In a career spanning four decades, Edward Albee has written more than twenty plays. Two of his most popular remain the 1958 one-act play The Zoo Story, and the award-winning Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, (1962) which also became a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous 1922 portrait of America's Jazz Age. The novel's protagonist, the self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby, is considered the embodiment of American ambition in the early part of this century.

Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1944) is a "dream play" featuring the character of Amanda Wingfield, a woman who lives in a St. Louis tenement with her two children: Laura, a shy young woman; and her brother Tom, a poet who supports the family by working in a warehouse.

Longer life expectancy, health issues, age discrimination, and retirement concerns are just...