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Author: Susan Johann Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN: 1611177162 Category : Photography Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
A photographer's intimate view of writers' personal and creative journeys In 1989 Susan Johann was hired to photograph Christopher Durang for a magazine article about his play Naomi in Her Living Room. The playwright was known for his outrageous comedy, so Johann anticipated a session with a rather wild, young eccentric. To her surprise, the man who came to her studio was mild mannered and buttoned down. Johann found this twist captivating, and it was then that this project was born. Over the ensuing twenty-year period, she photographed more than ninety playwrights, including many winners of the Pulitzer Prize and other prestigious awards. Johann photographed Wendy Wasserstein, Anna Deavere Smith, August Wilson, and Nilo Cruz in the weeks after they won the Pulitzer. Tony Kushner sat for his portrait between the productions of part 1 and part 2 of Angels in America. Eve Ensler came to Johann's studio during the week she was previewing her famous one-woman show, The Vagina Monologues, and George C. Wolfe sat for her the morning after his play Spunk opened at the Public Theater. Each playwright was photographed in Johann's studio using the same film, a single light, and a plain backdrop, creating a portrait that captures and distills something essential—an intimate view. Her interviews explore the writers' personal and creative journeys including their inspirations, roadblocks, and obsessions, which influenced their work on paper and on the stage. Even those who know Edward Albee's plays intimately, for example, may be surprised by his incisive wit and inimitable voice as revealed in his interview with Johann. Beyond the book, Focus on Playwrights is also a live, multimedia presentation in which Johann narrates an inside look at creativity—the theater and photography. It has been given at such venues as the New Dramatists in New York, the Eugene O'Neill Theater, the Tryon Fine Arts Center and at the Photo Expo in New York.
Author: Susan Johann Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN: 1611177162 Category : Photography Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
A photographer's intimate view of writers' personal and creative journeys In 1989 Susan Johann was hired to photograph Christopher Durang for a magazine article about his play Naomi in Her Living Room. The playwright was known for his outrageous comedy, so Johann anticipated a session with a rather wild, young eccentric. To her surprise, the man who came to her studio was mild mannered and buttoned down. Johann found this twist captivating, and it was then that this project was born. Over the ensuing twenty-year period, she photographed more than ninety playwrights, including many winners of the Pulitzer Prize and other prestigious awards. Johann photographed Wendy Wasserstein, Anna Deavere Smith, August Wilson, and Nilo Cruz in the weeks after they won the Pulitzer. Tony Kushner sat for his portrait between the productions of part 1 and part 2 of Angels in America. Eve Ensler came to Johann's studio during the week she was previewing her famous one-woman show, The Vagina Monologues, and George C. Wolfe sat for her the morning after his play Spunk opened at the Public Theater. Each playwright was photographed in Johann's studio using the same film, a single light, and a plain backdrop, creating a portrait that captures and distills something essential—an intimate view. Her interviews explore the writers' personal and creative journeys including their inspirations, roadblocks, and obsessions, which influenced their work on paper and on the stage. Even those who know Edward Albee's plays intimately, for example, may be surprised by his incisive wit and inimitable voice as revealed in his interview with Johann. Beyond the book, Focus on Playwrights is also a live, multimedia presentation in which Johann narrates an inside look at creativity—the theater and photography. It has been given at such venues as the New Dramatists in New York, the Eugene O'Neill Theater, the Tryon Fine Arts Center and at the Photo Expo in New York.
Author: David Rush Publisher: SIU Press ISBN: 0809385821 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 191
Book Description
David Rush takes beginning playwrights through the first draft of a play and deep into the revision process. Drawing on examples from such classics as Othello and The Glass Menagerie, Rush provides detailed models for writers to evaluate their work for weaknesses and focus on the in-depth development of their plays. Rush encourages writers to make sure their plays are clear and focused. He shows how to keep plays dramatically compelling and offers ways to avoid common mistakes that make them dull, confusing, or ineffective. He then distills the essence of traditional revision into key questions and discusses frequently overlooked tools, terms, and strategies that go beyond established methods of evaluation.
Author: Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press ISBN: 9780838637302 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
Focusing on the work of twentieth-century women playwrights, this book recuperates for feminism the notions of realism and mimesis, and proposes new readings of modern women's plays. It claims that modern women playwrights establish a new form of mimesis. Drawing on theories of French feminist Luce Irigaray, the author calls this dramatic structure "labial mimesis," marks its difference from the traditional structure based on a male hero, and emphasizes its hospitality to the representation of trust, love, friendship, and erotic intimacy among women. She offers a fresh perspective in the lively debate about the viability of realism for feminist writing.
Author: Louis E. Catron Publisher: ISBN: Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
This book tells how to write stageworthy plays, develop your theatre sense, create theatrical characters, shape plot and dialogue, and find the resources to get your play produced.
Author: Penny Farfan Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472126326 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
This book foregrounds some of the ways in which women playwrights from across a range of contexts and working in a variety of forms and styles are illuminating the contemporary world while also contributing to its reshaping as they reflect, rethink, and reimagine it through their work for the stage. The book is framed by a substantial introduction that sets forth the critical vision and structure of the book as a whole, and an afterword that points toward emerging currents in and expansions of the contemporary field of playwriting by women on the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Within this frame, the twenty-eight chapters that form the main body of the book, each focusing on a single play of critical significance, together constitute a multi-faceted, inevitably partial, yet nonetheless integral picture of the work of women playwrights since 2000 as they engage with some of the most pressing issues of our time. Some of these issues include the continuing oppression of and violence against women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and ethnic minorities; the ongoing processes of decolonization; the consequences of neoliberal capitalism; the devastation and enduring trauma of war; global migration and the refugee crisis; the turn to right-wing populism; and the impact of climate change, including environmental disaster and species extinction. The book is structured into seven sections: Replaying the Canon; Representing Histories; Staging Lives; Re-imagining Family; Navigating Communities; Articulating Intersections; and New World Order(s). These sections group clusters of plays according to the broad critical actions they perform or, in the case of the final section, the new world orders that they capture through their stagings of the seeming impasse of the politically and environmentally catastrophic global present moment. There are many other points of resonance among and across the plays, but this seven-part structure foregrounds the broader actions that drive the plays, both in the Aristotelian dramaturgical sense and in the larger sense of the critical interventions that the plays creatively enact. In this way, the seven-part structure establishes correspondences across the great diversity of dramatic material represented in the book while at the same time identifying key methods of critical approach and areas of focus that align the book’s contributors across this diversity. The structure of the book thus parallels what the playwrights themselves are doing, but also how the contributors are approaching their work. Plays featured in the book are from Canada, Australia, South Africa, the US, the UK, France, Argentina, New Zealand, Syria, Brazil, Italy, and Austria; the playwrights include Margaret Atwood, Leah Purcell, Yaël Farber, Paula Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, debbie tucker green, Lisa Loomer, Hélène Cixous, Anna Deavere Smith, Lola Arias, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, Marie Clements, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Alia Bano, Holly Hughes, Whiti Hereaka, Julia Cho, Liwaa Yazji, Grace Passô, Dominique Morisseau, Emma Dante, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Lynn Nottage, Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Colleen Murphy, and Lucy Kirkwood. Encompassing several generations of playwrights and scholars, ranging from the most senior to mid-career to emerging voices, the book will be essential reading for established researchers, a valuable learning resource for students at all levels, and a useful and accessible guide for theatre practitioners and interested theatre-goers.
Author: Brenda Murphy Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139825615 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
This volume addresses the work of women playwrights throughout the history of the American theatre, from the early pioneers to contemporary feminists. Each chapter introduces the reader to the work of one or more playwrights and to a way of thinking about plays. Together they cover significant writers such as Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, Lillian Hellman, Sophie Treadwell, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Megan Terry, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Wendy Wasserstein, Marsha Norman, Beth Henley and Maria Irene Fornes. Playwrights are discussed in the context of topics such as early comedy and melodrama, feminism and realism, the Harlem Renaissance, the feminist resurgence of the 1970s and feminist dramatic theory. A detailed chronology and illustrations enhance the volume, which also includes bibliographical essays on recent criticism and on African-American women playwrights before 1930.
Author: Paul Castagno Publisher: Waveland Press ISBN: 1478651326 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 437
Book Description
Playwriting Intensive takes a fresh approach to playwriting—putting dialogue first. Castagno shows novice playwrights how to use language to generate character and structure. His decades of experience teaching and writing have resulted in a fresh, informed pedagogy designed to get students off to the right start and progressing quickly. Castagno emphasizes learning by process through the text, encouraging readers to experiment and familiarize themselves with the best practices provided. His lessons focus on the skills contemporary playwrights will use in their careers, including promoting diversity both through featured examples and dedicated exercises.
Author: Janet Neipris Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 0878301887 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
This book examines how debates over copyright law in the United States during the nineteenth century, particularly over the lack of an international copyright law, intersected with the business practices and political and artistic beliefs of American authors. These debates shaped a discourse of literary property rights that forced authors to negotiate their copyrights not only with their publishers, but with their readers as well. The author argues that the act of taking out a copyright was more than a mere legal mechanism marking a transition from amateur to professional or artist to businessperson. Taking out a copyright had a profound impact on how audiences viewed authors, how authors perceived their profession, and how they represented individual rights and property ownership within their texts. The book is unique in the scope of its research, tracking developments from the 1820s through the 1890s, and in the way it approaches the work and careers of well-known authors. The author employs research from the American Antiquarian Society, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, and the Government and Special Collections at the University of Iowa, drawing on an array of documents including newspaper editorials, legislative hearings, court decisions, and the public and private writing of James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Clemens, and Emily Dickinson to demonstrate how authors found themselves in an uneasy opposition to their reading public.
Author: Christopher Bigsby Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108321372 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
The early years of the twenty-first century saw several losses for the American theatre but also marked the emergence of a new generation of exciting playwrights. In this book, Christopher Bigsby explores the work of nine of these developing talents, and the importance of issues including race, gender and politics for their writing. Increasingly, these new figures are gaining their reputations not on Broadway but in small theatres and small towns or even abroad, bringing fresh and diverse perspectives to contemporary American drama. With a focus on female writers and on issues of personal and public identity in contemporary society, this volume investigates the styles and techniques these playwrights favour, the themes they raise, and their role in a changing America and a changing world.
Author: Lenora Inez Brown Publisher: Focus ISBN: 9781585107247 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"This is a book for dramaturgs of new work, but it is also a particularly effective book for anyone working on new plays: playwrights, directors, producers, even actors. Lenora skillfully dissects the process of workshopping new writing, and clearly defines the roles for all involved. I learned not only how to make a new play workshop more effective, but how to approach my writing and my directing, and how to meaningfully collaborate with others in this unique process. This is a necessary handbook for anyone working on new plays today." --Anne Marie Cammarato, Director
Author: Susan Johann
Author: Susan Johann
Author: David Rush
Author: Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio
Author: Louis E. Catron
Author: Penny Farfan
Author: Brenda Murphy
Author: Paul Castagno
Author: Janet Neipris
Author: Christopher Bigsby
Author: Lenora Inez Brown