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Studying Shakespeare: A Practical Introduction
by Katherine Armstrong Graham AtkinThis book is a concise single volume guide to studying Shakespeare, covering practical as well as theoretical issues. The text deals with the major topics on a chapter-by-chapter basis, starting with why we study Shakespeare, through Shakespeare and multimedia, to a final chapter on Shakespeare and Theory. Current trends and recent developments in Shakespearean studies are also discussed, with an emphasis on the contextualisation of Shakespeare, historical appropriations of his work and the debate concerning his place in the literary canon. Extensive reference is made to a variety of developing media, e.g. film, audio cassette, video, CD-Rom and global digital networks, bringing the study of Shakespeare into the twentieth century.
Stunning and Other Plays
by David Adjmi"Nearly everything about David Adjmi's Stunning has an original ring to it, from the setting . . . to the brassy bleat of the dialogue." -Time Out New YorkThis volume of distinctive work includes Stunning, set in an insular Syrian Jewish community, where a teenage bride's world is disrupted by her intellectual African American housekeeper; Evildoers, about the collapse of two privileged couples; and Elective Affinities, a post-9/11 monologue.David Adjmi's work has been produced at Lincoln Center Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, and the Royal Court in London. He has received numerous commissions and is the recipient of a 2009 Kesselring Fellowship and a Bush Artist Fellowship.
Stunts of Late Nineteenth-Century New York: Aestheticised Precarity, Endangered Liveness
by Kirstin SmithStunts of Late Nineteenth- Century New York: Aestheticised Precarity, Endangered Liveness examines the emergence of stunts in the media, politics, sport and art of New York at the turn of the twentieth century. This book investigates stunts in sport, media and politics, demonstrating how these risky performances tapped into anxieties and fantasies concerning work, freedom, gendered/ raced/ classed bodies and the commodifi cation of human life. Its case studies examine bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, stunt journalists such as Nellie Bly, and cycling feats including Annie Londonderry’s round- the- world venture. Supported by extensive archival research and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity, liveness and surrogation, Smith theorises an under- examined form which is still prevalent in art, politics and commerce, to show what stunts reveal about value, risk and human life. Suitable for scholars and practitioners across a range of subjects, from Performance Studies to gender studies, to media studies, Stunts of Late Nineteenth- Century New York explores how stunts turned everyday precarity into a spectacle.
Stupid Fucking Bird
by Anton Chekov Aaron PosnerAn aspiring young director rampages against the art created by his mother's generation. A nubile young actress wrestles with an aging Hollywood star for the affections of a renowned novelist. And everyone discovers just how disappointing love, art, and growing up can be. In this irreverent, contemporary, and very funny remix of Chekhov's The Seagull, Aaron Posner stages a timeless battle between young and old, past and present, in search of the true meaning of it all. Original songs composed by James Sugg draw the famously subtextual inner thoughts of Chekhov's characters explicitly to the surface. <p><p>STUPID FUCKING BIRD will tickle, tantalize, and incite you to consider how art, love, and revolution fuel your own pursuit of happiness.
Style For Actors: A Handbook for Moving Beyond Realism
by Robert Barton"Style is a journey from tourist to native. It is living in the world of the play, not just visiting it." - from Chapter One Anyone who has ever struggled with capes, fans, swords, doublets and crinolines should make Style for Actors 2nd Edition their constant companion. Robert Barton has completely updated his award winning handbook for the 21st century with contemporary references and up-to-date illustrations. This is the definitive guide to roles in historical drama. The past is a foreign country, and this outstanding book is concerned with exploring it from the actor’s point of view. Specific guides range from Greek, Elizabethan, Restoration and Georgian theatre to more contemporary stylings, including Futurism, Surrealism and Postmodernism. Barton takes great care to present the actor with the roles and genres that will most commonly confront them. His analysis moves from entire genres to specific scenes and characters. A huge resource of nearly 150 practical exercises helps a newfound understanding of style to make the leap from page to performance.
Style for Actors: A Handbook for Moving Beyond Realism
by Robert BartonStyle for Actors is an award-winning handbook and the definitive guide to roles in historical drama. Anyone who has ever struggled with capes, fans, swords, doublets and crinolines should make this third edition their constant companion. The past is a foreign country, and this outstanding book is concerned with exploring it from the actor's point of view. Specific guides to each major period give readers a clear map to discover a range from Greek, Elizabethan, Restoration and Georgian theatre to more contemporary stylings, including Futurism, Surrealism and Postmodernism. New material in this edition covers Commedia dell'arte and non-Western forms of theatre, theatrical fusion and developments in musicals and Shakespeare. The book’s references, images, resource lists and examples have all been updated to support today's diverse performers. Robert Barton takes great care to present the actor with the roles and genres that will most commonly confront them. Containing a huge resource of nearly 150 exercises, suggestions for scene study and applications not only for theatrical performance but also for stylistic challenges in the reader’s own offstage life, this book is an invaluable resource for students and practitioners of acting and drama.
Style: An Approach To Appreciating Theatre
by E. Bert WallaceStyle: An Approach to Appreciating Theatre offers brief, readable chapters about the basics of theatre as a starting point for discussion, and provides new adaptations of classic plays that are both accessible to students learning about theatre and fit for production. In this text, style is the word used to describe the various ways in which theatre is done in real space and time by humans in the physical presence of other humans. The book uses style, the "liveness" of theatre that makes it distinct from literature or history, as a lens to see how playwrights, directors, designers, and actors bring scripts to life on stage. Rather than focusing on theatre history or literary script analysis, it emphasizes actual theatrical production through examples and explores playscripts illustrating four theatrical styles: Realism, Theatricalism, Expressionism, and Classicism. Susan Glaspells Realistic play Trifles is presented as written, while The Insect Play by the Brothers apek, The Hairy Ape by Eugene ONeill, and Antigone by Sophocles are original, full-length adaptions. Style: An Approach to Appreciating Theatre is the perfect resource for students of Theatre Appreciation, Introduction to Theatre, Theatrical Design, and Stagecraft courses.
Subject to Change
by Jules E. TascaFirst produced at the Pheasant Run Playhouse in Chicago, with Phyllis Diller featured as Madeline Basset, the action takes place in a two story residence in suburban New York. The play concerns the two Bassett sisters, Gertrude is prudish, capable and hardworking, says only "Oh, fudge", when she's upset. Madeline is completely dependent on her sloppy, fat cunning, and sounds like a plumber who has lost his number four wrench the perfect role for Phyllis Diller? When Gertrude decides to marry, leaving Madeline to fend for herself, the situation becomes traumatic. In an attempt to break up Gertrude's romance, Madeline runs the gamut, making obscene telephone calls to the bridegroom's 80 year old lush of a mother; outrageously insulting the groom to be, sneaking off to New York to trip on LSD, and finally sneaking back home to live in the attic and sulk. When all efforts fail, she feigns a stroke.
Subjects of Advice: Drama and Counsel from More to Shakespeare
by Ivan LupiIn Subjects of Advice, Ivan Lupić uncovers the rich interconnectedness of dramatic art and the culture of counsel in the early modern period. While counsel was an important form of practical knowledge, with concrete political consequences, it was also an ingrained cultural habit, a feature of obligatory mental, moral, and political hygiene. To be a Renaissance subject, Lupić claims, one had to reckon with the advice of others. Lupić examines this reckoning in a variety of sixteenth-century dramatic contexts. The result is an original account of the foundational role that counsel played in the development of Renaissance drama.Lupić begins by considering the figure of Thomas More, whose influential argument about counsel as a form of performance in Utopia set the agenda for the entire century. Resisting linear narratives and recovering, instead, the simultaneity of radically different kinds of dramatic experience, he shows the vitality of later dramatic engagements with More's legacy through an analysis of the moral interlude staged within Sir Thomas More, a play possibly coauthored by Shakespeare. More also helps explain the complex use of counsel in Senecan drama, from the neo-Latin plays of George Buchanan, discussed in connection with Buchanan's political writings, to the historical tragedies of the mid-sixteenth century.If tyranny and exemplarity are the keywords for early Elizabethan drama of counsel, for the plays of Christopher Marlowe it is friendship. Lupić considers Marlowe's interest in friendship and counsel, most notably in Edward II, alongside earlier dramatic treatments, thus exposing the pervasive fantasy of the ideal counselor as another self. Subjects of Advice concludes by placing King Lear in relation to its dramatic sources to demonstrate Shakespeare's deliberate dispersal of counsel throughout his play. Counsel's customary link to plain and fearless speech becomes in Shakespeare's hands a powerful instrument of poetic and dramatic expression.
Subscribe Now!
by Danny Newman"Buy it, borrow it, steal it, but get your hands on it! If you follow Danny's advice on how to sell tickets, you won't have an unsold seat in the house all season long!"--Ralph Black, American Symphony League
Subscription Theater: Democracy and Drama in Britain and Ireland, 1880-1939 (Material Texts)
by Matthew FranksSubscription Theater asks why turn-of-the-century British and Irish citizens spent so much time, money, and effort adding their names to subscription lists. Shining a spotlight on private play-producing clubs, public repertory theaters, amateur drama groups, and theatrical magazines, Matthew Franks locates subscription theaters in a vast constellation of civic subscription initiatives, ranging from voluntary schools and workers' hospitals to soldiers' memorials and Diamond Jubilee funds. Across these enterprises, Franks argues, subscribers created their own spaces for performing social roles from which they had long been excluded. Whether by undermining the authority of the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays and London's commercial theater producers, or by extending rights to disenfranchised women and property-less men, a diverse cast of subscribers including typists, plumbers, and maids acted as political representatives for their fellow citizens, both inside the theater and far beyond it. Citizens prized a "democratic" or "representative" subscription list as an end in itself, and such lists set the stage for the eventual public subsidy of subscription endeavors.Subscription Theater points to the importance of printed ephemera such as programs, tickets, and prospectuses in questioning any assumption that theatrical collectivity is confined to the live performance event. Drawing on new media as well as old, Franks uses a database of over 23,000 stage productions to reveal that subscribers introduced nearly a third of the plays that were most frequently revived between 1890 and the mid-twentieth century, as well as nearly half of all new translations, and they were instrumental in staging the work of such writers as Shaw and Ibsen, whose plays featured subscription lists as a plot point or prop. Although subscribers often are blamed for being a conservative force in theater, Franks demonstrates that they have been responsible for how we value audience and repertoire today, and their history offers a new account of the relationship between ephemera, drama, and democracy.
Suburban Motel
by George F. WalkerSix plays, united only by the fact that they take place in one and the same suburban motel room: Problem Child, Criminal Genius, Risk Everything, Adult Entertainment, Featuring Loretta, and The End of Civilization. Transients, lovers, the haunted, the hunted, the desperate, the dumb, each "strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard of no more.
Suburbia (new version)
by Eric Bogosian"Bogosian's script retains the playwright-performer's trademark vitriol and hammer wit."--Time OutThis new version of Eric Bogosian's best-selling play, set in a convenience store parking lot, premiered last season Off Broadway. His rewrites--for a world seeped in cell phones, hip-hop, and a new political context--render the piece "an American anyplace where everything, yet nothing, has changed" (The New York Times).Eric Bogosian's plays and solo shows include Talk Radio (Pulitzer Prize finalist); Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; and Drinking in America. He has received three OBIE awards and has toured throughout the country.
Subversions
by Julie Wilkinson Gabriele Griffin Erika BlockFirst Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Successions
by Michaela Di CesareAfter the unexpected death of their parents, two second-generation Italian Canadian brothers must come together to decide whether to hold on to the family home, which is full of secrets and hoarded junk, or save what’s left of their strained relationship. When Anthony, an uptight lawyer running for office, arrives with his former actor-turned-campaign-manager wife Cristina, they’re set on signing away the house and everything that comes with it. But Enzo, a disorganized plumber, and his pregnant girlfriend Nat have other plans. The pleasantries quickly turn to tense deliberations that unearth dramatically differing views of the group’s past experiences and present values. This clever family dramedy takes a close look at issues that affect modern second-generation immigrant families in Canada—class differences, antiquated old-world beliefs, and a crumbling Canadian dream.
Such Creatures
by Judith ThompsonTwo characters and two monologues, tied together across time and place, their stories a candid pursuit of hope and empathy, even in the face of an unbelievably cruel world. Judith Thompson's Such Creatures portrays her raw style of storytelling and showcases her incessant quest to understand the dark, neglected, and troubling corners of society. Both unbelievably cruel and unbelievably human, Such Creatures is an awe-inspiring portrayal of the breadth of the human spirit.
Suddenly the Storm: A play
by Paul SlabolepszyA smouldering dark comedy that suddenly leads to startling revelations, rage and recrimination. Combative, volatile, constantly on the verge of exploding, Dwayne and Shanell Combrink are two halves of a white South African working-class couple, living an uneasy truce as they struggle with the day-to-day trials of scraping together a living and dreaming competing dreams. But beneath Dwayne's angry, violent exterior lies the heartbreak that governs his attitude to life. Dwayne is a man in mourning. Shanell believes his current level of despair was sparked by the death of his childhood friend and recent work partner, Jonas, but the source of his mourning and anger lies much further back. When the elegant and self-contained Namhla Gumede, born on 16 June 1976, arrives on their doorstep seeking answers to questions that have remained buried for 40 years, Dwayne and Shanell finally find out the truth. What starts as a smouldering dark comedy suddenly turns into a roller-coaster ride of startling revelations, rage and recrimination, before the storm finally breaks.
Sugar & Spice
by Florence RyersonComedy / 2m, 3f / Interior / Jane Jones, almost sixteen, is visited by a young friend who has just returned from Paris with a boy complex and some acquired mannerisms which infuriate Jane. When the friend takes Jane's boyfriend, Chump Edwards, right out from under her nose, Jane is roused to a realization of Chump's worth and takes him back again. She also learns a great truth-- that more boys are caught with sugar than with vinegar.
Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy (Translations from the Asian Classics)
by Stanleigh Jones Jr.Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy is a classic play from Japan's golden age of puppet theater. Written in the eighteenth century, it tells the tale of Sugawara no Michizane, a wronged scholar-official who, in death, joins the Shinto pantheon as a nurturer of scholarship and calligraphy. The story recounts Sugawara's entanglement with the powerful Fujiwara family, who accuse Sugawara of plotting against the emperor, resulting in his exile and death in 903. After a series of misfortunes befall those who conspired against him, Sugawara's enemies appease his spirit through deification. Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy centers on three archetypical brothers and their wives. Their fates unfold against the intrigues surrounding Sugawara and his foes, which reflect the cultural values of the Edo period woven into a stylized past. This annotated translation by Stanleigh H. Jones Jr. replicates the play's poetic and idiomatic language and its original mix of register while also clarifying the drama's complex story and dialogue for students of Japanese literature and drama. An introduction situates the play within its eighteenth-century context and ninth-century setting and describes the relationship between bunraku puppet theater and kabuki. A unique illustrated appendix delves into the construction of puppets and the art of puppetry.
Suggestopedia and Language
by W. Jane BancroftFirst published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Suggs
by David WiltseFull Length, Drama / 4 m, 4 f / Int. / George Suggs, a bright, energentic young man, comes to the city to work as a sportscaster. He is fascinated but then repelled by the ugly realities he finds there, making him cynical and bitter. His career suffers, the wife he should never have married leaves him and he loses his mundane job. Dissolute and paranoid, making one last attempt to connect on a human level he employs a prostitute for company. Premiered at New York's Lincoln Center Theatre. / "Wry, funny sad, sharply observed, perceptive." -N.Y. Times
Suitehearts
by Jane Milmore Billy Van ZandtComedy / 3m, 2f / Interior / A young couple from Pennsylvania checks into a posh New York hotel to fill their weekend with bliss, only to have it filled with strangers. Timothy and his wife have inadvertently booked the same honeymoon suite as Frankie and Wanda, an older couple from New Jersey. After they scuffle over the accommodations, no one is where or with whom they should be. Filled with sight gags and one liners, this play broke the house records at New Jersey's Dam Site Dinner Theater. During the course of the evening, Timothy grows into a man, Elizabeth learns about trust, Frankie learns to respect women and Wanda learns to respect herself.
Sultans of the Street
by Anusree RoyWhen young orphans Mala and Chun Chun encounter brothers Prakash and Ojha on the busy streets of Kolkata, they are immediately at odds. The brothers come from a lower-middle-class family and spend their time flying kites instead of attending class, while Mala and Chun Chun can only dream of going to school, a goal Aunty promises will be fulfilled if they beg for money from passersby. After a petty fruit-stall heist lands Ojha in Aunty’s cunning hands, the brothers are blackmailed into begging alongside Mala and Chun Chun, forcing the children to interact. Though they find each other nuisances at first, the kids soon realize their strength in numbers as Aunty’s scheming is slowly revealed.
Summer Rain - Back to you
by Charlotte Forsdick Anna Winter / Anna FayeThe young Skyler Montrose turned her back on her hometown Bozeman years ago. Back then a scandal had shaken the sleepy Montana town. A scandal in which Skyler’s family was involved. But the events of the past still cast their shadows on another person: Mark Chastain. The one time star quarterback has become a successful businessman. When Skyler returns to Bozeman it is not only the old secrets of a youthful indiscretion that boil up again, but also a few old unrequited feelings.
Summer in the City (Mango Delight #2)
by Fracaswell HymanGet ready, world—Mango&’s about to become a STAR! In this sequel to Mango Delight, the delightful heroine&’s adventures—and misadventures—continue as she prepares to make her off-Broadway debut. Where Mango goes, drama is sure to follow! It&’s summer break, and Mango is content to spend her time babysitting her brother, hanging with her friend Izzy, and binge-watching movies late into the night. Then she runs into her drama teacher, who has some big news: their middle school play Yo, Romeo! is headed to the stage in New York City . . . and he wants Mango for the lead role! After overcoming her mom&’s initial reluctance—and with some firm rules established—Mango goes off to Brooklyn to stay with her Aunt Zendaya in a teeny apartment and prepare for her theatrical debut. It&’s the opportunity of a lifetime, but soon Mango must confront homesickness, insecurity, and the all-important question of what it means to be a good friend—especially when you&’re far away from the people you love.