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The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy from 1675 by William Wycherley. A product of the tolerant early Restoration period, the play reflects an aristocratic and anti-Puritan ideology, and was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time. Even its title contains a lewd pun. Based on several plays by Molière, it turns on two indelicate plot devices: a rake's trick of pretending impotence in order to safely have clandestine affairs with married women, and the arrival in London of an inexperienced young "country wife", with her discovery of the joys of town life, especially the fascinating London men. The scandalous trick and the frank language have for much of the play's history kept it off the stage and out of print. Between 1753 and 1924, The Country Wife was considered too outrageous to be performed at all and was replaced on the stage by David Garrick's cleaned-up and bland version The Country Girl. The original play is again a stage favourite today, and is also acclaimed by academic critics, who praise its linguistic energy, sharp social satire, and openness to different interpretations.

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• July 1996 – First International Festival of Ancient Greek Drama held in Cyprus
• 9 July 1991 – Premier of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, which describes the encounter of a former torture victim with the man she believed tortured her
• 13 July 1934 – Birth of Wole Soyinka, considered Africa's most distinguished playwright and the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature
• 17 July 1951 – Original Abbey Theatre burned down, the first state-subsidized theatre in the English-speaking world

Anton Chekhov was a Russian physician, short story writer, and playwright. His brief playwriting career produced four classics of the repertoire, while his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress". Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896; but the play was revived to acclaim by Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Uncle Vanya and premiered Chekhov’s last two plays, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a special challenge to an acting ensemble, and they also challenge audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text". Not everyone appreciated that challenge: Leo Tolstoy reportedly told Chekhov, "You know, I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse". Tolstoy did, however, admire Chekhov's short stories. Chekhov had at first written stories only for the money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later exploited by Virginia Woolf and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure.

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• ... that the concert series Regine at the Theater was conceived two years earlier but was delayed after singer Regine Velasquez suffered acid reflux?
• ... that the New Amsterdam Theatre, once described as "a vision of gorgeousness", later had dead cats in the basement and mushrooms growing through the floor?
• ... that fans of the musical Rent would sleep outside the Nederlander Theatre to get cheap front-row tickets?
• ... that the studios of a California TV station were converted back into a movie theater after it went out of business?
• ... that although Agnes Kimball was a popular recording artist of opera and musical theatre, she never appeared as a singing actress on the stage?
• ... that though Broadway's Ambassador Theatre was characterized as having a "relatively lackluster career", it has hosted the same musical since 2003?

Often as he sneered at Plato, Aristotle never called him a playwright. — Max Beerbohm

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