The play that gives us one of Shakespeare's most complex and fascinating characters is also the most entertaining of his history plays. Watch with horror tinged with delight as the shrewd, manipulative, cunning third son of the royal family engages in a devilish chess match -- his goal, the throne; the result, bloody good fun. This great play about ambition is not just a brilliant character study (and one of the most desired parts in the canon!), it is also a rich tapestry of characters whose fates and choices are governed by their relationships to the title character. It will resonate with anyone who has witnessed political maneuvering in any context.

In case you were afraid that only kings were of interest to the great playwrights and that the only good leading roles written in the histories are for men, we bring you Mary Stuart. Perhaps Shakespeare portrayed Richard in a less favorable light than some historians believed fair in order to please his monarch, the granddaughter of the king who overthrew him. At any rate, it was left to the great German playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller to explore the story of that Queen, Elizabeth I, and her fierce rivalry with her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. WSC will use the new version by Peter Osvald, which premiered at the Donmar Warehouse before traveling to the West End and then Broadway.

"Th' whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis" in Sean O'Casey's gorgeous tragedy, replete with all the color, character and humor of the Irish tenement in which it is set. The second of his Dublin trilogy will be the first play WSC will have done by the great poet of early 20th-century Ireland, who chronicles the preening Captain Boyle, his long suffering wife Juno (the breadwinner of the family), his irascible drinking companion, Joxer Daly, a daughter desperate to escape their world any way she can, and a son caught up in the internecine struggle that followed the Irish Civil War.

After our namesake playwright, WSC has produced the plays of no writer more frequently than those of the inimitable Tom Stoppard. His rarely mounted, typically wide-ranging 1978 play looks at a British newspaper strike through the prism of journalists covering a civil war in Africa and introduces us to Ruth Carson, the expatriate wife of a British mine owner and your scintillatingly witty Stoppardian guide to the proceedings.

A double-bill of infrequently performed one-acts by the glorious American poet laureate of the stage, whom Arthur Miller credited with revolutionizing the craft. Portrait of a Madonna is an early, poignant, and eerily beautiful sketch of the character who would become Blanche DuBois, while The Gnädiges Fräulein is considered one of the most successful of his mid-career experiments in style, a heartbreakingly yet hilarious ode to the indomitability of the human spirit and what many believe to be a thinly disguised allegory of his own creative life.