Amédée The New Tenant Victims of Duty - Three Plays

Eugène Ionesco

Summary

Three hilarious and provocative plays by the absurdist pioneer who remains “one of the most important and influential figures in the modern theater” (Library Journal). 
 
The author of such modern classics as The Bald Soprano, Exit the King, Rhinoceros, and The Chairs, Eugene Ionesco’s plays have become emblematic of Absurdist theatre and the French avant-garde. This essential collection combines The New Tenant with Amédée and Victims of Duty—plays Richard Gilman has called, along with The Killer, Ionesco’s “greatest plays, works of the same solidity, fulness, and permanence as [those of] his predecessors in the dramatic revolution that began with Ibsen and is still going on.” 
 
In Amédée, the title character and his wife have a problem—not so much the corpse in their bedroom as the fact that it’s been there for fifteen years and is now growing, slowly but surely crowding them out of their apartment. 
 
In The New Tenant, a similar crowding is caused by an excess of furniture—as Harold Hobson said in the London Times, “there is not a dramatist . . . who can make furniture speak as eloquently as Ionesco, and here he makes it the perfect, the terrifying symbol of the deranged mind.” 
 
In Victims of Duty, Ionesco parodies the conformity of modern life by plunging his characters into an obscure search for “mallot with a t.”

Available since: 03/31/2015.

Print length: 192 pages.

Poetry & Theatre

Other books that might interest you

The Domino Effect and other...

Fin Kennedy

This second volume of plays from award-winning playwright Fin Kennedy features three ensemble plays for large casts of young people aged thirteen to nineteen, each developed via a long-term, collaborative process with the target age group.
In The Dream Collector, a school group on a Media Studies field trip to the isolated country house of a black-and-white movie pioneer enter a sinister dreamworld when they go exploring after dark. Once they step through the movie screen, each of the young friends meets their dream double, the sinister Neverborn...
In Fast, a twenty-four-hour school fundraiser in a semi-rural town takes on a new urgency when farmer's daughter Cara refuses to eat again until the supermarkets she holds responsible for her father's suicide agree to her demands.
In The Domino Effect – a five-star hit at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe – a silent girl finds her voice, and her mother, when a mysterious East End antiques dealer teaches her how small actions lead to big effects, and how to master the law of unintended consequences.
With their flexible, mixed casts, the plays are particularly suited to performance by young people's groups, who will enjoy the demands and challenges of playing roles specifically created for teenage actors.

Show book

Orgasmic Sinister

Joseph Batte

Immerse your Spirit in a world of darkened narrative poetry, blended with insightful and twisted humor. An hourglass is tilted; but, but, death is nothing, compared to possessing of a hunted soul and spirit.

Show book

Ballad of Yachiyo

Philip Kan Gotanda

The Ballad of Yachiyo is a tale of illicit passion by Guggenheim-winning playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, set in 1919 among the lush cane fields of Hawaii. Inspired by true events in the playwright’s family, The Ballad of Yachiyo follows 16-year-old Yachiyo as she reluctantly leaves her impoverished parents to live with sophisticated relatives. Her mother hopes she will learn the Japanese tea ceremony and other refinements that will help attract a wealthy husband. But as Yachiyo acquires civilized graces from her hostess, Okusan, she also struggles with a growing passion for Okusan’s handsome, dissolute husband. The Ballad of Yachiyo is a gripping story of poetic imagery by one of America’s leading contemporary playwrights.An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring June Angela, Takayo Fischer, Dian Kobayashi, Lane Nishikawa, Sab Shimono, Greg Watanabe and Annie Yee.

Show book

Snail House (NHB Modern Plays) -...

Richard Eyre

Sir Neil Marriot had a 'good pandemic', becoming familiar to millions from his TV appearances as a government medical advisor. His service even earned him a knighthood, and he is now rewarding himself with a lavish birthday party.
But, amidst the oak panelling, the champagne and the silver service, his family are at one another's throats again, and he thinks there's something familiar – and somehow unsettling – about one of the catering staff...
The Snail House is a play about how the past impacts on the present, and how overconfidence can have disastrous consequences. Written and directed by Richard Eyre, it premiered at Hampstead Theatre, London, in September 2022.

Show book

Born in the USA - Exploring...

Emma Lazarus, Alan Seeger,...

Poetry. A form of words that seems so elegantly simple in one verse and so cleverly complex in another. Each poet has a particular style, an individual and unique way with words and yet each of us seems to recognise the path and destination of where the verses lead, even if sometimes the full comprehension may be a little beyond us.

Through the centuries every culture has produced verse to symbolize and to describe everything from everyday life, natural wonders, the human condition and even in its more hubristic moments, the crushing triumph of an enemy.

In the volumes of this series we take a look through the prism of individual regions of the United States through the centuries and decades.

The United States may be many things: the world’s policeman, a bully, a shameless purveyor of mass market culture but it also, in its better moments, a standard bearer for truth, transparency, equality and the more positive qualities of democracy.

Little wonder that’s its poets are rightly acknowledged as wonders of their art. Leading lights in the fight against slavery and for equality, even if the rest of the Nation is finding it problematic to catch up.

In this volume we have collected verse from poets born in one of the most famous cities in the World: New York. Within its five boroughs are a small universe of wonder and magic, a kaleidoscope of almost everything the planet has to offer. In past times New York was a gateway to a new land and a new future whatever the misery and tragedy of your former life. Of course, this golden vision was not attained by everyone. But our local poets, including such luminaries as Emma Lazarus, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Alice Duer Miller, and Alan Seeger bring vision and truth to this unrivalled city and its hallowed status in the world of verse

Show book

The Garden of Love

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.He was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work (Summary by Wikipedia)

Show book