Spotlighting the best of Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional, and experimental writings since 2000, Duo!: The Best Scenes for Two for the 21st Century offers bravura pieces for performance, acting class, and study. Culled from the work of over 100 playwrights – veterans as well as up-and-coming talents – and encompassing the seminal issues of our time – from race to gender, class to politics – this follow-up compendium to the popular edition of the 1990s is by turns comic or, serious – and sometimes both – but always intensely human. Duo!'s satisfyingly complex characters are the obscure or famous, young, middle-aged, and older.

Tracy Letts confronts the aftermath of betrayal on a night too hot for sleep in August: Osage County; Karen Finley exposes sexual politics outside the Oval Office in George & Martha; Tom Stoppard investigates the difficulties of understanding Greek as well as the younger generation in Rock 'n' Roll; Lynn Nottage delineates gentility, the fear of being alone, and the passage of time in Intimate Apparel; Richard Greenberg weighs the costs of being godly or becoming merely human in the baseball-themed Take Me Out; and Tina Howe bends time, showing the universal power of dramatic recognition across the ages, in Water Music.