This new revised and expanded edition features great photos throughout, with chapters on: Preparation, In Front of the Camera - Before You Shoot, The Take, Characters, Directors, On Being a Star, and much more. "Remarkable material ... A treasure ... I'm not going to be looking at performances quite the same way ... FASCINATING!" - Gene Siskel

    Lewis and American poet Joy Gresham. Shadowlands shows how love, and the risk of loss, transformed this great man's relationships, even with God. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring: Arthur Hanket, Harriet Harris, Nicholas Hormann, Martin Jarvis, Christopher Neame, Kenneth Schmidt, W. Morgan Sheppard

    Romantically attached, they continue to exchange letters through the boarding school and college years—where Andy goes on to excel at Yale and law school, while Melissa flunks out of a series of "good schools." While Andy is off at war Melissa marries, but her attachment to Andy remains strong and she continues to keep in touch as he marries, becomes a successful attorney, gets involved in politics and, eventually, is elected to the U.S. Senate. Meanwhile, her marriage in tatters, Melissa dabbles in art and gigolos, drinks more than she should, and becomes estranged from her children. Eventually she and Andy do become involved in a brief affair, but it is really too late for both of them. However Andy's last letter, written to her mother after Melissa's untimely death, makes it eloquently clear how much they really meant, and gave to, each other over the years—physically apart, perhaps, but spiritually as close as only true lovers can be.

    As a blizzard rages outside, a lonely figure, Henry Harry, lies sleeping under a heap of blankets. Suddenly, he is awakened by the insistent knocking of an unexpected visitor who turns out to be Rosannah DeLuce, a distraught young woman who has fled all the way from Arizona to escape her impending marriage, and who bursts into the cabin dressed in full bridal regalia. Exhausted, she throws herself on Henry's mercy, but after sleeping for two days straight, her vigor and combativeness return. Both characters, it develops, have been wounded and embittered by life, and both are refugees from so-called civilization. Thrown together in the confines of the snowbound cabin, they alternately repel and attract each other as, in theatrically vivid exchanges, they explore the pain of the past and, in time, consider the possibilities of the present. In the end their very isolation proves to be the catalyst that allows them to break through the web of old griefs and bitter feelings that beset them both and to reach out for the solace and sanctuary that only hard-won understanding, self-awareness and compassion for the plight of others can bestow.

    

    In Laughing Wild, two comic monologues evolve into a man and a woman’s shared nightmare of modern life and the isolation it creates. From her turf battles at the supermarket to the desperate clichés of self-affirmation he learns at his “per­sonality workshop,” they run the gamut of everyday life’s small brutalizations until they meet, with disastrous inevitability, at the Harmonic Convergence in Central Park.

    This work is both a biography and an architectural history of a city within a city spiced with lively anecdotes.

    

    Now, Marvin finds himself in Falsettoland and Finn is firmly established as one of the most intriguing composers/lyricists working today. Here, together in one exclusive hardcover volume is the complete libretto of Finn's extraordinary "Marvin Songs." Marvin is funny sensitive, and bewildered by life. He is married to Trina, devoted to his son Jason, and in love with a man named Whizzer. In the course of this hilarious and moving journey, Marvin comes to terms with his sexual preference, Trina marries Marvin's psychiatrist, Mendel, Jason comes of age, and Whizzer falls victim to AIDS.Through Finn's one-of-a-kind lyrics and the imaginative collaboration of James Lapine (co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George), Marvin's confusion, obsession, love, and loss are totally compelling. With their unique talents perfectly in sync, Finn and Lapine "pull off the balancing act between satire and seriousness brilliantly."--Michael Kuchwara, AP

    His best-known plays include The Castle, Scenes from an Execution and The Possibilities. All of his plays are emotionally highly charged, intellectually stimulating and far removed from the theatrical conventions of what he terms ‘the Establishment Theatre’. These fragments, essays, thoughts and poems on the nature of theatre likewise reject the constraints of ‘objective’ academic theatre criticism. They explore the collision (and collusion) of intellect and artistry in the creative act. This book is more than a collection of essays: it is a cultural manifesto for Barker’s own ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’.

    

    

    

    A collection of plays.

    A brief description of characters and situation prefaces each scene, and is followed by a commentary which discusses its major acting challenges and opportunities. Each scene has been chosen for its independent life requiring only the simplest of stage properties and the barest of spaces.

    Ken Mandelbaum reveals the unique creative genius that shaped A Chorus Line and offers a fascinating account of a man and a career the likes of which Broadway may never see again. Photographs.

    An account of The Mahabharata, the legendary Sanskrit epic magically retold in a theatrical extravaganza and subsequent Channel 4 film directed by Peter Brook.

    Early Marx Brothers comedy with Groucho as a hotel owner, Chico and Harpo as con men and Margaret Dumont as a wealthy matron.

    Gozzi's stage becomes a multiscenic home for adventures, loves, enmities, and dazzling visual effects. This collection brings together for the first time modern English translations of five of Gozzi's most famous plays: The Raven, The King Stag, Turandot, The Serpent Woman, and The Green Bird, each annotated by the translators and preceded by the author's preface. Ted Emery's Introduction places Gozzi in his social and historical context, tracing his world view in both the content and the form of his tales. In the ten works he called fiable or fairy tales, Gozzi intermingled characters from the traditional and improvised commedia dell'arte with exotic figures of his own invention. During Gozzi's lifetime, Goethe and Schiller translated and produced some of his dramas at the Weimar Theatre. In our century, the dramas have reasserted themselves under the direction of Max Reinhardt, Vsevolod Meyerhold, George Devine, and Benno Besson, as well as in operatic adaptations by Puccini and Prokofiev. The powerful conflicts, the idyllic and fearsome settings, and the startling transformations in these plays offer exceptional opportunities to actors, directors, and designers. The lively translations are faithful to Gozzi's Italian, while being eminently playable for English-speaking audiences today. Two of the translations have already had highly successful stagings by Andrei Serban at the American Repertory Theatre and on tour.

    

    Second Editon, updated by Author Craig Zadan

    in Dallas in 1947—the model for more than 450 such theatres in the country today. Margo was mentor to playwrights William Inge, Horton Foote, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, as well as Tennessee Williams, whose The Glass Menagerie she co-directed in its first Broadway production.

    A fire in 1985 totally destroyed Andrews's studio, and he painstakingly set about reassembling his photos, which document the history of the flourishing African-American theater from 1957 to 1984. A preface by playwright/director Harrison provides a historical framework for the photos, and the afterword is an interview in which Andrews discusses personal and professional matters. Only a few of these photographs may be great--but taken together, they are a unique record and reveal the awesome variety, vibrancy, and passion of black theater in America. The book is an important addition to material on theater history. Recommended for larger theater and photography collections. - Johanna Ezell, Pennsylvania State Univ. Lib., Mont Alto

    

    These magnificent sketches, stage sets, and costumes come from drama, musicals, ballet, and opera. They include Alison Chitty's suspended, golden representation of the heavens for several Shakespeare plays; Patrick Robertson's and Rosemary Vercoe's modern-day conception of Rigoletto, and John Napier's elaborate, futuristic creation for Starlight Express.

    PHIL is an aging account manager who has begun to question his purpose in life and work. LARRY is his longtime partner, a savvy and quick-witted salesman with a penchant for rough language and absolute contempt for dishonesty. BOB is a recent hire from te company research center, on hand to represent technical expertise--an earnest young man defined, in part, by devotion to his religion. As the evening unfolds, unspoken differences between them become lines in the sand. And when a case ofo mistaken identity puts the entire affair in the hands of the devout, young researcher, a philosophical batter ensures that lays bare their hearts and leaves no soul unscathed. Basis for the 1999 movie, The Big Kahuna, starring Danny DeVito and Kevin Spacey.

    The Alchemist (1610) is a major satire on folly and greed, brilliantly plotted and dazzling in its use of language. Bartholomew Fair (1614), possibly Jonson's greatest achievement, reveals a panoramic depiction of London society. The New Inn (1629) and A Tale of a Tub (1633) suggest a different Jonson, exploring new forms and writing from a profoundly modified perspective. In The New Inn, a romantic comedy overlaid with an atmospheric melancholy and ethical urgency, Jonson engages seriously for the first time with the conventions of non-satiric comedy. A Tale of a Tub, a riotous farce set in the early years of Queen Elizabeth, is now widely regarded as a nostalgic Jonsonian pastiche of Elizabethan popular drama. In recent criticism, Jonson's later career has been undergoing considerable reassessment, and this edition is the first that attempts to take this new view of Jonson into account.

    Perkins' book (which includes a bibliography of plays and pageants by black women before 1950 as well as a selected bibliography of critical works) is a major help in providing access to [the world of black drama]." --Theatre JournalThe need to acknowledge these works was the impetus behind this volume. Perkins has selected nineteen plays from seven writers who were among the major dramatizers of the black experience during this early period. As forerunners to the activist black theater of the 1950s and 1960s, these plays represent a critical stage in the development of black drama in the United States.