If you're curious about the path of American drama in the past thirty years -- that is, American drama other than what Broadway had to offer -- then this is the anthology to get. It's huge, diverse, and full of surprises. If you haven't been paying close attention to off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, and nowhere-near-Broadway theatre, then there are likely to be unfamiliar names here. That's okay; the editors are knowledgeable and have made their choices carefully (Mac Wellman is himself an excellent playwright). Yes, you'll discover some familiar names, since many of the major American playwrights of the past few decades are included here -- Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, etc. However, the excitement in this anthology is how much you will discover: there's Maria Irene Fornes, perhaps the greatest of the avant-garde playwrights to emerge in the '60s; and Len Jenkin, whose plays tend to be a cross between all the good parts of Philosophy 101 and the X-Files; and Suzan-Lori Parks, who is, simply, a genius.

It's certainly not all easy reading, for these are plays by playwrights who love to explore the boundaries of language, of imagery, of theatrical imagination, but if you're adventurous and willing to have your conceptions of the theatre's possibilities be expanded, then this book will be a treasure-trove for you.

The only anthology to rival this one is Michael Feingold's Grove New American Theatre, which includes six wonderful scripts. From the Other Side of the Century includes over thirty. Get both if you can, but if you can only have one, then this is the anthology to buy.

If my memory serves me well, I first learned of "Smoke and Other Early Stories" after reading an article about Douglas Messerli, founder of Sun & Moon Press in Los Angeles. Messerli spoke of his giddy discovery that the copyright on many of Barnes' short stories had run so he had the legal right to publish them. Though Barnes apparently was not pleased by this, this collection is the result. And God bless the result. These fourteen tales (puntuated by Barne's own strange and evocative pen-and-ink illustrations) should be read by anyone who loves well-crafted, provative short fiction; and it should be a must for those who are beginning writers. The first sentence of each story introduces you to a world where everyday people and things transmute inexplicably into something weird and dreamlike: "Every Saturday, just as soon as she had slipped her manila pay envelope down her neck, had done up her handkerchiefs and watered the geraniums, Paprika Johnson climbed onto the fire-escape and reached across the strings of her pawnshop banjo." (From "Paprika Johnson.") Sometimes, she sets the stage simply as with the first line of "What Do You See, Madam?": "Mamie Saloam was a dancer." As Messerli notes in the introduction, Barnes' stories were published in newspapers at a time (the first two decades of the 1900s) when the public expected to see short fiction in such venues. Reading this collection can only make you long for such an era.