Four riotous plays in one volume from a winner of an Outer Critics Circle Award: “A comic playwright of the first rank.”—New York Daily News Renowned for his wicked camp humor and biting social satire, playwright and drag legend Charles Busch has delighted audiences both on and off Broadway. This book contains four of his works, among them Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, one of the longest-running plays in Off-Broadway history, of which the New York Times said “the female roles [Busch] creates are hilarious vamps, but also high comic characters...the audience laughs at the first line and goes right on laughing at every line to the end.” Also included is the Tony-nominated Broadway hit The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife—a comedy about a self-absorbed Upper West Side woman whose life is devoted to mornings at the Whitney, afternoons at the Museum of Modern Art, and evenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, until her world is transformed by a visit from a childhood friend; The Lady in Question, a tribute to 1940s Hollywood that is both funny and suspenseful; and Psycho Beach Party, a cross between Gidget and Spellbound.

Psycho beach party: Cast gender - mixed; number - 5 males, 6 females (total 11); size - medium; length - 10 scenes. Parody of the 1960s beach party movies. Surfing teenagers go crazy in Malibu.

THE STORY: When murder roars through a small Missouri town, Ruth Hoch begins her own quest to find truth and honesty amid small town jealousies, religion, greed and lies. This tornado of a play propels you through its events like a page-turning mys

"Howard Katz" is a new play by Marber, who has been called "the greatest British playwright to have emerged in the 1990s." ("The Financial Times") Following on the success of "Closer, " this haunting play is centered on its title character, a hard-as-nails talent agent now down on his luck.

The “villainous homosexual” has long stalked America’s cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society’s understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires. Murder Most Queer examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy. Murder Most Queer works to expose the forces that create the homophobic paradigm that imagines sexual and gender nonconformity as dangerous and destructive and to show how theater artists—and for the most part LGBT theater artists—have rewritten and radically altered the significance of the homicidal homosexual. Jordan Schildcrout argues that these figures, far from being simple reiterations of a homophobic archetype, are complex and challenging characters who enact trenchant fantasies of empowerment, replacing the shame and stigma of the abject with the defiance and freedom of the outlaw, giving voice to rage and resistance. These bold characters also probe the darker anxieties and fears that can affect queer lives and relationships. Instead of sentencing them to the prison of negative representations, this book analyzes the meanings in their acts of murder, confronting the real fears and desires condensed in those dramatic acts.

Theatre of the Ridiculous is a significant movement that highlighted the radical possibilities inherent in camp. Much of contemporary theatre owes this form a great debt but little has been written about its history or aesthetic markers. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the important practitioners, along with critical commentary of their work. Beginning with Ridiculous' most recognizable name, Charles Ludlam, the author traces the development of this campy, queer genre, from the B movies of Maria Montez to the Pop Art scene of Andy Warhol to the founding of the Play-House of the Ridiculous and the dawn of Ludlam's career and finally to the contemporary theatre scene.