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The Columnist: A Play
by David AuburnA new play from the Pulitzer- and Tony Award–winning author of Proof, coming to Broadway this AprilIn midcentury America, newspaper columnists are kings—and Joseph Alsop wears the biggest crown. Joe sits at the nexus of Washington life: beloved, feared, and courted in equal measure by the very people whose careers and futures he determines. But as the sixties dawn and America undergoes dizzying change, the intense political dramas Joe has been throwing his weight around in—supporting the war in Vietnam and Soviet containment, criticizing student activism—come to bear a profound personal cost.Based on the real-life story of Joe Alsop, whose columns at the time of his 1974 retirement were running three times a week in more than three hundred newspapers, David Auburn's The Columnist is a deft blend of history and storytelling. A hilarious, searing portrait of the glorious rewards and devastating losses that accompany ego, ambition, and the pursuit of power, The Columnist pens a vital letter from a radically changing decade to our own turbulent era.
Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying
by Daniel SackCrying holds a privileged place in conversations around emotions as an expression of authentic feeling. And yet, tears are ambiguous: they might signal the most positive and negative of affects; they might present a sincere revelation of self or be simulated to manipulate others. Unsurprisingly, tears figure prominently on stage and on screen, where actors have experimented with the mechanics of making tears. Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying uses tears as a prism through which to see some of the foundational problems and paradoxes of acting and spectatorship anew, including matters of authenticity and sincerity, the ethics of the witness, the interaction between a speech act and its affective force, liveness and documentation. Across seven semi-autonomous essays, Cue Tears looks at the mechanisms of tear production, internal and external techniques that actors use to weep, and the effects of tears in performance situations on the stage, in the gallery, and in the classroom. The writing moves with a light touch between theory and criticism of a broad range of instances from literature, theater, performance art, visual art, and cinema, while also embracing a strong autobiographical and personal slant. Author Daniel Sack’s father was a biochemist who studied tears and collected his son’s tears for research during his childhood. These “reflex tears” were produced as a physical response to irritation—an eye stretched past the point of blinking, a cotton swab up the nose. This childhood occupation coincided with his first years taking acting classes, trying to learn how to cry “emotional tears” onstage through psychological stimulation and the recollection of memory. Cue Tears investigates these memories and methods, finding that tears both shore up and dissolve distinctions between truth and artifice, emotional and physical, private and public, sad and humorous.
James Graham: State of the Nation Playwright
by Maryam PhilpottJames Graham is one of the UK’s leading dramatists, a multi-award-winning writer who for almost 20 years has analysed and articulated concepts of power and authority in modern British society. James Graham: State of the Nation Playwright is the first full-length assessment of the writer’s output, applying core thematic areas - Democracy, Anarchy, Famous Faces and Television - to understand how different power bases operate in modern society, their effectiveness and influence, and how they came to pre-eminence during the last 70 years. The book concludes with an evaluation of Graham’s contribution to state-of-the-nation debates, Britain’s cycles of decline and its consequences for understanding contemporary national identity.
Berryman's Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings
by John BerrymanEdited by John HaffendenWith a Preface by Robert GirouxJohn Berryman, one of America's most talented modern poets, was winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs and the National Book Award for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. He gained a reputation as an innovator whose bold literary adventures were tempered by exacting discipline. Berryman was also an active, prolific, and perceptive critic whose own experience as a major poet served to his advantage. Berryman was a protégé of Mark Van Doren, the great Shakespearean scholar, and the Bard's work remained one of his most abiding passions--he would devote a lifetime to writing about it. His voluminous writings on the subject have now been collected and edited by John Haffenden.
If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet: A Play
by Nick PayneFifteen-year-old Anna is bullied by her classmates for being overweight. Her mother, Fiona, decides to transfer her to the school where she teaches, but that only makes things worse. Anna's father, George, is no help—he's too obsessed with saving the world. Just as Anna gets suspended for head-butting one of her tormenters, her uncle Terry arrives for an unannounced visit. A heartbroken, filthy-mouthed slacker, Terry reaches out to Anna in a way that no one ever has. Their unexpected friendship sends her parents' rocky marriage into a tailspin as the whole family wonders what—or who—really needs saving. Nick Payne's If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet is a brilliantly sad, humorous, and empathetic play about a family stuck somewhere between knowing what the problem is and doing something about it.
Jack Be Nimble: The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director
by Jack O'BrienA warm, witty tell-all and history of American regional theater, from one of our best-loved directorsFor Jack O'Brien, there's nothing like a first encounter with a great performer, nothing like the sound of an audience bursting into applause. In short, there's nothing like the theater. Following a fairly normal Midwestern childhood, O'Brien hoped to make his mark by writing lyrics for Broadway but was instead pulled into the growing American regional theater movement by the likes of John Houseman, Helen Hayes, Ellis Rabb, and Eva Le Gallienne. He didn't intend to become a director, or to direct some of the most brilliant—and sometimes maddening—personalities of the age, but in a charming, hilarious, and unexpected way, that's what happened. O'Brien has had a long, successful career on Broadway and as artistic director of San Diego's Old Globe Theatre, but the history of the movement that shaped him has been overlooked. In the middle of the last century, some extraordinary people forged a link in the chain connecting European influences such as the Moscow Art Theatre and Great Britain's National Theatre with the flourishing American theater of today. O'Brien was there to see and record it all, in beautifully vivid detail. Funny, exuberant, unfailingly honest, Jack Be Nimble is the tale of those missing heroes, performances, and cultural battles. It is also the irresistible story of one of our best-loved theater directors, growing into his passion and discovering what he is capable of.
A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families
by Michael HolroydPLEASE NOTE: THIS EBOOK DOES NOT CONTAIN PHOTOS INCLUDED IN THE PRINT EDITION.Deemed "a prodigy among biographers" by The New York Times Book Review, Michael Holroyd transformed biography into an art. Now he turns his keen observation, humane insight, and epic scope on an ensemble cast, a remarkable dynasty that presided over the golden age of theater.Ellen Terry was an ethereal beauty, the child bride of a Pre-Raphaelite painter who made her the face of the age. George Bernard Shaw was so besotted by her gifts that he could not bear to meet her, lest the spell she cast from the stage be broken. Henry Irving was an ambitious, harsh-voiced merchant's clerk, but once he painted his face and spoke the lines of Shakespeare, his stammer fell away to reveal a magnetic presence. He would become one of the greatest actor-managers in the history of the theater. Together, Terry and Irving created a powerhouse of the arts in London's Lyceum Theatre, with Bram Stoker—who would go on to write Dracula—as manager. Celebrities whose scandalous private lives commanded global attention, they took America by stormin wildly popular national tours.Their all-consuming professional lives left little room for their brilliant but troubled children. Henry's boys followed their father into the theater but could not escape the shadow of his fame. Ellen's feminist daughter, Edy, founded an avant-garde theater and a largely lesbian community at her mother's country home. But it was Edy's son, the revolutionary theatrical designer Edward Gordon Craig, who possessed the most remarkable gifts and the most perplexing inability to realize them. A now forgotten modernist visionary, he collaborated with the Russian director Stanislavski on a production of Hamlet that forever changed the way theater was staged. Maddeningly self-absorbed, he inherited his mother's potent charm and fathered thirteen children by eight women, including a daughter with the dancer Isadora Duncan.An epic story spanning a century of cultural change, A Strange Eventful History finds space for the intimate moments of daily existence as well as the bewitching fantasies played out by its subjects. Bursting with charismatic life, it is an incisive portrait of two families who defied the strictures of their time. It will be swiftly recognized as a classic.Please note: This ebook edition does not contain photos and illustrations that appeared in the print edition.
The Earl's Forbidden Ward
by Bronwyn ScottInnocent debutante Tessa Branscombe senses that underneath her handsome guardian's cool demeanor there is an intensely passionate nature. The arrogant earl infuriates her—yet makes her want to explore those hidden depths….Peyton Ramsden, Earl of Dursley, has no time for girls—especially those who are suddenly given over to his care! Miss Tessa Branscombe, in particular, is trouble. She tempts this very proper earl to misbehave—and forbidden fruit always tastes that much sweeter.
Staging Interspaces in Contemporary British Theatre: Environment and Fluidity
by Vicky AngelakiThis open access book considers how relationships to place and spatial ecologies more broadly are becoming redefined in light of intersecting climate, health, identity and care crises. Through an interdisciplinary, intersectional discourse it investigates how spaces of liminality frame contemporary human conditions in their interactional modes with both human and non-human ecologies. The interspace grounds the discussion, indicating states of flux and transience, where the in-between is the defining characteristic. This open access monograph, then, takes up the new complexity in one’s relationship(s) to their surrounding spaces through a rigorous discussion of texts and performance contexts in cutting-edge contemporary British theatre on a national and international scale. It seeks to address how in-betweenness spatially, temporally, environmentally, geographically and socially conceived has been emerging as the primary state for the unmoored individual of our time – and how it might serve as catalyst for performing one's agency in modes more empathetic not only to other humans, but, also, and equally, to the non-human world.