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Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language are too limited. "The 30-Minute Shakespeare" is a new series of abridgements that tell the "story" of each play from start to finish while keeping the beauty of Shakespeare's language intact. Specific stage directions...
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The Duchess of Malfi (originally published as The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy) is a Jacobean revenge tragedy written by English dramatist John Webster in 1612—1613. Published in 1623, the play is loosely based on events that occurred between 1508 and 1513 surrounding Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi (d. 1511), whose father, Enrico d'Aragona, Marquis of Gerace, was an illegitimate son of Ferdinand I of Naples. As in the play, she secretly...
Series
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Bridget is forty-something and single again after breaking up with Mark Darcy. She decides to focus on her job and surround herself with old friends and some new ones. But her love life takes a turn when she meets a dashing American named Jack. In an unlikely twist, Bridget finds herself pregnant but she can only be fifty percent sure of the father's identity.
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Series
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Early in his career, Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) wrote a series of plays revolving around characters obsessed with the sea. This period culminated in the 1922 production of Anna Christie, a Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of social realism that was among the first of the author's plays to explore characters searching for their own identities. Centering on the reunion of a barge captain and his daughter after a twenty-year separation, the play derives...
6) Ripcord
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Summary
Set in the Bristol Place Assisted Living Facility, this glorious and biting new comedy from David Lindsay-Abaire centers around Abby, who takes pride in her residence in one of the most coveted rooms in the rest home. Things turn sour quickly when she must take in Marilyn, a new roommate to share her precious space. In a satirical conflict of territory and control, Lindsay-Abaire spins a benign, typically mundane setting into an absurdist, colorful...
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Cow. Slob. Pig. How many insults can you hear before you have to stand up and defend the woman you love? Tom faces just that question when he falls for Helen, a bright, funny, sexy young woman who happens to be plus-sized, and then some. Forced to explain his new relationship to his shallow (although shockingly funny) friends, finally he comes to terms with his own preconceptions of the importance of conventional good looks. Neil LaBute's sharply...
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Molly Sweeney, by the great Irish playwright Brian Friel, tells the story of married couple Molly and Frank, who live in a remote Irish village. Molly has been blind since birth, but now a surgeon – Mr. Rice – believes he may be able to restore her sight. In a series of interwoven monologues, Molly Sweeney takes us into the minds of three people with very different expectations of what will happen when Molly regains her vision. An L.A. Theatre...
9) End days
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In Deborah Zoe Laufer's End Days, a suburban family is undergoing a spiritual crisis following the September 11th attacks. Sylvia Stein has turned to Christianity to save her disaffected husband Arthur and her rebellious teenage daughter Rachel. But as Sylvia races around preparing for the Rapture, Rachel is learning that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in her philosophy. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:...
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Set in early 17th-century London this play is renowned for its sharp wit, intricate plot, and vibrant characters. Jonson masterfully crafts a story centered around the wealthy, old Morose, who detests noise and yearns for a quiet life, leading him to marry the seemingly silent Epicoene. However, his quest for tranquility quickly unravels in a series of comedic twists and turns, revealing the true nature of his bride and the scheming surrounding his...
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At the peak of her international career, Maria Enders is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous twenty years ago. Back then she played the role of an alluring young girl but now she is being asked to step into the older role. With her assistant Maria prepares to play opposite a young Hollywood starlet and finds herself on the other side of the mirror, face to face with an unsettling reflection of herself.
12) Emma
Summary
Handsome, clever, and rich, Emma Woodhouse is a restless queen bee without rivals in her sleepy little town, In this glittering satire of social class and the pain of growing up, Emma must adventure through misguided matches and romantic missteps to find the love that has been there all along.
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Jupiter Jones was born under a night sky, with signs predicting that she was destined for great things. Now grown, Jupiter dreams of the stars but wakes up to the cold reality of a job cleaning toilets and an endless run of bad breaks. Only when Caine, a genetically engineered ex-military hunter, arrives on Earth to track her down does Jupiter begin to glimpse the fate that has been waiting for her all along.
14) Egg
Summary
An unflinching comedy about why women choose motherhood, why they revere it, fear it, and why some women forgo it.
15) Paradise Hills
Summary
A young woman is sent to Paradise Hills to be reformed only to learn that behind the high-class facility's beauty is a sinister secret.
17) Hidden figures
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Summary
As the United States raced against Russia to put a man in space, NASA found untapped talent in a group of African-American female mathematicians that served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history. Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson crossed all gender, race, and professional lines while their brilliance and desire to dream big, beyond anything ever accomplished before by the human race, firmly cemented...
18) The color purple
Summary
A young uneducated woman living in the rural South is raped by her father who then forces her to marry a man who beats her. Her life is transformed by the friendship of two women who help her find self-respect and the courage to change her life.
19) Swallow
Summary
A newly pregnant housewife, she seems content to spend her time tending to an immaculate home and doting on her Ken-doll husband, Richie. However, as the pressure to meet her controlling in-laws and husband's rigid expectations mounts, cracks begin to appear in her carefully created facade. Hunter develops a dangerous habit, and a dark secret from her past seeps out in the form of a disorder called pica, a condition that has her compulsively swallowing...
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Two plays expanding on Hawthorne's classic novel "The scarlet letter." In the blood: Hester La Negrita, an unapologetic mother of five illegitimate children, practices writing the alphabet to help herself "one day get a leg up." Fucking A: Hester Smith works the only job available to her, as an abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son.