"All the world’s a stage" in Shakespeare's lyrical tale of pastoral life in the Forest of Arden. For nearly 400 years this comedy’s rapturous verse, including some of the Bard’s most beautiful and trenchant speeches, and its lovable characters, have been delighting audiences. Today, in our modern rush and hurry, the Forest of Arden is more appealing than ever. The very title suggests that Shakespeare himself was saying of the play: ‘Here’s something to divert you, something you'll enjoy’ In this play, three of Shakespeare's immortal characters harmoniously interact: Touchstone, the court clown; Jaques, the melancholy philosopher, and Rosalind, one of Shakespeare's most popular heroines, personifying beauty, youth, gaiety and courage. It’s a sweet and warmly human comedy, full of gentle wisdom, bursting with joy and fun.

Plucking his plot from a minor coincidence of history (the co-residence of novelist James Joyce, Dadaist Tristan Tzara and political revolutionary Lenin in Zurich, Switzerland, during 1917) Tom Stoppard has constructed a knotty high-and-low comedy of ideas, history, politics, aesthetics, and music hall burlesque that is glued together by one sticky individual named Henry Carr, one of the truly inspired comic creations of modern theatre. As we know from ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, JUMPERS and THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND, Stoppard likes to steep his comedy in intellectual ideas. In TRAVESTIES he has overlapped a parody of Oscar Wilde's THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST with a lawsuit over a pair of pants, obscene limericks, Beethoven’s ”Appassionata” and Lenin's heavy prose style. TRAVESTIES is altogether a stunningly witty play that bombards the audience with a thousand laughs and nine hundred thoughts.

The homes in South St. Louis were missing the men who had not yet come home from the War in 1919, so the postmen called the all-women homes ‘ladyhouses.’ LADYHOUSE BLUES poignantly pinpoints the eve of revolutionary change in America through the close relationships of a St. Louis mother and her four daughters. Capitalizing on the fact that in less than 60 years America has radically changed socially and economically, O’Morrison has employed his poet's command of language and a painter’s sense of detail to create a realistic psychological American drama of life hanging in suspension. This new play, scheduled for Broadway in May, is a beautiful tone piece about a time when American values were changing rapidly and women were feeling the roots of today's feminism.

Winner of the 1976 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for the "Best American Play,’ STREAMERS uses a room in an Army barracks as a microcosm for some of the most contemporary tensions in U.S. society, - racial, sexual, social - set against the uneasy 1965 backdrop of suddenly escalating American involvement in Vietnam. STREAMERS is the third in Rabe’s trio of controversial human dramas, following THE BASIC TRAINING OF PAVLO HUMMEL and STICKS AND BONES. The play’s title, Army slang for unopened parachutes that doom paratroopers to a swift end, reflects the author's concern with the sudden, random nature of violence and death in modern America. It is a masterly drama, attacking traditional notions of virility and macho war heroics, employing humor, pathos and impressive depths of understanding. This play makes you realize that sitting on the edge of your seat is more than an idle theatrical catch-phrase.

ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR captured the hearts of 1975-76 Broadway theatre-goers for more than 17 months at the Music Box Theatre. It's a brilliantly polished comedy that looks at three contemporary couples at three successive Christmas parties. But underneath the hilarity, ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR takes a long, hard look at a cross-section of today's society. The result is a bright, witty, satirical work by Alan Ayckbourn, who also wrote RELATIVELY SPEAKING, which played at ACT last season.