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Peerless
by Jiehae ParkAsian-American Twins M and L have given up everything to get into The College. So when D, a one-sixteenth Native American classmate, gets "their" spot instead, they figure they've got only one option: kill him. A darkly comedic take on Shakespeare's Macbeth about the very ambitious and cut-throat world of high school during college admissions.
Acting Shakespeare is Outrageous!: Playing the Bard for Beginners
by Herb ParkerPerforming the work of William Shakespeare can be daunting to new actors. Author Herb Parker posits that his work is played easier if actors think of the plays as happening out of outrageous situations, and remember just how non-realistic and presentational Shakespeare's plays were meant to be performed. The plays are driven by language and the spoken word, and the themes and plots are absolutely out of the ordinary and fantastic - the very definition of outrageous. With exercises, improvisations, and coaching points, Acting Shakespeare is Outrageous! helps actors use the words Shakespeare wrote as a tool to perform him, and to create exciting and moving performances.
A Monologue is an Outrageous Situation!: How to Survive the 60-Second Audition
by Herb ParkerA Monologue is an Outrageous Situation! How to Survive the 60-Second Audition explains how to successfully tackle the "cattle call" acting audition with a sixty-second monologue. Through Q&As, tips, director’s notes, and a glossary full of outrageous actions meant to inspire the actor into truly connecting with the piece, this book shows actors where and how to find a monologue, edit it, and give the best audition possible.
Amorous Ambassador
by Michael ParkerFarce / 4m, 4f / Interior When Harry Douglas, the new American Ambassador to Great Britain, tells his family he is going to Scotland to play golf, his wife and daughter announce weekend plans of their own. Their newly hired butler, Perkins, watches stoically as each leaves and secretly returns for a romantic rendezvous in the empty house. Harry's secretary and Captain South of Marine Corps Embassy Security then arrive in the wake of a bomb threat and the embassy is sealed off, with hilarious results. Even the imperturbable Perkins is drawn into the shenanigans .
Hotbed Hotel
by Michael ParkerComedy / 4m, 5f / Unit Set / Terri and Brian Cody are trying to sell their one star (and often one guest) hotel in the Florida Keys. A prospective buyer is about to arrive from New York. They decide to have the staff masquerade as paying guests to convince the him that the establishment is busy and prosperous. Unfortunately, the staff consists of a bibulous maintenance man and a curvaceous but somewhat vacant young maid. Add the eccentric retired British Army Major who resides at the hotel, a wealthy Arab Sheik (who looks suspiciously like the Major), a nymphomaniac dubbed The Barracuda during her annual stays, the prospective buyer's girlfriend and, unexpectedly, his wife, and you have a laugh a minute merry go round that leaves audiences screaming with delight.
Lone Star Love Potion
by Michael ParkerFarce / 3m, 4f / The wealthy owner of a 200,000 acre Texas ranch has died. His butler Jarvis, an alluring maid, the rancher's niece his only living relative and her husband are gathered for the reading of the will. Oddly, Miss Tammy Jo Harper, a neighbor, has also been invited. As expected, the niece inherits everything. Jarvis then produces from the safe a reputed love potion. Does it work? Before long, everyone is sipping the sample with hilarious results. As the audience vacillates between thinking the potion is potent and believing it's a ruse, they are drawn into the mystery and hilarity. The flow of characters in, out and from under the beds reaches a frenetic pace before the startling truth is revealed.
Never Kiss A Naughty Nanny
by Michael Parker4 or 5m, 2f / Farce / Interior / Mr. Broadbent, a developer and builder, has created "THE HOUSE OF THE FUTURE". He has filled it with gadgets such as: self lighting fire places, a self cleaning bathroom, central trash disposal units, automatic closets, hidden telephones, and his masterpiece "The Personal Ion Chamber". The house, however, has remained unsold for four years, probably because, as we see in the course of the play, most of the innovations of the future fail to work properly. He has, at last found prospective buyers, Fred and Gladys McNicoll, and invites them to stay in the house. He is determined to offload this huge "White Elephant". He bribes two members of his staff, Casey Cody and Ben Adams, to pose as a married couple, who are renting the house. They are to extol its virtues and explain how everything works. He is pulling out all the stops. The fridge is full of expensive wine and he has hired a chef to prepare a gourmet meal. Unknown to The McNicolls', he even has his maintenance man Eddie Cott on hand to make running repairs. He thinks he has all the bases covered. When Gladys hears Casey refer to Mr. Cott by name, the cat seems to be out of the bag, but Casey quickly recovers by saying she didn't say "Mister Cott" but "Mm Turcotte", the children's nanny. Eddie Cott now spends the rest of the play as Nanny Turcotte. A surprise visitor, Mr. Brooks, takes an almost insane fancy to "Nanny" who now has to defend 'her' honor, as well as fix the gadgets, all of which, without exception, misbehave.
The Sensuous Senator
by Michael ParkerComedy / 4m, 5f / Interior / Senator Douglas is running for President on a "morality" platform, but when his wife Lois leaves to attend a conference in Chicago he does not hesitate to invite Veronica, his secretary and lover, over. Finding her unavailable, he has an escort agency send voluptuous Fiona. All seems well until his elderly Congressional colleague and neighbor locks himself out and asks to spend the night. Then Congressman Jack Maguire drops in unexpectedly and Fiona, unsure who her client is, zeros in on him. Meanwhile, Veronica changes her plans and appears on the scene. Before Lois reaches the airport, her fashionable Washington townhouse is swarming with libidinous politicians, scantily dressed women, security police and a muckraking reporter from The National Intruder! When snow closes the airport and she returns home, the bedlam crescendos to a surprise ending in this outrageous farce by the author of The Amorous Ambassador.
Sin, Sex & The CIA
by Michael ParkerFull Length, Comedy . Characters: 3 male, 4 female . Huge oil reserves have been discovered in the Chagos Islands. O.P.E.C. is pressuring the Chagosians to join the cartel. A C.I.A. agent and an under Secretary of State, whose life appears to be run by her libido, are sent to a C.I.A. safe house in the mountains of Virginia to begin negotiations for the U.S. to place the Chagos Islands under their protection. Unfortunately, no one knows who the islands' representative really is. We are left to wonder how the C.I.A. agent ever got the job. He gets caught in all his own booby traps, he electrocutes himself, he sets fire to himself, he gets a bucket stuck on his head, and finally locks himself in his own handcuffs! Add to the inevitable chaos, a stranded televangelist, his innocent secretary (or is she?), an ex-marine caretaker, who isn't what he seems to be, and a mysterious, glamorous neighbor, and you have a complex, laugh out loud farce, that can be played on any stage.
There's A Burglar In My Bed
by Michael ParkerComedy / 3m, 4f / Various sets / William Worthington III and his wife are both going to be away for the weekend from their two hundred acre Massachusetts estate with its twenty six bedroom mansion, he to Delaware to shoot ducks with the Duponts and she to her mother's in Boston. Both have, in fact, arranged trysts with their respective lovers in the estate's beach cottage. Inevitably their paths cross and divorce is in the air. Neither is willing to give up the world famous Worthington necklace, so each devises a plan to steal it. True to the laws of farce, both simulated burglaries are scheduled for same night. Fun filled chaos ensues: mistaken identities, unlikely romantic liaisons, a bumbling private detective, a fake necklace, one very determined nymphomaniac and two scantily clad pseudo nuns sharing a single skirt where did they come from? Confusion is piled on confusion until the mystery of who has the real necklace and who has the fake is revealed in a surprise ending.
Who's In Bed With Butler
by Michael ParkerFarce / 3m, 6f / Interior / A California billionaire has bequeathed all of his assets to his only daughter Constance - except the 22-million-dollar yacht he wanted Josephine to have, a 25 million-dollar art collection left to Rene and some priceless antique automobiles willed to Marjorie. Constance arrives at her father's mansion with her lawyer, determined to find out who these women are and to buy them off or contest the will. The butler seems to hold the key and she learns from him that the three sultry ladies were her father's lovers. She also discovers that the yacht, the art and the cars have vanished, all having been sold to The Bimbo Corporation. Could the butler be behind the shenanigans - and is he carrying on with all of the ladies in question? Does the elderly, deaf housekeeper really have a pet rat? Can the bumbling detective hired by Constance really be so inept, linguistically as well as professionally? And why has the butler hired an actress to play his wife? Hilarity erupts long before the audience realizes that the temptresses are all being played by the same actress! This is a madcap addition to the author's string of inventive American farces.
Whose Wives Are They Anyway?
by Michael ParkerComedy / 3m, 5f / The Ashley Maureen Cosmetics Company has been sold and two of its vice presidents, David McGrachen and John Baker, have planned a weekend off before the new C.E.O. arrives on Monday. With their wives safely off on a shopping spree in New York City, they check into The Oakfield Golf and Country Club intending to "golf their brains out." They unexpectedly encounter their new boss, Ms. Hutchison, and she insists on meeting the wives, commenting blithely "no one who went golfing for a weekend without his wife would ever work for me." So ... David and John have to produce wives. John persuades Tina, the hotel's sexy receptionist, to play the role of his wife, but the only one who can pretend to be David's wife is John. Inevitably everything goes wrong as John moves in and out of bedrooms, changing from male to female at a frantic pace. Hilarious chaos ensues when the hotel phone system goes on the blink, Tina has too much champagne and can't keep her clothes on, and, yes, the real wives arrive!
Sex Please We're Sixty
by Michael Parker Susan Parker2m, 4f / Farce / Mrs. Stancliffe's Rose Cottage Bed & Breakfast has been successful for many years. Her Guests (nearly all women) return year after year. Her next door neighbor, the elderly, silver-tongued, Bud "Bud the Stud" Davis believes they come to spend time with him in romantic liaisons. The prim and proper Mrs. Stancliffe steadfastly denies this, but really doesn't do anything to prevent it. She reluctantly accepts the fact that "Bud the Stud" is, in fact, good for business. Her other neighbor and would-be suitor Henry Mitchell is a retired chemist who has developed a blue pill called "Venusia," after Venus the goddess of love, to increase the libido of menopausal women. The pill has not been tested. Add to the guest list three older women: Victoria Ambrose, a romance novelist whose personal life seems to be lacking in romance; Hillary Hudson a friend of Henry's who has agreed to test the Venusia: and Charmaine Beauregard, a "Southern Belle" whose libido does not need to be increased! Bud gets his hands on some of the Venusia pills and the fun begins, as attempts to entertain all three women! The women mix up Bud's Viagra pills with the Venusia, and we soon discover that it has a strange effect on men: it gives them all the symptoms of menopausal women, complete with hot flashes, mood swings, weeping and irritability! When the mayham settles down, all the women find their lives moving in new and surprising directions.
What Is Susan's Secret?
by Michael Parker Susan ParkerCharacters: 3-7 male, 3-7 femaleFarceInterior The Cider Mill Inn is an old, rustic and somewhat run down country inn owned and operated by an endearing elderly couple, Michael and Susan Edwards. At first they appear to be bordering on senility. We quickly learn however that they are very clever con artists, preying on their unsuspecting guests, by advertising huge discounts to various tradesmen. Using an elaborate check-in form with duplicate copies, guests are, in fact, signing a work contract, requiring them to perform various tasks and improvements at the inn. Over the course of three weekends, plumbers, tile layers, carpenters and electricians are recruited to do work they never expected.This unique play offers theatres the opportunity for the other twelve characters (Besides Susan and Michael) to be played by either two males and two females, or twelve different actors, or any number in between. The characters vary from the world's most boring man, (his wife says he's had charisma bypass surgery), to a young couple on their honeymoon. Audiences will fall in love with each of these distinctive characters, but especially the loving relationship between the two main characters, Michael and Susan, so touching that this play might be called a love story, if it wasn't first and foremost a farce.So, what is Susan's secret? On this subject the authors remain silent, preferring instead to let the audience decide on the truth, which of course, in a Parker play, is only revealed in the last few seconds of the show.
Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords (Haney Foundation Series)
by Patricia ParkerWhat does the keyword "continence" in Love's Labor's Lost reveal about geopolitical boundaries and their breaching? What can we learn from the contemporary identification of the "quince" with weddings that is crucial for A Midsummer Night's Dream? How does the evocation of Spanish-occupied "Brabant" in Othello resonate with contemporary geopolitical contexts, wordplay on "Low Countries," and fears of sexual/territorial "occupation"? How does "supposes" connote not only sexual submission in The Taming of the Shrew but also the transvestite practice of boys playing women, and what does it mean for the dramatic recognition scene in Cymbeline?With dazzling wit and erudition, Patricia Parker explores these and other critical keywords to reveal how they provide a lens for interpreting the language, contexts, and preoccupations of Shakespeare's plays. In doing so, she probes classical and historical sources, theatrical performance practices, geopolitical interrelations, hierarchies of race, gender, and class, and the multiple significances of "preposterousness," including reversals of high and low, male and female, Latinate and vulgar, "sinister" or backward writing, and latter ends both bodily and dramatic.Providing innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives on Shakespeare, from early to late and across dramatic genres, Parker's deeply evocative readings demonstrate how easy-to-overlook textual or semantic details reverberate within and beyond the Shakespearean text, and suggest that the boundary between language and context is an incontinent divide.
Romantic Tragedies
by Reeve ParkerTroubled politically and personally, Wordsworth and Coleridge turned in 1797 to the London stage. Their tragedies, The Borderers and Osorio, were set in medieval Britain and early modern Spain to avoid the Lord Chamberlain's censorship. Drury Lane rejected both, but fifteen years later, Coleridge's revision, Remorse, had spectacular success there, inspiring Shelley's 1819 Roman tragedy, The Cenci, aimed for Covent Garden. Reeve Parker makes a striking case for the power of these intertwined works, written against British hostility to French republican liberties and Regency repression of home-grown agitation. Covertly, Remorse and The Cenci also turn against Wordsworth. Stressing the significance of subtly repeated imagery and resonances with Virgil, Shakespeare, Racine, Jean-François Ducis and Schiller, Parker's close readings, which are boldly imaginative and decidedly untoward, argue that at the heart of these tragedies lie powerful dramatic uncertainties driven by unstable passions - what he calls, adapting Coleridge's phrase for sorcery, 'dark employments'.
Priapea: Poems for a Phallic God (Routledge Revivals)
by W. H. ParkerFirst published in 1988, Priapea is a collection of eighty Latin epigrams, English translated, that make up the corpus Priapeorum, which displays remarkable skill, artistry and wit. Their elegance of style contrasts strikingly with their indecent subject matter. The poems are mostly spoken by, or addressed to, the lewd god Priapus, famous for the size and tenseness of his erect membrum virile or phallus. A main theme is the threatened use of his formidable organ to assault obscenely any intruders that he may catch thieving, but requests and offsprings made to Priapus, and his comparison of himself with other deities, also figure prominently among the poems. This book will be of interest of literature, classical studies, and translation studies.
Scene Design and Stage Lighting
by W. Oren Parker R. Craig WolfThis established and respected text for courses in scene design and stage lighting offers a contemporary viewpoint from two experienced authors. The authors highlight current trends, such as the importance of collaboration in the theatrical process.
Scene Design and Stage Lighting
by W. Oren Parker R. Craig Wolf Dick BlockPacked with professional information and cutting-edge technologies, SCENE DESIGN AND STAGE LIGHTING, Ninth Edition, equips you with the most up-to-date coverage available on scenery, lighting, sound, and technology. Completely current, the exciting new ninth edition mirrors the best of real-world practices. Vibrant color production photographs support the text and spotlight examples of contemporary work. Scenery design and technology coverage includes a strong emphasis on modern technology, while changes in the lighting section reflect the latest practices. Coverage of sound for the theatre reflects the digital age in which we live and work. The text also includes an expanded section on television design, as well as greater emphasis on health and safety issues. The authors emphasize collaboration in all sections of the new text, and they provide insight via interviews with professional lighting and scenery designers in two features: "Working Professionals" and "Designers at Work. " Reflecting current professional practice, SCENE DESIGN AND STAGE LIGHTING, Ninth Edition, offers in-depth coverage of a broad range of topics, making it the most detailed and comprehensive text available in the scenic and lighting design and technology fields.
Cyborg Theatre
by Jennifer Parker-StarbuckThis book articulates the first theoretical context for a 'cyborg theatre,' metaphorically integrating on-stage bodies with the technologized, digitized, or mediatized, to re-imagine subjectivity for a post-human age. It covers a variety of examples, to propose new theoretical tools for understanding performance in our changing world.
365 Days / 365 Plays
by Suzan-Lori Parks"Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most important dramatists America has produced."-Tony Kushner "The plan was that no matter what I did, how busy I was, what other commitments I had, I would write a play a day, every single day for a year. It would be about being present and being committed to the artistic process every single day, regardless of the 'weather.' It became a daily meditation, a daily prayer celebrating the rich and strange process of a writing life."-Suzan-Lori Parks On November 13, 2002, the incomparable Suzan-Lori Parks got an idea to write a play every day for a year. She began that very day, finishing one year later. The result is an extraordinary testament to artistic commitment. This collection of 365 impeccably crafted pieces, each with its own distinctive characters and dramatic power, is a complete work by an artist responding to her world, each and every day. Parks is one of the American theater's most wily and innovative writers, and her "stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous" (TIME).
The America Play and Other Works
by Suzan-Lori Parks"Parks has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way.... She's passionate and jokey and some kind of genius."--Vogue
The Book of Grace
by Suzan-Lori Parks"[Suzan-Lori Parks'] dislocating stage devices, stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous."--Time "An original whose fierce intelligence and fearless approach to craft subvert theatrical convention and produce a mature and inimitable art that is as exciting as it is fresh."--August Wilson Named one of the "100 Innovators for the Next New Wave" by Time magazine, Suzan-Lori Parks is a truly original voice of the American theater. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur "Genius" Award, Parks is renowned for her groundbreaking language, theatricality, and an aesthetic that continues to evolve in unexpected ways. Her first full-length play since her award-winning Topdog/Underdog, The Book of Grace is a scorching three-person drama in which a young man returns home to south Texas to confront his father, unearthing deep-seated passions and ambition. The play premiered in spring 2010 at the Public Theater, where Parks is in the midst of a three-year residency as the first recipient of the theater's master writer chair. Suzan-Lori Parks is a playwright, screenwriter, songwriter, and novelist. Her plays include Topdog/Underdog (winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize), In the Blood (a 2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Venus (OBIE Award winner) and Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (OBIE Award, Best New American Play).
Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & #3)
by Suzan-Lori Parks"By turns philosophical and playful, lyrical and earthy, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), swoops, leaps, dives and soars, reimagining a turbulent point in American history through a cockeyed contemporary lens . . . The finest work yet from this gifted writer."--The New York Times"Thrilling. . . . A masterpiece . . . A story that engages the deepest possible issues in the most gripping possible ways."--New YorkOffered his freedom if he joins his master in the ranks of the Confederacy, Hero, a slave, must choose whether to leave the woman and people he loves for what may be another empty promise. As his decision brings him face to face with a nation at war with itself, the ones Hero left behind debate whether to escape or wait for his return, only to discover that for Hero, freedom may have come at a great spiritual cost. A devastatingly beautiful dramatic work, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) is the opening trilogy of a projected nine-play cycle that will ultimately take us into the present.Suzan-Lori Parks became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog in 2002. Her other plays include The Book of Grace, In the Blood, Venus, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Fucking A, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The America Play. In 2007 her 365 Days/365 Plays was produced at more than seven hundred theaters worldwide. Parks is a MacArthur Fellow and the Master Writer Chair at the Public Theater.
The Red Letter Plays
by Suzan-Lori Parks"In the Blood is an extraordinary new play...It is truly harrowing...we cannot turn away, and we do not want to. The play strikes us as Hawthorne claimed his first glimpse of the scarlet letter struck him, with "a sensation not altogether physical yet almost so, as of a burning heat, as if the letter were not of red cloth but of red-hot iron.'"--Margo Jefferson, The New York TimesThe playwright who "has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way [John Heilpern, New York Observer and Vogue]," has written two haunting riffs on Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter: In the Blood and Fucking A.Hester La Negrita of In the Blood is an unapologetic mother of five illegitimate children--"my treasures, my five joys"--who practices writing the alphabet to help herself "one day get a leg up. The letter A is as far as she gets. Hester Smith of Fucking A works the only job available--abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son. Her branded A bleeds afresh every time a patient comes to see her.These are two mature, beautifully crafted, inventive and poetic plays by one of the most unique voices writing for the stage today.Suzan Lori-Parks is also the author of The America Play and Other Works and Venus, both published by TCG. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.