In this collection of plays, Walter Wykes creates a series of modern myths, tapping into something in the strata of the subconscious, through ritualism and rich, poetic language. The worlds he creates are brand new and hilarious, yet each contains an ancient horror we all know and cannot escape and have never been able to hang one definitive word on.

The Profession follows the experiences of a naïve young man exposed to the inner workings of a secret society of assassins. In Fading Joy a young woman finds herself caught up in the intoxicating world of a smooth-talking salesman. When he flees to escape a mysterious group known only as "The Tall Men," she finds it impossible to go back to her old way of life. Not only has she changed in some inexplicable way, but the landscape itself has taken on a strange and menacing new personality. Finally, The Father Clock tells the apocalyptic tale of two actors and a stage manager abandoned by their aging director. As the auditorium begins to fill and the lights dim, they desperately attempt to pull the show together even as a strange and disturbing illness drifts through the theatre.

In that small apartment, “Black” and “White,” as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men–though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it.

Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life.

Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.

Mouawad's work ponders the human experience in an unstable world and the power of individual choices to shape one's environment.

An atmosphere of dream and nightmare pervades the plays of Tadeusz Rozewicz. Characters are confronted with the consequences of their own inaction. They are surrounded by the physical manifestations of their emotional wastelands. In The Card Index the fractured hero is simultaneously a child, a middle-aged man and a corpse. In The Witnesses a young boy is observed by a married couple who exchange banalities as the boy tortures a kitten and finally buries it alive. In Gone Out a wife insists that her amnesiac husband must be made to remember the misery of his old life despite his new-found happiness. Rozewicz draws his dramatic vision from "the detritus that constitutes modern consciousness," yet manages to find reason for humour and hope among the debris.

This collection of 10-minute plays will delight readers and audiences alike. From the social drama of Jeanette D. Farr's Gray Matter to the Pinteresque tension of Walter Wykes' The Salmon Tribunal to the zany swashbuckling fun of Jeff Goode's Jolly Jack Junior: The Buccaneer's Bairn, each of these short plays expresses the unique vision of an emerging contemporary dramatist. Together, they make an exciting and diverse evening of theatre.

Other plays in this anthology include Nick Zagone's The DMV One, LB Hamilton's A Midnight Clear, Greg Vovos' Bloody Mary, Julianne Homokay's The Wedding Story, Douglas Hill's Heresy at a Crossroads, Brian E. Rochlin's Carmen Dick: Feminist Private Eye, and Eric Kaiser's The Weed Dreams.

Included are And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers, The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, Garden of Delights, Guernica, The Labyrinth, Picnic on the Battleground, and The Tricycle.

A harbinger of the symbolist movement in Europe, When We Dead Awaken is an unforgiving account of the last days of a world-renowned artist, not unlike Henrik Ibsen himself. Rubek, an aging sculptor, has lost all interest in the world around him. In spite of his wealth, his fame, and the attentions of his beautiful, young wife, he can find no joy in his existence. He has lost interest even in his work, sculpting nothing but occasional portrait busts for wealthy aristocrats whom he despises. He is stagnating, like the murky, shallow waters he travels with his wife, trapped in a spiritual vacuum, when suddenly he is jolted out of his stupor by an unexpected reunion with Irene, a model who once posed for him and whom he idolized. She is now half-mad--or appears to be so--and literally believes herself to be a walking corpse, a dead woman who roams the earth, who has returned from "the great dead waste." In spite of her delusions, however, and in spite of his marriage, Rubek attempts to rekindle the relationship. Irene eventually agrees to allow Rubek a few moments of real happiness. She will spend one final night with him ... but there is a terrible price to be paid.

Venus also treads the fault lines of several American cultural sensitivities, moving racial clichés and stereotypes out of the unlit mutterers' corners and back to center stage, where the sight of them makes us wince. Venus expresses both a global empathy, a mourning for all of suffering humanity, and at the same time an anger at oppression and oppressors, an indictment of wrongs yet to be righted. The play places human paradoxes of love and loathing, attraction and revulsion, pleasure and denial in a historical context of racism, sexism, exploitation, voyeurism and colonialism. By contextualizing these paradoxes the play places the historical in dialogue with the eternal–acknowledging the tragic, the immutable, while not extinguishing the possibility of mutation, of change.

The play revolves around an amnesiac, Claire, who wakes up every morning as a blank slate, on which her family must imprint the facts of her life. On this particular day, the shenanigans begin with Claire being abducted by a limping, lisping man who claims that her husband wants to kill her. They drive to the home of Claire's mother, who has had a stroke that left her aphasic (her attempt to say funny mirrors provides the play's title). The ensuing mayhem is both liberatingly funny and deeply touching.

This collection of plays includes Through the Leaves, about a female butcher and her laborer lover; The Nest, about a worker who inadvertently poisons a lake and, consequently, injures his infant son; and Mensch Meier, about a jittery, imaginative Munich assembly-line worker, his vague, housebound wife and their silently observant teenage son. Kroetz's characters are so rigidly confined by circumstance, by character, by the very language they speak, that violence seems the only natural outcome.

Schwab's first play Die Präsidentinnen was produced at the Theater im Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 1990. Between that time and his death four years later, he wrote sixteen plays, eight of which were produced during his lifetime, making his career one of the briefest, most spectacular and most controversial in contemporary German-language theatre.