Book picks similar to
Plays 1: The Memory of Water / Five Kinds of Silence / An Experiment With an Air Pump / Ancient Lights by Shelagh Stephenson
plays
memoir-biography
play-dramatisation
theatre
Seascape With Sharks and Dancer
Don Nigro - 1985
The play is set in a beach bungalow. The young man who lives there has pulled a lost young woman from the ocean. Soon, she finds herself trapped in his life and torn between her need to come to rest somewhere and her certainty that all human relationships turn eventually into nightmares. The struggle between his tolerant and gently ironic approach to life and her strategy of suspicion and attack becomes a kind of war about love and creation which neither can afford to lose. This is an offbeat, wonderful love story. Note: The play contains a wealth of excellent monologue and scene material.
Dirtbag Anthropology
Kate Willett - 2021
That is, until she found herself dumped, suddenly single, and mystifyingly...mostly attracted to dudes. Like any good comic, she was inspired to investigate, and thus ensued her hilarious, sometimes high-stakes personal research into the world of men, culminating in a beautiful, difficult romance. Featuring insightful interviews with comics and experts like W. Kamau Bell, Margaret Cho, Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Kate’s dad and close friends, this exploration of modern masculinity delves into how to be a good guy and how to be in love with one...and when that isn’t quite enough.
Is God Is
Aleshea Harris - 2017
Poetry. Performance Studies. African & African American Studies. California Interest. Hybrid Genre. Winner of the 2016 Relentless Award from the American Playwriting Foundation. Introduction by Dawn Lundy Martin. Aleshea Harris' IS GOD IS is a classic revenge tale about two sisters that blends tragedy, typography, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop and Afropunk. In this necessary new play, emotions are laid bare through gaps in language and characters are a window into the canon as well as our own broken times. A rigorous new work that unearths our deepest fears about humanity and who we think we are in relation to ourselves and the divine.--Dawn Lundy Martin Family, as the old tragedians knew, is our first country. Therefore, it's the earth from which we forge our first weapons, the fields of our first wars, the very turf over which we fight. With IS GOD IS, Aleshea Harris audaciously scours tragedy down with the rough edge of a rock. To read this merciless play is to get blood in your eye--and in Harris' sure grip, you'll recall that blood washes and stains, can run hot or cold, means both violence and family.--Douglas Kearney 3 Hole Press is a small press bringing new audiences to new plays in printed formats. The Press publishes titles that expand notions of what a play is, the possibilities that emerge for drama on the page, and the connection between plays and other mediums. Interdisciplinary by design, these books belong outside the drama section.
Year of the Fat Knight: The Falstaff Diaries
Antony Sher - 2014
This follow-up to Sher's 1985 classic Year of the King is a terrific read, rich in humor and excitement, that also stands as a celebration of the craft of character acting.
Anatomy of Gray
Jim Leonard - 2006
At first, the new doctor cures anything
Northern Soul
Jimmy Nail - 2004
Jimmy Nail has been a household name since Auf Wiedersehen, Pet hit our screens in the 1980s. since then, his career as an actor and a musician has put on him on the silver screen alongside Madonna and given him a No. 1 hit single. Success on this astonishing scale was beyond the wildest dreams of the working class lad whose harsh childhood and brutal schooling put him on a collision course with Strangeways. But a short spell in prison helped propel Nail onwards and upwards. With the support of his friends and family, it wasn't long before Jimmy's unique talents and single-minded determination brought him attention of a different kind - and changed his life for ever. In A Northern Soul, Jimmy Nail tells his own vivid story in this intriguing, inspiring and sometimes confounding account of how one man rose to fame and fortune by refusing to be anything but himself.
Boom
Jean Tay - 2009
Boom tells the story of an elderly woman and her property agent son in Singapore, who are struggling over the potential en bloc sale of their home. Their destinies become interwoven with that of an idealistic civil servant, Jeremiah, who is facing the greatest challenge of his career—persuading a reluctant corpse to yield its memories. Boom is a quirky yet poignant tale about the relocation of both dead and living, and how personal stories get left behind in the inexorable march of progress.Written by economist-turned-playwright Jean Tay, Boom was conceptualised at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2007, and developed and staged by the Singapore Repertory Theatre in September 2008. It was nominated for Best Original Script for The Straits Times’ Life! Theatre Awards in 2009 and is now an O- and N-Level Literature text in Singapore schools.“Jean Tay is one of the most gifted playwrights I have come across in years.” —Gaurav Kripalani, Artistic Director, Singapore Repertory Theatre
Cowboy Mouth
Sam Shepard - 1971
One act play, Drama. Two wanna-be rock stars await their takeout delivery--or is it their rock-n-roll messiah? An early work by "True West" playwright and actor Sam Shepard. Librarian's Note: No separate publication found at this time. Generally published in collections of Shepard works.
The Metal Children: A Play
Adam Rapp - 2010
Its directionless New York City author arrives in town to defend the book and finds that it has inspired a group of local teens to rebel in strange and unexpected ways. A timely and unforgettable drama about the failure of urban and heartland America to understand each other, The Metal Children explores what happens when fiction becomes a matter of life and death.
The Autumn Garden
Lillian Hellman - 1951
All of them are in one way or another frustrated and unhappy. Most of them are under the illusion that some day the things from which they suffer will be removed and they will be once more at peace. But when they come to see themselves, they realize that man is the sum of his past life, that they are incapable of any real revolt against their past, and that what they have made of themselves in earlier years is what they are when age approaches. Nor are they tragic figures. All of them are troubled average people, human, commonplace but they are studied with great understanding and a touch of intelligently unsentimental compassion."
Spring Storm
Tennessee Williams - 1999
His professor, the renowned E. C. Mabie, remarked as he got up and dismissed the seminar, "Well, we all have to paint our nudes!" Tom's earlier comment in his journal that the play "is well-constructed, no social propaganda, and is suitable for the commercial stage" seems accurate enough in 1999, but woefully naive deep in the Depression when the play's sexual explicitness—particularly its matter-of-fact acceptance of a woman's right to her own sexuality—would have been seen as not only shocking but also politically radical. Spring Storm would later be disavowed by the author as "simply a study of Sex—a blind animal urge or force (like the regenerative force of April) gripping four lives and leading them into a tangle of cruel and ugly relations."But the solid and deft characterizations of the four young people whose lives intertwine—the sexually alive Heavenly Critchfield, her earthy lover Dick Miles, Heavenly's wealthy but tongue-tied admirer Arthur Shannon, and the repressed librarian Hertha Nielson who loves Arthur—are archetypes of characters we will meet again and again in the Williams canon. Epic in scope, a bit melodramatic in execution, tragic in outcome, Spring Storm created a wave of excitement among theatre insiders when it was given a staged reading at The Ensemble Studio Theatre's Octoberfest '96. This edition has been prepared, with an illuminating introduction, by Dan Isaac, who initiated the Octoberfest production.
Divine Fate: The Complete Series
Alicia Rades - 2018
Now she's been thrown headfirst into a magical school for angels, with the power to become their savior in the war against demons. She trains in secret with her bad boy mentor, Marek, who is hiding a troubled past. Only Ryn has the ability to end the war and save the people she loves. But Ryn's fate doesn't just concern her new home. If she fails, humanity will fall... and the very world will be at stake.