The Best American Short Plays 2013-2014
The Best American Short Plays 2013-2014

Author: William W. Demastes

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2015-06-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1495035417

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(Best American Short Plays). For more than 70 years, The Best American Short Plays has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. From its inception, it has identified cutting-edge playwrights Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and others who have gone on to establish award-winning careers. The Best American Short Plays 2013-2014 takes a look at our changing times. "Uncertain" seems to be the watchword of today's world, full of surprises, shocks, and even a few delights. Uncertainty brings with it fear and insecurity, as well as nostalgic longing for the good old days, but for some, uncertainty means opportunity and along with it the prospect of change for the better. This volume explores various experiences of uncertainty and includes a series of nine plays gathered by Daniel Gallant, entitled Nine Signs of the Times , as well as short plays by Neil LaBute, John Guare, Laura Shaine Cunningham, Daniel F. Levin, Quincy Long, Halley Feiffer, Caridad Svich, and Clay McLeod Chapman. This collection will be complemented by a range of plays from around the country by playwrights likewise observing and digesting the signs of the times. Together the plays of this volume work as a time capsule, capturing the fears and longings of a world on the verge and in the midst of big changes, hopefully for the better but quite possibly for the worse.

The Best American Short Plays 2012-2013
The Best American Short Plays 2012-2013

Author: William W. Demastes

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2014-06-01

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1480397210

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(Applause Books). For over 70 years, The Best American Short Plays has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. From its inception, it has identified cutting-edge playwrights who have gone on to establish award-winning careers, including Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and more. In this volume, the plays capture the struggle between "hot tempers and cold decrees." Humans love to think of themselves as rational beings well in control of their lives and surroundings from sunup to sundown, sundown to sunrise. We learn to follow rules of proper behavior and more than happily issue out advice to our friends who just can't get a handle on themselves. Restraint and order, after all, are the cornerstones of human society and civilization. The problem is that human nature bucks and bridles at every attempt to socialize and civilize. Shakespeare got it right when he penned the observation, "The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree." In those few words he has managed to capture precisely why it is so difficult to be human; if it were okay simply to let our hot tempers prevail, life would be so much easier. But cold decrees are what prevent us from self-destruction, and so we endure the struggle.

The Director as Collaborator
The Director as Collaborator

Author: Robert Knopf

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-04-07

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1317326571

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The Director as Collaborator teaches essential directing skills while emphasizing how directors and theater productions benefit from collaboration. Good collaboration occurs when the director shares responsibility for the artistic creation with the entire production team, including actors, designers, stage managers, and technical staff. Leadership does not preclude collaboration; in theater, these concepts can and should be complementary. Students will develop their abilities by directing short scenes and plays and by participating in group exercises. New to the second edition: updated interviews, exercises, forms, and appendices new chapter on technology including digital research, previsualization and drafting programs, and web-sharing sites new chapter on devised and ensemble-based works new chapter on immersive theater, including material and exercises on environmental staging and audience–performer interaction

Action!
Action!

Author: Robert Benedetti

Publisher: Waveland Press

Published: 2022-11-14

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1478650265

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Multiple award-winning producer and leading teacher of acting Robert Benedetti offers a no-nonsense, detailed, and clearly structured approach to the fundamentals of acting for the camera. Benedetti uses the same approach he has employed in writing and teaching for over fifty years — defining underlying principles, presenting them in a logically sequential program of development, and providing experiential exercises to help future, as well as experienced, actors shine in film and television.

Best Monologues from The Best American Short Plays, Volume Three
Best Monologues from The Best American Short Plays, Volume Three

Author: William W. Demastes

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2015-04-01

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1495028887

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(Best American Short Plays). "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Really? Words can break spirits, destroy confidence. They can also build hope and incite great acts of heroism. Playwrights know this, and so do theater audiences. Otherwise, why go? Words matter and carry clout every bit as dangerous as a hammer or crowbar. This, too, playwrights know. The monologues in this volume are full of such blows, striking at our imaginations and our memories, generating responses such as joyful laughter or chilling surprise. Others squeeze us into worlds we've never experienced, or perhaps experienced at the furthest edges of memory and recollection. Still others may help us alter the way we see certain things, people, or beliefs. Best Monologues from The Best American Short Plays, Volume Three is a collection of monologues drawn from the popular Best American Short Plays series, an archive of works from many of the best playwrights active today. Long or short, serious or not, excerpts or entireties, this collection abounds in speech acts that may trigger physical reactions and almost certainly will transform an attitude or two, drawing out lost memories, creating new ones, and definitely entertaining, engaging, amusing us all along the way.

New Voices Playwrights Theatre Annual Anthology of Short Plays 2016
New Voices Playwrights Theatre Annual Anthology of Short Plays 2016

Author: John Bolen

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2016-08-11

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1365323250

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Third annual anthology of short plays from the playwrights of New Voices Playwrights Theatre. Includes plays by Austin Peay, John Franceschini, John Lane, Michael Buss, John Bolen, Anne V. Grob, Linda Whitmore, David Rusiecki, Mark Bowen, Pattric Walker and Lynne Bolen.

New Voices Playwrights Theatre Annual Anthology of Short Plays 2015
New Voices Playwrights Theatre Annual Anthology of Short Plays 2015

Author: John Bolen

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2015-08-28

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1329518071

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Annual anthology of short plays by members of the New Voices Playwrights for the year 2015. Includes plays by John Bolen, Lynne Bolen, Mark Bowen, Michael C. Buss, Frank Farmer, John Franceschini, Anne V. Grob, John Lane, Austin Peay, David Rusiecki, Pattric Walker, and Linda Whitmore.

Understanding John Guare
Understanding John Guare

Author: William Demastes

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2017-02-28

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 1611177391

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A comprehensive study of an award-winning playwright known for unconventional blending of genres John Guare, one of the most innovative and influential contemporary American playwrights of the last sixty years, is best known for such works as House of Blue Leaves, winner of an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, and four Tony Awards, and Six Degrees of Separation, recipient of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play and the Olivier Best Play Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. In Understanding John Guare, William W. Demastes provides a concise biography and analyzes the playwright's career from his earliest works produced off-off Broadway in the 1960s to his most recent Broadway play, A Free Man of Color, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Often compared to his contemporaries Sam Shepard and David Mamet, who have distinctive voices tied to their mastery of realistic, idiomatic American English, Guare has a style that is perhaps more varied, Demastes speculates, the result of his formal training in theater. After earning a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, Guare earned an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. He then polished his theater craft in New York City during the exciting and turbulent 1960s, breaking from realist conventions and creating an unlikely blend of comedy, burlesque, stand-up comedy, and absurdly incongruous plotlines. The result has been a theater of surprise that is rich in stage action and experimentally invigorating. Demastes examines Guare's tools and techniques such as mixing serious with comic, creating characters who break into song and dance, inserting stand-up comedy routines, and drawing from the most absurd incongruities of everyday life. In doing so, Guare has created plays about the best and worst of humanity, about lost souls, and about delusional ideals.