The Book of the Play PDF Download

Author: Marta Straznicky
Publisher: Massachusetts Studies in Early
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This collection of essays examines early modern drama in the context of book history, and focuses on the readership of plays that opens different perspectives on the relationship between the cultures of print and performance.

Author: Lauren Gunderson
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 0822237725
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn’t have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Condell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They’ll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.

Author: Bert O. States
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This witty, informed, and concise introduction to the principles of drama helps us to experience the pleasure of plays from Oedipus Rex to Endgame. Never losing sight of the interaction between play and spectator, Bert O. States provides a spirited view of works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinter, Brecht, Beckett, Stoppard, Churchill, and many others.

Author: David Kaufman
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781557836373
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
(Applause Books). From his first unscripted appearance on an Off-Broadway stage in the revolutionary 1960s to the frontpage news of his death from AIDS in 1987 at age 44, Charles Ludlam embodied and helped to engender the upheavals of his time. The astonishing life and legacy of this force to be reckoned with are at last revealed in RIDICULOUS! , a literary biography of an American comic genius. After founding the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967, Ludlam sustained an ever-shifting troupe of bohemian players through two decades of perennially daunting circumstances by writing 29 plays plays that he starred in and directed as well. While Ludlam's work has become increasingly popular at regional theatres, on college campuses, and on stages throughout the world, his gender-bending theories and wide-ranging cultural impact have reached far beyond Bette Midler, the original cast members of Saturday Night Live and the countless other artists he influenced during his abbreviated lifetime. Like his early plays, Ludlam's life was rife with the sex, drugs and creative experimentation that characterized the freewheeling '60s and '70s. Based on a decade of research and interviews with more than 150 people who knew or worked with Ludlam including all of the major players in his troupe and seven of his lovers RIDICULOUS! recreates the dramatic life of an inimitable and subversive theatrical master with you-are-there intensity. Winner of the LAMBDA Literary Award for Biography and the Theatre Library Association Award for Outstanding Theatre Book of the Year "David Kaufman makes a persuasive case for Ludlam's being a genius ... As a record of Ludlam's life and the theatrical world in which he was both guru and grandmaster, this book is informed and passionate." Mel Gussow, The New York Times "A fascinating portrait of an authentic stage genius and the New York avant-garde scene in which he toiled with such demented and dedicated diligence." Playbill "The phenom who inspired everyone from Bette Midler and Madeline Kahn to Tony Kushner and Paul Rudnick was no box of chocolates which, as reading experiences go, makes his story all the sweeter." Vanity Fair "This is one helluva piece of work." Marilyn Stasio, Variety.com

Author: Mayo Simon
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781557835628
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
"Structured as an evening in the theatre, this book is analytical but straightforward, serious but entertaining. Mayo Simon presents a working playwright's view of what really happens between the stage and the audience, from the beginning of the play until the end." --BOOK JACKET.

Author: Jan Balakian
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 1557837252
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
(Applause Books). Playwright Wendy Wasserstein is, above all, a social historian. Her plays balance drama and comedy to address such issues as social class and Jewish-American identity. Most notably, however, WassersteinOs work explores the lives and struggles of women. Although she never wanted to be called a feminist playwright, her plays ask whether women can have both satisfying careers and families, concluding that even well-educated women have not yet achieved parity with men. In Reading the Plays of Wendy Wasserstein, author Jan Balakian places WassersteinOs seven major plays in a historical context. Close readings of each play are interwoven with discussion of such topics as the Gilded Age (Old Money), life at a womenOs college in the early 1970s (Uncommon Women and Others), challenges to liberal assumptions (Third), and the rise and fall of feminism (The Heidi Chronicles, winner of the Pulitzer Prize). Drawing on the recently established Wasserstein archives at Mount Holyoke College, this book delves into primary sources such as commencement speeches and popular songs and features unpublished handwritten pages from the playwrightOs notebooks. Lending further insight into WassersteinOs concerns are BalakianOs own interviews with the playwright herself and conversations with WassersteinOs friends, including playwright Christopher Durang, director Dan Sullivan, and playwright and director Emily Mann. Thoroughly researched, accessible, and rich in detail, Reading the Plays of Wendy Wasserstein will provide students, teachers, theatergoers, and other readers with fresh perspective on the work of one of AmericaOs great contemporary playwrights.

Author: Jorge A. Huerta
Publisher: Arte Publico Press
ISBN: 9781611922325
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Huerta, a leading exponent of contemporary Chicano theater, has assembled six short, representative plays that not only share the common theme of survival but also have received successful staging. The playsÍ stylistic variety, from the Brechtian Guadalupe and La victima through the realistically domestic Soldierboy to the modern morality play Money, combined with useful introductions both to the collection as a whole and to each of the scripts, enhances the anthologyÍs value. Readers should be informed that some scenes are bilingual and some written entirely in Spanish. Recommended especially for libraries serving Hispanic communities.

Author: Jordan Tannahill
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 177056411X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it. Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between? A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form. Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination. ‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom "interdisciplinary" is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail ‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)

Author: Edward Sharpham
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Written in response to 'Measure for Measure', and with not one but two heroines disguising themselves as boys, this is a tale of sex and politics in Jacobean London seen through the eyes of a malcontented Italian duke.

Author: Bonnie Marranca
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780801856983
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
As a theatrical form, the "ridiculous" thrived in the 1970s and early 1980s, playfully subverting dramatic and social convention in its mix of camp, role-playing, literary and cinematic allusions--and anticipating the current interest in gender, cross-dressing, and popular culture. Originally published in 1979, THEATRE OF THE RIDICULOUS (now revised and updated) was the first book to document this innovative and challenging form.