Four Plays: Come Back Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop; The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (Black Cat Books)

Description

---

A Life of William Inge: The Strains of Triumph

Description

In the spring of 1973 one of the country's most successful dramatists, William Inge, ran out of reasons to think he was any good. He went into his garage one night and shut the door, seated himself behind the wheel of his new car, and turned the key. By morning he was dead. "Death makes us all innocent," Inge had written, "and weaves all our private hurts and griefs and wrongs into the fabric of time, and makes them a part of eternity." But William Inge had it made, or so it seemed in 1962. He had written an unprecedented string of Broadway hits: Picnic, Bus Stop, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and Come Back, Little Sheba. All four plays had become successful films featuring top Hollywood stars. Inge had received a Pulitzer Prize for Picnic and an Academy Award for his screenplay, Splendor in the Grass. Even his longtime friend and mentor, Tennessee Williams, was envious of his success. Privately, Inge was miserable. His long struggle with alcoholism and profound shame over his homosexuality plagued him before, during, and after his decade of great success. As criticism of his work intensified, Inge responded with increasingly frantic attempts to please by "modernizing" his writing. He abandoned the small-town characters and settings he knew in favor of more lurid, urban subject matter. In the end, his characters lost their authentic voices, and neither critics nor audiences found his later work believable. In this first book-length literary biography of Inge, Ralph Voss peels back the veneer of public success and lays bare the private pain and isolation of the man who was called America's first authentic midwestern playwright. He draws upon interviews, memoirs, and unpublished manuscripts, letters, and papers to show how Inge's unhappy life fueled the struggles his plays depict.

---

The philosophy of Plotinus: the Gifford lectures at St. Andrews, 1917-1918

Description

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1918. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... the hypothesis of ether as the ultimate form of Matter.1 Ether has been defined as 'undifferentiated imperceptible, homogeneous plenum.'2 Plotinus says that Matter is the infinite (a-weipov) in the sense of the indeterminate (aopia-rov). Its nature is to be the recipient of Forms. In itself it is no thing (to nh ov), though not absolutely nothing (owe ov). In the Timaeus, 'primary Matter' cannot be distinguished from Space in three dimensions. But for Plotinus Space is 'later' than Matter and bodies.3 In discussing Matter, he combines the Aristotelian distinction of Svvafut and evepyeta with the Platonic conception of a world formed by the union of being and not-being, of.the same and the different, of the one and the many. Plotinus calls Matter pure Svvamt, i.e. potentiality without any potency.4 In one of his fullest descriptions of it,6 he says, 'Matter is incorporeal, because Body only exists after it; Body is a composite of which Matter is an element. . . . Being neither Soul nor Spirit nor life nor form nor reason nor limit (for it is indefiniteness) (a-n-eipla), nor a power (Svvanit) ;* for what does it produce? but falling outside all these things, it cannot rightly be said to have Being, but should rather be called Not-being (jj.ri ov). . . . It is an image and phantom of extension (eiScoov iral tj>avrao-na oyxov), an aspiration to exist (virwrrao-eaK efa&it). It is constant only in change (ia-rtiKot owe iv a-ratrei); it 1 Moore (Home University Library--' Nature and Origin of Life ') thinks it probable that atoms are generated out of the ether. Mendeleeff, too, has argued that the ether, instead of being some mysterious form of non-matter, is the lightest and simplest of the elements. . . . The atomic weight of the ether he concludes to be nearly on...

---

A Loss of Roses.

Description

A PLAY

---

The Victorian Age: The Rede Lecture For 1922 (1922)

Description

This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

---

Bus Stop: A Three-Act Romance

Description

Upon hitting Broadway in 1955 Bus Stop was an immediate commercial & critical success. During a winter storm a busload of weary travelers are forced to shack up at a roadside diner until morning. Inge was renowned for his in-depth character studies, Bus Stop is no exception and offers a warm play about the intersecting lives of eight ordinary people.

A L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring: Megan Anderson, Terrence Currier, Rachel Miner, Anson Mount, Kyle Prue, Lynnie Raybuck, Jefferson A. Russell and Gary Sloan.

---