Volume 1 of My Collected Plays by award winning author Lazarre Seymour Simckes, who has taught at Harvard, Yale, Williams, Vassar, Bennington, Tufts, and Brandeis, and conducted nationally televised writing workshops, contains his first four plays: Seven Days of Mourning, Ten Best Martyrs of the Year, Nossig's Antics, and Open Rehearsal. The critical acclaim for these plays has hailed them as "fascinating, unforgettable, funny, wild, compassionate, unique, strange, outrageous, mythic, enlivened by an almost hysterical inventiveness; a different kind of theater, one that leaves much to interpretation and imagination, intelligent and witty and frequently moving."