Both anthologies are about New Orleans: the past and the present.

This author has grown up in this city, and there is a certain timelessness about it - the past definitely influences the present. All the plays are permeated with the sensuousness, decadence and bewilderment of brave and driven people living in chaos, confusion, extreme pleasure and delight. I hope you get a taste of this rich jambalaya of life as you experience these plays.

Volume Two contains historical plays, mostly Victorian, with characters driven by stratified society and tradition. Knowledge of New Orleans history made me want to adapt Uncle Vanya. I loved the play but felt its details were too Russian. I took the bones of Vanya and put it on a plantation called Waverly, the last sugarcane plantation in Louisiana, and called my play Uncle Victor.

That play won a number of awards and hooked me on historical drama. I also researched Edgar Degas'' visit to New Orleans in 1872 and wrote a nine-cast show, so struck was I by all Degas'' relatives who had lived with him in 1872. Degas had tried to save his Uncle''s failing cotton business and create new roots in the city of his mother. He fell prey to scandal and decadence.

I spent days visiting Kate Chopin''s house in Cloutierville, La. and interviewed descendents of Chopin''s lover Albert Sanpitie and town members about the scandals of her life. I researched in French and English all the books on Degas. I did similar research in New York and Paris for Beckett at Greystones Bay and John Singer Sargent and Madame X, which are loosely tied to New Orleans.

We are glad Degas did go back to Paris and paint and didn''t succumb to the temptations of New Orleans. We are pleased Sargent refused to change his scorned portrait of Madame X and that Kate Chopin forged a way to raise her six children and still write.

Both anthologies are about New Orleans: the past and the present. This author has grown up in this city, and there is certain timelessness about it - the past definitely influences the present. All the plays are permeated with the sensuousness, decadence and bewilderment of brave and driven people living in chaos, confusion, extreme pleasure and delight. I hope you get a taste of this rich jambalaya of life as you experience these plays.

Volume One contains modern plays set in pre-Katrina New Orleans, the City that Care Forgot. After I founded Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, we initiated a new play festival to develop new voices and a friend challenged me to write. My play, Wishing Aces, won me a Senior Fulbright Research Specialist grant to Paris. From then on, I stopped writing textbooks and wrote plays primarily about New Orleans.

When shaping a play, I take a question that disturbs me that I can''t figure out, such as: why can''t this professor and this student communicate in a profound way? Why can''t this mother set boundaries for her out-of-control son? What would it take for that to happen? I then look at voice and structure, using the names of people from my life (I may change these later) to get the right phrasing and tone. I put these ghosts in my play, pick the most haunting place in New Orleans, and use cards to come up with an outline of scenes. Place inspires that sense of mystery that is so important to the theatre: an abandoned train station in the Louisiana swamps, a Baroness Pontalba apartment in the Quarter, a Garden District mansion. Place, weather, time, sounds inspire designers who are critical to creating the images the story requires. I try to fill my plays with details from New Orleans; the heat, the rain, the light through the oaks, the phantom gallery of a plantation house at dusk so that you too can experience what it''s like to live here.

As playgoers hear the voices in Marilyn Monroes head and encounter seven visitors to James Dean, they must rethink their relationships with cultural icons. As they ride through a Louisiana swamp in the middle of a hurricane, they must rethink their own lives and losses. ONeill can somehow enable her audiences to laugh uproariously while re-examining the lies they have been telling themselves.

Katherine H. Adams, HUTCHINSON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS

Rosary ONeills third volume of plays certainly provides ample evidence of the playwrights versatility and artistic fertility. As our resident dramatist, our 112 year-old institution is so proud we have this gifted artist at this period of world history that has never needed more the power of theatre to confront, alert, and awaken.

O. Aldon James PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ARTS CLUB, NEW YORK, NY

Rosarys work has scope: From her Southern Gothic roots, her epic collection of plays about a dysfunctional Louisiana family, to that Boulevard of broken dreams, Hollywood. Finally on to her great insights into the worlds of other great artists of the past, Rosary leaves no stone unturned.

Peter Bloch DIRECTOR, NEW YORK, NY

Both anthologies are about New Orleans: the past and the present.

This author has grown up in this city, and there is a certain timelessness about it - the past definitely influences the present. All the plays are permeated with the sensuousness, decadence and bewilderment of brave and driven people living in chaos, confusion, extreme pleasure and delight. I hope you get a taste of this rich jambalaya of life as you experience these plays.

Volume Two contains historical plays, mostly Victorian, with characters driven by stratified society and tradition. Knowledge of New Orleans history made me want to adapt Uncle Vanya. I loved the play but felt its details were too Russian. I took the bones of Vanya and put it on a plantation called Waverly, the last sugarcane plantation in Louisiana, and called my play Uncle Victor.

That play won a number of awards and hooked me on historical drama. I also researched Edgar Degas'' visit to New Orleans in 1872 and wrote a nine-cast show, so struck was I by all Degas'' relatives who had lived with him in 1872. Degas had tried to save his Uncle''s failing cotton business and create new roots in the city of his mother. He fell prey to scandal and decadence.

I spent days visiting Kate Chopin''s house in Cloutierville, La. and interviewed descendents of Chopin''s lover Albert Sanpitie and town members about the scandals of her life. I researched in French and English all the books on Degas. I did similar research in New York and Paris for Beckett at Greystones Bay and John Singer Sargent and Madame X, which are loosely tied to New Orleans.

We are glad Degas did go back to Paris and paint and didn''t succumb to the temptations of New Orleans. We are pleased Sargent refused to change his scorned portrait of Madame X and that Kate Chopin forged a way to raise her six children and still write.

Both anthologies are about New Orleans: the past and the present. This author has grown up in this city, and there is certain timelessness about it - the past definitely influences the present. All the plays are permeated with the sensuousness, decadence and bewilderment of brave and driven people living in chaos, confusion, extreme pleasure and delight. I hope you get a taste of this rich jambalaya of life as you experience these plays.

Volume One contains modern plays set in pre-Katrina New Orleans, the City that Care Forgot. After I founded Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, we initiated a new play festival to develop new voices and a friend challenged me to write. My play, Wishing Aces, won me a Senior Fulbright Research Specialist grant to Paris. From then on, I stopped writing textbooks and wrote plays primarily about New Orleans.

When shaping a play, I take a question that disturbs me that I can''t figure out, such as: why can''t this professor and this student communicate in a profound way? Why can''t this mother set boundaries for her out-of-control son? What would it take for that to happen? I then look at voice and structure, using the names of people from my life (I may change these later) to get the right phrasing and tone. I put these ghosts in my play, pick the most haunting place in New Orleans, and use cards to come up with an outline of scenes. Place inspires that sense of mystery that is so important to the theatre: an abandoned train station in the Louisiana swamps, a Baroness Pontalba apartment in the Quarter, a Garden District mansion. Place, weather, time, sounds inspire designers who are critical to creating the images the story requires. I try to fill my plays with details from New Orleans; the heat, the rain, the light through the oaks, the phantom gallery of a plantation house at dusk so that you too can experience what it''s like to live here.

As playgoers hear the voices in Marilyn Monroes head and encounter seven visitors to James Dean, they must rethink their relationships with cultural icons. As they ride through a Louisiana swamp in the middle of a hurricane, they must rethink their own lives and losses. ONeill can somehow enable her audiences to laugh uproariously while re-examining the lies they have been telling themselves.

Katherine H. Adams, HUTCHINSON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS

Rosary ONeills third volume of plays certainly provides ample evidence of the playwrights versatility and artistic fertility. As our resident dramatist, our 112 year-old institution is so proud we have this gifted artist at this period of world history that has never needed more the power of theatre to confront, alert, and awaken.

O. Aldon James PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ARTS CLUB, NEW YORK, NY

Rosarys work has scope: From her Southern Gothic roots, her epic collection of plays about a dysfunctional Louisiana family, to that Boulevard of broken dreams, Hollywood. Finally on to her great insights into the worlds of other great artists of the past, Rosary leaves no stone unturned.

Peter Bloch DIRECTOR, NEW YORK, NY