A founding member of the acclaimed New York-based company Mabou Mines, Breuer's gifts as a writer and director have have made him a mainstay of the theatrical avant-garde.

English versions of Sophocles' three great tragedies based on the myth of Oedipus, translated for a modern audience by two gifted poets. Index.

In addition to the listed contents, includes an essay and five poems.

King Oedipus/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone Three towering works of Greek tragedy depicting the inexorable downfall of a doomed royal dynasty The legends surrounding the house of Thebes inspired Sophocles to create this powerful trilogy about humanity's struggle against fate. King Oedipus is the devastating portrayal of a ruler who brings pestilence to Thebes for crimes he does not realize he has committed and then inflicts a brutal punishment upon himself. Oedipus at Colonus provides a fitting conclusion to the life of the aged and blinded king, while Antigone depicts the fall of the next generation, through the conflict between a young woman ruled by her conscience and a king too confident of his own authority. Translated with an Introduction by E. F. WATLING

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play It is the spring of 1948. In the still cool evenings of Pittsburgh's Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rises just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there's the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. August Wilson's Seven Guitars is the sixth chapter in his continuing theatrical saga that explores the hope, heartbreak, and heritage of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. The story follows a small group of friends who gather following the untimely death of Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton, a local blues guitarist on the edge of stardom. Together, they reminisce about his short life and discover the unspoken passions and undying spirit that live within each of them.

Oedipus presents ceaseless paradoxes that have fascinated readers for centuries. He is proud of his intellect, but he does not know himself and succumbs easily to self-deceptions. As a ruler he expresses the greatest good will toward his people, but as an exile he will do nothing to save them from their enemies. Faced with a damning prophecy, he tries to take destiny into his own hands and fails. Realizing this, he struggles at the end of his life for a serenity that seems to elude him. In his last misery, he is said to illustrate the tragic lament that it is better not to be born, or, once born, better to die young than to live into old age. Such are the themes a set of powerful thinkers take on in this volume-self-knowledge, self-deception, destiny, the value of a human life. There are depths to the Oedipus tragedies that only philosophers can plumb; readers who know the plays will be startled by what they find in this volume. There is nothing in literature to compare with the Oedipus plays of Sophocles that let us see the same basic myth through different lenses. The first play was the product of a poet in vibrant late middle age, the second of a man who was probably in his eighties, with the vision of a very old poet still at the height of his powers. In the volume's introduciton, Paul Woodruff provides historical backdrop to Sophocles and the plays, and connections to the contributions by philosophers and classicists that follow.

Published to coincide with its British premiere at the Royal National Theatre, The Darker Face of the Earth is Rita Dove's first play. Set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina, it has been performed to great critical acclaim.