Best of
Drama

1983

Sunday in the Park with George


Stephen Sondheim - 1983
    A complex work revolving around a fictionalized Seurat immersed in single-minded concentration while painting the masterpiece, the production has evolved into a meditation on art, emotional connection, and community. This publication contains the entire script of the musical. "Sunday is itself a modernist creation, perhaps the first truly modernist work of musical theatre that Broadway has produced ... a watershed event that demands nothing less than a retrospective, even revisionist, look at the development of the serious Broadway musical."- Frank Rich, The New York Times Magazine

The Madness of a Seduced Woman


Susan Fromberg Schaeffer - 1983
    Agnes falls in love with this man, a local stonecutter, but the hero is also a betrayer, the apex of a triangle that eventually leads Agnes to commit murder.

Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays


David Ball - 1983
    The text is full of tools for students and practitioners to use as they investigate plot, character, theme, exposition, imagery, motivation/obstacle/conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play. He includes guides for discovering what the playwright considers the play’s most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details.Using Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for illustrating script-reading techniques as well as examples of the kinds of misinterpretation readers can fall prey to by ignoring the craft of the playwright. Of immense utility to those who want to put plays on the stage (actors, directors, designers, production specialists) Backwards and Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.

Four Plays: The Clouds/The Birds/Lysistrata/The Frogs


Aristophanes - 1983
    The darker comedy of The Clouds satirizes Athenian philosophers - Socrates in particular - and reflects the uncertainties of a generation in which all traditional religious and ethical beliefs were being challenged. The Birds takes place in a flawed utopia, with man's eternal flaws observed from up above. In Lysistrata a band of women use sex's manipulative power in order to try and end a war. In The Frogs, the god Dionysus visits the underworld, consulting the late Aeschylus and Euripides regarding whether or not classical Athens will ever have another great dramatist - and provoking an argument between both.Three of the leading Greek translators of the twentieth century - William Arrowsmith, Richmond Lattimore, and Douglas Parker - have created versions of the comedies that are at once contemporary, historically accurate, and funny. Also included are introductions to each play that describe the historical and literary background of the work.

Christopher Durang Explains it All for You


Christopher Durang - 1983
    ' dentity CrisisRecovering from a nervous breakdown, Jane is nursed and nagged by her energetic and overwhelming mother, Edith Fromage, who claims to have invented cheese. She also criticizes Jane for her suicide attempt, but then claims it never happened. Plus Jane is very confused by the fact that her mother and her brother Dwayne seem to be having an affair. But then at other times, her brother turns into her father, and then into her grandfather, and sometimes into a French count. So Jane isn’t really sure who he is. Her psychiatrist makes a house call and listens sympathetically to Jane’s recurring memory of attending a nightmarish production of “Peter Pan” in her youth. But then he goes off and has sex change, and returns as a woman, and Jane has trouble recognizing him. Then his wife shows up, also with a sex change, and the wife now looks like the psychiatrist. So poor Jane feels crazier still, though Edith and Dwayne/father/ grandfather/count think the new company is great fun, and everybody ends by conjugating the verb “dentity” : I dentity, you dentity, he she or it denties.The Actor's NightmareThe Actor's Nightmare is a short comic play by Christopher Durang. It involves an accountant named George Spelvin, who is mistaken for an actor's understudy and forced to perform in a play for which he doesn't know any of the lines.

The Rocky Horror Show (Vocal Selections)


Richard O'Brien - 1983
    Book by Richard O'Brien

Stage Makeup


Richard Corson - 1983
    Hundreds of illustrations including color charts and plates of period hairstyles supplement information on designing and applying theatrical makeup, stippling, and quick changes.

Migrations of the Heart


Marita Golden - 1983
    In those turbulent years, she gained a profound understanding of what it means to be black in America.While studying in America, she met Femi, an African man. They fell in love and she journeyed to Nigeria to become his wife. In Africa, plunged into a culture so very different from her own, but one she felt she should understand, Marita Golden learned about both her own new sprawling Nigerian family and Nigeria's large American community.But Femi, once her strength, began to insist she fit herself into the strict mold of his society and assume the submissive role of a Nigerian wife.In her new, strange surroundings, Marita Golden discovered that home is not simply a destination, but rather something you must carry always inside you."A marvelous journey . . . powerful imagery . . . distinctly drawn characters come alive, events pulsate with energy." -- The Washington Post Book World

The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth


Marilyn Singer - 1983
    Their love lives, and those of their friends, parallel those of the play. An American Library Association Best Book, 1983.

Voice of the Heart


Barbara Taylor Bradford - 1983
    The irresistible Katharine Tempest's rise from unknown actress to Hollywood legend is marked by dazzling performances and a relentless determination.

Not about Heroes: The Friendship of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen


Stephen MacDonald - 1983
    It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. This moving play is about the poetic life and the inter relationship between two of the finest Great War poets: Owen who died and Siegfried Sasson who didn't. Told by means of letters and poetry, Not About Heroes paints a vivid picture of the war. It was staged to

Peter Hall's Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle


Peter Hall - 1983
    In his startlingly frank, incisive style, he creates sometimes affectionate, sometimes acid portraits of his friends and enemies, of great actors in rehearsal. In his foreword, Hall casts a critical eye over the state of British theatre today and, through a discussion of politics and the arts in the eighties and nineties, contemplates its future.

La Cage Aux Folles


Jerry Herman - 1983
    Complete vocal score to the Broadway sensation with 11 songs: The Best of Times * I Am What I Am * A Little More Mascara * Look over There * Song on the Sand (La Da Da Da) * With You on My Arm * and more.

The Arthur Miller Collection


Arthur MillerJoBeth Williams - 1983
    Ten essential plays by one of the greatest American playwrights of the last century.©2012 L A Theatre Works

The Lottery: A play in one act


Brainerd Duffield - 1983
    

Fiddler on the Roof: Vocal Score


Hal Leonard Corporation - 1983
    The vocal score from this Broadway musical includes 30 songs, including: Anatevka * Do You Love Me? * The Dream * Far from the Home I Love * If I Were a Rich Man * Matchmaker * Miracle of Miracles * Now I Have Everything * The Rumor * Sabbath Prayer * Sunrise, Sunset * To Life * Tradition * Wedding Dance, No. 1. Includes composer bios.

The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy


Bernard Knox - 1983
    In all but one of the extant Sophoclean dramas, a heroic figure who is compounded of the same literary elements faced a situation which is essentially the same. The demonstration of this recurrent pattern is made not through character-analysis, but through a close examination of the language employed by both the hero and those with whom he contends. The two chapters attempt to present what might, with a slight exaggeration, be called the "formula" of Sophoclean tragedy.A great artist may repeat a structural pattern but he never really repeats himself. In the remaining four chapters, a close analysis of three plays, the Antigone, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus, emphasizes the individuality and variety of the living figures Sophocles created on the same basic armature. This approach to Sophoclean drama is (as in the author's previous work on the subject) both historical and critical; the universal and therefore contemporary appeal of the plays is to be found not by slighting or dismissing their historical context, but by an attempt to understand it all in its complexity. "The play needs to be seen as what it was, to be understood as what it is."

Orpheus: A Poetic Drama


Owen Barfield - 1983
    Lewis. The play was performed only once, in 1948, and remained buried in Barfield's papers until John Ulreich, Jr., of the University of Arizona was tantalized by Barfield's allusions to it and disinterred it. He saw it through to publication in 1983 and wrote the introduction, in which he rightly praises Orpheus as "the evolution of consciousness made flesh, the thing itself in human form, the myth made fact as imaginative experience."

Complete Plays 1913–1920


Eugene O'Neill - 1983
    This Library of America volume (the first in a three-volume set) contains 29 plays he wrote between 1913, when he began his career, and 1920, the year he first achieved Broadway success.Many of O’Neill’s early plays are one-act melodramas whose characters are caught in extreme situations. Thirst and Fog depict shipwreck survivors, The Web a young mother trapped in the New York underworld, and Abortion the aftermath of a college student’s affair with a stenographer.His first distinctive works are four one-act plays about the crew of the tramp steamer Glencairn that render sailors’ speech with masterful faithfulness. Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees portray these “children of the sea” as they watch over a dying man, sail though submarine-patrolled waters, take their shore leave in a London dive, and drink rum in a moonlit tropical anchorage.In Beyond the Horizon Robert Mayo begins a tragic chain of events by abandoning his dream of a life at sea, choosing instead to marry the woman his brother loves and remain on his family farm. The sea in “Anna Christie” is both “dat ole devil” to coal barge captain Chris Christopherson and a source of spiritual cleansing to his daughter Anna, an embittered prostitute. When a swaggering stoker falls in love with her, Anna becomes the apex of a three-sided struggle full of enraged pride, grim foreboding, and stubborn hope. Both of these plays won the Pulitzer Prize and helped establish O’Neill as a successful Broadway playwright.The Emperor Jones depicts the nightmarish journey through a West Indian forest of Brutus Jones, a former Pullman porter turned island ruler. Fleeing his rebellious subjects, Jones confronts his violent deeds and the tortured history of his race in a series of hallucinatory episodes whose expressionist quality anticipates many of O’Neill’s later plays.

Costume Design


Barbara Anderson - 1983
    The text is thoroughly illustrated, providing guidelines for the student for creating the figure and the costume design, examples of many styles of costume presentation, a guide to historical costume shapes, and scale drawings of the basic historical patterns with photos of them made up in muslin. Many theatre departments require all theatre majors take a course in costume design.