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The Third Casket: How Shakespeare Taught Us to Choose the Thing We Cannot Refuse

A man walks into a room and finds three boxes waiting for him. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He has been told that his whole life turns on which one he opens, and that the rules forbid him to open more than one. The woman he wants stands beside the boxes, unable to help him, bound by a dead father’s will. This is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, and it is one of the strangest moments in Shakespeare, because the test is rigged twice over. It is rigged inside the play, where Portia’s dead father designed the riddle so that only a man who can see past surface will win her. It is rigged outside the play, in the deeper sense Freud uncovered in 1913, where the choice was never free at all, and the man was always going to reach for the box that means his death.

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A Brand New Boles Book for the Playwright in Society

Yes, today is a Day for Fools — but there’s no joking around that I now have a brand new Boles Book for the Playwright in Society — available for purchase from David Boles Books Writing & Publishing! This Boles Book for… is a thoughtful compilation of a lot of my writing on how the Playwright derives power and structure from the fabric of belonging.

BUY NOW!

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How One Act Plays Killed the Theatre

I am not a fan of the One Act Play — even though I’ve written many of them — because I now realize just how ubiquitously they have killed the modern theatre by shaving expectation, shortening audience attention spans and by setting a low-budget watermark for producers and a little-to-none time commitment for directors and actors.  One Act Plays are a cheat against the human spirit, as the convenience of mindless television plotting replaces the tension of the live stage performance.

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August Wilson Plays the Blues

When you think of August Wilson, you quickly recall images from his amazing canon of plays that made him the best and most successful Playwright in the modern American theatre. 

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November 25, 1996

In order to preserver the history of who we are on UnitedStage.com, this was our original mandate 14 years ago:

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United Stage Russian Plays Download

As President of The United Stage, one of the joys of my job is to support both foundling and professional Playwrights who wish to direct their own plays.

As an online United Stage feature, we offer any Playwright the ability to upload plays for others to read and for everyone to download new plays from Playwrights you might not yet know.

I invite you today to go to the United Stage Plays Download Site to discover the new work of some outstanding Playwrights across the world.

Our latest Playwright offering is from “Churyahin.” Churyahin is a Russian Playwright born into a military prosecutor’s family (Novosibirsk, 1955) who graduated from the Institute of Nonferrous Metals and Gold (Krasnoyarsk, 1977) and earned an approved a doctorial dissertation (Novosibirsk, 1983). Churyahin currently works as a lecturing professor in the area of mathematical modeling at the Siberian Aerospace University (Krasnoyarsk).