Elizabeth Swados

American Playhouse is an anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.

Love and passion, anger and heartbreak, laughter and happiness, all complex textures woven into the fabric so many have come to know as marriage. For behind the seemingly comfortable well-trimmed hedges of suburban Americana, live and often love, Richard and Joan Maple. Adapted from a series of stories appearing in the New Yorker Magazine over a period of twenty three years by Pulitzer Prize winning author John Updike ("The Witches of Eastwick", "Rabbit Run"), "Too Far To Go" garnered overwhelming critical praise in its theatrical debut. With its exceptional cast, this film envelops us in a poignant, sometimes funny, sometimes exasperating journey through this most important relationship.

Tommy Wilhelm is a salesman. An honest, hard-working guy who has lost his job, his girlfriend, and left part of his sanity behind as he heads to New York to pick up the pieces of his life. He's always been able to sell, but caught in a downward spiral, he must, in addition, face the father who never really understood him, while trying to balance his newly precarious existence.

An intimate portrait of director Peter Brook by his son, Simon Brook.

Gordon has a loving wife and two sons, Bryan and Keith, but he favors his spoiled younger son Keith over Bryan, who is defiant and not good at sports. As Gordon begins to yell and hit Bryan, Bryan's behavior slips towards the psychotic side and he takes it out on beings who can't defend themselves until he goes way too far one day during a summer camping trip.

A young immigrant comes to America in the 60s and is caught up in the counterculture movement which tests his bonds of friendship and love.

Meryl Streep stars as Alice in this production of Elizabeth Swados' musical, which was adapted from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Based on the acclaimed New York Shakespeare Festival production by Joseph Papp, Alice at the Palace follows Alice's surreal adventures with The Mad Hatter, The March Hare, The Queen of Hearts, and The Cheshire Cat, among many others.

Hank marries the divorced Joan, who's the mother of teens Sebastian and Jessica. After living with his new family for years, Hank announces that he's getting a sex change operation. The family deserts Hank, with Jessica going her own way and Sebastian staying with his mom. But Joan becomes an alcoholic, so Sebastian moves back in with Hank — now Henrietta — who turns out to be far more supportive than anyone else.

Ab Snopes (Tommy Lee Jones) is a Southern tenant farmer whose unrelenting and violent nature proves to be his undoing in William Faulkner's Barn Burning. Snopes sets his employer's barn on fire when he thinks he's been treated unfairly. His son, Sarty, is horrified. Snopes escapes justice for lack of proof, but he and his family are told to move on. No sooner do they move than Snopes is offended by his new rich employer. Torn between trying to win his father's acceptance and his aversion to what his father will do, Sarty must make a decision and act quickly. Adapted by Academy Award winning screenwriter Horton Foote, Faulkner's complex world of class divisions and hostile family relationships comes to life through a boy's attempt to liberate himself from hatred and poverty.

During World War I, a poor black Southerner travels north to Chicago to get work in the city's slaughterhouses, where he becomes embroiled in the organized labor movement.

With virtually no financial resources, Ellen Stewart created the La Mama theater in New York in 1961, where writers and actors such as Sam Shepard, Elizabeth Swados, and Harvey Fierstein found both encouragement and a home for their work. Includes footage from the early days, interviews and brief excerpts from some of the theater works. Stewart also talks about her experiences as a "colored" working at Saks Fifth Avenue between 1950 and 1957

Based on Elizabeth Swados’ picture book of the same name, this animated short film charts one woman's struggle with depression.

Set in 18th Century Italy, RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER is the tale of a young scholar named Giovanni (Kristoffer Tabori) who falls in love with a beautiful, yet forbidden, girl who tends her father's poison garden. However, the strange and unearthly beauty of Beatrice (Kathleen Beller) masks a terrifying curse which Giovanni must tragically discover. Her father, the mysterious Dr. Rappaccini, has made her the subject of a diabolical experiment. In Giovanni's attempt to free Beatrice from the control of her father and to escape the poisonous effect she begins to have on him, he unwittingly destroys her. From the short story of master American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, two quintessential Hawthorne themes are explored: the sins of interfering with another's soul and the futility of trying to tamper with nature.

Three Irwin Shaw short stories are dramatized. In "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" a young married couple stop for a drink on a Sunday morning in Manhattan, and the conversation turns to the husband's fidelity. "The Monument" centers on the conflict between a popular bartender with a following in an upscale Irish bar in 1938 Manhattan and its owner, who is determined to introduce a more economical whiskey in the establishment over the barkeep's objections. In "The Man Who Married a French Wife" the influential American husband of a French woman is asked by her former lover, a former resistance fighter, to help him escape the country.

A conservative, Midwestern farmer rallies his neighbors against a power company planning to erect huge towers across their land, and a political activist schoolteacher helps them organize into an effective bloc.

Hot-tempered Greek immigrant Andreas arrives in America in 1915. He finds work on a railroad, but soon gives his corrupt foreman Mekakis a savage beating. Making his way west across the country, Andreas eventually comes upon another railroad looking for workers. It turns out Mekakis has gone westward, too. He offers Andreas the only job suitable for him, a "mountain mover" on the suicide squad: He must grapple down the face of a cliff, position sticks of dynamite and then climb back up again before the lit fuses reach the explosive.

Earth is visited by a race of aliens, who issue an ultimatum: either peace or complete destruction.

This drama tells the story of Irish insurgents and the captured British soldiers whom they are assigned to guard. While confined to a remote farmhouse the foursome enjoy card playing, jig dancing, and a great deal of amiable bickering. Throughout the conviviality, however, Barney Callahan is haunted by the knowledge that reprisals will be in order if the Irish harm their British captives.

A profile of composer, performer, and author Elizabeth Swados, inter-cutting scenes of the artist at work and in travel with personal reflections and animated depictions of her stories.