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Amy's Wish
by Tom SharkeyComedy / 3m, 3f / Interior Recently retired and newlywed, Sam Galway is flabbergasted when the spring water at his honeymoon retreat transforms dear old Amy into a 19-year-old knockout. His "young'' bride attracts a youthful admirer while the sheriff becomes convinced that Sam has murdered Amy. This romantic comedy by the librettist-composer of It's a Wonderful Life, the author of My Heart Reminds Me and the co-author of Just Say Yes! is a charming audience-pleaser.
Ana en el Trópico
by Nilo Cruz Nacho Artime"Extraordinary and evocative, the stellar Anna in the Tropics is a work of art."--Christine Dolen, Miami HeraldThis lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of America in the midst of the Depression. Set in Ybor City (Tampa) in 1930, Cruz imagines the catalytic effect of the arrival of a new "lector" (who reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to the workers as they toil in the cigar factory) has on a Cuban-American family. Cruz celebrates the search for identity in a new land.
Analysing Gender in Performance
by J. Paul Halferty Cathy LeeneyAnalysing Gender in Performance brings together the fields of Gender Studies and Performance Analysis to explore how contemporary performance represents and interrogates gender. This edited collection includes a wide range of scholarly essays, as well as artists’ voices and their accounts of their works and practices. The Introduction outlines the book’s key approaches to concepts in English language gender discourses and gender’s intersectionalities, and sets out the approaches to performance analysis and methods of research employed by the various contributors. The book focuses on performances from the Global North, staged over the past fifty years. Case studies are diverse, ranging from site-specific, dance theatre, speculative drag, installation, and music video performances to Mabou Mines, Churchill, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Contributors explore how gender intersects with sexuality, social class, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, culture and history. Read individually or in tension with one another, the essays confront the contemporary complexities of analysing gender in performance.
An Analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Plays in Théâtre complet (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by Adrian van den HovenAn Analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Plays in Théâtre complet is the first volume to propose a critical analysis of all of Jean-Paul Sartre’s plays as published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2005. Viewing the plays in the context of Sartre’s philosophy, his prose writings and works by other philosophers, novelists, and playwrights, this comprehensive volume is essential reading for students of French literature, theatre, and existentialist philosophy.
The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to its Theory and Practice
by Anthony Howell A. HowellThis finely illustrated book offers a simple yet comprehensive 'grammar' of a new discipline. Performance Art first became popular in the fifties when artists began creating 'happenings'. Since then the artist as a performer has challenged many of the accepted rules of the theatre and radically altered our notion of what constitutes visual art. This is the first publication to outline the essential characteristics of the field and to put forward a method for teaching the subject as a discipline distinct from dance, drama, painting or sculpture.Taking the theory of primary and secondary colours as his model, Anthony Howell posits three primaries of action and shows how these may be mixed to obtain a secondary range of actions. Based on a taught course, the system is designed for practical use in the studio and is also entertaining to explore. Examples are cited from leading performance groups and practitioners such as Bobbie Baker, Orlan, Stelarc, Annie Sprinkle, Robert Wilson, Goat Island, and Station House Opera. This volume, however, is not just an illustrated grammar of action - it also shows how the syntax of that grammar has psychoanalytic repercussions. This enables the performer to relate the system to lived experience, ensuring a realisation that meaning is being dealt with through these actions and that the stystem set forth is more than a dry structuring of the characteristics of movement.Freud's notion of 'transference' and Lacan's understanding of 'repetition' are compared to a performer's usage of the same terms. Thus the book provides a psychoanalytic critique of performance at the same time as it outlines an efficient method for creating live work on both fine art and theatre courses.
Analysis through Action for Actors and Directors: From Stanislavsky to Contemporary Performance
by David ChambersAnalysis through Action for Actors and Directors is a comprehensive view of an innovative and exciting process for making new theatre.As well as an understanding of how Analysis through Action has developed over time, this book also demonstrates how it can be put into practice in today’s theatre. The first part of this book traces the exciting genealogy from Stanislavsky’s unfinished experiments, through the insights of geniuses Maria Knebel and Georgii Tovstonogov, down to today’s avant-garde auteurs. The second part is a practical manual based on extensive field testing by the author and colleagues. Here, two key components of the process are elucidated: Text Actions – ten interwoven text analysis steps – to be twinned with the thrilling rehearsal process using focused and joyful improvisations called Études.Written for new or experienced theatre students and practitioners, this book will enrich the technique of any theatre artist and anyone else interested in the theatre and its future.
Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Michael Y. BennettTheatrical characters’ dual existence on stage and in text presents a unique, challenging case for the analytical philosopher. Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play re-examines the ontological status of theatre and its fictional objects through the "possible worlds" thesis, arguing that theatre is not a mirror of our world, but a re-creation of it. Taking a fresh look at theatre’s key elements, including the hotly contested relationships between character and actor; onstage and offstage "worlds"; and the play-text and performance, Michael Y. Bennett presents a radical new way of understanding the world of the play.
Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation: A Case Study of Shakespearean Films (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture)
by Robert GealThis book develops a new approach for the study of films adapted from canonical ‘originals’ such as Shakespeare’s plays. Departing from the current consensus that adaptation is a heightened example of how all texts inform and are informed by other texts, this book instead argues that film adaptations of canonical works extend cinema’s inherent mystification and concealment of its own artifice. Film adaptation consistently manipulates and obfuscates its traces of ‘original’ authorial enunciation, and oscillates between overtly authored articulation and seemingly un-authored unfolding. To analyse this process, the book moves from a dialogic to a psychoanalytic poststructuralist account of film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. The differences between these rival approaches to adaptation are explored in depth in the first part of the book, while the second part constructs a taxonomy of the various ways in which authorial signs are simultaneously foregrounded and concealed in adaptation’s anamorphic drama of authorship.
Anarchic Dance
by Liz Aggiss Billy Cowie Ian BramleyLiz Aggiss and Billy Cowie, known collectively as Divas Dance Theatre, are renowned for their highly visual, interdisciplinary brand of dance performance that incorporates elements of theatre, film, opera, poetry and vaudevillian humour. Anarchic Dance, consisting of a book and DVD-Rom, is a visual and textual record of their boundary-shattering performance work. The DVD-Rom features extracts from Aggiss and Cowie's work, including the highly-acclaimed dance film Motion Control (premiered on BBC2 in 2002), rare video footage of their punk-comic live performances as The Wild Wigglers and reconstructions of Aggiss's solo performance in Grotesque Dancer. These films are cross-referenced in the book, allowing readers to match performance and commentary as Aggiss and Cowie invite a broad range of writers to examine their live performance and dance screen practice through analysis, theory, discussion and personal response. Extensively illustrated with black and white and colour photographs Anarchic Dance, provides a comprehensive investigation into Cowie and Aggiss’s collaborative partnership and demonstrates a range of exciting approaches through which dance performance can be engaged critically.
The Anarchist
by David MametNothing is quite what it seems in Mamet's latest work. With a nod to his mentor, Harold Pinter, Mamet employs his signature verbal jousting in The Anarchist, which centers on two women: a prison governor and a prisoner with a life sentence trying to make the case that she merits parole. The Broadway premiere stars Patti LuPone and Debra Winger.
Anarchy in High Heels: A Memoir
by Denise LarsonAnarchy in High Heels is not a state of dress; it&’s a state of mind.A San Francisco porno theater might be the last place you&’d expect to plant the seed of a feminist troupe, but truth is stranger than fiction.In 1972, access to birth control and a burn-your-bra ethos were leading young women to repudiate their 1950s conservative upbringing and embrace a new liberation. Denise Larson was a timid twenty-four-year-old actress wannabe when, at an after-hours countercultural event, The People&’s Nickelodeon, she accidentally created Les Nickelettes. This banding together of ¬¬like-minded women with an anything-goes spirit unlocked a deeply hidden female humor. For the first time, Denise allowed the suppressed satirical thoughts dancing through her head to come out in the open. Together with Les Nickelettes, which quickly became a brazen women&’s lib troupe, she presented a series of feminist skits, stunts, and musical comedy plays. In 1980, The Bay Guardian described the group as &“nutty, messy, flashy, trashy, and very funny.&”With sisterhood providing the moxie, Denise took on leadership positions not common for women at the time: playwright, stage director, producer, and administrative/artistic director. But, in the end, the most important thing she learned was the power of female friendship.
The Anastasia Trials In the Court of Women
by Carolyn GageInteractive drama / 9 f / Simple set Audience participation in this courtroom drama creates a profoundly engaging excursion into a world of women who are survivors and abusers. Actually a farcical play within a play, the drama opens as members of a radical feminist theatre group, the Emma Goldman Theatre Brigade, are about to implement their innovative lottery system aimed at insuring equal opportunity for all. They each draw the role they will play on this evening from a hat, putting sisterhood to an iron test. The performance that follows is the conspiracy trial of five women who are accused of denying the defendant Anastasia Romanov her identity. Audience members decide throughout to overrule or sustain the attorneys' motions, creating a different play at every performance.
The Anatomy of Drama (Routledge Revivals)
by Marjorie BoultonThis title, first published in 1960, is intended primarily to increase the understanding of drama among those who do not have easy access to the live theatre and who, therefore, study plays mainly in print. The author’s emphasis is on Shakespeare, but most forms of drama receive some attention. A lucid and lively study of the techniques of plot, dialogue and characterization will help the reader to a deeper appreciated of the problems and successes of the dramatist.
The Ancients and the Postmoderns
by Fredric JamesonFredric Jameson sweeps from the Renaissance to The Wire High modernism is now as far from us as antiquity was for the Renaissance. Such is the premise of Fredric Jameson's major new work in which modernist works, this time in painting (Rubens) and music (Wagner and Mahler), are pitted against late-modernist ones (in film) as well as a variety of postmodern experiments (from SF to The Wire, from "Eurotrash" in opera to Altman and East German literature): all of which attempt, in their different ways, to invent new forms to grasp a specific social totality. Throughout the historical periods, argues Jameson, the question of narrative persists through its multiple formal changes and metamorphoses.From the Hardcover edition.
...And Baby Makes Two
by Nanci ChristopherCharacters: 1 femaleA single woman's desire to experience motherhood without a husband at her side sends her through the world of adoption. Her path leads her through an array of characters and situations rife with drama. Settling on private adoption through an attorney she suffers an unfathomable heartbreak at the death of her newborn son. She is somehow able to rise out of despair to try again and meets Elizabeth who is looking for someone to adopt her unborn child. A new family is forged through the courage of two very brave women. The running time is one hour."Christopher's messages about love and following your dreams are worth telling...fascinating material." - Backstage West...And Baby Makes Two - an adoption tale was nominated for the 2009 SUSAN SMITH BLACKBURN PRIZE.
And Fat Freddy's Blues
by P. J. BarryFull Length Comedy / 2 m., 2 f. / Interior / Fat Freddy Caputo, a "reformed" mobster, faces a crisis in Jericho, R.I. in 1952: the reuniting of his daughter and her former boyfriend who married another but is now separated. His schemes, including a million dollar bribe, backfire with hilarious and heart warming results. / "A standout!" Forth Worth Star Telegram.
And Go to Innisfree
by Jean Lenox ToddieComedy/Drama. Jean Lenox Toddie . Characters: 3 female. Bare stage. . It's October. The beach is deserted. A woman appears, flowered parasol raised and long skirt sweeping the sand. She has come to make a decision, but will she make it alone? The middle aged matron she was argues for the comfort of a retirement home. The child she was urges her to sit again and eat blackberries, to lie under the brambles and study ants, and to arise at long last and go to Innisfree.
And Maggie Makes Three
by Joan Lowery NixonMaggie, living with her grandmother in Houston, joins the drama club at school, wins a part in a play, begins to make friends, and learns to deal with feelings of loneliness, being in love, and having an unusual family life and background.
...And Rain Came to Mayfield
by Jason MilliganA poetic family drama, this play takes place in a small gas station/luncheonette on a Mississippi highway in 1962. The owner's son Carl dreams of going to college but his alcoholic father does not support these aspirations and his mother referees a desperate tug of war between the them. One afternoon, a young black man appears in the doorway seeking shelter while he waits for the bus to Jackson. On this Mississippi day, the two young men discover that they share a need to establish their independence and follow thier dreams. Carl's father reacts violently when he finds the black man in his establishment, but Carl stands up to his father for the first time in his life.
And Slowly Beauty
by Michel Nadeau Maureen LabontéEverything changes on what begins as a typical day in the life of the aptly named Mr. Mann, a forty-eight-year-old, buttoned-down, middle management type in a pinstriped grey suit, who feels himself losing touch with his job, his wife, his children, and the rest of his urban life. He wins tickets to a production of Chekhov's Three Sisters and realizes that the mid-life cocoon he has spun around himself is beginning to unwind.And Slowly Beauty, first performed in French in 2003, was created collaboratively by Michel Nadeau and colleagues from his Quebec troupe, Théâtre Niveau Parking. With the intensity of an electric current striking a reflecting pool, Nadeau shows us how Chekhov's century-old drama about the yearning of three sisters in a dreary provincial town directly addresses Mann's own stifled existence and liberates him from his self-imposed "gulag."Mann returns to see Three Sisters a second time, finding that its themes of beauty and poetry lost to the monotony of everyday existence mirror many aspects of his own existence. At the same time, Mann's dying friend realizes that he is for the first time able to appreciate the astonishing beauty of trees outside his window. The irony of such a deathbed admission is not lost on Mr. Mann.With Chekhov's characters and themes coming to inhabit the protagonist's mind and life, emphasized by the repeated image of geese flying overhead - these birds do not question the purpose of their journey but find it sufficient to fly in unison - And Slowly Beauty speaks eloquently to the power of art to transform lives.Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
......And the Dogs Were Silent/......Et les chiens se taisaient
by Aimé CésaireAvailable to readers for the first time, Aimé Césaire’s three-act drama . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent—written during the Vichy regime in Martinique in 1943 and lost until 2008—dramatizes the Haitian Revolution and the rise and fall of Toussaint Louverture as its heroic leader. This bilingual English and French edition stands apart from Césaire’s more widely known 1946 closet drama. Following the slave revolts that sparked the revolution, Louverture arrives as both prophet and poet, general and visionary. With striking dramatic technique, Césaire retells the revolution in poignant encounters between rebels and colonial forces, guided by a prophetic chorus and Louverture’s steady ethical and political vision. In the last act, we reach the hero’s betrayal, his imprisonment, and his last stand against the lures of compromise. Césaire’s masterwork is a strikingly beautiful and brutal indictment of colonial cruelty and an unabashed celebration of Black rebellion and victory.
And Then There Were None
by Agatha ChristieFull Length Play / Mystery Thriller / 8m, 3f / Interior Set. Ten guilty strangers are trapped on an island. One by one they are accused of murder; one by one they start to die. In this superlative mystery comedy statuettes of little soldier boys on the mantel of a house on an island off the coast of Devon fall to the floor and break one by one as those in the house succumb to a diabolical avenger. A nursery rhyme tells how each of the ten "soldiers" met his death until there were none. Eight guests who have never met each other or their apparently absent host and hostess are lured to the island and, along with the two house servants, marooned. A mysterious voice accuses each of having gotten away with murder and then one drops dead - poisoned. One down and nine to go! The excitement never lets up in this ideal play for schools, colleges, and community theatres.
And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World
by Anne BogartFrom well-known auteur of the American theatre scene, Anne Bogart, And Then, You Act is a fascinating and accessible book about directing theatre, acting and the collaborative creative process. Writing clearly and passionately, Bogart speaks to a wide audience, from undergraduates to practitioners, and makes an invaluable contribution to the field tackling themes such as: intentionality inspiration why theatre matters. Following on from her successful book A Director Prepares, which has become a key text for teaching directing classes, And Then, You Act is an essential practitioner and student resource.
And There I Stood with My Piccolo
by Meredith WillsonAnd There I Stood with My Piccolo, originally published in 1948, is a zesty and colorful memoir of composer Meredith Willson's early years--from growing up in Mason City, Iowa, to playing the flute with John Philip Sousa's band and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, to a successful career in composing for radio and motion pictures in Hollywood. It was apparent to everyone, except maybe Willson himself, that he was on his way to something big.Lighthearted and inspiring, it is no surprise Willson's tales caught the attention of prominent Broadway producers. In 1957, just nine years after the publication of this book, The Music Man became a Broadway sensation, winning five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Meredith Willson's musical comedy is to this day arguably the most produced and beloved musical in American culture.
...And The There Was Nun
by Bruce W. GilrayComedy with Music / 11 characters (m or f) ...And Then There Was Nun is written in the style of a classic 1940's murder mystery; and is a blend of humor and who-dun-it as the actors emulate iconic movie stars of the past. Take one foreboding mansion on a secluded island, throw in ten whacked-out members of The Holy Order of the Sisters of San Andreas, stir in their unseen and mysterious leader, add an assortment of the sharpest tongues this side of Hollywood and Vine; then infuse with a healthy dose of some of the most famous lines in cinema (slightly warped). Roast well in a preheated treasure trove of movie facts, trivia, legends and gossip for two acts, sit back and savor. ...And Then There Was Nunis a treat for movie buffs and non-movie buffs alike. Actors who take on the personas parodied in this play will be creatively challenged to mold their performances with the mannerisms and vocal styles of famous actors of the past, having an amazingly fun experience along the way. ...And Then There Was Nun was the winner of the 1990 "Robby" Award for "Best Comedy Production" and for "Best Actor" - Tif Rice as Sister Katharine. "...a gas...over the top and as thick as the North Pasture. Needless to add, the audience loved every single second of it." -Drama-Logue "...the nun's story to end all nun's stories...leagues above most comedies and the laughs come nonstop..." -Frontiers "...a captivating mystery...Bruce Gilray and Richard Witter ... created a work that's a joy for actors." -The Press Telegram "...what more could a movie buff desire? A killer evening of hilarity." -The Daily Breeze "Plan a social evening with friends and buy a group of tickets for one of the funniest and entertaining evenings on the current theatre scene in Los Angeles" -The Tolucan