This witty and passionate play explores the story of a man with Alzheimer's and at the same time turns into "a travel guide to Middle America conducted by aliens from outer space." The play has a wonderful comic sensibility, but this is a chillingly painful play addressing postmodern society's collective nervous breakdown. "If not the best new play of recent years, surely this is the most imaginative. Constance Congdon's brilliant Off-Broadway script wryly deflects the story of a man with Alzheimer's disease into a travel guide to Middle America conducted by aliens." -William Henry III, Time...

-One of the best playwrights our country, and our language, has produced.- -Tony Kushner
-Quirky, disturbing, and inexplicably beautiful theatrical poetry.- -Cary M. Mazer, Philadelphia City Paper
-Congdon writes like a woman possessed.- -Nels Nelson, New York Daily News
An immensely inventive and challenging writer, Constance Congdon is one of America's finest playwrights, endowed with great compassion, keen insight and an unfailing comic sensibility. Throughout the plays in her first collection, she demonstrates a range rare in writers in any age, from a somber...

His biting satire, witty dialogue, and irreverent staging have made him a favorite with theatergoers for four centuries. This Norton Critical Edition of Moliere's most controversial and most often-performed play is based on Constance Congdon's acclaimed new verse translation. It is accompanied by explanatory annotations and nine illustrations of the seventeenth-century farce.

"Backgrounds and Sources" draws readers' attention to the real-life controversy Moliere faced following the opening of Tartuffe, which was immediately banned by the Church. Both sides of the argument...

"Moliere penned his final play, the slapstick comedy THE IMAGINARY INVALID more than 450 years ago, and it is not only amazing that this lesser-known play still stands the test of time, but how visionary this comedy, currently being seen in Constance Congdon's new adaptation at the American Conservatory Theatre, has become. Or should we really be surprised in this age of plentiful medication-as doctors scribble prescriptions faster than it takes to gulp a handful of pills down with a glass of water-that THE IMAGINARY INVALID feels as relevant today as it did when healers swore by snake oil...

Goldoni's eighteenth-century masterpiece is an enduring story of love, passion, and mistaken identity. Young Venetian Clarice can't marry her lover, Silvio. She had been betrothed to Rasponi, who appears to have returned from the dead to claim her. But the Rasponi who appears is actually Beatrice, Rasponi's sister who is in disguise as her brother and has come to Venice to find her suitor, Florinda. Complications arise when a servant greedily seeks employment with both the disguised Beatrice and Florinda and spends the rest of the play trying to serve two masters while keeping the two unaware...

Constance Congdon's witty verse adaptation of Moliere's timeless classic, in which a religious conman infiltrates the household of a gullible man and his exasperated family, has lent itself to productions set in modern-day Texas, New Orleans, and even The Sopranos' New Jersey. "Constance Congdon slips into Moliere's tricky shoes and the fit is Cinderella-perfect. Congdon's quicksilver wit and breathless urgency coax the dark heart of Tartuffe into glowing with a twenty-first-century heat." -John Guare " The] over-the-top setting for the Two River Theater production of TARTUFFE is a Texas...

An adaptation of Gorky's classic black comedy, VASSA ZHELEZNOVA, A MOTHER concerns a family's stern, penny-pinching matriarch who will do anything for her family. ..". Dark, invigoratingly sardonic...Constance Congdon's MOTHER is as uncompromisingly savvy as it is bitingly funny... MOTHER is an exhilarating blend of one of Chekhov's dysfunctional provincial families run through the wringer of Joe Orton's iconoclastic comedy. It's also Maxim Gorky through and through, providing a canny look at Gorky as a dramatic bridge between Chekhov and Brecht. Congdon's A MOTHER is adapted from Gorky's...

In this delightful comedy about the French aristocracy, told with MoliEre's signature wit, the atmosphere is frivolous, the morals are loose, the egos are larger than life and everyone is looking for love. Constance Congdon's verse version of this intelligent satire is both provocative and funny.

"Love is all bad sonnets, big fluffy beds and silly preening in the first half of THE MISANTHROPE... Then the gloves come off...and the characters are fighting for their lives.
MoliEre's 1666 comedy about yearning for truth and love in a world of self-serving hypocrites never falls...