Book picks similar to
One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays by Kenneth Koch
poetry
plays
drama
looking-for-tr
Working on a Song: The Lyrics of HADESTOWN
Anaïs Mitchell - 2020
Heralded as "The best new musical of the season," by the Wall Street Journal, and "Sumptuous. Gorgeous. As good as it gets," by The New York Times, this show is the breakout hit of 2019, and is positioned to be a longtime Broadway favorite with its poignant social commentary, to the tune of spellbinding music and lyrics. In this book, Anais Mitchell takes readers inside her more than decade's-long process of building the musical from the ground up--detailing her inspiration, breaking down the lyrics, and offering thoughtful annotations of Hadestown. Fans of the musical will love this deeply thoughtful, revealing, and open look at how the songs from “the underground” evolved and became what they are today.
Leaving Saturn
Major Jackson - 2002
Major Jackson, through both formal and free verse poems, renders visible the spirit of resilience, courage, and creativity he witnessed among his family, neighbors, and friends while growing up in Philadelphia. His poems hauntingly reflect urban decay and violence, yet at the same time they rejoice in the sustaining power of music and the potency of community. Jackson also honors artists who have served as models of resistance and maintained their own faith in the belief of the imagination to alter lives. The title poem, a dramatic monologue in the voice of the American jazz composer and bandleader Sun Ra, details such a humane program and serves as an admirable tribute to the tradition of African American art. Throughout, Jackson unflinchingly portrays our most devastated landscapes, yet with a vividness and compassion that expose the depth of his imaginative powers.
Elegiac Feelings American
Gregory Corso - 1970
The title poem is a tribute to Jack Kerouac, fusing a memorial to the poet's dead friend with a bitter lament for the present state of America. Reproduced in facsimile from Corso's handwritten sheets, his marginal decorations, drawings and glyphs are included. The balance of the book is drawn from his shorter poems.
W.H. Auden: Poems Selected by John Fuller
W.H. Auden - 1998
H. Auden (1907-73) came to prominence in the 1930s among a generation of outspoken poets that included his friends Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis. But he was also an intimate and lyrical poet of great originality, and a master craftsman of some of the most cherished and influential poems of the past century.Other volumes in this series: Betjemen, Eliot, Plath, Hughes and Yeats.
God's Favorite
Neil Simon - 1975
Just when it seems things couldn't get any worse, he is visited by Sidney Lipton, a.k.a. A Messenger from God (and compulsive film buff) with a mission: test Joe's faith and report back to "the Boss." The jokes and Tests of Faith fly fast and furious as Neil Simon spins a contemporary morality tale like no other in this hilarious comedy.
Country Music: Selected Early Poems
Charles Wright - 1982
From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim and redeem a personal past, to make a reckoning with his present, and to conjure the terms by which we might face the future," writes David St. John in the forward. These poems, powerful and moving in their own right, lend richness and insight to Wright's recently collected later works. "In Country Music we see the same explosive imagery, the same dismantled and concentric (or parallel) narratives, the same resolutely spiritual concerns that have become so familiar to us in Wright's more recent poetry," writes St. John.
A Thurber Carnival
James Thurber - 1990
A perfect evening of comedy. Scenes Include:ACT ONEWord Dance (Part One)The Night the Bed FellFables for Our Time (Part One)The Wolf at the DoorThe Unicorn in the GardenThe Little Girl and the WolfIf Grant Had Been Drinking at AppomattoxCasuals of the KeysThe Macbeth Murder MysteryGentleman ShoppersThe Last FlowerACT TWOThe Pet DepartmentFile and ForgetMr. Preble Gets Rid of His WifeTake Her Up TenderlyThe Secret Life of Walter MiddyWord Dance (Part Two) Only material authorized for the production of this play may be used."Of belly laughs there is abundance...Small, cozy, and completely captivating revue...a sheer delight... joyous, magnificently lunatic festival" - New York Daily News
The Plays of Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov - 1905
by such theatrical directors as Lee Strasberg, Elizabeth Swados, Peter Sellars and Robert Wilson. Critics have hailed these translations as making Chekhov fully accessible to American audiences. They are also accurate -- Schmidt has been described as "the gold standard in Russian-English translation" by Michael Holquist of the Russian department at Yale University.Swan song --The bear --The proposal --Ivanov --The seagull --A reluctant tragic hero --The wedding reception --The festivities --Uncle Vanya --Three sisters --The dangers of tobacco --The cherry orchard.
I Am an Emotional Creature
Eve Ensler - 2010
Moving through a world of topics and emotions, these voices are fierce, alive, tender, complicated, imaginative, and smart. Girls today often find themselves in a struggle between remaining strong and true to themselves and conforming to society’s expectations in an attempt to please. They are taught not to be too intense, too passionate, too smart, too caring, too open. They are encouraged to shut down their instincts, their outrage, their desires and their dreams, to be polite, to obey the rules. I Am an Emotional Creature is a celebration of the authentic voice inside every girl and an inspiring call to action for girls everywhere to speak up, follow their dreams, and become the women they were always meant to be.Among the girls Ensler creates are an American who struggles with peer pressure in a suburban high school; an anorexic blogging as she eats less and less; a Masai girl from Kenya unwilling to endure female genital mutilation; a Bulgarian sex slave, no more than fifteen, a Chinese factory worker making Barbies; an Iranian student who is tricked into a nose job; a pregnant girl trying to decide if she should keep her baby.Through rants, poetry, questions, and facts, we come to understand the universality of girls everywhere: their resiliency, their wildness, their pain, their fears, their secrets, and their triumphs. I Am an Emotional Creature is a call, a reckoning, an education, an act of empowerment for girls, and an illumination for parents and for us all.
The Fourth Dimension
Yiannis Ritsos - 1964
The volume also contains a group of modern narratives, including the famous, and much-anthologized, Moonlight Sonata. Ritsos, rightly, regarded the The Fourth Dimension as his finest achievement. It is now presented to English- speaking readers for the first time in its entirety.From PhiloctetesAll the speeches of great men, about the dead and about heroes. Astonishing, awesome words, pursued us even in our sleep, slipping beneath closed doors, from the banqueting hallwhere glasses and voices sparkled, and the veilof an unseen dancer rippled silentlylike a diaphanous, whirling wallbetween life and death. This throbbingour childhood nights, lightening the shadows of shieldsetched on white walls by slow moonlight.
The Tempest (No Fear Shakespeare)
SparkNotes - 2018
No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of The Tempest on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right.
Each No Fear Shakespeare contains
The complete text of the original play
A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday language
A complete list of characters with descriptions
Plenty of helpful commentary
A Prairie Home Companion: English Majors
Garrison Keillor - 2008
ENGLISH MAJORS. You know who you are and here is a double-CD celebrating the secret society of those who, though they may be chauffeuring kids to swim lessons or writing Unix programs or frying cheeseburgers, still could, if need be, write a term paper on the water imagery in "The Waste Land." Includes the "Six-Minute Hamlet," the "Ten-Minute MacBeth," tributes to Hawthorne and Kerouac and Emily Dickinson, a Guy Noir adventure that exposes an M.F.A. scam, the Ballad of John Henry ('John Henry was an English major and poetry was his line. He sat by the window with his yellow legal pad and he wrote one sentence at a time.'), and more. With guest appearances by Allen Ginsberg, Billy Collins, Roy Blount Jr., Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and Calvin Trillin.
Theatre and Audience
Helen Freshwater - 2009
It argues for more audience-responsive approaches to what theatre does for those who witness, watch or participate.
A Thousand Clowns
Herb Gardner - 1962
Tired of writing cheap comedy gags for "Chipper the Chipmunk," a children's television star, Murray finds himself unemployed with plenty of free time with which to pursue his...pursuits. Lectured by his conventional brother Arnold and hounded by "the system," Murray is paid a visit by bickering, uptight social workers, Sandra and Albert, and finds himself solving their problems as well as most of his own."Would be a standout comedy in any season. Filled with laughter and warmth and sweetness and inspired daffiness. One of the quintessential New York comedies."-New York Daily News "An extraordinarily funny play with some brilliantly offbeat lines."-The New York Post