Playing With Canons

Explosive New Works from Great Literature by America's Indie Playwrights ...

18 plays by some of indie theatre's most exciting playwrights in a single volume celebrating the enduring power and spirit of classic literature and drama

These remarkable plays reshape familiar material in challenging, innovative, and unexpected fashion, pushing these timeless works into the 21st century in resoundingly resonant high style

Part I - Reflections on Shakespeare

WANT'S UNWISHT WORK - Cyberpunk poetry response to Love's Labour's Lost and other works of Shakespeare

LA TEMPESTAD - Characters and situations from The Tempest assembled in a timely new play set in Vieques, Puerto Rico

TITUS X - Titus Andronicus as a punk rock musical

Part II - From Legend, Myth & Sacred Sources

GENESIS - Contemporary re-imagination of five medieval Mystery plays telling familiar Bible stories

THE EUMENIDES - A modern adaptation of the last play of The Oresteia of Aeschylus

PRINCIPIA - A peppy musical fable based on the Principia Discordia and other post-modern legends

Part III - Chekhov and Other Russians

UNCLE JACK - Chekhov's Uncle Vanya transplanted to present-day West Virginia

STORY OF AN UNKNOWN MAN - Chekhov himself appears in this comic drama based on one of his stories

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, PARTS I AND II - An epic, faithful dramatization of the classic Dostoyevsky novel

Part IV - American Literature on Stage

BEL CANTO - Poe's suspense story The Tell Tale Heart recast among noirish gangsters, with jazzy overtones

SALEM - A savvy morality tale, after Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER - Melville's famous novella is brought to the stage in this moving adaptation

Part V - European Literature on Stage

FRANKENSTEIN - A highly theatrical rendering of Mary Shelley's classic novel

NORTHANGER ABBEY - Jane Austen's novel fuses with the gothic adventure The Mysteries of Udolpho in this delightful and inventive comedy

THE MAN WHO LAUGHS - A live "silent film" version of Victor Hugo's touching, macabre tale

Part VI - Fresh Looks

BALD DIVA! - Absurdist satire set among the well-heeled, shallow Chelsea gay boys

FATBOY - Sensationalized update of Jarry's Ubu plays

THE PERSIANS - A raucous vaudeville based on the oldest extant work in the Western canon

In addition to the complete text of these 18 plays, the anthology also includes -

Brief introductory essays by critic Leonard Jacobs, dramaturg/producer Chad Gracia, actor Tim Cusack, and directors Stephen Speights, Eric Parness, and David Fuller Complete production information and how to obtain permission to produce each of the plays Biographical data about each of the playwrights