This is Carolyn Gage's second volume of monologues and scenes for lesbian actors. Some of her characters are historical, and not always lesbian: actresses Nance O'Neil and Henrietta Vinton Davis, Alcoholics Anonymous pioneer Marty Mann, lighting designer Jean Rosenthal... and Lizzie Borden's maid! A fascinating companion to her first volume.
Finally! A book for lesbians who are tired of passing at auditions and in acting classes and workshops! Here at last, from one of the most talented and inventive contemporary playwrights, are twenty-five monologues and forty-five scenes by, for, and about lesbians.
All actors and acting teachers need The Ultimate Scene and Monologue Sourcebook, the invaluable guide to finding just the right piece for every audition. This remarkable book describes the characters, action, and mood for more than 1,000 scenes in over 300 plays. This unique format is ideal for acting teachers who want their students to understand each monologue in context. Using these guidelines, the actor can quickly pinpoint the perfect monologue, then find the text in the Samuel French or Dramatist Play Service edition of the play. Newly revised and expanded, the book also includes the author’s own assessment of each monologue.
Fourteen bold, dynamic, and daring women take the stage in this collection of women's lives and stories. Individually and collectively, these writers and performers speak the unspoken and perform the heretofore unperformed. The first section includes scripts and essays about performances of the lives of Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Cushman, Anaïs Nin, Calamity Jane, and Mary Martin. The essays consider intriguing interpretive issues that arise when a woman performer represents another woman's life. In the second section, seven performers--Tami Spry, Jacqueline Taylor, Linda Park-Fuller, Joni Jones, Terri Galloway, Linda M. Montano, and Laila Farah--tell their own stories. Ranging from narrrative lectures (sometimes aided by slides and props) to theatrical performances, their works wrest comic and dramatic meaning from a world too often chaotic and painful. Their performances engage issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, loss of parent, disability, life and death, and war and peace. The volume as a whole highlights issues of representation, identity, and staging in autobiographical performance. It examines the links among theory and criticism of women's autobiography, feminist performance theory, and performance practice.
PLAYS FOR THREE is a unique anthology of 23 outstanding plays for three actors by an exciting mix of established and emerging playwrights. Everyone’s heard that “Two’s company, three’s a crowd.” That may be true on a date, but on stage, three is a magic number. Add a third character to any interaction and the dramatic possibilities increase exponentially: suddenly there’s competition, intrigue, shifting allegiances, comic misunderstandings, secrets and lies. Triangles make excellent drama, and three-handers offer the kind of substantial and challenging roles that actors love. Plays for Three offers six full-length and seventeen short plays featuring dramatic trios of every sort. Rob Ackerman Pete Barry Stephen Belber Cesi Davidson Adrienne Dawes Philip Dawkins Catherine Filloux Madeleine George Amlin Gray Frank Higgins Cory Hinkle Wendy Kesselman Eric Lane Kitt Lavoie Mark Harvey Levine Matthew Lopez Donald Margulies Anna Moench A. Rey Pamatmat David Riedy Nina Shengold Stephen Webb Craig Wright
Plays for Two is a unique anthology of twenty-eight terrific plays for two actors, by a mix of celebrated playwrights and cutting-edge new voices. It takes two to tango—or to perform a duet, fight a duel, or play ping-pong. The two-character play is dramatic confrontation stripped to its essence. These four full-length and twenty-four short plays feature pairs of every sort—strangers, rivals, parents and children, siblings, co-workers, friends, and lovers—swooning or sparring, meeting cute or parting ways. In a dizzying range of moods and styles, these two-handers offer the kind of meaty, challenging roles actors love, while providing readers and audiences with the pleasures of watching the complex give-and-take dynamics of two keenly matched characters. Plays by: Billy Aronson, David Auburn, Pete Barry, Naveen Bahar Choudhury, Anthony Clarvoe, Steven Dietz, Halley Feiffer, Simon Fill, Frank Higgins, David Ives, Jacob Juntunen, Ean Miles Kessler, Neil LaBute, Eric Lane, Kitt Lavoie, Jacqueline E. Lawton, Mark Harvey Levine, Elizabeth Meriwether, Michael Mitnick, Daria Polatin, Marco Ramirez, Kelly Rhodes, Jose Rivera, Paul Rudnick, Edwin Sanchez, Nina Shengold, Cori Thomas, Doug Wright
Drawing on conversations with hundreds of women about their genitalia, the author presents a collection of performance pieces from her one-woman show of the same name.
Winter's Tales tackles the question of whether narrative and drama are as different from each other as some scholars have assumed. By examining everything from voice and tense to "scene and summary," George, a theater professor and novelist, analyzes the many choices a writer has when framing a story. She addresses narrative theoretical ground before focusing on contemporary plays that are "novelistic." She finishes the study by examining the problems of adaptation from novel to stage. Her account is-by way of its essayistic style-personal, at times a writer's journal of reading and writing discoveries. In Winter's Tales, George demonstrates, among other things, the ways the diegetic is evident in the very content of frame plays and divided plays: she distinguishes between kinds of memory plays by cataloguing the possible stances of the narrator: she also covers subjects like multiple narration, and she gives accounts of the epic, dramatic, and lyric solutions to adapting novels. Kathleen George is a Professor in the Theatre Arts Department at the University of Pittsburgh.
