Theater Books For Actors

One of Ireland's leading playwrights, Conor McPherson sets his latest play around a house hemmed in by a restive, starving populace in rural Ireland. In May 1822, the defrocked Reverend Berkeley arrives at the once-glorious Mount Prospect House to accompany seventeen-year-old Hannah to England, where she is to be married off in order to absolve her mother's debts. But compelled by the peculiar voices that haunt his enchanting young charge and a fascination with the spirits that pervade the house...

With 40 monologues for men chosen from plays written in the last 10 years, this collection offers a variety of compelling one-person pieces. Commentary from a theater professional who has worked on the play is included with each monologue, along with the context from the play in which the piece is taken. Offering characters that can be richly brought to life, this volume provides a useful tool for professional and amateur actors, acting students, and drama coaches.

This collection considers what is at stake when a theatrical space is created and when a performance takes place, asking under which circumstances the topology of theatre becomes political. The book focuses on this issue from various angles, taking theatre as a cultural paradigm for political dimensions of space in its respective historical context. From its very beginnings, theatre has been both an art and a public space shared by actors and spectators, and as a result its entity and history i...

Since its modest beginning in 1959, The Second City in Chicago has become a world-renowned bastion of hilarity. A training ground for many of today’s top comedic talents—including Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd, Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, Bill Murray, and Amy Sedaris— it was an early blueprint for improv-based sketch revues in North America and abroad. Its immeasurable influence also extends to television, film, and the Broadway stage. Mike Thomas interviewed scores of key figures who have contributed...

Three new works from José Rivera, a writer known for his lush language, open heart, and stylistic flirting with the surreal. Boleros for the Disenchanted is the moving story of the playwrights own parents: their sweet courtship in 1950s Puerto Rico, and then forty years later in more difficult times in America. With Brainpeople, Rivera explores the troubled minds of three women in a post-apocalyptic setting who feast on a freshly slaughtered tiger. In School of the Americas, he imagines Che Guev...

Providing an international overview of the latest work and thinking in Drama and Education, and featuring interviews with a worldwide variety of leading practitioners and theorists, this book explores how Educational Theatre, Applied Theatre and Drama Therapy facilitate change within schools, community centres, prisons, and theatres.

Garrison Keillor and Philip Brunelle have performed together with a long list of great orchestras: the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Chicago, L.A. Philharmonic, Cleveland, St. Louis, Minnesota Orchestra, Seattle, and San Francisco. After years on the road, they brought the show home to St. Paul, the Fitzgerald Theater, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. As always, Keillor served as amiable host and narrator, Brunelle as guest conductor. The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra was the f...

Theatre Communications Group (TCG) is pleased to announce the publication of Chinglish, an uproarious new comedy by two-time Pulitzer finalist David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly, Yellow Face). Chinglish received its world premiere at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2011 before transferring to Broadway later that year. Declared the “Best American Play of 2011” by Time magazine, Chinglish will be adapted for an upcoming film by director-producer Justin Lin with a screenplay by Hwang. Springing from ...

The hilarious script for the Broadway play Peter and the Starcatcher is presented along with commentary by the playwright, the directors, the composer, the set designer, and our own Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. Filled with behind-the-scenes information and photos of the cast and crew, this annotated script will enchant and entertain fans of the book and the play alike.

In the first book of its kind to be published in twenty years, ten award-winning and current Broadway designers—five set designers, four lighting designers, and one projection designer—discuss the business aspects of the theatre world, sharing relevant insider information and strategies that will prove invaluable to aspiring and seasoned theatrical designers alike. Culled from years of experience, the information offered in these enlightening conversations will strengthen readers’ understanding...

Many colorful theatrical activities can be found throughout China. The best known and most unique of these is perhaps traditional Chinese opera, which has a history of over 800 years. However, since the early twentieth century, following increased contact with the West, drama without music has also become popular in China. The development and prosperity of modern drama has created a new landscape for Chinese theater, which, as a whole, has become more diverse. In this illustrated introduction F...

There are thousands of students enrolled in school drama classes in yet very often young actors cannot be heard, are culturally encouraged to trail off at the ends of sentences, and habitually use only the lowest pitches of the voice. Drama teachers, frequently ask, “How can I get my students to speak up, to be clear, to articulate?” Voice and the Young Actor is written for the school actor, is inviting in format, language and illustration and offers clear and inspiring instructions. An 85-...

TCG is proud to present Mojo and Other Plays, a new collection of plays by the author of the Tony Award-nominated Jerusalem. One of Britain’s most compelling and original playwrights, Butterworth follows up the publication of that critically acclaimed play with this collection of six early works. The volume includes the Olivier Award-winning Mojo, as well as an interview between the playwright and Nick Hern, founder of Nick Hern Books.

The work of an outstanding Georgian theatre director and teacher Mikhail Tumanishvili (1921-1996) was first published in Georgia in 1976 and is now made available for the first time in an English translation. Before the Rehearsal Begins is a precise and demanding exploration of the director's creative process. The book is richly illustrated with diagrams and drawings sketched by the author and is inspiring in its simplicity and imaginative freedom. Tumanishvili is acknowledged worldwide as a...

The piano music of Maurice Ravel is among the most thrilling, the most colorful, and, for pianists, the most challenging of the repertoire. This book is about how performers and listeners can discover it and relate to it - how it sounds and feels under the fingers and within the receptive imagination. But to write about those experiences, to explore the background, influences, and impulses behind Ravel's music, is to be engaged in a form of biography. Discovering the delicate melancholy of the ...

"A brilliant and daring book on how art reveals life, how it illuminates childhood beyond what the sciences of development can tell us." ---Jerome Bruner, University Professor, New York University "Combining the surgical precision of a psychoanalytically informed critic with the oracular eloquence of a brilliant close reader, Ellen Handler Spitz reads our cultural fortunes about childhood and parenting through works of art. Moving us (in both senses of the term) from the serene plenitude of...

The Lettre sur la Comédie de l'Imposteur is the only work of any length which does full justice to comedy in the seventeenth century as a serious dramatic form. It is an important document in its own right and because it is inseparable from the historical context of Molière's Le Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur and the circumstances which influenced its development.

Droznin is remarkable and valuable for his ability to combine serious and historically contextualised reflection on the body, psychology and human behaviour with an incorporated and systematic exploration of these ideas in practice.' Paul Allain Andrei Droznin’s Physical Actor Training presents a unique introduction to the master teacher behind a programme of stage movement training that is taught all over the world. Droznin’s influence on the way biomechanical principals and the relationshi...

The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezín, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death; but in the midst of this was a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children’s drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners’ theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavors, deserves serious attention as well. Performing Captivity collects ele...

From Komisarjevsky in the 1920s, to Cheek by Jowl’s Russian ‘sister company’ almost a century later, Russian actor training has had a unique influence on modern British theatre. Russians in Britain, edited by Jonathan Pitches, is the first work of its type to identify a relationship between both countries’ theatrical traditions as continuous as it is complex. Unravelling new strands of transmission and translation linking the great Russian émigré practitioners to the second and third generat...

The Brecht Yearbook is a venue for discussion about aspects of theater and literature that were of particular interest to Bertolt Brecht, especially the politics of literature and the politics of theater in a global context. The Volume Brecht in / and Asia contains twenty-six essays based on presentations given at “Brecht in/and Asia,” the thirteenth Symposium of the International Brecht Society (IBS), which was held at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa in 2010. Themes covered include Bre...

In Darkening Mirrors, Stephanie Leigh Batiste examines how African Americans participated in U.S. cultural imperialism in Depression-era stage and screen performances. A population treated as second-class citizens at home imagined themselves as empowered, modern U.S. citizens and transnational actors in plays, operas, ballets, and films. Many of these productions, such as the 1938 hits Haiti and The "Swing" Mikado recruited large casts of unknown performers, involving the black community not on...

While award-winning author Rudolfo Anaya is known primarily as a novelist, his genius is also evident in dramatic works performed regularly in his native New Mexico and throughout the world. Billy the Kid and Other Plays collects seven of these works and offers them together for the first time. Like his novels, many of Anaya’s plays are built from the folklore of the Southwest. This volume opens with The Season of La Llorona, in which Anaya fuses the Mexican legend of the dreaded “crying wom...

Comedy 5m, 3f, Possible Cast Expansion / Interior Sea Spray is a charming beach town, perfect for romantic getaways and cliff-side proposals. While tourists walk around with stars in their eyes, the locals take their lumps and watch their relationships fray and fizzle. Karl is a self-professed good guy who bought the little village dream for his wife, only to have her run off with the town aromatherapist. Now he's stuck with a quaint souvenir shop he never wanted, and the vengeful impulse ...

Theater is the room where performance happens. Where people sit and watch other people. The moment to moment event that unfolds hinges on our imperfect-ness. . . . Theatre for Beginners is a manual for the actor based in the belief that the person is interesting before the performing happens, and the essence of good stage work is rooted in a constant state of beginning. Richard Maxwell, the downtown writer and director with a deadpan aesthetic and an ever-innovative body of work, has written ...

As stage and screen artists explore new means to enhance their craft, a new wave of interest in expressive movement and physical improvisation has developed. And in order to bring authenticity and believability to a character, it has become increasingly vital for actors to be aware of movement and physical acting. Stage and screen artists - including dancers, clowns, puppeteers, singers, and other performers who combine acting with their art - must now call upon physical presence, movement on st...

In Exercises for Rebel Artists, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes use their extensive teaching and performance experience with La Pocha Nostra to help students and practitioners to create ‘border art’. Designed to take readers right into the heart of radical performance, the authors use a series of crucial practical exercises, honed in workshops worldwide, to help create challenging theatre which transcends the boundaries of nation, gender, and racial identity. The book features: ...

In Tribes, Billy, who is deaf, is the only one who actually listens in his idiosyncratic, fiercely argumentative bohemian family. But when he meets Sylvia, who is going deaf, he decides he finally wants to be heard. With excoriating dialogue and sharp, compassionate insights, Nina Raine crafts a penetrating play about belonging, family and the limitations of communication.

Theatre in Pieces: politics, poetics and interdisciplinary collaboration is an innovative compilation of seven highly acclaimed productions by key practitioners of non-playwright-driven theatre. Each playtext is reproduced in full and accompanied by extensive notes from members of the original producing theatre. A substantial introduction by Anna Furse provides an overview of the works and contextualizes their reading by revealing how a script can emerge from or provoke a collaborative devising ...

It’s been said (actually, it’s been sung), that when a Broadway baby says goodnight, it’s early in the morning. But what about those Broadway nights? The thrill of being on stage, the adulation, the applause, the stage door fanatics… Stephen Sherrin has no such life. Sure, he dallies on the Great White Way, but when he does have a job it’s beneath the stage, subbing in the orchestra pit. Other parts of his life are the pits, too—including his love life. Why does he always date men who already ha...

Current market forces in the performing arts, such as aging audiences, electronic media, and HD broadcasts, have changed the operatic landscape. Young opera singers entering the workforce find themselves navigating difficult and highly competitive waters. Previously ignored skill sets become assets - and, in many cases, requirements - in casting. But most singers graduate from college having never taken a formal acting class and knowing little about acting technique as it pertains to their craft...

Pantomime is a much-loved institution, but how is it created? What tools and processes are used? Working from purely a title, this practical book explains how scripts and a design can develop together through the creative processes to culminate in the wonder and excitement of a unique production on opening night.

The starting point for virtually all theatre is studying the play script, but what does this involve? Interpreting the Play Script: Contemplation and Analysis argues that one type of analysis cannot fit every play, nor does one method suit every theatre artist or collaborative team. The first text to combine traditional and non-traditional models, it gives students a range of tools with which to approach different kinds of performance. Supported by pragmatic questions, practical exercises an...

Ed Hooks' indispensable acting guidebook for animators has been fully updated and improved! Hooks uses basic acting theory to explain everything from character movement and facial expressions to interaction and scene construction. Just as acting on film and on stage are very different disciplines, so is the use of acting theory in creating an animated character, scene or story. Acting for Animators is full of essential craft tips from an acting master. New to this Routledge edition: - ...

With her quartet of plays set in small-town Vermont, twenty-nine-year-old Annie Baker is making a big impact on the American theater. Circle Mirror Transformation, which takes place in a summer acting class and alternates between theater exercises and moments between classmates, shares the 2010 OBIE Award for Best Play with The Aliens, Baker's "gentle and extraordinarily beautiful new play" (The New York Times) that explores weighty topics of love and death through the easy banter of the slacker...

Founding member of the Provincetown Players, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, best-selling novelist and short story writer Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was a great contributor to American literature. An exploration of eleven plays written between the years 1915 and 1943, this critical study focuses on one of Glaspell’s central themes, the interplay between place and identity. This study examines the means Glaspell employs to engage her characters in proxemical and verbal dialectics with the forc...

The world of young people in the United States today is exhilaratingly global, enriched by the influences of many various cultures. With that, however, comes the need for children to retain confidence in their own heritage while empathizing with people who might seem very different from them. The protagonists of these four plays—written for the world-renowned Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis—strive to achieve that balance with determination, love, and humor. The richness and relevanc...

Freeing the Actor is the seventh in a series of acting books by Eric Morris, which explain and describe his unique system of acting. In this book, which is totally aimed at the instrument, Eric has implemented a complete approach to eliminating the obstacles, dependencies, traps, and habits that plague and block actors from functioning from an authentic, organic place. By teaching actors how not to act, Eric leads them to understand that they must experience in reality what the character is expe...

Encourages reluctant participants to engage, collaborate, and develop not just skills for drama but skills for life. Following the ninety games and exercises aimed at developing core skills, the book offers scenarios for a series of improvisational challenges that test participants' abilities in mediation, communication, negotiation, assertiveness, and managing emotions.

Grounded equally in discussions of theater history, literary genre, and theory, Martin Puchner's Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama explores the conflict between avant-garde theater and modernism. While the avant-garde celebrated all things theatrical, a dominant strain of modernism tended to define itself against the theater, valuing lyric poetry and the novel instead. Defenders of the theater dismiss modernism's aversion to the stage and its mimicking actors as one more for...

Disaster capitalism is an increasingly popular critical paradigm for contextualizing and understanding life in the twenty-first century. This book includes three full-length plays by award-winning dramatist Rick Mitchell: Shadow Anthropology, a dark comedy about the US occupation of Afghanistan; Through the Roof, a Faustian trip through the social history of natural disaster in New Orleans; and Celestial Flesh, a sacrilegious romp through the 1980s sanctuary movement. Placing the plays in histor...

The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare is a window onto how today’s actors contribute to the continuing life and relevance of Shakespeare’s plays. The process of acting is notoriously hard to document, but this volume reaches behind famous performances to examine the actors’ craft, their development and how they engage with playtexts. Each chapter relies upon privilieged access to its subject to offer an unparalleled insight into contemporary practice. This volume explores the tech...

To win a screen role, an actor must learn to contend with an on-camera audition. Understanding how to make the crucial adjustments to one’s craft that this kind of audition requires is vital to the career of any screen actor. Auditioning On Camera sets out the key elements of a successful on-camera audition and explains how to put them into practice. Joseph Hacker draws on 35 years of acting experience to guide the reader through the screen auditioning process with an engaging and undaunting...

In Fifty Words, a Brooklyn brownstone becomes a marital battleground for Adam and Jan; What the Night Is For dramatizes Adam's infidelity at a hotel with former lover Melinda; and in Side Effects, Melinda and her husband Hugh come to terms with their broken relationship. Michael Weller has written over forty dramatic works, including the plays Moonchildren, Fishing, Loose Ends, and Beast, and the screenplays for Hair and Ragtime.

“The first two generations of Asian American drama articulated experiences and issues of race and identity. In this anthology, a new generation of Asian American playwrights explores the myriad ways in which Asians live in America.”—Editor Chay Yew This first major anthology of contemporary Asian American drama in almost two decades collects the following: Julia Cho’s Durango; Sunil Kuruvilla’s Rice Boy; Han Ong’s Swoony Planet; Sung Rno’s Wave; Diana Son’s Boy; Alice Tuan’s Last of the Suns;...