The first collection from a major new voice in American theatre.

“Nearly everything about David Adjmi’s Stunning has an original ring to it, from the setting . . . to the brassy bleat of the dialogue." –Time Out New York This volume of distinctive work includes Stunning, set in an insular Syrian Jewish community, where a teenage bride’s world is disrupted by her intellectual African American housekeeper; Evildoers, about the collapse of two privileged couples; and Elective Affinities, a post-9/11 monologue. David Adjmi’s work has been produced at Lincoln Center Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, and the Royal Court in London. He has received numerous commissions and is the recipient of a 2009 Kesselring Fellowship and a Bush Artist Fellowship.

The main characters of these five plays by Christopher Bollas struggle to survive in a post-"Catastrophe" world. As they go about ordinary life, it is clear that something insidious has both preceded their existence, colored it, and is everywhere and nowhere. Like the existential universe of some plays of the 1950's-Ionescu, early Pinter, Beckett-human meaning is in meager supply, but Bollas's work-clearly following in this tradition-examines existence in the 21st century through a new lens. He explores a damaged self that strives to find a way to live in a world devoid of meaning. One lives to fulfill a function. The absurd context in which many of the characters live seems eerily premonitional, as if some rough new character formation is slouching towards us all. Theraplay and Other Plays includes pieces such as: a theatre company which has one day to change the life of a damaged man; a friendship that comes to an end on grounds so petty that causation is up for laughs; a dinner party that descends into madness; a man assigned the task of interviewing people for a job that has never been explained to him; and a farce about a rock collector who visits a psychoanalyst to sort out the rock's object relations. These plays are dark, oddly amusing, and deeply moving. Bollas finds redemption within human frailty. His characters' bewilderment in the face of absurd conditions becomes an embarkation point for recovery from social disaster.

This volume of Lee Blessing's most recent and some of his best work, includes: Patient A - a rethinking of the Kimberly Bergalis AIDS case; Two Rooms - the strain on families of hostages in the Middle East; Down the Road - a tale of a serial killer concerned with image; Fortinbras - a hilarious reexamination of Hamlet in a contemporary political context; and Lake Street Extension - an exploration of the dark theme of child molestation. All of these plays resonate with Blessing's characteristic depth of human feeling and his insistence that the personal is the political.

"Beautifully conceived, confidently executed . . . not just her finest to date, but also the best new play to open Off Broadway this fall."—The New York Times A witty, melancholy comedy about a group of friends pushing against middle age, This is a major new work for Melissa James Gibson, best known for her boundary-challenging, linguistically delectable pieces. This volume also includes downtown cult favorites [sic] and Suitcase, and Brooklyn Bridge, a play for young audiences. Melissa James Gibson's plays include [sic] (winner of the OBIE Award for playwriting and the Kesselring Prize), Suitcase: or those that resemble flies from a distance, Brooklyn Bridge, Given Fish, and Current Nobody.

Kuyanuka and other Plays by Gha-Makhulu Diniso is also a collection of three one person plays; Kuyanuka was first performed in 1991, Koropa in 2000 and Shoeville in 2005. As critic Darryl Accone observes: It is precisely because of his conscience and commitment to true freedom that Diniso remains an artist neglected in his own country. Not for him complacency about the much lip-serviced Rainbow Nation, a least not while the stench of inequality not only persists but grow fouler by the day. There is no extravagant escapism imported from abroad and peddled to the nouveaux riches and petite bourgeois of the New South Africa. Instead though the creation of multiple characters reflecting the harshness of life under the neo-liberal economic order, Diniso expresses the problematic of celebrating political freedom when most black people find their living standards under threat and soaring unemployment and casualization undermining much of the early liberation promise.