For over 70 years, The Best American Short Plays has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. From its inception, it has identified cutting-edge playwrights who have gone on to establish award-winning careers, including Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and more. In this volume, the plays capture the struggle between hot tempers and cold decrees. Humans love to think of themselves as rational beings well in control of their lives and surroundings from sunup to sundown, sundown to sunrise. We learn to follow rules of proper behavior and more than happily issue out advice to our friends who just cant get a handle on themselves. Restraint and order, after all, are the cornerstones of human society and civilization. The problem is that human nature bucks and bridles at every attempt to socialize and civilize. Shakespeare got it right when he penned the observation, The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps oer a cold decree. In those few words he has managed to capture precisely why it is so difficult to be human; if it were okay simply to let our hot tempers prevail, life would be so much easier. But cold decrees are what prevent us from self-destruction, and so we endure the struggle.
Includes the following plays:
The True Death of Socrates by Frank Higgins
Existence by Murray Schisgal
The Origins of the Drink They Named After Me by Steve Feffer
Rise by Crystal Skillman
Spatial Disorientation by Lisa Soland
Between the Lines by Amber Leanne Marcoon
The Rainbow by James Armstrong
Subtraction by Kevin McFillen
Flare by Edith Freni
Blue, Blue Moon by John Patrick Bray
Kid Gloves by David Rusiecki
The Grim Raper by Daniel Guyton
Hurt by Saviana Stanescu
Cell by Cassandra Medley
Abandoned in Queens by Laura Maria Censabella
Free Will by Billy Aronson
Dark King Kills Unicorn by Reina Hardy
Deer Haunting: A Far Side Cartoon by Andrea J Onstad