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Broadway Bookshelf

Biographies, show books, musical scores, history, and must-read theatre books.
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Sanford Meisner on Acting (1987)

Meisner, a member of the Theater Guild and the Group Theater, has devoted most of 50 years to teaching acting and is one of the great unsung resources in American theater. This book is not an acting text, but a journal of a 15-month course taken by 16 adult actors. We follow them as they progress from early exercises through preparation to detailed scene work. Meisner emphasizes emotional truth and acting as the reality of doing. His students find the course difficult, but most improve markedly....
Sanford Meisner on Acting Cover
Environmental Theater (1973)

Here are the exercises which began as radical departures from standard actor training etiquette and which stand now as classic means through which the performer discovers his or her true power of transformation. Available for the first time in fifteen years, this new expanded edition offers a new generation of theater artists the gospel according to Richard Schechner, the guru whose principles and influence have influenced a quarter century of theater.
Environmental Theater Cover
A Practical Handbook for the Actor (1986)

6 working actors describe their methods and philosophies of the theater. All have worked with playwright David Mamet at the Goodman Theater in Chicago.
A Practical Handbook for the Actor Cover
Audition (1979)

Michael Shurtleff has been casting director for Broadway shows like Chicago and Becket and for films like The Graduate and Jesus Christ Superstar. His legendary course on auditioning has launched hundreds of successful careers. Now in this book he tells the all-important HOW for all aspiring actors, from the beginning student of acting to the proven talent trying out for that chance-in-a-million role!
Audition Cover
Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays (1983)

This guide to playreading for students and practitioners of both theater and literature complements, rather then contradicts or repeats, traditional methods of literary analysis of scripts. Ball developed his method during his work as Literary Director at the Guthrie Theater, building his guide on the crafts playwrights of every period and style use to make their plays stageworthy. The text is full of tools for students and practitioners to use as they investigate plot, character, theme, expo...
Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays Cover

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