Wallace Shawn

"In these bold essays---including a new essay for the paperback edition---Wallace Shawn takes us on a revelatory journey through high art, war, culture, politics, and privilege. With his distinctive humor and insight, Shawn invites us to look at the world with new eyes, the better to understand ...and hange it." -- P. [4] of cover.

This first collection of Wallace Shawn's plays from the seventies and eighties brings together A Thought in Three Parts, Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, and The Fever - four incisive and provocative works that have disturbed theatergoers on both sides of the Atlantic. Shawn's themes include sex, historical guilt, the conflict between high and low culture, and the effort to define the self, all described in a remarkable, attentive language. Brilliant...

A Princeton admissions officer, Portia Nathan, who is up for a major promotion, takes a professional risk after she meets a college-bound alternative school kid who just might be the son she gave up years ago in a secret adoption.

"[Book title] is a passionate, volatile, and humorous encounter between two friends who have not seen each other for a long time, and decide to catch up on each others' lives over dinner. André Gregory is an intense, highly experimental theater director and playwright in search of life's meanings and spiritual revelations. His friend, Wally Shawn, is an actor and playwright living in New York who is more preoccupied with the search for his next meal....

"As the play begins Marie and Bruce, a young married couple, are still in bed, he sleeping soundly, she excoriating him and vowing that she will put an end to their marriage. It seems that she had thrown away his ancient typewriter, which precipitated an ugly scene, but there is more to their problem than this. However, when Bruce wakes and prepares breakfast, he seems impervious to her insults and blithely unconcerned about her threats to leave him....

"Woody has always been confident about his place in the world and that his priority is taking care of his kid, whether that₂s Andy or Bonnie. But when Bonnie adds a reluctant new toy called 'Forky' to her room, a road trip adventure alongside old and new friends will show Woody how big the world can be for a toy." --

"An astonishing world where toys play while their owners are away. Woody is a pull-string cowboy doll and is the leader of the toys until the latest, greatest action figure, Buzz Lightyear, enters the picture. When the toy rivals are separated from their owner, they learn to put aside their differences and work as a team to get back home to the boy they love." --

Simon is a timid man, scratching out an isolated existence in an indifferent world. He is overlooked at work, scorned by his mother, and ignored by the woman of his dreams. He feels powerless to change any of these things. The arrival of a new co-worker, James, serves to upset the balance. James is both Simon's exact physical double and his opposite: confident, charismatic and good with women. To Simon's horror, James slowly starts taking over his...

The fun and adventure continues when Andy goes off to cowboy camp and the toys are left to their own devices. Things shift into high gear when an obsessive toy collector kidnaps Woody, who hasn't the slightest clue that he's a greatly valued collectible.

A kindly grandfather sits down with his grandson and reads him a bedtime story. As the grandfather reads the story, the action comes alive in a classic tale of love and adventure. The beautiful Buttercup is kidnapped and held against her will in order to marry the nasty Prince Humperdinck, while Westley (her childhood beau, now returned as the Dread Pirate Roberts) attempts to save her. Along the way he meets an accomplished swordsman and a giant,...