The New Inne
Playes in themselves have neither hopes, nor feares, Their fate is only in their hearers eares: If you expect more then you had to*night, The maker is sick, and sad. But do him right.
Broadway Bookshelf — For Actors — Page 15
Biographies, show books, musical scores, history, and must-read theatre books.
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For Actors Books
The Alchemist
The Alchemist is a sublimely accomplished satirical farce about dreams of self-refinement: people want to transform themselves into something nobler, richer, more powerful, and more virile just as base metal was touted to be transformed into gold in the alchemical process. First performed in 1610 and set in the same contemporary London time period, the plot revolves around scheming con artists during their master’s absence from the house. Face, Subtle and Doll Common dupe a series of ‘c...
Epicoene: Or, The Silent Woman
"Epicoene, or the Silent Woman is a comedy by Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson. It was originally performed by the Blackfriars Children, a group of boy players, in 1609. It was, by Jonson's admission, a failure on its first presentation; however, John Dryden and others championed it, and after the Restoration it was frequently revived--indeed, a reference by Samuel Pepys to a performance on July 6, 1660 places it among the first plays legally performed after Charles II's ascension. The play ...
Volpone and Other Plays
The three plays collected in this volume depict the faults, errors and foibles of ordinary people with exuberant humour, savage satire and acute observations. "Volpone" portrays a rich Venetian who pretends to be dying so that his despised acquaintances will flock to his bedside with extravagant gifts in hope of an inheritance. "The Alchemist" also deals with greed and gullibility, as a rascally trio of confidence tricksters, claiming to have the legendary Philosopher's Stone, fool a series of ...
Every Man in His Humor
Every Man in His Humour is a 1598 play by the English playwright Ben Jonson. The play belongs to the subgenre of the "humours comedy," in which each major character is dominated by an overriding humour or obsession. All the available evidence indicates that the play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1598 at the Curtain Theatre. That date is given in the play's reprint in Jonson's 1616 folio collection of his works; the text of the play (IV,iv,15) contains an allusion to John Bar...
Cynthia's Revels
Cynthia's Revels was one element in the so-called Poetomachia or War of the Theatres between Jonson and rival playwrights John Marston and Thomas Dekker. Ben Jonson coined the term poetmaster, which he defined as an inferior poet with pretensions to artistic value. Ben Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. He is known for his satirical plays such as Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. Jonson was a great reader and lover of controversy. He had an unparalleled bre...
The Ground on Which I Stand
August Wilson's radical and provocative call to arms.
Master Olof (A Drama in Five Acts)
A drama based 'the Luther of Sweden'
Creditors, and Pariah
Johan August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a Swedish writer, playwright, and painter. Strindberg is known as one of the fathers of modern theatre. His work falls into two major literary movements, Naturalism and Expressionism. His novel The Red Room (1879) brought him fame. His early plays were written in the Naturalistic style. His best-known play from this period is Miss Julie (1888). Later, he underwent a time of inner turmoil known as the Inferno Period, which culminated in the production of a ...
Open Letters to the Intimate Theater
Swedish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, who combined in his works psychology, naturalism, and later elements of new literary forms. Strindberg was married three times – several of his plays drew on the problems of his marriages and reflected his constant interest in self-analysis. A sensitive and controversial writer, who suffered from hostile reviews, Strindberg represented the 19th-century ideal of artist as a free personality, unrestrained by convention.
August Strindberg: Selected Essays
This is the first fully edited translation of a series of essays by the great Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. The essays, edited and translated by Michael Robinson, have been selected for the light they shed, both directly and indirectly, on Strindberg's contribution to the European theater, first in such masterpieces of psychological realism as The Father and Miss Julie, and subsequently in those works, including A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, with which he largely established a basis...
Miss Julie and The Stronger: Two Plays
Frank McGuinness presents scintillating new versions of two of August Strindberg's plays -- one a major work, the other less well known. Miss Julie is Strindberg's examination of power, sex, and class, set on a midsummer's eve in a nobleman's house and focusing on the shifting relationship between Miss Julie, the daughter of the house, and Jean, her father's manservant. The Stronger is a short play that explores the complex range of emotions felt by Madame X when she encounters Mademoiselle Y, ...
A Dream Play
Following the logic of a dream—in which characters merge, locations change in an instant, and a locked door recurs obsessively—Strindberg’s 1902 A Dream Play is a potent mix of Freud plus Alice in Wonderland. Caryl Churchill, perhaps the most fascinating and respected female dramatist in the English-speaking world, has taken on Strindberg’s Dream in this spare and resonant adaptation.
Married
He had just completed his thirteenth year when his mother died. He felt that he had lost a real friend for during the twelve months of her illness he had come to know her personally as it were and established a relationship between them which is rare between parents and children. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Captain's Tiger
The newest work by the acclaimed South African playwright. The New Yorker has said of Athol Fugard, "A rare playwright, who could be a primary candidate for either the Nobel Prize in Literature or the Nobel Peace Prize." His major works for the stage include: Blood Knot; "Master Harold"...and the boys; My Children! My Africa!; A Lesson from Aloes; The Road to Mecca; Valley Song; and The Captain's Tiger.
Exits And Entrances
"A thought-provoking, elegant, and engrossing new play by Athol Fugard."-The Hollywood Reporter "A rare playwright, who could be a primary candidate for either the Nobel Prize in Literature or the Nobel Peace Prize."-The New Yorker "Athol Fugard can say more with a single line than most playwrights convey in an entire script. One phrase from his new play, 'He's dying of unimportance,' relates to an offstage character, but it also strikingly sums up the slow, painful decline of its fading ...
Victory
South African playwright, director and actor Athol Fugard and Shubert Organization Chairman Philip J. Smith have been awarded 2011 Special Tony Awards for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. Playwright, performer and activist Eve Ensler will receive the 2011 Isabelle Stevenson Award, which recognizes an individual from the theater community who has made a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of humanitarian, social service or charitable organizations. The three rec...
A Lesson from Aloes
The New Yorker has said of Athol Fugard, "A rare playwright, who could be a primary candidate for either the Nobel Prize in Literature or the Nobel Peace Prize." His major works for the stage include: Blood Knot; "Master Harold"...and the boys; My Children! My Africa!; A Lesson from Aloes; The Road to Mecca; Valley Song; and The Captain's Tiger.
After the Fall: A Play in Two Acts
A lost character draws upon events in his past as he searches for life's meaning in Miller's powerful play.
On Politics and the Art of Acting
Ronald Reagan might have been the first professional actor elected president, but as Arthur Miller reminds us in his delightfully acerbic, On Politics and the Art of Acting, Reagan was by no means the only actor to occupy the White House in modern times. Beginning with our latest farcical election, Miller considers the twin arts of acting and politics in our brave new Age of Entertainment and contrasts the relatively poor thespian skills of presidential candidates Bush and Gore with the con...
Conversations with Miller
CONVERSATIONS WITH MILLER offers a personal and revealing account of one of the major playwrights of our time. Arthur Miller is revealed in deep and candid conversation with the highly regarded dramatic critic, Mel Gussow. In this series of interviews, which took place over 40 years, Miller is astonishingly forthcoming about his creative sources, his accomplishments and his disappointment; about his staunch resistance to the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950's; about his private life including h...
Salesman in Beijing
" In 1983 Arthur Miller was invited to direct a Chinese version of his play, "Death of a Salesman." "Salesman in Beijing" is his day by day account of his experience. Most of the book focuses on the problems of communication with the Chinese actors as a result of linguistic and cultural differences. He feels that he was able to overcome these difficulties because of the dedication of the actors and the fact that the play itself deals with universal qualities that transcend local culture. He ...
The Theater Essays Of Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller is one of the most important and enduring playwrights of the last fifty years. This new edition of The Theater Essays has been expanded by nearly fifty percent to include his most significant articles and interviews since the book's initial publication in 1978. Within these pages Miller discusses the roots of modern drama, the nature of tragedy, and the state of contemporary theater; offers illuminating observations on Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, O'Neill, and Williams; probes the ...
The Great Adventure
Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a British novelist. He was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. At age 21 he went to London as a solicitor's clerk. He won a literary competition in Tit Bits magazine in 1889 and was encouraged to take up journalism full time. From 1900 he devoted himself full time to writing, giving up the editorship and writing much serious criticism, and also theatre journalism, one of his special interests. In 1902 Anna of the Five...
The Eleven Comedies
The Clouds, Lysistrata, Peace, The Acharnians, The Knights
The Knights
In many respects 'The Knights' may be reckoned the great Comedian's masterpiece, the direct personal attack on the then all-powerful Cleon, with its scathing satire and tremendous invective, being one of the most vigorous and startling things in literature. Already in 'The Acharnians' he had threatened to "cut up Cleon the Tanner into shoe-leather for the Knights," and he now proceeds to carry his menace into execution, "concentrating the whole force of his wit in the most unscrupulous and merc...
Plutus
The story of 'Plutus' concerns Chremylus, a poor but just man, who accompanied by his body-servant Cario, consults the Delphic Oracle concerning his son, whether he ought not to be instructed in injustice and knavery and the other arts whereby worldly men acquire riches. By way of answer the god only tells him that he is to follow whomsoever he first meets upon leaving the temple, who proves to be a blind and ragged old man.
The Clouds
The Clouds is a comedy written by the celebrated playwright Aristophanes lampooning intellectual fashions in classical Athens. It was originally produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and it was not well received, coming last of the three plays competing at the festival that year. It was revised between 420-417 BC and thereafter it was circulated in manuscript form. No copy of the original production survives and scholarly analysis indicates that the revised version is an incomplete form of Ol...
The Wasps
The Wasps is the fourth in chronological order of the eleven surviving plays by Aristophanes, the master of an ancient genre of drama called 'Old Comedy'. It was produced at the Lenaia festival in 422 BC, a time when Athens was enjoying a brief respite from The Peloponnesian War following a one year truce with Sparta. As in his other early plays, Aristophanes pokes satirical fun at the demagogue Cleon but in The Wasps he also ridicules one of the Athenian institutions that provided Cleon with h...
Artaud on Theatre
All of Artaud's theatrical ideas collected in one volume Artaud's cherished dream was to found a new kind of theatre in France that would not be an artistic spectacle, but a communion between spectators and actors. This volume contains all of Artaud's key writings on theatre and cinema from 1921 to his death in 1948, together with a definitive commentary on the key texts of this 20th-century theatre visionary. Although his potent theories were never successfully realised during his own tortured...
Ivanoff
Chekhov was a Russian who wrote short stories and plays. Chekhov was a doctor during most of his life. He was said to say, "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress".
Tatyana Repina
The sensational onstage suicide of Russian actress and opera singer Kadmina in 1881 led Alexei Suvorin to memorialize her in his 1888 four-act play Tatyana Repina. One year later, his friend Anton Chekhov, himself fascinated by Kadmina, sent Suvorin a one-act play, which was in fact a fifth act continuation of Tatyana Repina, with instructions to show it to no one. When the play was finally made public years later by Chekhov's brother Mikhail, it presented a mystery: Was it, as the brother clai...
7 Short Farces by Anton Chekhov
Includes: The Bear, a Reluctant Tragic Hero, Swan Song, the Proposal, the Dangers of Tobacco, the Festivities, the Wedding Reception
Plays by Anton Chekhov, Second Series
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practiced as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress." Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrou...
Belle Moral: A Natural History
Premiered at the Shaw Festival one of the largest classical repertory theatres
Erechtheus
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHTHONIA. O Goddess, be good to thy people, that in them dominion and freedom may dwell. CHORUS. Turn from us the strengths of the sea. 1090 CHTHONIA. Let glory's and theirs be one name in the mouths of all nations made glad with the sun. CHORUS. For the cloud is blown back with thy breath. CHTHONIA. With the long ...
Chastelard
A tragic drama in verse of Mary Stuart and the French poet
Becket And Other Plays
Includes Becket, The Cup, The Falcon And The Promise Of May.
Twelve Plays
This work contains all Alfred de Musset's best known plays, providing a standard reference work for students, an acting text for performers and a lively introduction to this French playwright.
The Crafty Art of Playmaking
The author of 64 plays, Ayckbourn has garnered international acclaim as a writer-director and remains one of the most widely performed living playwrights. Now he throws a spotlight on his stagecraft secrets and insights in this slim but valuable handbook on how to write and direct plays. It's designed to chronologically carry readers from a play's inspiration and creation to auditions, read-throughs, rehearsals, previews and press night. Ayckbourn covers "obvious rules" such as "Never start a p...
Henceforward
Starring Anne Heche and Jared Harris, the hilarious Henceforward... is one of Alan Ayckbourn s most unusual works. In the not-so-distant future a composer is building a female robot to act as his fiancée, so that he can convince his ex-wife that their daughter should come live with him. Thus, he hopes to overcome his writers block and redress the pain of his past. A full-cast performance featuring: Jack Davenport, Jared Harris, Anne Heche, Paula Jane Newman, Moira Quirk and Darren Richardson...
Agamemnon
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: And wept; while visioned in the light Of her own loveliness, more bright Than pictured breathing form that is but mute, She looked as though she wished, with that pure voice, That oft her father's halls along, Had made full many a chieftain there rejoice, To speak to that assembled throng. STROPHE IV. Yes! at those...
Adrienne Kennedy Reader
Adrienne Kennedy has been a force in American theatre since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her hauntingly fragmentary lyrical dramas. Exploring the violence racism visits upon people's lives, Kennedy's plays express poetic alienation, transcending the particulars of character and plot through ritualistic repetition and radical structural experimentation. Frequently produced, read, and taught, they continue to hold a significant place among the most exciting dramas ...
Red Light Winter: A Play
It's totally familiar but dreamlike at the same time," observes one American of Amsterdam's notorious Red Light District in the stunning new work from Adam Rapp. Escaping their lives in Manhattan, former college buddies Matt and Davis take off to the Netherlands and find themselves thrown into a bizarre love triangle with a beautiful young prostitute named Christina. But the romance they find in Europe is eventually overshadowed by the truth they discover at home. Written with an unflinching po...
Pygmalion
This play is based on the Greek myth of Pygmalion. It tells the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics (based on phonetician Henry Sweet), who makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can successfully pass off a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a refined society lady by teaching her how to speak with an upper class accent and training her in etiquette. In the process, Higgins and Doolittle grow close, but she ultimately rejects his domineering ways and declares sh...
The Ultimate Scene and Monologue Sourcebook: An Actor's Guide to over 1000 Monologues and Dialogues from More Than 300 Contemporary Plays
Preparing for an audition and unsure of what you want to do? The Ultimate Scene and Monologue Sourcebook is the book you've been waiting for. Unlike “scene books” that reprint 50 to 75 monologues excerpted from plays but don't include any background information, this annotated guide tells you what you really need to know about audition material from more than 300 contemporary plays. Here is how the book works. Suppose that you're looking for a dramatic male/female scene. When you sc...
The First Man
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) is one of the most significant forces in the history of American theater. With no uniquely American tradition to guide him, O'Neill introduced various dramatic techniques, which subsequently became staples of the U.S. theater. By 1914 he had written twelve one-act and two long plays. Of this early work, only Thirst and Other One-act plays (1914) was originally published. From this point on, O'Neill's work falls roughly into three phases: the early plays, written from ...
Being and Doing: A Workbook for Actors
A fun and exciting workbook for actors to use in establishing a daily work schedule. Designed to help the actor integrate the two parts of the process, THE INSTRUMENT AND THE CRAFT. Which gives spontaneity, dimension, and authenticity to his performance. The numerous daily exercises deal with every aspect of acting including the actor's relationship to the business. Blank pages provide the actor with space to document his or her own involvement and progress. Being a workbook, every page is fill...
El Burlador De Sevilla
El burlador de Sevilla is a play by Tirso de Molina, first published in Spain around 1630, though it may have been performed as early as 1616. Set in the 14th century, the play is the earliest fully-developed dramatisation of the Don Juan legend.
An Actor's Guide--Making It in New York City
For any actor in or on the way to New York City, this is the definitive source for advice, winning strategies, marketing techniques, and invaluable insights to being a successful New York actor. This new edition has been completely revised and updated to cover the significant changes in the New York theater landscape over the last nine years. This indispensable guide has also been expanded to include dozens of new interviews with top New York City actors and a completely improved Internet chap...
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