The plot focuses on the turmoil of an outside world of strikes and riots converging on a Dublin city church in the midst of its preparations for a harvest festival. Set in 1913, it deals with Irish workers' battles against economic oppression and religious hypocrisy, with that vital combina­tion of passion, humour and pathos that distinguishes O'Casey's later plays. It is a rich melodrama of class struggle, with ironically pointed clashes involving...

Is a sensitive and mysterious poet really an IRA gunman in hiding? Set in a Dublin tenement in the 1920s, The Shadow of a Gunman was the first part of O'Casey's celebrated Dublin Trilogy. Equal parts comedy and tragedy, this classic play is brilliantly performed by a stellar cast, featuring Richard Dreyfuss (Academy Award winner, Jaws; Mr. Holland's Opus) and Frank Converse.

Spanning the centuries from Ben Jonson to John Van Druten, this sparkling procession of prose comedies is calculated to excite in the reader every expression of felicity ranging between sly-cat amusement and the most earthy of belly laughs. Louis Kronenberger, distinguished critic, scholar, and director of this cavalcade, has staunchly refused admittance to any laughless failures of merely historical interest and has included only those plays which...