Theater of the Real

A dramatized reconstruction of the events in the inquiry into the murder of Briton Stephen Lawrence.

These are three testimonial plays from South Africa by the hugely influential and highly acclaimed young playwright Yael Farber. Uniquely, this collection of testimonial plays is based on the lives of the original black South African performers. It includes:A Woman in Waiting,Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise, andHe Left Quietly.

The Laramie Project premiered on February 19, 2000, and went on to become one of the most-performed pieces of theater in America. The groundbreaking play portrays a small Wyoming town after one of its citizens, a young gay man named Matthew Shepard, was targeted, beaten and left to die. Based on transcripts of more than 200 interviews with people of the town, The Laramie Project is both a mainstay of modern theater and a focal point for political activism. Now, in this volume, The Laramie Project- Ten Years Later joins the original work. The second play-a stunning coda to the original-revisits Laramie a decade after the tragedy, and finds a town grappling with the twin specters of justice and forgiveness. Here, the Tectonic Theater Project exposes the denial that has taken root-claims that Matthew was killed, not out of hate, but out of a robbery gone wrong. Together, these plays comprise a deeply moving theatrical cycle that explores the depths to which humanity can sink-and the heights of compassion to which we can rise. This new edition will replace The Laramie Project in our backlist.

The first major collection by playwright Emily Mann contains four powerful docudramas. Based on extensive interviews of real people's experiences, these plays explore various moral issues and questions that still resonate in America today. Annulla: An Autobiography is a solo piece featuring the reflections of an elderly Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by pretending to by Aryan. Jerry Talmer of the New York Post calls Annulla "one bangup 90 minutes of theatre...I don't know when I've been stimulated as much by anything on the living stage." Still Life is composed of interviews with a Vietnam War veteran with PTSD, the pregnant wife he physically and emotionally abuses, and the mistress who finds herself entranced by his passion and violence. This Obie Award-winning play is "a powerful affair, full of passion and viability...Mann offers no easy answers or pat solutions, she simply invites us into these three characters' lives" (Los Angeles Times). Execution of Justice follows the trial of the former policeman who shot San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and openly gay City Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1979. Called "thought-provoking...a taut courtroom drama" (New York Times), Execution of Justice "is theatre reasserting its claim on the country's moral conscience" (Washington Post). Greensboro: A Requiem is "a particularly all-American tragedy" (New York Times) as Mann interviews those involved in the largely unreported 1979 massacre of unarmed demonstrators by members of the Ku Klux Klan, Greensboro police force, and FBI. Forbes calls Greensboro "a provocation, a potent exposé of the 'less-than-human thing' which fuels the politics of hate and injustice in America."

I Am My Own Wifeis the winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. From the Obie Award-winning author ofQuills comes this acclaimed one-man show, which explores the astonishing true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. A transvestite and celebrated antiques dealer who successfully navigated the two most oppressive regimes of the past century-the Nazis and the Communists--while openly gay and defiantly in drag, von Mahlsdorf was both hailed as a cultural hero and accused of colluding with the Stasi. In an attempt to discern the truth about Charlotte, Doug Wright has written "at once a vivid portrait of Germany in the second half of the twentieth century, a morally complex tale about what it can take to be a survivor, and an intriguing meditation on everything from the obsession with collecting to the passage of time" (Hedy Weiss,Chicago Sun-Times).