Among them: Suheir Hammad, Beau Sia, Steve Colman, Stacyann Chin, Mayda del Valle, Georgia Me, Poetri, and other well-established and up-and-coming Slam artists who have forever changed the face of poetry and offer a fresh, exuberant, insightful, and comedic look at who we are as Americans today.

    Every actor can find a sitcom niche by identifying with one of these eight characters. Using past and current actors and sitcom personalities, Sedita describes in detail where these characters come from and how actors can play them truthfully. * who is normally cast as The Logical Smart One' * why do we love The Lovable Loser' * why is The Neurotic such a fun character to play' In addition, readers learn how to break down a comedy script, how to identify different types of jokes, how to deliver them with comedic precision, sitcom auditioning techniques, and how to market themselves.

    Ideal for film production and directing classes, as well as for aspiring and current directors, Directing covers all phases of preproduction and production, from idea development to final cut. Thoroughly covering the basics, Directing guides the reader to professional standards of expression and control, and goes to the heart of what makes a director. The book outlines a great deal of practical work to meet this goal, with projects, exercises.The third edition emphasizes the connection between knowing and doing, with every principle realizable through projects and exercises. Much has been enhanced and expanded, notably: aspects of dramaturgy; beats and dramatic units; pitching stories and selling one's work; the role of the entrepreneurial producer; and the dangers of embedded moral values. Checklists are loaded with practical recommendations for action, and outcomes assessment tables help the reader honestly gauge his or her progress. Entirely new chapters present: preproduction procedures; production design; script breakdown; procedures and etiquette on the set; shooting location sound; continuity; and working with a composer. The entire book is revised to capitalize on the advantages offered by the revolutionary shift to digital filmmaking.

    Broadway actress Sharon Wheatley reveals an authentic and personal look at the damaging physical and emotional effects of childhood obesity.

    Drawing on 40 years of experience on movies ranging from Long Day's Journey Into Night to The Verdict, Lumet explains the painstaking labor that results in two hours of screen magic.

    Written by one of the most adventurous and respected directors working today, this book will be an essential item in every student and practitioner’s kitbag. It provides detailed assistance with each aspect of the varied challenges facing all theatre directors, and does so with startling clarity. It will inspire everyone, from the beginner just starting out to the experienced practitioner looking to reinvigorate their practice.Katie Mitchell shares and explains the key practical tools she uses to approach her work with both actors, production teams, and the text itself. She addresses topics such as: the ideas that underpin a play’s text preparing improvizations Twelve Golden Rules for working with actors managing the transition from rehearsal room to theatre analyzing your work after a run has ended. Each chapter concludes with a summary of its critical points, making this an ideal reference work for both directors and actors at any stage of their development.

    He reveals his working relationships with his many collaborators, including Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean, John Steinbeck and Darryl Zanuck, and describes his directing "style" as he sees it, in terms of position, movement, pace, rhythm and his own limitations. Kazan also retraces his own decision to inform for the House Un-American Activities Committee, illuminating much of what may be obscured in McCarthy literature.

    Murray Abraham on gaining an audience’s sympathy for Shylock, Sir Ben Kingsley on communicating Shakespeare’s ideas through performance, Germaine Greer on the playwright’s home life, Dame Harriet Walter on the complexity of his heroines, Brian Cox on social conflict in his time and ours, Jane Smiley on transposing King Lear to Iowa in A Thousand Acres, and Sir Antony Sher on feeling at home in Shakespeare’s language. Together these essays provide a fresh appreciation of Shakespeare’s works as a living legacy to be read, seen, performed, adapted, revised, wrestled with, and embraced by creative professionals and lay enthusiasts alike.

    With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling Will in the World, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers.Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare’s preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare’s works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare’s interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority—that is, Shakespeare’s deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained.A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

    For the first time, Gregory shares memories from a life lived for art, including stories from the making of My Dinner with André. Taking on the dizzying, wondrous nature of a fever dream, This is Not My Memoir includes fantastic and fantastical stories that take the reader from wartime Paris to golden-age Hollywood, from avant-garde theaters to monasteries in India. Along the way we meet Jerzy Grotowski, Helene Weigel, Gregory Peck, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, Wallace Shawn, and many other larger-than-life personalities.This is Not My Memoir is a collaboration between Gregory and Todd London who together create a portrait of an artist confronting his later years. Here, too, are the reflections of a man who only recently learned how to love. What does it mean to create art in a world that often places little value on the process of creating it? And what does it mean to confront the process of aging when your greatest work of art may well be your own life?

    THE ONE-STOP, SINGLE-VOLUME COMPANION TO SHAKESPEARE'S GREATEST WORKS-HIS HISTORY PLAYS, COMEDIES, TRAGEDIA, ROMANCES, AND POETRYA portrait of Shakespeare's life and times: critics, contemporaries, patrons, and the era's vibrant theater.Full commentaries on all 39 plays including detailed plot summaries, a survey of dramatic interpretations on stage and screen, and an introduction to Shakespeare's sonnets and narrative poetry.Insight into Shakespeare's unique world, including his language, his sources of inspiration, and teh secret of his enduring universal appeal.

    But when a domestic disturbance call takes a turn for the worse, their friendship is put on the line. The result is a difficult journey into a moral gray area where trust and loyalty struggle for survival against a sobering backdrop of pimps, prostitutes, and criminal lowlifes.A dark duologue filled with sharp storytelling and biting repartee, A Steady Rain explores the complexities of a lifelong bond tainted by domestic affairs, violence, and the rough streets of Chicago.

    'Blessings in Disguise', which was originally published in 1986, is Sir Alec s autobiography. It is a profoundly rich, subtly delineated series of sketches of self and others (among the latter, internationally famous British actors such as Gielgud and Richardson).

    Ellen Terry was a natural actress who filled the theatre with a magical radiance. The Times called her the “uncrowned queen of England,” but behind her public success lay a darker story. The child bride of G.F. Watts, she eloped with a friend of Oscar Wilde’s at the age of twenty-one and gave birth to two illegitimate children. But her greatest partnership was on stage with Henry Irving. At the Lyceum Theatre in London, the two of them created a grand Cathedral of the Arts. Their intimately involved lives exceeded in plot the Shakespearean dramas they performed on stage — and indeed were curiously affected by them. They also influenced the life and work of their remarkable children, Ellen’s children in particular. Edy Craig founded a feminist theatre group, The Pioneer Players. Her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, the revolutionary stage designer who collaborated with Stanislavski is revealed by this book to be the forgotten man of modernism. He had thirteen children by eight women. He is, perhaps, the most extraordinary man Michael Holroyd has ever written about.

    Small though that number is, it is inflated by dozens of skippers with only a few weeks or months at the helm of a club. If we were to define "real" managers as those who have managed a thousand games - not, after all, a terribly high bar to hurdle, fewer than seven full seasons - we would find that fewer than one hundred men qualify. Now Bill James, "the guru of baseball" (Newsweek), takes on the challenge of chronicling that history, including a decade-by-decade snapshot of baseball strategy from the 1870s through the 1990s.