Contains the text to two of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett's greatest works, a single-act play and a single-person mime sketch. Endgame is an absurdist, tragicomic one-act play about a blind, paralyzed, domineering elderly man, his geriatric parents and his doddering, dithering, harried, servile companion in an abandoned shack in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who mention their awaiting some unspecified "end" which seems to be the end of...

In 1899, Yeats helped found the Irish National Theatre Society, which later became the famous Abbey Theatre of Dublin. He and Lady Augusta Gregory, another of the theatre's founders, collaborated on a few short plays during those first experimental years at the theatre. One such play, "The Pot of Broth", is a "peasant" farce that tells the story of a gullible peasant woman, convinced by a tramp that dropping a magic stone into hot water will make...

The play examines the powerful force of political idealism and the lives of those swept up in its tide. It is the final play in Sean O'Casey's Dublin trilogy. he play is set in Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916, and its premiere at the Abbey Theatre sparked rioting by nationalists who felt that it defamed Irish patriots. Among the characters who fight to keep their lives intact despite the war's destruction are Nora and Jack Clitheroe. Although...

O'Casey turned to England during World War II to pay homage to the Battle of Britain and England's ancient traditions. The entire play is set in a Cornish Manorial House that is serving as a headquarters for the Home Guard during World War II while being haunted by the ghosts of England's past glories. While the ghostly story infuses this work with fantastical elements, a realistic plot grounds the work as O'Casey once again introduces a wide range...

Krapp's last tape is a monologue of a man who, after 30 years, plays back the autobiographical tape he had recorded on his 39th birthday. All that fall is about the pilgrimage of an old Irish woman to meet her blind, grumbling husband at the train. In Embers, an old man and his wife ramble on and on. In Act without words I, a man responds to inviting off-stage whistles only to be thrown back from the wings. Act without words II has two men emerging...

In this darkly lyrical tale of a traveling faith healer roaming through Scotland and Wales with his wife and his manager, the author has created a metaphorical portrait of the artist as both creator and destroyer. The Broadway production starred James Mason.--From publisher description.