theater plays

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, "A Random House Play", 131 pages illustrated with photographs from the stage production featuring Kaye Ballard and Jerry Stiller. Cover label illustration by Hirschfeld. John Latouche's Introduction is his unusual expository curtain speech recounting the circumstances of the plays inception and history. Front end paper tanned. No dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Press, 1st, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, two-tone blue cloth covers, 120 pages. The blackly comic play about the oppressed lives of women in 1950s New York. One of literature's leading humorists, Dorothy Parker drew from the dark side of her imagination to pen The Ladies of the Corridor, a searing drama about women living on their own in a New York residence hotel. Loosely based on Parker's life, and co-written with famed Hollywood playwright Arnaud d'Usseau, The Ladies of the Corridor exposes the limitations of a woman's life in a drama teeming with Parker's signature wit. This copy INSCRIBED BY FRANCES STARR on the front fly leaf who had a leading role in the play as Mrs. Nichols.

Hardcover. NY/New Haven, Coward-McCann / Yale University, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, #38/525 copies, Numbered and SIGNED by Wilder on a leaf tipped onto the copyright page, bound in faux-vellum spine, flowered paper covered boards. Mild foxing to a few pages, otherwise clean. A one act play whose action spans 90 years in the home of one family, specifically in the dining room during Christmas dinners. laid in is a page of The Yale Alumni Weekly from 1931 with a review of the play.

Hardcover. London, Allen & Unwin, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with fading to spine. INSCRIBED BY THE TRANSLATOR INGALLS on the front fly leaf. The desperate struggle between the aging Manchu Empress T z'u-hsi and her young nephew the Emperor, at the close of the nineteenth century. A story told as a parable against both Japanese occupation and the Communist rule. Small ownersjp stamp on first page, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. A facsimile reprint.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 40 pages, b&w frontis. Facsimile reprint of 18th century (1732) edition. An anti-Catholic play by Fielding, Introduction by Connie Capers Thorson. Includes bibliographical references.

Softcover. NY, Harmony Books, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 249 pages. The original, complete, and totally unedited scripts from the now famous BBC "Hitchhiker Radio Show." Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, New York Theatre Program Corp., 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 48 page playbill program for the Shubert revue "Hooray for What!" starring Ed Wynn (featured on the cover) and Vivian Vance ( of The Lucy Show). Great ads feature night spots like Sardi's and The Cotton Club. Light wear, stapled, clean. 6 3/4 X 9 1/4".

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80,pages. A facsimile reprint, Introduction by Deborah C. Payne. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, unclipped. A collection of essays and articles relating to the "new theatre," the Third Theatre off-off Broadway, and the Living Theatre as it displayed itself on its recent American tour. Also includes non-theatre essays - on the Madison Avenue Villain; on horror movies; a memoir, and an assortment of literary reviews and speculations. 294 pages, clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 88 pages. A facsimile reprint of a satirical play written in 1700. Name on front cover, otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper and Brothers, 1st, 1905, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, small volume (4 X 6 1/4"), blue cloth designed and lettered in white. Frontispiece and 5 plates in b/w by Frank Nankivell. Comical theatrical play the scene of which is "a summer hotel in mid-August, where a group of summer-girls, longing for masculine companionship, construct a large worsted man from an old afghan, stuffing him with cotton. He comes to life, and proves to be one of the worst flirts ever created. Exceedingly funny to read, and is suitable for amateur theatricals." Includes a depreciating African-American character, Sambo Front, and use of music borrowed from Gilbert and Sullivan. Inscription on front fly leaf dated 1905, otherwise clean, bright copy. Plate at page 6 is loose.

Softcover. Baltimore, Theatre Arts, 1960, Book: Very Good, Softcover, stapled, 72 pages, b&w illustrations. Notes on "The Best Man" by Gore Vidal, From Pillow to Post by Mary Rogers, the complete play "Once Upon a Mattress", articles on directing, scenic design and lighting, Maureen Stapleton, Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Theatre Arts, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80 pages, b&w illustration. Articles on Eugene Ionesco, Translated By Donald Watson (Complete Play Text: The Chairs and The Lesson), William Saroyan (Inoesco), George Jean Nathan (Stage as Self-Poisoner), Ward Morehouse (Broadway's Baance Sheet), John s Wilsonn (Straw-hat Season and Tents, too), Hesketh Pearson (Pinero and Barrie), World of Wiiam Inge, Patterson Greeene (Greek Theater in Los Angees), Amrica's Dramatic Critics (Harold V. Cohen, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) Etc. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Theatre Arts, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 94 pages, b&w illustrations. In stapled wrappers.Good used condition with cover lightly worn. *Waiting for Godot* by Samuel Beckett. "Why She Would Not": A Little Comedy by George Bernard Shaw. Florida Premiere for New Tennessee Williams Play: *Sweet Bird of Youth*. McKenna in "Saint Joan". Zolotow on The Actors Studio. "Carmen Jones". Clean copy.

Hardcover. Paris, Garnier, 1911, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 625 pages, original blue paper wrappers here bound in half leather and marbled boards, spines with raised ribs and gilt design, floral end papers. Top edge gilt, 4 color plates.

Hardcover. Ireland, Gallery Books, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 100 pages. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, previous owner's signature on prelim page, else a clean, tight copy. This Irish edition precedes all others..

Hardcover. NY, Crown, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 644 pages, b&w illustrations. After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich, who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's "chosen biographer", covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing, or avoiding it, at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a "repressed puritan" poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event, in this case, the opening of a remarkable play, this is an impressively argued biography.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan Company, 1st, 1914, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, maroon cloth with gilt lettering on spine. 164 pages plus 5 pages of publisher's ads. Remnants of torn dust jacket laid in at rear. From reviews on flap: "An effective presentation of modern life in New York City" ... "One of the most sparkling comedies of recent years, depicting life among the artists in Manhattan..." One of only two plays written by this poet. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, facsimile reprint of the 1682 edition, 80 pages. Introduction by Diane Dreher. An early historical play about Anne Boleyn, second queen of Henry VIII. Clean copy.

Hardcover. San Francisco, The Bohemian Club, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 74 pages, illustrated orange paper over boards with title on front cover and spine. Illustrated with woodcuts by Vincent Perez. Issued without dust jacket. Bohemian Club Library Notes brochure laid in.