Drama

Shakespeare's most sophisticated comedy is a riotous tale of hopelessly unrequited passions and mistaken identity....

In the hands of Sophocles, the master dramatist, the anguished tale of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother retains its power to shock and move beyond any Freudian reference....

Lysistrata is an ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes, which was originally performed in Athens in 411 BC. It is a comic account of a woman's extraordinary quest to terminate the Peloponnesian War between Greek city states, by advocating that the women deny all the men of the land any sex....

These four plays, translated into blank verse by C. A. Wheelwright, present to us the wide range of this ancient playwright's fertile imagination....

This final play from the pen of Oscar Wilde is a stylish send-up of Victorian courtship and manners, complete with assumed names, mistaken lovers, and a lost handbag....

In this BBC full-cast production of Much Ado About Nothing, some handsome soldiers return from battle. Yet one soldier finds himself locked in a merry war of his own....

Stacy Keach and Jane Kaczmarek star in this 1949 masterpiece by Arthur Miller, a searing portrait of the physical, emotional, and psychological costs of the American dream....

Goethe’s two-part dramatic work, Faust, based on a traditional theme, and finally completed in 1831, is an exploration of that restless intellectual and emotional urge which found its fullest expression in the European Romantic movement....

The final play of the Oresteia, called The Eumenides (Εὐμενίδες, Eumenídes), illustrates how the sequence of events in the trilogy ends...

George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion is a fussy unmarried professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who claims that he could train an uneducated person off the street to speak so that he or she could pass as a member of the aristocracy. His pick is Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers....

You learn how drama makes visible the conflicts and wars of culture in ways other forms cannot manage....

Inspired by the mythic house of Thebes, Sophocles’s defining Greek tragedies follow the fates that befall three doomed generations....

Sophocles' The Theban Plays, all three of which are included in this collection alongside adaptations of Electra and Philoctetes, are brought to life by celebrated writers, poets, and playwrights....

Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s most compelling Roman plays. The plot against Caesar and the infamous assassination scene make for unforgettable listening....

Chekhov’s masterpiece in a full-cast performance starring Tessa Thompson, Jennifer Westfeldt, Sarah Zimmerman and Jon Hamm....

In Richard III, Shakespeare invites us on a moral holiday. The play draws us to identify with Richard and his fantasy of total control of self and domination of others....

In this classic of Chekhov’s canon, an overbearing professor pays a visit to his country estate, where Sonya and Vanya, his daughter and former brother-in-law, have slaved to maintain his wealth....

In Sophocles' tragedy, Oedipus discovers that he has been caught in his terrible destiny....

Six phenomenally sophisticated Noël Coward comedies: Fallen Angels, Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Blithe Spirit, Present Laughter....

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies....

A dark tale of hubris, lust, and self-destruction… as told by a man who famously fell prey to those same impulses in his own life....

This widely studied play is one of the "best sellers" of the Shakespeare canon....

Antigone, daughter of Jocasta and Oedipus, faces great challenges when she must arrange a formal burial for her brother, Polynices....

The Peloponnesian War drags on and on with no end in sight, and the tough-minded Lysistrata has had enough. Taking matters into her own hands, Lysistrata convenes a meeting of women from warring city-states across Greece and calls for a sex strike....

Eight of George Bernard Shaw's most memorable plays in one splendid collection....