This extraordinary trilogy of short plays includes South of Tomorrow, Nijinsky Choked His Chicken, and Poppa Dio! The characters are street roughs, junkies, and prostitutes, navigating their tough and tragic lives in these lyrical, violent, and forceful plays.

Robert De Niro, Ralph Macchio, and Burt Young starred in this harrowing yet often hilarious first play by a young Hispanic playwright in a sold out, limited engagement on Broadway. Cuba is a small time cocaine and marijuana dealer whose pride and joy is his 16 year old son Teddy. Cuba has great hopes for his son; what he doesn't know is that the boy has already succumbed to the lure of the streets and is fast becoming a heroin junkie.

A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks's latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.

Once upon a time there was a theme park called the Great Hole of History. It was a popular spot for honeymooners who, in search of "post-nuptial excitement," would visit this hole and watch the daily historical parades. One of these visitors was a man who has now come to call himself The Foundling Father. He was a digger by trade—a grave digger—and he was struck by the size of the Hole and the pageantry of the place. He returns home with his wife, Lucy, a woman who keeps secrets for the dead, and together they start a mourning business. Unfortunately, our hero can't get the Great Hole pageantry out of his head; the echoes of history speak to him and call him to greatness.

At rise we meet this Foundling Father. He has left his wife and child and gone out west to dig a huge replica of the Great Hole of History. In the hole sits our hero. He is dressed like Abraham Lincoln, complete with beard, wart, frock coat and stove pipe hat. He tells us the story of his own life (in the third person) and tells us that he has become a very successful Abraham Lincoln impersonator! He's so successful that people actually pay a penny to re-enact Lincoln's assassination, using our impostor-hero and a phony gun. Eventually the Father dies and the second act sees his wife Lucy and thrity-five-year-old son, Brazil, a professional weeper, visit the hole to dig for his Father's remains. Listening to the past through her deaf-horn, Lucy hears echoes of gunshots and lurid stage-shows. When they dig up the Foundling Father's body (he's alive) they decide they have to lay him to rest for good. In the play's last image, his son is trying to climb a ladder out of the Hole of History while the Foundling Father sits starkly on his own coffin, refusing burial.

In Yellowman, a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, Alma and Eugene have known each other since they were young children. As their friendship blossoms into love, Alma struggles to free herself from her mother's poverty and alcoholism, while Eugene must contend with the legacy of being "yellow"—lighter-skinned than his brutal and unforgiving father.

A violent family history passes from one generation to the next. The narrator, a young woman, uses stories, poetry and characters to introduce and juxtapose situations. Through her powerful eyes we witness violence, friendship, alienation, family love and loyalty.

Clybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood (borrowing a plot line from Lorraine Hansberry'’s A Raisin in the Sun) and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same, fifty years on?

Bruce Norris'’s excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and property. Clybourne Park is the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the winner of the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play.

In this brief but staggering two-act, playwright Norris demonstrates his skill at drawing out the dark truth that lurks beneath the surface of the “perfect” family. His crackling satire takes dead aim at the self-satisfied, left-leaning American upper-middle class and its many self-delusions.

On a winter afternoon, Kelly and Clay——an attractive, prosperous, seemingly happy couple with a four-year-old daughter and a newborn baby——must explain to a visitor the events of the previous Thanksgiving, on which, so it seems, someone or something had been gnawing at the avocados on their kitchen table. In the course of this holiday gathering——attended by Clay'’s mother, a well-meaning but clueless first-grade teacher who spouts pointless liberal bromides; his brother, a plastic surgeon with a nihilistic streak and a taste for martinis; and his brother's girlfriend, a sexy Balkan immigrant with a love for all things American (racism included)——the recent past is unearthed along with revelations of failed marriages, fraternal hatred, infidelity and venereal disease, in the form of their daughter’'s nasty genital infection. And it’'s a comedy. As the story is gradually unfolded to their visitor, a Muslim cab driver, his relationship to the events becomes increasingly clear, as does the emptiness of the family’'s supposed benevolence and sensitivity.

With its crashing emotion and cutting humor, this vicious dissection of the comfortable progressive life lays bare the lies that people use to feel righteous even as they veer off a genuinely ethical path.

Mullins's early one-act play about a patient in a home for eating disorders, anthologized in the collection Lucky Thirteen.

Anne Marie has an epiphany on the subway when she reads this poster: "No One Ever Remembered a Great Accountant: TEACH." She quickly decides to ditch her lucrative advertising career, and dreams of pursuing a more meaningful life of teaching inner-city high school students. But despite her over-qualifications, a lack of teaching credits lands her at Staten Island Community College. Armed with enthusiasm, she throws herself into her work, but an insanely unruly student and an indifferent department begin to upend all of her good intentions. How long can she hold out?