Best of
Theatre

1985

The Normal Heart


Larry Kramer - 1985
    It tells the story of very private lives caught up in the heartrendering ordeal of suffering and doom - an ordeal that was largely ignored for reasons of politics and majority morality.Filled with power, anger, and intelligence, Larry Kramer's riveting play dramatizes what actualy happened from the time of the disease's discovery to the present, and points a moral j'accuse in many directions. His passionate indictment of government, the media, and the public for refusing to deal with a national plague is electrifying theater - a play that finally breaks through the conspiracy of silence with a shout of stunning impact. As Douglas Watt summed it up in his review for the New York Daily News,THE NORMAL HEART is "an angry, unremitting and gripping piece of political theater. You are bound to come away moved."

Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook


Antony Sher - 1985
    "This is the most wonderfully authentic account of the experience of creating a performance. It's full of delicate and sometimes moving observation; full of striking information...; full of the frustration and tedium and occasional tears of the unequal struggle of any of us flawed thespians with ourselves and a great role; and full of his own astonishing and unforgettable drawings. Images, images. What images!" Simon Callow, The Sunday Times (London)

Les Liaisons Dangereuses


Christopher Hampton - 1985
    Christopher Hampton has made a masterful adaptation for the stage of the conspiracy to corrupt a young girl barely out of her convent.

The Foreigner


Larry Shue - 1985
    When others begin to speak freely around him, he not only becomes privy to secrets both dangerous and frivolous, he also discovers an adventurous extrovert within himself.

Seascape With Sharks and Dancer


Don Nigro - 1985
    The play is set in a beach bungalow. The young man who lives there has pulled a lost young woman from the ocean. Soon, she finds herself trapped in his life and torn between her need to come to rest somewhere and her certainty that all human relationships turn eventually into nightmares. The struggle between his tolerant and gently ironic approach to life and her strategy of suspicion and attack becomes a kind of war about love and creation which neither can afford to lose. This is an offbeat, wonderful love story. Note: The play contains a wealth of excellent monologue and scene material.

Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater


Bert O. States - 1985
    It is an extension of notes on the theater and theatergoing that have been accumulating for some time. It does not have an argument, or set out to prove a thesis, and it will not be one of those useful books one reads for the fruits of its research. Rather, it is a form of critical description that is phenomenological in the sense that it focuses on the activity of theater making itself out of its essential materials: speech, sound, movement, scenery, text, etc. Like most phenomenological description, it will succeed to the extent that it awakens the reader's memory of his own perceptual encounters with theater. If the book fails in this it will be about as interesting to read as an anthology of someone else's dreams. In any case, this book is less concerned with the scientific purity of my perspective and method than with retrieving something from the theater experience that seems to me worthy of our critical admiration.

Players of Shakespeare 1: Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Twelve Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company


Philip Brockbank - 1985
    Twelve distinguished actors were asked to write about the preparation and performance of a Shakespeare role they had played in a production with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Irreverent Acting: A Bold New Statement on the Craft of Acting and Individual Talent


Eric Morris - 1985
    The book explores the seven major obligations related to material--time and place, relationship, emotional, character, thematic, historical, and subtextual--and from there goes on to define choices and explain how to use them to fulfill those obligations. The third element of the craft, the choice approaches, is the practical work the actor must do to create the choices. Out of the current thirty-one choice approaches, only twenty-two are explored in this book. The remaining nine are investigated in subsequent books.

The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting


Joseph R. Roach - 1985
    Explores the historical and cultural evolution of the theoretical language of the stage

Dreams That Money Can Buy: The Tragic Life of Libby Holman


Jon Bradshaw - 1985
    The accident haunted the rest of her life as key men around her kept dying off : her 2d husband, her son and then Monty Clift. "She was like no one else we survivors ever knew," says Gore Vidal.

Theater Games for Rehearsal: A Director's Handbook


Viola Spolin - 1985
    This guide gives advice on selecting a play, auditioning a cast, and creating a stage space, shows how to conduct acting workshops, and demonstrates rehearsal techniques.

Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre


Hallie Flanagan - 1985
    

The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia


Hélène Cixous - 1985
    Brilliant, bold, and combative, author of numerous novels and a gargantuan study of James Joyce, and sponsor of a series of notorious seminars at the University of Paris about women's writing, she has exploited the roles of femme fatale and maitresse d'education in a career that has been spectacularly defiant and productive. Sihanouk is one of Cixous's most ambitious projects: the dramatic portrayal of the conflicts between old and new, East and West, North and South, religion and politics. At its center is the figure of Norodom Sihanouk. Vain when a prince, as king Sihanouk discovered his responsibility to his country and came to embody Cambodia. He used every means to keep his country growing, healthy, and out of the wars of Southeast Asia that consumed Laos and Vietnam.Cixous recognized in Sihanouk a historical figure as fascinating as a tragic king in Shakespeare: a man of uncommon intelligence on whom his country's history pivoted, a man placed by fate into a world of bad choices and surrounded by powerful and relentless antagonists. But Sihanouk gave Cixous something more: a king who is indisputably modern, who has read and loved Shakespeare, and whose story continues.First published in 1985, the play begins with Sihanouk's abdication in 1955 and ends with his arrest by the Khmer Rouge two decades later. The destiny of an entire country unfolds through the fifty characters who appear on stage.

Between Theater and Anthropology


Richard Schechner - 1985
    The way performances are created--in training, workshops, and rehearsals--is the key paradigm for social process.

Intimate Exchanges, Volume II: A Play (Acting Edition)


Alan Ayckbourn - 1985
    

Intimate Exchanges, Volume I: A Play (Acting Edition)


Alan Ayckbourn - 1985
    

Dido And Aeneas (Kalmus Edition)


Henry Purcell - 1985
    This is from the Baroque era.

Hamlet II (Better Than the Original)


Sam Bobrick - 1985
    If you've had trouble grasping the intent of Shakespeare's classic endeavor, this should clear it up once and for all. The text remains very true to good old Will's basic fundamentals.

The Green Bird: A Commedia Dell' Arte Play in Three Acts


Carlo Gozzi - 1985
    Mitchel, The Green Bird is a fairy tale written by the 18th century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi. An evil queen, a dim king, a princess and a mysterious green bird inhabit the world of Carlo Gozzi's theatrical fantasy. It is the story of a dysfunctional royal family where the evil mother in-law, Tartagliona buries her daughter in-law, the Queen, under the royal toilets. First performed in 18th century Venice, The Green Bird is often revived, charming contemporary audiences with its playful take on familiar fairy tale forms and wowing them with its sheer theatrical imagination. This book is complete with stage directions.

The Mysteries


Tony Harrison - 1985
    Tony Harrison's light translation of a brace of the northern Mystery plays as performed by the National Theatre in the eighties.

The Fighting Days


Wendy Lill - 1985
    The play focuses on the life and work of Francis Marion Beynon, a Manitoba journalist and political activist. When the play opens, Francis is on her way to Winnipeg, leaving behind a sheltered and religious rural childhood. Soon after she arrives she meets Nellie McClung and becomes involved in the Votes-for-Women movement. She also begins work as the women’s page editor for The Rural Review, airing her controversial political views on the editorial page. Suddenly, Canada is involved in World War I, and the conscription crisis divides the suffragists: should all women have the vote or just Dominion-born women who are sending their husbands and sons off to battle? Should women use their votes to push for conscription or to lobby for a swift end to the war?A play about the polarities of public and private lives, and about issues of racism and pacifism within the women’s movement, The Fighting Days deals with timeless moral concerns. Francis Beynon, says the playwright, “gave up everything for her beliefs and one can only hope the world’s a better place for it.

Scapino; One Act


Frank Dunlop - 1985
    Great copy! Great condition.