San Antonio College Library

The play takes place during the Great Depression and concerns an idealistic young congressman who takes the surprising position of opposing a bill that provides money for a huge construction project in his district. Alan McClean has found out since his election that the price being charged to the taxpayers for construction of the dam in his state is much more than it needs to be; in addition, there are hundreds of other, unrelated expenditures that...

This comedy is about three generations of a Jewish family. All the action takes place around an all purpose dining table, sometimes a restaurant table and other times the dining table of a Jewish mother to end all Jewish mothers. Other characters include an exceedingly irreverent younger son, his martini swilling older brother who is married to a shiksa, and the older brother's two kids.

As two couples spend the 4th of July in a house left to one of the women by her brother, a victim of AIDS, they mask their fear with desperate wit and hide inside uncomfortable marriages--each character struggling to come to terms with a world of anxious isolation haunted by ever-present death. A powerful play Frankie and Johnny.

Among the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is perhaps best remembered for the innovative use of jazz rhythms in his writing. While his poetry and essays received much public acclaim and scholarly attention, Hughes' dramas are relatively unknown. Only five of the sixty-three plays Hughes scripted alone or collaboratively have been published (in 1963). Published here, for the first time, are four of Hughes' most poignant,...

"On October 30, 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities concluded the first round of hearings on the alleged Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Hollywood was ordered to "clean its own house," and ten witnesses who had refused to answer questions about their membership in the Screen Writers Guild and the Communist party eventually received contempt citations. By 1950 the Hollywood Ten, as they quickly became known, were...

At the Turn of the Last Century, as routinized industrial labor made a mockery of the gospel of work, Americans increasingly sought fulfillment not on the job but in their leisure activities. This book explores the multiple and, at times, contradictory tensions surrounding this turn to play and examines their impact on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature. Arguing that American writers participated in the ongoing debates over...