Ernie takes a trip in his imagination as he gazes at the night sky. A night-light in the shape of a smiling star lights up this story. Full color.

Little Ernie prepares to go to sleep.

Young children love to explore their world through drama—characters, dialogue, story arcs, and props are all standard elements of a child’s play. It is no surprise then that professional theatre has long been regarded as a way to support children’s social-emotional, cognitive, and creative development. Increasingly, there is an international interest in theatre for very young audiences, and the Wall Street Journal reported on a “baby boom” in American theatre, with a marked upswing in the number of stage plays being written and produced for toddlers and preschoolers. Fueled by ongoing research into developmental psychology and theatre arts, the Children’s Theatre Company (CTC) of Minneapolis presents in this book four of its newly commissioned plays for preschoolers. CTC is widely recognized as the leading theatre for young people and families in North America; it received the 2003 Tony award for regional theatre, and Time magazine rated it the number one children’s theatre in the United States. These four plays encompass a broad range of styles and subjects: Bert and Ernie, Goodnight! is a musical about Bert and Ernie’s unlikely but true friendship, written by Barry Kornhauser and based on the original songs and scripts from Sesame Street. The Biggest Little House in the Forest is a toy-theatre play about a group of diverse animals trying to share a very tiny home, adapted by Rosanna Staffa from the book by Djemma Bider. The Cat’s Journey is a dazzling shadow-puppet play with a little girl who rides on a friendly cat, written by Fabrizio Montecchi. And Victoria Stewart’s Mercy Watson to the Rescue!, adapted from the Kate DiCamillo Mercy Watson series, is a comic romp featuring the inadvertent heroics of everyone’s favorite porcine wonder. While these plays are as different as they could be, they all help young children to develop a moral compass and critical-thinking skills—while also showing them the power of the theatre to amaze, delight, and inspire.

Drama Characters: 8 male, 3 female Unit set. Harold Prince staged this drama on Broadway with Donald Moffat starring as a Canadian salesman and father determined to drink himself to death. Cam MacMillan he is full of pride for in his heritage as a descendant of the Scottish laird who originally settled the area and for his success as a salesman. His downfall begins during World War II when he gets involved in black marketing gas rationing coupons. Although he does not go to

Condemned to spend his “Golden Years” cooped up in Sunset Nursing Home, 84-year-old Charlie Lambert refuses this ending for himself. With the help of an old sailing buddy living in Maine, Charlie plans to go AWOL permanently, buy a boat, and hit the high seas, where he will live out the remainder of his life on his own terms. Nothing ever goes quite as planned, though, and as Charlie heads towards Maine on a 46-foot sailboat, he strikes up an unexpected romance with Abigail, a woman decades his junior. Things take a darker turn, though, when he discovers a former FBI agent-turned-insurance-investigator hot on his trail. Agent Roberts has been hired to find out what happened to Charlie: bring him back if he’s alive, or determine he’s dead so his estranged sons can collect on his life insurance policy. Roberts doesn’t expect a fight from the old man, but that’s just what he gets. Because Charlie has no intention of ever returning to Sunset, whether in handcuffs or a pine box. Funny, heart-warming, and heart-breaking, That Good Night tells the story of a man who, rather than rail against going “gentle into that good night,” as Dylan Thomas wrote, instead wishes to simply sail into a sunset of his own choosing.

Collected for the first time, the New York stories of John O'Hara, "among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language" (Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker) Collected for the first time, here are the New York stories of one of the twentieth century’s definitive chroniclers of the city—the speakeasies and highballs, social climbers and cinema stars, mistresses and powerbrokers, unsparingly observed by a popular American master of realism. Spanning his four-decade career, these more than thirty refreshingly frank, sparely written stories are among John O’Hara’s finest work, exploring the materialist aspirations and sexual exploits of flawed, prodigally human characters and showcasing the snappy dialogue, telling details and ironic narrative twists that made him the most-published short story writer in the history of the New Yorker. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.