But for the people of Laramie–both the friends of Matthew and those who hated him without knowing him–the tragedy was personal. In a chorus of voices that brings to mind Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, The Laramie Project allows those most deeply affected to speak, and the result is a brilliantly moving theatrical creation.

    The cat is reported dead when Padriac is away bombing civilian targets in Northern Ireland as a one-man splinter group and his family and friends on Inishmore desperately try to conceal the cat's death and what caused it before he returns.

    In it, Anne Bogart speaks candidly and with wisdom of the courage required to create 'art with great presence'. Each chapter tackles one of the seven major areas Bogart has identified as both potential partner and potential obstacle to art-making. They are Violence; Memory; Terror; Eroticism; Stereotype; Embarrassment; and Resistance. Each one can be used to generate extraordinary creative energy, if we know how to use it.A Director Prepares offers every practitioner an extraordinary insight into the creative process. It is a handbook, Bible and manifesto, all in one. No other book on the art of theatre comes even close to offering this much understanding, experience and inspiration.

    Continuing this tradition, you will find them ranging from the way set a scene to directing the actor on the way to laugh. The tips are clear, concise, evocative, and constructed to give you a better day in rehearsal and performance. A buffet of ways to improve immediately that you'll refer to over and over again!

    The book argues that, for example, Trainspotting, Blasted, Mojo and Shopping and F**king are much more than a collection of shock tactics - taken together, they represent a consistent critique of modern life, one which focuses on the problem of violence, the crisis of masculinity and the futility of consumerism. The book contains extensive interviews with playwrights, including Sarah Kane (Blasted), Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and F**king), Philip Ridley (The Pitchfork Disney), Patrick Marber (Closer) and Martin McDonagh (The Beauty Queen of Leenane).

    This new volume collects the author’s plays written in the past five years, including References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot ("effortlessly melds otherworldly fantasy with gritty realism to make sparks fly onstage."—The Journal News), Sueño (a reworking for Pedro Calderón’s Life is a Dream) and Sonnets for an Old Century, the author’s most recent work, which recently premiered in Los Angeles.Puerto Rican-born playwright José Rivera plays have been produced all over the world and his work has been translated into seven languages. His best known work includes Marisol and Each Day Dies with Sleep. "Rivera has a messianic mission to replace old and dying creeds with vibrant new visions."—Robert Brustein, New RepublicAlso available by José RiveraMarisol and Other Plays PB $15.95 1-55936-136-0 • USA

    Small, weedy, Jewish, painfully conscious of his unfulfilled homosexuality, Ant, as his mother called him, found refuge in art, later in theatre and escape to London. Initially turned down by RADA and Central, he went on to create a series of triumphant stage performances - including Richard III, Macbeth, Pam Gems' Stanley - and to become the first actor of his generation to be knighted. His novels have been acclaimed, as have his theatre-journals filled with his own illustrations. Creativity is Sher's rush, although there was a time when a cocaine habit threatened his survival. Whether describing the battle with this growing dependency, or the sinister paradise of white South Africa in the fifties, or his personal experiences of theatre figures as diverse as Olivier, Stoppard and Mike Leigh, he writes with remarkable candour, wit and great style. In this unique autobiography, Antony Sher takes us on a personal odyssey through the approvals and dismissals, awards and addictions, doubts and dreams which have characterised his first fifty years.

    Composer Jason Robert Brown says of his debut musical, "It's about one moment. It's about hitting the wall and having to make a choice, or take a stand, or turn around and go back. The moment you think you know where you stand, the things that you're sure of slip from your hand, and you're suddenly a stranger in some completely different land." Our songbook features 10 vocal selections from the show: Christmas Lullaby * The Flagmaker, 1775 * Hear My Song * I'd Give It All for You * I'm Not Afraid of Anything * King of the World * The New World * She Cries * Stars and the Moon * Surabaya-Santa. Also includes an introduction by Brown.

    Together they come up with the ultimate con: raise more money than needed, produce a show that is bound to flop, and pocket the change. Of course, all best laid plans are subject to be mucked up.

    She has spent her career on both sides of the auditioning process, both as an award-winning casting director who has worked with Harold Prince, Bernard Bertolucci, and James Ivory, and as an accomplished actor herself. In this highly informative and accessible book, Merlin provides everything the actor needs to achieve self-confidence and artistic honesty–from the most basic practical tips to an in-depth framework for preparing a part. Filled with advice from the most esteemed people in the business, such as James Lapine, Nora Ephron, and Stephen Sondheim, and charged with tremendous wisdom and compassion, this indispensable resource will arm the reader to face an actor's greatest challenge: getting the part.

    For over three decades, on both sides of the Atlantic, Tynan was at the hot center of the theater and film worlds. He knew everybody, and everybody wanted to know him. His diaries-so resplendent with griefs and gossip-bear superb witness to the fame he courted and the price he paid for it.

    Our matching folio for this multiple-Tony Award-winning musical by Elton John and Tim Rice features 17 outstanding songs, and a stunning 8-page section of full-color photos from the Broadway production. Includes: Another Pyramid * Dance of the Robe * Easy as Life * Enchantment Passing Through * Every Story Is a Love Story * Fortune Favors the Brave * How I Know You * I Know the Truth * My Strongest Suit * Not Me * Written in the Stars * and more. A Piano/Vocal Highlights collection (00313223, $16.95) is also available, featuring 11 songs in standard piano/vocal format with the melody line in the piano part.

    This volume contains the complete script of 11 plays, author bios, permission information, author notes, and a detailed Introduction by the editor, Martin Denton. Included are: HOSPITAL 2008 by Randy Sharp and Axis CompanyA four-part serial play that explores the unconscious memories of a man in a coma. LINUS & ALORA by Andrew Irons A whimsical and poetical exploration of the powers of imagination: a lot can happen in nine months. SISTER CITIES by Colette Freedman Four sisters reunite following their mother's alleged suicide in this surprising and incisive comedy. S/HE by Nanna Nick Mwaluko The journey from Samantha to Sam: a young African American biological female struggles with gender and becomes a man. DEATH AT FILM FORUM by Eric Bland Aspiring filmmaker/auteurs compete a la Project Runway in this very funny mixed media satirical drama. TRACES/fades by Lenora Champagne A meditation on Alzheimer's and our national inability to remember history. NOWHERE ON THE BORDER by Carlos Lacamara A timely drama about a Mexican father searching the Arizona desert for his missing daughter, and the American Minuteman who detains him. AMERICAN BADASS, OR 12 CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF A NATIONAL IDENTITY by Chris Harcum In a dozen monologues, a look at who we are in 2008 and how we may have gotten that way. A FIRE AS BRIGHT AS HEAVEN by Tim Collins An epic solo tour de force chronicling the past seven years of American upheaval. CONVERSATION STORM by Rick Burkhardt A mind-blowing exercise in thejustification of torture, in a taut, concise, single act. KRAPP, 39 by Michael Laurence Haunted by Beckett's Krapp, a 39-year-old actor throws himself a birthday party in this deeply personal solo play about the last moments of youth.

    Book annotation not available for this title.

    This songbook includes 12 selections from Andrew Lippa's hit production, which won the 2000 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Musical, and was nominated for 13 Drama Desk Awards. Includes the songs: How Did We Come to This? * I'll Be Here * Let Me Drown * The Life of the Party * Look at Me Now * Maybe I Like It This Way * An Old-Fashioned Love Story * Out of the Blue * Poor Child * Raise the Roof * What Is It About Her? * and A Wild, Wild Party, plus a plot synopsis and a photo and bio of Lippa.

    Written between 1983 and 1998, they showcase Wellman’s ongoing exploration of the limits of language and the consequences of humanity in the postmodern world.

    Zany, thought-provoking, and always original, this anthology brings together all the one-acts from the Off-Broadway hit Mere Mortals and from the all-new Lives of the Saints, as well as several new and uncollected plays, including Bolero, Arabian Nights (which premiered at the celebrated Humana Festival in Louisville), The Green Hill, and Captive Audience.

    Indeed any regular theatergoer is familiar with the experience of a performance that conjures the ghosts of previous productions. The Haunted Stage explores this theatrical déjà vu, and examines how it stimulates the spectator's memory. Relating the dynamics of reception to the interaction between theater and memory, The Haunted Stage uncovers the ways in which the memory of the spectator informs the process of theatrical reception.Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York.

    In this inhospitable setting live a pair of sisters, twins who are not identical in any way: Sugar, a complicated, insecure waif who still wears the tracksuit her mother died in ten years prior, and Grace, a rough-and-tumble hellcat who owns the local dump. At the play’s opening, it is their thirtieth birthday, and the TV news has announced the disappearance of a local Scrabble-champ stripper. While Grace is at the dump, housebound Sugar is surprised by a mysterious drifter, one Trout Stanley, foot fetishist and fake cop, who is searching for the lake where his parents drowned – a fishy story if there ever was one. He quickly becomes mired in a surreal love triangle with the two sisters.Trout Stanley is about three people who confuse codependence for co-operation and affliction for affection. An eccentric, captivating story in which the biggest catch of all is love.Lavishly illustrated by Jason Logan.

    1250 A.D.: The river flooded again last week. The chandler's shop just burned to the ground. Nobody's heard of the wheelbarrow yet. And Ste. Foy, the patron of the local monastery, hasn't worked a miracle in thirteen years. In other words, the Dark Ages still look pretty dark. All eyes turn to the Pope, whose promised visit will surely encourage other pilgrims to make the trek and restore the abbey to its former glory. That is, until a rival church claims to possess the relics of Ste. Foy-and "their" bones are working miracles. All seems lost until the destitute monks take a lesson from a larcenous one-eyed minstral, who teaches them an outrageous new way to pay old debts.

    The legend, handed down through the ages in fragments, remains at the core of Western civilization. In this ten-part epic drama, the story is told complete. Achilles, Helen of Troy, Cassandra, Orestes and the heroes of Greek myth face up to the questions and dilemmas of a world at war.

    These are musicals that broke all the old rules and created new ones, and changed the way we looked at musical theatre forever: the savage political satire of The Cradle Will Rock in 1937the surprisingly dark sexuality of Pal Joey in 1940the profound innovations of Oklahoma! in 1943the absurdist social satire of Anyone Can Whistle in 1964the convention-shattering experiment that was Hair in 1967the intimacy and emotional power of Jacques Brel in 1968the provocative honesty of the gay-themed Ballad of Little Mikey in 1994the abstract sophistication of the jazz/pop/R&B-flavored Songs for a New World in 1995the emotional immensity of the "anti-spectacle" Floyd Collins in 1995the overwhelming influence of the 1996 rock musical Rent.Offering insightful, provocative opinions on character, plot, musical and textual themes, lyrics, subtext, motivation, backstory, and historical context, Miller reveals astonishing new details about what makes each one of these musicals great. He'll get you thinking and talking about these shows like you never have before. Visit Scott's website at http: //www.geocities.com/Broadway/3164/.

    But when the Reverend dies in hospital, Angel lands in solitary confinement next to Lucius, a card-carrying Christian serial-killer.

    It provides a detailed account of the most significant productions throughout the world, on stage, film, and television. The book conveys the unique interpretations of the Tyrone family by such actors as Fredric March, Jason Robards, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, Colleen Dewhurst, Ruby Dee, Kevin Spacey, Jack Lemmon, and Alan Bates, among other distinguished theatre artists. This history includes a production chronology, bibliography, discography and videography.

    Exploring the violence racism visits upon peopleOCOs lives, KennedyOCOs plays express poetic alienation, transcending the particulars of character and plot through ritualistic repetition and radical structural experimentation. Frequently produced, read, and taught, they continue to hold a significant place among the most exciting dramas of the past fifty years. This first comprehensive collection of her most important works traces the development of KennedyOCOs unique theatrical oeuvre from her Obie-winning Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) through significant later works such as A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), Ohio State Murders (1992), and June and Jean in Concert, for which she won an Obie in 1996. The entire contents of KennedyOCOs groundbreaking collections In One Act and The Alexander Plays are included, as is her earliest work Because of the King of France and the play An Evening with Dead Essex (1972). More recent prose writings Secret Paragraphs about My Brother, A Letter to Flowers, and Sisters Etta and Ella are fascinating refractions of the themes and motifs of her dramatic works, even while they explore new material on teaching and writing. An introduction by Werner Sollors provides a valuable overview of KennedyOCOs career and the trajectory of her literary development. Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931) is a three-time Obie-award winning playwright whose works have been widely performed and anthologized. Among her many honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters award and the Guggenheim fellowship. In 1995-6, the Signature Theatre Company dedicated its entire season to presenting her work. She has been commissioned to write works for the Public Theater, Jerome Robbins, the Royal Court Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and Juilliard, and she has been a visiting professor at Yale, Princeton, Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard. She lives in New York City. "

    Available for the first time, this handbook presents more than forty exercises that allow actors to side coach themselves at home, in rehearsal, or in performance.Spolin's improvisational techniques changed the nature and practice of modern theater. Her work has inspired actors, directors, teachers, and writers in theater, television, and film. Her techniques have also influenced the fields of education, mental health, social work, and psychology.

    A writer is told, in confidence, a terrible tale of murder and injustice and he promises never to repeat the story. Goodness is the writer breaking his word.Recently divorced, Michael Redhill goes to Poland to get away frm his life and to do some research on the Holocaust. Thwarted by witnesses unwilling to talk, he returns home via England, but in London is introduced to someone who can tell him a 'real' story of evil. Through this reluctant witness, Redhill learns of a genocide. He encounters, through the memory of the storyteller, an alleged war criminal, about to be put on trial. But this is an old man with Alzheimer's who can no longer remember the time his crimes were allegedly committed. Has his guilt dissolved with his memory? Could he be pretending to be ill in order to escape punishment? The witness conjures for Redhill the war criminal's passionate and beautiful daughter, who will defend her father at all costs. There is also the prosecuting attorney, who has much in common with the old man whose destruction he seeks. As well as an uncomfortable attraction to his daughter. Each is drawn to the other. All is witnessed by a female prison guard – the one who tells the playwright, years later, what really happened in the quest to give a nation some closure. Everyone's story is compelling, and the ending is as unexpected as it is shocking.Who do we believe? A prison guard still wounded by history? A writer suffering from heartache? A dying war criminal? What is our responsibility? Who does memory serve? Did the past really happen? And if it did, who has a claim on it?Goodness is a play about what happens in the gaps between experiencing, telling and hearing.

    Illustrations.

    Hart’s memoir, Act One, which told of a youth lived in poverty and his early success on Broadway, became the most successful and most loved book ever published about the lure of the theater. But it ended at the beginning—when Hart was only twenty-five—and at times embroidered or skirted the facts. Now, at last, we have the full and far richer story. Hart exemplified wit, urbanity, and grace. He knew everybody, from the Algonquin Round Table crowd to the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Noël Coward, Cole Porter, and the Hollywood moguls. His passion for the theater gave wings to his long playwriting collaboration with George S. Kaufman; together they gave us such classic comedies as You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. On his own Hart wrote the stunning Lady in the Dark and Light Up the Sky. His screenplays include Gentleman’s Agreement, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born. His career as a director was crowned by the creation of My Fair Lady and Camelot, his last two shows. They were still on Broadway when he died in 1961 at the age of fifty-seven.But Hart’s life was not always golden, in spite of a Pulitzer Prize, Tony Awards, and Oscar nominations. His successes were shadowed by the unpredictable and often debilitating mood swings of manic depression. And he struggled with issues of sexual identity—documented here for the first time—finally marrying and fathering children in his forties.Dazzler is the story of the seen and unseen struggles that beset Hart in a life crowded with friends, glamour, and achievements, a life that seemed to be one triumph and delight after another. But it was actually a life tormented in ways we didn’t know, and thus, heroic. It isn’t just that Hart rose from humble beginnings to fame and fortune. It’s that he rose above his private demons to achieve a kind of happiness that survives him still. He used to say, even in the face of failure, “Well, we aspired.” Aspiration was a key to his life, and the key to this superb biography.

    It's a passionate, yes-you-can designed to prove that anybody can act Shakespeare. By explaining how Elizabethan actors had only their own lines and not entire playscripts, Patrick Tucker shows how much these plays work by ear. Secrets of Acting Shakespeare is a book for actors trained and amateur, as well as for anyone curious about how the Elizabethan theater worked.

    Throw in 80’s indie music, a ventriloquist’s dummy, some magical fairy stories and a word called "nimston" and you have a hilarious black comedy that isn’t afraid to make you think while you’re laughing out loud.

    

    As teacher, administrator, author, and performer, Dolan places her professional labor in relation to issues of community, pedagogy, public culture, administration, university missions, and citizenship. She works from the assumption that the production and dissemination of knowledge can be forms of activism, extending conversations on radical politics in the academy by other writers, such as Cary Nelson, Michael Berube, Gerald Graff, and Richard Ohmann. The five interconnected essays in Geographies of Learning map the divisions and dissensions that stall the production of progressive knowledge in theatre and performance studies, LGQ studies, and women's studies, while at the same time exploring some of the theoretical and pedagogical tools these fields have to offer one another.

    Her fantasy life is a kind of denial—her father was a drunk, her mother was mad—but her creative escape has given birth to 20 books of poems."—Kate Taylor, The Globe and Mail

    New York magazine calls this award-winning drama about doomed 1920s cave explorer Floyd Collins, "The daring and original musical of our day...a powerhouse!" The vocal score by Adam Guettel and Tina Landau features 30 songs from the production, including: An' She'd Have Blue Eyes * The Ballad of Floyd Collins * The Call * The Carnival * Daybreak * The Dream * Git Comfortable * How Glory Goes * Is That Remarkable? * Lucky * Time to Go * Trapped * and more.

    Each notebook offers in diary form comprehensive histories of major artistic elements that are the center of the creative process. This volume includes: In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks (The Joseph Papp Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival); The First Picture Show by David and Ain Gordon (Mark Taper Forum and American Conservatory Theatre), The Geography Project by Ralph Lemon (Yale Repertory Theatre) and Shakespeare Rapid Eye Movement, directed by Robert Lepage (Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel-Munich). Each notebook is profusely illustrated with production shots and/or set and costume renderings.Mark Bly is the Associate Artistic Director of the Yale Repertory Theatre.

    Students will keep it as a lifelong career reference on how to make things work. Written subjectively, it's based on nearly a half-century of teaching and directing, creating a theatre text that compels involvement in all layers of creating memorable theatre. Thirty-five chapters in seven sections with assignments and convenient section summaries make a complete semester course. But this drama text is far more than a 'how-to' book. Experientially, it reveals how to jolt lagging imaginations into an ensemble of lively and involved performers. Adaptable for use by student directors and actors from secondary to graduate level, this book comes highly recommended by leading theatre educators.

    Infused with the author's personal experience this is never a set of dry instructions, but a vital engagement with Stanislavsky's mature ideas on actor training.

    It provides a collection of interviews, primary sources and essays on 20th century directing theories and practices around the world. Organized into four key areas of the subject, the book explores: theories of directing; the boundaries of the director's role; the limits of categorization; and the history of the theatre and performance art.

    In down-to-earth chapters, award-winning playwright and screenwriter Jeffrey Sweet introduces tools enabling writers to: write exposition using the future tensemake characters vivid even before they appearfind the idiosyncrasies in a character that will generate storyEach chapter includes a discussion of a particular technique, followed by an assignment from Sweet's workshop and scenes written by his colleagues and students. There are also detailed discussions of what works in the scenes, what is problematic, and why.

    A comprehensive glossary includes character names, place names, and all unfamiliar words, as well as words whose pronunciation is affected by the iambic pentameter line. A respelling system and phonetic transcriptions make this guide accessible to an audience ranging from high-school students to academic specialists. All The Words on Stage also includes a chapter on verse scansion and an appendix detailing language usage specific to each play.

    It's 1952: America's on the verge of the H-bomb, Dwight Eisenhower's on the campaign trail, and on Monday nights. Meanwhile, Senator Joe McCarthy's daughter just got engaged to a Soviet spy, and Boston detective Maggie Pelletier has to find out who dumped the dead guy in the Harbor or else lose out on a honeymoon in Havana. A blunt-nosed, sharp-eyed look at love and tying (and untying, and retying) the knot.

    They will call her mad, but, then, they said that about Strindberg."—Mail on SundayShopping and F***ing: "A real coup de theatre ... a blackly humorous play for today's twenty-somethings."—Evening StandardThe Beauty Queen of Leenane: "The most wickedly funny, brilliantly abrasive young dramatist on either side of the Irish Sea ... a born storyteller."—The New York Times

    His popularity also extends to the United States, where his plays have won three Tony awards and his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. John Fleming offers the first book-length assessment of Stoppard’s work in nearly a decade. He takes an in-depth look at the three newest plays (Arcadia, Indian Ink, and The Invention of Love) and the recently revised versions of Travesties and Hapgood, as well as at four other major plays (Rosencrantz, Jumpers, Night and Day, and The Real Thing). Drawing on Stoppard’s personal papers at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRHRC), Fleming also examines Stoppard’s previously unknown play Galileo, as well as numerous unpublished scripts and variant texts of his published plays. Fleming also mines Stoppard’s papers for a fuller, more detailed overview of the evolution of his plays. By considering Stoppard’s personal views (from both his correspondence and interviews) and by examining his career from his earliest scripts and productions through his most recent, this book provides all that is essential for understanding and appreciating one of the most complex and distinctive playwrights of our time.

    To those of us, however, who have seen her on the stage—whether in London, Toronto, or New York—she is the essence of theater, her presence so transfixing that the memory of having seen her is emblazoned in the mind forever.The daughter of a plumber and a taxi dancer born in Australia at the height of the Great Depression, Caldwell first demonstrated her talents at the age of nine when she appeared on the stage as Slightly Soiled in Peter Pan. Hampered by a mild dyslexia, she felt that acting was the only way she could communicate, and by the age of fourteen she was appearing professionally in national radio soap operas. Caldwell spent the next ten years honing her skills as an actress, before she was sent to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1958, where she began a Shakespearean acting career that would culminate in her stunning portrayal of Cleopatra, the Bard's greatest female role.Caldwell's own uniquely charming and powerful voice—one that she brought to her roles in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and as Maria Callas in Master Class—shines throughout this intimate memoir. Rather than emphasizing the stories of her adult triumphs, however, Caldwell deliberately focuses on the early influences and experiences that molded her as an actress: her enchanting first visits to the theater, sandwiched in between her parents, where she sat in "the gods," way up in the cheap seats; her early teachers and coaches who taught her not only how to use her diaphragm but also how to keep people "awake and in their seats"; and her journey—steerage class—to England at the age of twenty-five to perform at Stratford with many of the greatest actors of the twentieth century. As Caldwell reveals in these pages, acting is not a craft practiced in isolation. With an experienced eye, she describes her fellow performers, writers, and directors who have shaped her career: from Charles Laughton and Albert Finney to Edith Evans, Paul Robeson, and Laurence Olivier. She has performed the works of major playwrights from Shakespeare and Chekhov to Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams, many of whom she knew personally. Her insights into the actor's craft reveal the completely undiluted and remarkably fine voice of an artist still impassioned about her craft and dedicated to its perpetuation in its purest form.I Will Be Cleopatra represents the literary culmination of a legendary theatrical career and a fascinating life.

    By addressing both theater and the commercial world this book will be of real help to a broad range of people in the theater industry.

    An extraordinary expose of a country's cultural identity.

    With prison guards doubling as other characters in flashback, Hauptmann tells his gripping story."It is one of rising anti German sentiment in America, of rich versus poor, of the state versus the indivi