The Beauty Queen of Leenane


Book Description

The Beauty Queen of Leenane tells the darkly comic tale of Maureen Folan, a plain and lonely woman in her early forties, and Mag her manipulative ageing mother whose interference in Maureen's first and potentially last loving relationship sets in motion a train of events that is as gothically funny as it is horrific.




The Body of an American


Book Description

Mogadishu, 1993. Paul is a Canadian photojournalist who is about to take a picture that will win him the Pulitzer Prize. Princeton, the present day, Dan is an American writer who is struggling to finish his play about ghosts. Both men live worlds apart but a chance encounter over the airwaves sparks an extraordinary friendship that sees them journey from some of the most dangerous places on earth to the depths of the human soul.Flying from Kabul to the Canadian High Arctic, The Body of an American sees two actors jump between more than thirty roles in an exhilarating new form of documentary drama. It urgently places these two men’s battles – both public and private –against a backdrop of some of the world’s most iconic images of war. The Body of an American is the recipient of the 2013 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History. It also received the PEN Center USA Award for Drama and the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and premiered at Portland Center Stage in 2012, directed by Bill Rauch. The play was the recipient of the McKnight National Residency & Commission from the Playwrights’ Center, as well as a Sundance Institute Time Warner Storytelling Fellowship and a TCG Future Collaborations Grant. For further information and resources on this play, visit the Edward M Kennedy website: http://kennedyprize.columbia.edu/winners/2013/obrien/




Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children


Book Description

This is the first comprehensive study of Brecht's Mother Courage. Peter Thomson locates the sources of the play in Brecht's own experience and heritage, and provides a detailed account of Brecht's own production with the newly formed Berliner Ensemble in 1949. Thomson then explores how the play has been transmitted in the English-speaking theatre from Joan Littlewood's production with the Theatre Workshop Company in 1956 to the Royal National Theatre, with Diana Rigg as Mother Courage, in 1995. The book also examines such influential interpretations as those by William Gaskill, Judi Dench, and Glenda Jackson in the English theatre, and by Herbert Balu and Richard Schechner in America. Seminal productions in France and the Germanies are also discussed. A final chapter highlights the new urgency of the text in light of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and closes with an account of a triumphant staging in Uganda.




Mother Courage and Her Children


Book Description

Anna Fierling tries to hold her family together during the Thirty Years War.




Mother Courage and Her Children


Book Description

Widely considered one of the great dramatic creations of the modem stage, Mother Courage and Her Children is Bertolt Brecht s most passionate and profound statement against war. Set in the seventeenth century, the play follows Anna Fierling ( Mother Courage ), an itinerant trader, as she pulls her wagon of wares and her children through the blood and carnage of Europe s religious wars. Battered by hardships, brutality, and the degradation and death of her children, she ultimately finds herself alone with the one thing in which she truly believes her ramshackle wagon with its tattered flag and freight of boots and brandy. Fitting herself in its harness, the old woman manages, with the last of her strength, to drag it onward to the next battle. In the enduring figure of Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht has created one of the most extraordinary characters in literature."




Call It Courage


Book Description

For use in schools and libraries only. Relates how Mafatu, a young Polynesian boy whose name means Stout Heart, overcomes his terrible fear of the sea and proves his courage to himself and his people.




Be Safe, Love Mom


Book Description

This essential guide for all military families provides helpful advice and reassurance on topics ranging from boot camp, to deployment, to PTSD, from a former "Army brat" turned mother of four military kids. When you enlist in the United States military, you don't just sign up for duty; you also commit your loved ones to lives of service all their own. No one knows this better than Elaine Brye, an "Army brat" turned military wife and the mother of four officers-one each in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. For more than a decade she's endured countless teary goodbyes, empty chairs at Thanksgiving dinners, and sleepless hours waiting for phone calls in the night. She's navigated the complicated tangle of emotions that are part and parcel of life as a military mother. Be Safe, Love Mom braids together Elaine's own personal experiences with those of fellow parents she's met along the way. She offers gentle guidance and hard-earned wisdom on topics ranging from that first anxious goodbye to surrendering all control of your child, from finding comfort in the support of the military community and the healing power of faith to coping with the enormous sacrifices life as a military mother requires. With hard-to-come-by information and encouragement that is like advice from a wise and trusted friend, Be Safe, Love Mom is an essential handbook to membership in a strong and special sisterhood.




The Life of Courage


Book Description

A companion volume to Simplicissimus: the story of young girl named Courage, caught up in the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War, who survives, even prospers, by the use of her native cunning and sexual attraction. Completely amoral, she flits through a succession of husbands and lovers and ends her life with a band of Gypsies. The conceit here is that Courage supposedly tells her story to get back at Simplicissimus, who treats her dismissively in his own memoirs. This is a remorseless tale of lechery, knavery and trickery.




Dept. of Speculation


Book Description

From the acclaimed author of Weather comes a slim, stunning portrait of a marriage--a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Vogue.com, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed In the beginning, it was easy to imagine their future. They were young and giddy, sure of themselves and of their love for each other. “Dept. of Speculation” was their code name for all the thrilling uncertainties that lay ahead. Then they got married, had a child and navigated the familiar calamities of family life—a colicky baby, a faltering relationship, stalled ambitions. When their marriage reaches a sudden breaking point, the wife tries to retrace the steps that have led them to this place, invoking everything from Kafka to the Stoics to doomed Russian cosmonauts as she analyzes what is lost and what remains. In language that shimmers with rage and longing and wit, Offill has created a brilliantly suspenseful love story—a novel to read in one sitting, even as its piercing meditations linger long after the last page.




Jewish Mothers Tell Their Stories


Book Description

Winner of the Women in Psychology Jewish Caucus Award for 2000! Jewish Mothers Tell Their Stories: Acts of Love and Courage contains touching and personal essays written by contemporary Jewish mothers from different parts of the globe. Their stories reveal the choices that Jewish mothers make in our post-Holocaust, non-Jewish worldthe many ways of being Jewish, the acts of loving, of preserving and celebrating Jewish traditions and spirituality, and of transmitting them to their children and families. The reader, Jewish or not, mother or not, will be drawn into an appreciation of the cultural, ethnic, and spiritual aspects of mothering. Jewish mothers will find a loving celebration of the many ways of being who they are. Rabbis and educators will also gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Jewish mother today.