Dr. Ivans, unable to make a living in London, migrates with his two daughters to Australia, where he hopes to make his fortune; one of his girls, Melida, is forced to leave her suitor, Williams, behind. Arriving in Australia, Ivans finds himself unable to improve his fortune–he's too willing to help the poor, and has a good reputation for charitable works. Then a group of gold miners, a motley crew of Frenchmen, send for him to heal a young ...
To save his father from execution for treason, the Bravo Giovanni agrees to act as an assassin for The Council of Ten, and ruthlessly carries out their orders for targeted killings against real or imagined enemies of the Serene Republic of Venice in Italy. Inevitably, the Council members begin using the Bravo for their own purposes. When the Count de Bellamonte lusts after a helpless orphan girl, he forces Giovanni to eliminate her protector. Bu ...
OLYMPIAS is one of Voltaire's most powerful tragedies. It's based on the suspicion that King Alexander the Great was poisoned, and left an infant daughter, Olympias, by his Persian wife Statira, daughter of the last Persian king. Olympias was raised by Cassander, son of King Antipater of Macedon, who's also tried to murder Statira (although she survived, unbeknownst to him). Now Cassader has succeeded his father as King, but is ri ...
Set in Roman times, Voltaire's play THE TRIUMVIRATE details a meeting on an island between Anthony and Octavian, in which the two main players in the post-Caesar Roman world decide how to divide up the spoils of war–and eliminate all potential rivals. Anthony agrees to divorce his wife Fulvia and marry Octavian's sister; and Octavian wants to marry Julia, Lucius's daughter, who loves Sextus Pompey, son of Pompey the Great. When a ...
Written in 1847, while Dumas was at the height of his powers, this play recounts the events leading up to the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of the French Huguenots–and the subsequent death of King Charles IX. The playwright focuses on the people inadvertently caught up in the slaughter–which, once started, cannot be repressed. By following the fate of two nobles, the Catholic Count Coconnas and the Huguenot Count de la Mole, and linking ...
This adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas tale tells the story of two brothers, born as Siamese twins, but separated not long after birth. They're raised by two different families, but are still able to «feel» the emotions of the other, even at a distance. On the island of Corsica they become entwined in the long-running feud between the Orlandi and the Colonnas–a dispute that had its beginnings in a dispute over the ownership of a chicken! Mo ...
Well-known French writer Theophile Gautier and Bernard Lopez combine their talents in this send-up of the cloak-and-sword dramas so popular with the Romantics. When the Spanish Queen's horse runs away with her, two unknown caballeros rescue Elizabeth from certain death–despite the fact that Spanish law prohibits anyone but the King and her closest attendants from touching her. But the Queen is not ungrateful, and Dona Beatrix, a Lady-in-Wai ...
The nineteenth-century Southern writer (George Washington Cable) who wrote the stories on which this play is based was born in New Orleans, and the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of that great city impregnates all his work, and gives him a cast of eccentric and memorable characters worthy of Dickens. Dramatist Frank J. Morlock centers the action of his play around the Cafe des Exiles in the 1820s, and the square in front of it where all ...
Emile Zola (1840-1902) was one of France's greatest novelists of the nineteenth century, being most famous as a writer for Nana (the story of a courtesan), and in the political world for his role in exposing the frame-up of Captain Dreyfus. However, he had limited success as a dramatist until he partnered with William Busnach, an Algerian Jew. This adaptation of the Zola novel of the same name is a powerful expose of life among the working ...
