shoot off like fireworks into dazzling patterns and hues" - New York Times

When you emerge from this impish comic playwright's glittering tribute to Molière, written entirely in verse, your head will be so dizzy with syncopated rhyme that you'll almost expect to find yourself speaking and thinking in chiming couplets...[Ives] add The truism that families come in all shapes and sizes is illuminated with haunting beauty...in this exquisitely wrought comedy-drama...a piercing portrait of the contemporary social architecture, in which the distance between people can be widened or collaps

Winner of three Pulitzer Prizes for Drama during his long and distinguished career, Edward Albee is one of America's preeminent playwrights. "The Play About the Baby" is an absurdist black comedy, reminiscent of burlesque in its high spirits and banter, that grapples with such issues as reality and the games we play to define it, the ambiguity of existence, and the agonizing bonds between parents and children. A fresh young couple-Boy and Girl-have a new baby, whom an older couple-Man and Woman-have come to steal. Why? Because, as Man says, "If you don't have the wound of a broken heart, how can you know you're alive?" Brutal loss-the loss of a child or childhood self-has been a recurring Albee theme, and Ben Brantley of the "New York Times" summed up the critical reaction to "The Play About the Baby" when he called it a "funny, harrowing dramatic fable . . . as explicit and concise a statement of what Mr. Albee believes as he is ever likely to deliver."

THE STORY: By turns funny, mysterious and disturbing, THE PLAY ABOUT THE BABY concerns a young couple who have just had a baby, and the strange turn of events that transpire when they are visited by an older man and woman.

This volume contains the eight plays written by Albee during his first decade as a playwright, from 1958 to 1965. These range from the four one-act plays with which he exploded on the New York theatre scene in 1958-59 to his early masterpiece 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' in 1961-62.

THE STORIES: COUNTING THE WAYS. In a series of blackout sketches, He and She probe into the nature of their love for one another. Long married, but aware that time has wrought changes in their relationship, the two spar and thrust at each other

New York sculptor Louise Nevelson's life was marked by intrepid triumphs and deep inner turmoil. Both her public accomplishments and private emotional conflicts are thoroughly examined by an unnamed interviewer who questions the posthumous Nevelson with an unabashed scrutiny. The result is a touching, humorous, and honest tribute to a woman who was a pioneer for free-thinking females everywhere, but also stood on her own as one of the 20th century's greatest artistic minds.