The Playwrights Muse

Author : Joan Herrington
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136542191
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Playwright's Muse written by Joan Herrington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: August Wilson penned his first play after seeing a man shot to death. Horton Foote began writing plays to create parts for himself as an actor. Edward Albee faced commercial pressures to modify his scripts-and resisted. After Wit, Margaret Edson swore off playwriting altogether and decided to keep her day job as a kindergarten teacher, instead. The Playwright's Muse presents never-before-published interviews with some of the greatest names of American drama-all recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize. In these scintillating exchanges with eleven leading dramatists, we learn about their inspirations and begin to grasp how the creative process works in the mind of a writer. We learn how their first plays took shape, how it felt to read their first reviews, and what keeps them writing for theater today. Introductory essays on each playwright's life and work, written by theater artists and scholars with strong professional relationships to their subjects, provide additional insight into the writers' contributions to contemporary theater.

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Playwright's Muse written by and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Terrence McNally
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781683932819
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Muse of Fire written by Terrence McNally and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muse of Fire is a collection of the four-time Tony Award-winning playwright's meditations on the power of theater to change minds by first changing hearts, and on the responsibilities of the playwright as a member of the theater community.

Author : Amy Muse
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 135000782X
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl written by Amy Muse and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Ruhl is one of the most highly-acclaimed and frequently-produced American playwrights of the 21st century. Author of eighteen plays and the essay collection 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, she has won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, been nominated for a Tony Award for In the Next Room or the vibrator play and twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for The Clean House and In the Next Room. Ruhl is a writer unafraid of the soul. She writes not about “this or that issue,” but “about being,” creating plays that ask “big questions about death, love, and how we should treat each other in this lifetime.” In this volume, Amy Muse situates Ruhl as an artist-thinker and organizes her work around its artistic and ethical concerns. Through a finely-grained account of each play, readers are guided through Ruhl's early influences, the themes of intimacy, transcendence, and communion, and her inventive stagecraft to dramatize “moments of being” onstage. Enriched by essays from scholars Jill Stevenson, Thomas Butler, and Christina Dokou, an interview with directors Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn, and a chronology of Ruhl's life and work, this is a companionable guide for students of American drama and theatre studies. Amy Muse specializes in dramatic literature and performance studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department. She is the author of “Sarah Ruhl's Sex Ed for Grownups” (Text & Presentation 2013) and essays on Romantic drama, intimate theatre, female Hamlets, and travel in Romantic Circles, Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture & Criticism, Frontiers, and other journals. METHUEN DRAMA CRITICAL COMPANIONS Series Editors: Patrick Lonergan (National University of Ireland, Galway) and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Loyola Marymount University, USA)

Author : Yael Zarhy-Levo
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1587297795
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Making of Theatrical Reputations written by Yael Zarhy-Levo and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2008-04-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's successful plays and playwrights achieve their prominence not simply because of their intrinsic merit but because of the work of mediators, who influence the whole trajectory of a playwright's or a theatre company's career. Critics and academic writers are primarily considered the makers of reputations, but funding organizations and various media agents as well as artistic directors, producers, and directors also pursue separate agendas in shaping the reputations of theatrical works. In The Making of Theatrical Reputations Yael Zarhy-Levo demonstrates the processes through which these mediatory practices by key authority figures situate theatrical companies and playwrights within cultural and historical memory. To reveal how these authorizing powers-that-be promote theatrical events, companies, and playwrights, Zarhy-Levo presents four detailed case studies that reflect various angles of the modern London theatre. In the case of the English Stage Company's production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, she centers on a specific event. She then focuses on the trajectory of a single company, the Theatre Workshop, particularly through its first decade at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London. Next, she explores the career of the dramatist John Arden, especially its first ten years, in part drawing upon an interview with Arden and his wife, actress and playwright Margaretta D'Arcy, before turning to her fourth study: the playwright Harold Pinter's shifting reputation throughout the different phases of his career. Zarhy-Levo's accounts of these theatrical events, companies, and playwrights through the prism of mediation bring fresh insights to these landmark productions and their creators.

Author : Enoch Brater
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472025066
Total Pages : 165 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Arthur Miller's Global Theater written by Enoch Brater and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No American playwright is more revered on the international stage than Arthur Miller. In Arthur Miller’s Global Theater—a fascinating collection of new essays by leading international critics and scholars—readers learn how and why audiences around the world have responded to the work of the late theatrical icon. With perspectives from diverse corners of the globe, from Israel to Japan to South Africa, this groundbreaking volume explores the challenges of translating one of the most American of American playwrights and details how disparate nations have adapted meaning in Miller’s most celebrated dramas. An original and engaging collection that will appeal to theater aficionados, scholars, students, and all those interested in Miller and his remarkable oeuvre, Arthur Miller’s Global Theater illustrates how dramas such as Death of a Salesman,The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge developed a vigorous dialogue with new audiences when they crossed linguistic and national borders. In these times when problems of censorship, repressive regimes, and international discord are increasingly in the news, Arthur Miller’s voice has never been more necessary as it continues to be heard and celebrated around the world. Enoch Brater is the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature at the University of Michigan. His other books include Arthur Miller: A Playwright’s Life and Works and Arthur Miller’s America.

Author : Kathy A. Perkins
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253113660
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Female Playwrights written by Kathy A. Perkins and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1990-10-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fine reading and a superb resource." -- Ms. "Highly recommended." -- Library Journal "Perkins has chosen the plays well, and her issue-oriented introduction places the women and their works in a literary and historical context." -- Choice "As well as being centered on the black experience, the plays in Black Female Playwrights are centered on the female experience." -- Voice Literary Supplement "Perkins' anthology is valuable for a number of reasons... Perkins' book (which includes a bibliography of plays and pageants by black women before 1950 as well as a selected bibliography of critical works) is a major help in providing access to [the world of black drama]." -- Theatre Journal The need to acknowledge these works was the impetus behind this volume. Perkins has selected nineteen plays from seven writers who were among the major dramatizers of the black experience during this early period. As forerunners to the activist black theater of the 1950s and 1960s, these plays represent a critical stage in the development of black drama in the United States.

Author : Stephen J. Bottoms
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472022210
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Playing Underground written by Stephen J. Bottoms and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-11-10 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Scrupulously researched, critically acute, and written with care, Playing Underground will become a classic account of an era of hard-won free expression." -William Coco "At last---a book documenting the beginnings of Off-Off Broadway theater. Playing Underground is an insightful, illuminating, and honest appraisal of this important period in American theater." -Rosalyn Drexler, author of Art Does (Not!) Exist and Occupational Hazard "An epic movie of an epic movement, Playing Underground is a book the world has waited for without knowing it. How precisely it captures the evolution of our revolution! I am amazed by the book's scope and scale, and I bless its author especially for giving two greats, Paul Foster and H. M. Koutoukas, their proper, polar places, and for memorializing such unjustly forgotten masterpieces as Irene Fornes's Molly's Dream and Jeff Weiss's A Funny Walk Home. Stephen Bottoms's vivid evocation of the grand adventure of Off-Off Broadway has woken and broken my heart. It is difficult to believe that he was not there alongside me to breathe the caffeine-nicotine-alkaloid-steeped air." -Robert Patrick, author of Kennedy's Children and Temple Slave Few books address the legendary age of 1960s off-off Broadway theater. Fortunately, Stephen Bottoms fills that gap with Playing Underground---the first comprehensive history of the roots of off-off Broadway. This is a theater whose legacy is still felt today: it was the launching pad for many leading contemporary theater artists, including Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, and others, and it was a pivotal influence on improv comedy and shows like Saturday Night Live. Off-off Broadway groups such as the Living Theatre, La Mama, and Caffe Cino captured the spirit of nontraditional theater with their edgy, unscripted, boundary-crossing subjects. Yet, as Bottoms discovers, there is no one set of truths about off-off Broadway to uncover; the entire scene was always more a matter of competing perceptions than a singular, concrete reality. No other author has managed to illuminate this shifting tableau as Bottoms does. Through interviews with dozens of the era's leading playwrights, performers, directors, and critics, he unearths a countercultural theater movement that was both influential and transforming-yet ephemeral and quintessentially of its moment. Playing Underground will be a definitive work on the subject, offering a complete picture of an important but little-studied period in American theater.

Author : John H. Muse
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472053639
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Microdramas written by John H. Muse and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Microdramas, John H. Muse argues that plays shorter than twenty minutes deserve sustained attention, and that brevity should be considered a distinct mode of theatrical practice. Focusing on artists for whom brevity became both a structural principle and a tool to investigate theater itself (August Strindberg, Maurice Maeterlinck, F. T. Marinetti, Samuel Beckett, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Caryl Churchill), the book explores four episodes in the history of very short theater, all characterized by the self-conscious embrace of brevity. The story moves from the birth of the modernist microdrama in French little theaters in the 1880s, to the explicit worship of speed in Italian Futurist synthetic theater, to Samuel Beckett’s often-misunderstood short plays, and finally to a range of contemporary playwrights whose long compilations of shorts offer a new take on momentary theater. Subjecting short plays to extended scrutiny upends assumptions about brief or minimal art, and about theatrical experience. The book shows that short performances often demand greater attention from audiences than plays that unfold more predictably. Microdramas put pressure on preconceptions about which aspects of theater might be fundamental and about what might qualify as an event. In the process, they suggest answers to crucial questions about time, spectatorship, and significance.

Author : Philip O'Leary
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781782054580
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Transitional Playwrights in Irish written by Philip O'Leary and published by . This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There was no native tradition of theatre in Irish. Thus, language revivalists were forced to develop the genre ex nihilo if there was to be a Gaelic drama that was not entirely made up of translations. The earliest efforts to do so at the beginning of the 20th century were predictably clumsy at best, and truly dreadful at worst. Yet by the 1950s, a handful of Gaelic playwrights were producing plays in Irish worthy of comparison not only with those by their Irish contemporaries working in English but also with drama being produced elsewhere in Europe as well as in North America.