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  Romeo and Juliet

  William Shakespeare

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  In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a world of violence and generational conflict in which two young people fall in love and die because of that love. The story is rather extraordinary in that the normal problems faced by young lovers are here so very large. It is not simply that the families of Romeo and Juliet disapprove of the lover's affection for each other; rather, the Montagues and the Capulets are on opposite sides in a blood feud and are trying to kill each other on the streets of Verona. Every time a member of one of the two families dies in the fight, his relatives demand the blood of his killer. Because of the feud, if Romeo is discovered with Juliet by her family, he will be killed. Once Romeo is banished, the only way that Juliet can avoid being married to someone else is to take a potion that apparently kills her, so that she is burried with the bodies of her slain relatives. In this violent, death-filled world, the movement of the story from love at first sight to the union of the lovers in death seems almost inevitable.

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  Irl

  Tommy Pico

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  IRL is a sweaty summertime poem composed like a long text message, rooted in the epic tradition of A.R. Ammons, ancient Kumeyaay Bird Songs, and Beyoncé’s visual albums. It follows Teebs, a reservation-born, queer NDN weirdo, trying to figure out his impulses/desires/history in the midst of Brooklyn rooftops, privacy in the age of the Internet, street harassment, suicide, boys boys boys, literature, colonialism, religion, leaving one's 20s, and a love/hate relationship with English. He’s plagued by an indecision, unsure of which obsessions, attractions, and impulses are essentially his, and which are the result of Christian conversion, hetero-patriarchal/colonialist white supremacy, homophobia, Bacardi, gummy candy, and not getting laid.IRL asks, what happens to a modern, queer indigenous person a few generations after his ancestors were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history? Teebs feels compelled towards “boys, burgers, booze”, though he begins to suspect there is perhaps a more ancient goddess calling to him behind art, behind music, behind poetry.

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  Steve Waters: Shorts (NHB Modern...

  Steve Waters

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  Five short plays from acclaimed playwright Steve Waters, all of them deeply personal accounts of his attempts to make sense of twenty-first-century Britain and an ever-changing world.
  From the migrant crisis in Europe to climate change and the increasing urbanisation of our green spaces, Waters turns his sensitive, thoughtful eye to the complex and challenging issues that face us today, moving from the personal to the political, and from the local to the global.
  Out of Your Knowledge explores our changing attitudes towards the landscape as Waters retraces the journey of John Clare, the 19th-century English poet who escaped his lunatic asylum in Essex and walked for over 100 miles to reach his home village.
  Told by a woman killed in a cycling accident, Death of a Cyclist is a poignant, bleakly comic monologue that imagines the moments after death, and our struggle to come to terms with the biggest shock of all.
  Set against the low hum of the War on Terror, Why Can't We Live Together? is a kaleidoscopic vision of our times through the lives of one man and one woman.
  In a Vulnerable Place is a monologue documenting Waters' own journey from the Norfolk Broads to the steppes of Mongolia to explore, first hand, what is happening to the natural world and the human heart.
  Finally, The Play About Calais, based on Waters' own visit to the 'Jungle' refugee camp in Calais and the people he met along the way, is an attempt to make sense of one of the most complex and divisive issues of our times.
  Steve Waters is a leading UK playwright whose plays include Limehouse, Temple and World Music (all at the Donmar Warehouse), and The Contingency Play (Bush Theatre). He ran the MPhil in Playwriting at Birmingham University for several years, and now teaches Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His book, The Secret Life of Plays, is published by Nick Hern Books.

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  A Lesson Before Dying

  Romulus Linney

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  Based on Ernest J. Gaines’ National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940’s. Jefferson, a young illiterate black man, is falsely convicted of murder and is sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, the plantation schoolteacher, agrees to talk with the condemned man. The disheartened Wiggins had once harbored dreams of escaping from his impoverished youth, yet he returned to his home town after university, to teach children whose lives seemed as unpromising as Jefferson’s. The two men forge a bond as they come to understand what it means to resist and defy one’s own fate.An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:Rick Foucheux as Paul BoninKeith Glover as Grant WigginsJamahl Marsh as JeffersonLinda Powell as Vivian BaptisteJefferson A. Russell as Reverend Moses AmbroseJerry Whiddon as Sam GuidryBeatrice Winde as Emma GlennDirected by Nick Olcott. Recorded at Voice of America in Washington DC.

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  Silver Filigree

  Elinor Wylie

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 14 recordings of Silver Filigree by Elinor Wylie. This was the Weekly Poetry project for March 27, 2011.

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  Marquis de Sade's Midsummer...

  Ophelia T'Wat, Robert Dwight...

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  Full-Cast Audiobook! 
  Go Beyond Your Wettest Dreams... as If You Are Penniless and Yet Listening From Outside the Globe Theater! 
  In the last decade of the 16th century, William Shakespeare could not dare write A Midsummer Night's (Wet) Dream unabridged. By the happenchance of his birth-century, The Bard wrote in a poetic 'Shakespearean Code', hinting at sexualities and paraphilias he fully intended to compose and expose his Elizabethan audience to. His intended 'erotica for every fetish' morphed instead into a 'humane and wise drama' by happenchance.  
  But What If? there was a multiversal reality where the Marquis de Sade deciphered the Shakespearean Code during his long stay at the lunatic asylum at Charenton. But now Ophelia T'Wat, living in a much more sexually accepting century, can reach across realities to snatch these pages from the bloody quill of the Marquis and finally, fatefully publish the Wettest Midsummer Night'sDream conceivable! 

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