America's premier poet of twentieth-century theater dominated the stage for almost 20 years. Despite his fall into ignominy and artistic disfavor in the final years of his career, Tennessee Williams is still considered one of the world's finest dramatists. Together with Arthur Miller, Williams pionee
"M. Butterfly" is the ostensibly true story of a French diplomat who carries on a 17-year affair with a bewitching Chinese opera star, only to discover that she is not only a spy, but also a man. The play, rooted in a tabloid headline and realized in a retelling of Puccini's famous "Madam Butterfly,"
Edward Albee calls his work "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen
Enigmatic, magnetic, elusive, and mysterious -- these words and others like them have been employed over the decades to describe actor/playwright Sam Shepard's cryptic persona and plays. After leaving a dead-end town in the middle of a California wasteland, a young Shepard moved to America's biggest