Cyprus Avenue


David Ireland - 2016
    He believes his five-week old granddaughter is Gerry Adams.His family keep telling him to stop living in the past and fighting old battles that nobody cares about anymore, but his cultural heritage is under siege. He must act.David Ireland's black comedy takes one man's identity crisis to the limits as he uncovers the modern day complexity of Ulster Loyalism.Cyprus Avenue was first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 11 February 2016, before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre, London in April 2016.

A Challenge For The Actor


Uta Hagen - 1991
    He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself -- and to do so takes an insatiable curiosity about the human condition. from the Prologue Uta Hagen, one of the world's most renowned stage actresses, has also taught acting for more than forty years at the HB Studio in New York. Her first book, Respect for Acting, published in 1973, is still in print and has sold more than 150,000 copies. In her new book, A Challenge for the Actor, she greatly expands her thinking about acting in a work that brings the full flowering of her artistry, both as an actor and as a teacher. She raises the issue of the actor's goals and examines the specifics of the actor's techniques. She goes on to consider the actor's relationship to the physical and psychological senses. There is a brilliantly conceived section on the animation of the body and mind, of listening and talking, and the concept of expectation. But perhaps the most useful sections in this book are the exercises that Uta Hagen has created and elaborated to help the actor learn his craft. The exercises deal with developing the actor's physical destination in a role; making changes in the self serviceable in the creation of a character; recreating physical sensations; bringing the outdoors on stage; finding occupation while waiting; talking to oneself and the audience; and employing historical imagination. The scope and range of Uta Hagen here is extraordinary. Her years of acting and teaching have made her as finely seasoned an artist as the theatre has produced.

Towards a Poor Theatre


Jerzy Grotowski - 1968
    As a record of Grotowski's theatrical experiments, this book is an invaluable resource to students and theater practioners alike.

Musical Theatre: A History


John Kenrick - 2008
    Musical Theatre: A History presents a comprehensive history of stage musicals from the earliest accounts of the ancient Greeks and Romans, for whom songs were common elements in staging, to Jacques Offenbach in Paris during the 1840s, to Gilbert and Sullivan in England, to the rise of music halls and vaudeville traditions in America, and eventually to "Broadway's Golden Age" with George M. Cohan, Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. The 21st century has also brought a popular new wave of musicals to the Broadway stage, from The Producers to Spamalot, and Mamma Mia! to The Drowsy Chaperone. Musical Theatre: A History covers it all, from the opening number to the curtain call, offering readers the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of the art form. As informative as it is entertaining, Musical Theatre is richly illustrated with anecdotes of shows and show people. It is cause for celebration for those working in the theatre as well as its legion of devoted fans.

The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics


Erika Fischer-Lichte - 2004
    In setting performance art on an equal footing with the traditional art object, she heralds a new aesthetics.The peculiar mode of experience that a performance provokes - blurring distinctions between artist and audience, body and mind, art and life - is here framed as the breeding ground for a new way of understanding performing arts, and through them even wider social and cultural processes.With an introduction by Marvin Carlson, this translation of the original Asthetik des Performativen addresses key issues in performance art, experimental theatre and cultural performances to lay the ground for a new appreciation of the artistic event.

Harlem Duet


Djanet Sears - 1997
    Winner of the Chalmers Play Award. A rhapsodic blues tragedy. Harlem Duet could be the prelude to Shakepeare's Othello, and recounts the tale of Othello and his first wife Billie (yes, before Desdemona). Set in contemporary Harlem at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X boulevards, the play explores the space where race and sex intersect. Harlem Duet is Billie's story.

Look Back in Anger


John Osborne - 1957
    He browbeats his flatmate, terrorizes his wife, and is not above sleeping with her best friend-who loathes Jimmy almost as much as he loathes himself. Yet this working-class Hamlet, the original Angry Young Man, is one of the most mesmerizing characters ever to burst onto a stage, a malevolently vital, volcanically articulate internal exile in the dreary, dreaming Siberia of postwar England.First produced in 1956, Look Back in Anger launched a revolution in the English theater. Savagely, sadly, and always impolitely, it compels readers and audiences to acknowledge the hidden currents of rottenness and rage in what used to be called "the good life."

Arden of Faversham


Anonymous
    Its authorship is unknown, although suggestions include Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.Wealthy businessman Arden is convinced his wife Alice is cheating on him. He's right – but he doesn't know the full story. Determined to free herself from her miserable marriage, Alice is in fact plotting to have him murdered. As the assassins close in on their unwitting victim, husband, wife and lover find themselves locked in a deadly game.This edition of Arden of Faversham was published alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company's revival of the play in 2014, and features the text edited for the RSC production, and introductions by key members of its creative team.

Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told


Kenneth Turan - 2009
    "Free for All" is the irresistible oral history of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater-two institutions that under the inspired leadership of Joseph Papp have been a premier source of revolutionary and enduring American theater. To tell this fascinating story, Kenneth Turan interviewed some 160 luminaries-including George C. Scott, Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Kevin Kline, James Earl Jones, David Rabe, Jerry Stiller, Tommy Lee Jones, and Wallace Shawn-and masterfully weaves their voices into a dizzyingly rich tale of creativity, conflict, and achievement. And at the center of this""incredibly engrossing account of artistic daring and excellence the larger-than-life figure of Joseph Papp reigns supreme.

Barber Shop Chronicles


Inua Ellams - 2017
    Six cities. A thousand stories.Newsroom, political platform, local hot spot, confession box, preacher-pulpit and football stadium. For generations, African men have gathered in barber shops to discuss the world.

Blue Heart


Caryl Churchill - 1998
    In Blue Kettle, a middle-aged man and his girlfriend are involved in a con, making elderly women believe they are the man’s long-lost mother. But neither play is what it seems, as something catastrophic threatens to disrupt and destroy them.Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. A renowned and prolific playwright, her plays include Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Bliss, Love and Information, Mad Forest and A Number. In 2002, she received the Obie Lifetime Achievement Award and 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

The Pain and the Itch


Bruce Norris - 2007
    Someone - or something - is leaving bite marks in the avocados, Clay and Kelly's little daughter has an itch, and Carol can't remember who played Gandhi. This work takes a look at phoney liberal values.

What the Constitution Means to Me (Tcg Edition)


Heidi Schreck - 2021
    Decades later, in What the Constitution Means to Me, she traces the effect that the Constitution has had on four generations of women in her family, deftly examining how the United States' founding principles are inextricably linked with our personal lives.

4.48 Psychosis


Sarah Kane - 2000
    The struggle of the self to remain intact has moved in her work from civil war, into the family, into the couple, into the individual, and finally into the theatre of phychosis: the mind itself. This play was written in 1999 shortly before the playwright took her own life at age 28. On the page, the piece looks like a poem. No characters are named, and even their number is unspecified. It could be a journey through one person's mind, or an interview between a doctor and his patient.

Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead


Eric Bogosian - 2008
    From subway panhandlers to barbecue-crazed millionaires. Bogosian reveals the hidden humor, fear, hypocrisy and rage of Americans - including, for the first time, "Eric Bogosian," a hyperaggressive standup comic. With this seductive element of self-revelation, he heightens the disturbing connections between his characters and, by extension, between us and the people we try not to see - and not to be - every day.