Rent: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical
by Jonathan Larson
from Applause Theatre and Cinema Books
Finally, an authorized libretto to this modern day classic! Rent won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as four Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score for Jonathan Larson. The story of Mark, Roger, Maureen, Tom Collins, Angel, Mimi, JoAnne, and their friends on the Lower East Side of New York City will live on, along with the affirmation that there is "no day but today." Includes 16 color photographs of productions of Rent from around the world, plus an introduction ("Rent Is Real") by Victoria Leacock Hoffman.
Art Of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives
by Lajos Egri
from Touchstone
For many years, Lajos Egri's highly opinionated but very enjoyable The Art of Dramatic Writing has been a well-guarded secret of playwrights, scriptwriters, and writers for television. Unlike many other books on playwrighting (several of which Egri criticizes during the course of this one), the author's systematic breakdown of the essentials for creating successful realistic plays and screenplays effectively demystifies the process of creative writing. Egri, who formulated his thoughts about "a well-made play" during its heyday (the 1940s and '50s), places a premium on an exhaustive analysis of characters and discussion of their psychological motivations. The writer is exhorted to find a premise to explore and to discover which characters will most effectively demonstrate this thesis, then is shown how most effectively to place them into conflict with each other. Conflict itself is also discussed, particularly how to create scenarios in which the crisis develops at a pace that feels unforced and natural. While Egri's view of the well-made play has little space for either the spare musings of Beckett and Pinter or the conscious excesses of non-narrative and other experimental writing, it nonetheless remains an essential text for writers drawn to realistic drama, and to any writer interested in the fundamental motivations of human behavior. --John Longenbaugh
Among the many "how-to" playwriting books that have appeared over the years, there have been few that attempt to analyze the mysteries of play construction. Lajos Egri's classic, The Art of Dramatic Writing, does just that, with instruction that can be applied equally well to a short story, novel, or screenplay.
Examining a play from the inside out, Egri starts with the heart of any drama: its characters. All good dramatic writing hinges on people and their relationships, which serve to move the story forward and give it life, as well as an understanding of human motives -- why people act the way that they do. Using examples from everything from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, Egri shows how it is essential for the author to have a basic premise -- a thesis, demonstrated in terms of human behavior -- and to develop the dramatic conflict on the basis of that behavior.
Using Egri's ABCs of premise, character, and conflict, The Art of Dramatic Writing is a direct, jargon-free approach to the problem of achieving
truth in writing.
Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937-1955 (Library of America)
by Tennessee Williams
from Library of America
Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays
by David Ball
from Southern Illinois University Press
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, exposition, imagery, motivation/obstacle/conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play. He includes guides for discovering what the playwright considers the play’s most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details.
Using Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for illustrating script-reading techniques as well as examples of the kinds of misinterpretation readers can fall prey to by ignoring the craft of the playwright. Of immense utility to those who want to put plays on the stage (actors, directors, designers, production specialists) Backwards and Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.
Tom Stoppard: Plays 5 : Arcadia, The Real Thing, Night & Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood
by Tom Stoppard
from Faber & Faber
Arcadia
The Real Thing
Night & Day;
Indian Ink;
Hapgood
This fifth collection of Tom Stoppard's plays brings together five classic plays by one of the most celebrated dramatists writing in the English language.
Arcadia received the Evening Standard, the Oliver, and the Critics Awards and
The Real Thing won a Tony Award.
Amadeus: A Play by Peter Shaffer
by Peter Shaffer
from Harper Perennial
0riginating at the National Theatre of Great Britain, Amadeus was the recipient of both the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics Award. In the United States, the play won the coveted Tony Award and went on to become a critically acclaimed major motion picture winning eight Oscars, including Best Picture.
Now, this extraordinary work about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is available with a new preface by Peter Shaffer and a new introduction by the director of the 1998 Broadway revival, Sir Peter Hall. Amadeus is a must-have for classical music buffs, theatre lovers, and aficionados of historical fiction.
The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition
by Eve Ensler
from Villard
"I say vagina because I want people to respond," says playwright Eve Ensler, creator of the hilarious, disturbing soliloquies in The Vagina Monologues, a book based on her one-woman play. And respond they do--with horror, anger, censure, and sparks of wonder and pleasure. Ensler is on a fervent mission to elevate and celebrate this much mumbled-about body part. She asked hundreds of women of all ages a series of questions about their vaginas (What do you call it? How would you dress it?) that prompt some wondrous answers. Standouts among the euphemisms are tamale, split knish, choochi snorcher, Gladys Siegelman--Gladys Siegelman?--and, of course, that old standby "down there." "Down there?" asks a composite character springing from several older women. "I haven't been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with [American president] Eisenhower." Two of the most powerful pieces include a jagged poem stitched together from the memories of a Bosnian woman raped by soldiers and an American woman sexually abused as a child who reclaims her vagina as a place of wild joy.
A poignant and hilarious tour of the last frontier, the ultimate forbidden zone, The Vagina Monologues is a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery. Hailed as the bible for a new generation of women, it has been performed in cities all across America and at hundreds of college campuses, and has inspired a dynamic grassroots movement—V-Day—to stop violence against women. Witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise, Eve Ensler's Obie Award-winning masterpiece gives voice to real women's deepest fantasies and fears, guaranteeing that no one who reads it will ever look at a woman's body, or think of sex, in quite the same way again.
Loved by everyone from Calista Flockhart to Joy Behar, the talk of tabloids and TV, performed at over two hundred colleges every year for V-Day -- a dynamic grass-roots movement to stop violence against women -- The Vagina Monologues is a national phenomenon. Witty, irreverent, and wise, it has become the bible for a new generation of women. "You don't just hook up with Eve", says Glenn Close. "You become a part of her crusade". Next February, the crusade takes us to Madison Square Garden for V-Day 2001, a huge, all-star, day-long extravaganza and call to action for which Jane Fonda will make a triumphant return to the stage. The V-Day edition of The Vagina Monologues includes three new monologues, a new preface by Eve, and heartbreaking testimonials from young women around the country. February will also see the opening of Necessary Targets, Eve Ensler's groundbreaking new play about women and war. Necessary Targets is the story of two American women, a Park Avenue psychiatrist and a human-rights worker, who go to Bosnia to help women refugees confront their memories of war and emerge deeply changed themselves. It has been read in New York by Meryl Streep, Anjelica Huston, and Calista Flockhart and was performed in Sarajevo with Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei. It will open its New York run with a similar all-star cast.
Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957-1980 (Library of America)
by Tennessee Williams
from Library of America
Travesties
by Tom Stoppard
from Grove Press
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