Hilary believes fervently that consciousness is more than the sum of our biology. When she receives a position at a prestigious think tank, she develops a novel experiment to prove that humans are intrinsically altruistic, but the results are something she never anticipated. Includes a post-show discussion with Mark Tramo, a neuroscientist, neurologist, and musician who is a professor in the UCLA Schools of Medicine, Music, and Letters & Science. Recorded...

The Coast of Utopia is Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy that explores a group of friends who come of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term "intelligentsia" was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was to challenge Marx for the soul of the masses; Ivan Turgenev, author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature; the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky;...

Comprising of three sequential plays, The Coast of Utopia chronicles the story of romantics and revolutionaries caught up in a struggle for political freedom in an age of emperors. The Coast of Utopia is Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy that explores a group of friends who come of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term 'intelligentsia' was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was...

Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm's-eve view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare's play. In Tom Stoppard's best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, where reality and illusion...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convene at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war,...

Tom Stoppers's play "Jumpers" is both a high-spirited comedy and a serious attempt to debate the existence of a moral absolute, of metaphysical reality, of God. The protagonists include an aging Professor Of Moral Philosophy -- trying to compose a lecture on "Man -- Good, Bad or Indifferent" -- while ignoring a corpse in the next room; his beautiful young wife, an ex-musical comedy Queen, lasciviously entertaining his university boss down the hall;...

Rock 'n' Roll is an electrifying collision of the romantic and the revolutionary. It is 1968 and the world is ablaze with rebellion, accompanied by a sound track of the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Clutching his prized collection of rock albums, Jan, a Cambridge graduate student, returns to his homeland of Czechoslovakia just as Soviet tanks roll into Prague. When security forces tighten their grip on artistic expression, Jan is inexorably drawn...

It is Tom Stoppard's very special skill as the master comedian of ideas in the modern theater to create brilliant, biting humor out of serious concerns. Virtually assaulting the audience with a cascade of words and a conspicuous display of intellect, Stoppard, in "Every Good Boy Deserves Favor," contrasts the circumstances of a political prisoner and a mental patient in a Soviet insane asylum, to question the difference, if any, between free will...

Plagued by debt, tormented by writer's block and in desperate need of a new hit, promising new playwright Will Shakespeare finds his muse in the form of passionate young noblewoman Viola De Lesseps. Their forbidden love soon draws everyone, including Queen Elizabeth, into the drama, and inspires Will to write the greatest love story of all time: Romeo and Juliet. Based on the Oscar-winning screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in...

Tom Stoppard's stimulating, funny play Night and Day is set in a fictional African country, Kambawe, which is ruled by a leader not unlike Idi Amin. The nation is faced with a Soviet-backed revolution which quickly brings newsmen from around the world to cover the story. Using the characters Ruth; her husband, Geoffrey Carson, a mine owner; an Australian veteran reporter, Dick Wagner; and an idealistic young journalist, Jacob Milne, Stoppard pits...