From August Wilson, author of The Piano Lesson and the 1984-85 Broadway season's best play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, is another powerful, stunning dramatic work that has won him numerous critical acclaim including the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize.

The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilson's ten-part Century Cycle), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s . . . a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can . . . a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less . . .

In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.

The play begins as an art auctioneer does a verbal machine gun patter auctioning a "totally flat, authentically white," evidently unpainted canvas to the highest bidder. Attending this bizarre auction is Biddy Andreas, an ordinary good person who is married to a tremendously wealthy Greek tycoon who desperately wants to be upper-crust English. He desperately wants his wife to become "interesting" as it may advance his social status. In Biddy's earnest attempt to please her husband, she discovers the work of an angry, neglected English landscape artist who has been abandoned in the rush toward abstract chic. Attracted to the paintings, she is also intensely aware of the painter, and above all of the untrendy notion that a passion for art can transform the spirit. Against a background of glib auctioneers, valueless dealers, pacesetting Americans, and a media woman for whom art is an extension of style, Biddy turns herself into a richer human being. Robbed of her husband by his body's rejection of a kidney transplant, Biddy finally sits for her painter, who finds himself valued again.

Australia, 1789. A young, married lieutenant is directing rehearsals of the first play ever to be staged in that country. With only two copies of the text, a cast of convicts, many of them illiterate, and one leading lady who may be about to be hanged, conditions are hardly ideal for what will be the antipodean premiere of George Farquhar's Restoration comedy, The Recruiting Officer. Our Country's Good is based on The Playmaker, a novel by Thomas Keneally.

An American woman who has never left Nashville searches Turkey for a deported Kurdish man who has disappeared. This is a darkly comic journey through a land where a language is illegal and illusions have to die if you want to survive.

Los Angeles playwright Kelly Stuart's hilarious satire of the male-dominated workplace is set in a baby formula company, where the men even determine the feeding and care of infants. But when Gina, a mother who breast-feeds, joins the staff, things begin to change, culminating in both fantastic and realistic events which jar the reader into reevaluating the gender-based power structure and the illusions which support it. First presented at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, this play was later performed at Playwrights Horizons in New York and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. In 1996, it was awarded the America Award for Drama as the best play of the year.

Somewhere in the nineteenth century, Amelia Pickles, a prim and proper spinster of modest means, agrees to let out a room in her Victorian London establishment to a retired military man, Josiah Wickett. The arrangement seems to be working out until Mr. Wickett decides to play matchmaker with Miss Pickles' prissy niece Alexandrina, and his nephew, Darlington, an officer in the cavalry. Through a gross misinterpretation, Miss Pickles believes she, not Alexandrina, is the object of Mr. Wickett's, not Darlington's, affection. Miss Pickles is convinced Mr. Wickett will soon ask for her hand in marriage. When he denies, she decides to take her boarder to a court of law for breach of promise. Mr. Wickett loses the trial. Or does he win? He doesn't wish to pay Miss Pickles her settlement and instead he opts to marry the lonely woman. Through the musings, regrets, anecdotes, and comedic bickerings between their forced duet it seems as though just maybe they were meant to be together after all.

Two elderly sisters forget all about southern charm when a young door-to-door evangelist comes knocking. This theological comedy blends Smith's trademark sharpness of wit and depth of character, while telling a story in which a crisis of faith arises when seemingly similar beliefs are discovered to be worlds apart.

In The Next Room, Or the Vibrator Play is a provocative, funny, touching and marvelously entertaining story about a young doctor and his wife. Dr. Givings is obsessed with the marvels of technology and what they can do for his patients. His wife, Catherine, is only a bystander in her husband's world—listening at the door from the next room as he treats his female patients. Dr. Givings is not sure exactly how the vibrators help the women he treats—but they do keep coming back. The only woman whose problem is not helped by the doctor is his own wife who longs to connect with him—but not electrically.

The Clean House is a wryly funny, deeply moving play that begs the question: What really is important in life?

Mathilda is depressed. She doesn't want to clean, she wants to tell jokes. In Portuguese. Problem is, she's Lynn's live-in maid. And all Lynn wants is a clean house. She's got everything else: a husband who's a successful surgeon and her own busy career as a doctor. Or so she thinks. Her husband finds his soulmate in one of his patients, and moves out of Lynn's house—which, by the way, is now clean because Lynn's sister Virginia has been cleaning it on the sly. The New York Times calls Sara Ruhl "a provocative new theatrical voice" and The Clean House "visionary."