Last winter, Playwrights Horizons premiered Craig Lucus’ latest play of public and private turmoil in today’s America. Here we find the Noone family: son Billy returns from Iraq, his pregnant sister Marianne marries Billy’s friend and former lover Tad, his mother Karen tries to keep her husband Austin from falling off the wagon—all while the Red Sox and Yankees battle for the 2004 pennant.

Soon to make its American premiere courtesy of MCC, this critically acclaimed Olivier Award-winning play by Alexi Kaye Campbell alternates between 1958 and 2008, and features the same three people living similar yet radically different lives. The Pride examines changing attitudes toward sexuality over a period of fifty years. It is an exploration of intimacy, identity, and the courage it takes to be who you really are.

The long-aborning musical with songs by legendary composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s and libretto by John Weidman bowed at the Public Theatre in spring 2009 for an all-too-brief run. Relive the saga of Addison and Wilson Mizner, two brothers who attempt to realize their versions of the American dream, with the complete script with all lyrics. (Note: Amazon.com lists this being available as of December 1, but it does not seem to be on sale yet.)

The most acclaimed drama of the year picked up nearly every “Best Play” kudo imaginable in 2009, from the Pulitzer Prize to the Lucille Lortel Award. Just released in a handsome hardcover edition, Lynn Nottage’s extraordinary new play Ruined is set against the backdrop of a rain forest bar and brothel in the brutally war-torn Congo where the establishment's shrewd matriarch, Mama Nadi, keeps peace between customers from both sides of the civil war, as government soldiers and rebel forces alike choose from her inventory of women, many already "ruined" by rape and torture when they were pressed into prostitution.

David Henry Hwang’s mock documentary put the author front and center as a character in the Public Theatre’s hit 2007-2008 production that explored both Asian identity as well as race in America, en route to winning the 2008 OBIE Award for Playwriting.