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New Dramaturgies: Strategies and Exercises for 21st Century Playwriting (Focus on Dramaturgy)
by Mark BlyIn New Dramaturgies: Strategies and Exercises for 21st Century Playwriting, Mark Bly offers a new playwriting book with nine unique play-generating exercises. These exercises offer dramaturgical strategies and tools for confronting and overcoming obstacles that all playwrights face. Each of the chapters features lively commentary and participation from Bly’s former students. They are now acclaimed writers and producers for media such as House of Cards, Weeds, Friday Night Lights, Warrior, and The Affair, and their plays appear onstage in major venues such as the Roundabout Theatre, Yale Rep, and the Royal National Theatre. They share thoughts about their original response to an exercise and why it continues to have a major impact on their writing and mentoring today. Each chapter concludes with their original, inventive, and provocative scene generated in response to Bly’s exercise, providing a vivid real-life example of what the exercises can create. Suitable for both students of playwriting and screenwriting, as well as professionals in the field, New Dramaturgies gives readers a rare combination of practical provocation and creative discussion.
New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (Longman Critical Readers)
by Richard Wilson Richard DuttonNew Historicism has been one of the major developments in literary theory over the last decade, both in the USA and Europe. In this book, Wilson and Dutton examine the theories behind New Historicism and its celebrated impact in practice on Renaissance Drama, providing an important collection both for students of the genre and of literary theory.
New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction
by Geoff KingWhat is "New Hollywood"? The "art" cinema of the Hollywood "Renaissance" or the corporate controlled blockbuster? The introverted world of Travis Bickle or the action heroics of Indiana Jones, Buzz Lightyear, and Maximus the Gladiator? Innovative departures from the "classical" Hollywood style or superficial glitz, special effects, and borrowings from MTV? Wholesale change or important continuities with Hollywood's past? The answer suggested by Geoff King in New Hollywood Cinema is all of these and more. He examines New Hollywood from three main perspectives: film style, industry, and the social-historical context. Each is considered in its own right, sometimes resulting in different ways of defining New Hollywood. But one of the book's central arguments is that a combination of these approaches is needed if we are to understand the latest incarnations of the cinema that continues to dominate the global market. King looks at the Hollywood "Renaissance" from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, industrial factors shaping the construction of the corporate blockbuster, the role of auteur directors, genre and stardom in New Hollywood, narrative and spectacle in the contemporary blockbuster, and the relationship between production for the big and small screens.
New Light Shine
by Shannon MurdochWhen he was twelve, Joe snuck into the field on the edge of town and saw the Town Mayor with his sister Peregrine. This one moment has overwhelmed and transformed his life, becoming the only thing that holds any importance to him. Years later, in jail for murder, Joe waits for Peregrine so that he can explain his plan for her future, a plan so intricately assembled that he has given it a name—New Light Shine. Four characters in Shannon Murdoch's bold new play are trapped in an argument of memory that threatens to turn perception into truth. Their task is to dig through years of silence and half-truths to arrive at a future that may at last bring peace. In the ensuing struggles, disturbing questions arise—about female and child sexuality as well as the responsibilities of government and community in raising children. Selecting Murdoch'sNew Light Shinefrom more than 800 submissions that arrived from the far reaches of the English-speaking world, contest judge John Guare praises the distinct voice of this play and its challenging subject. "I read it, put it aside, went back to it, couldn't get it out of my head," he recollects. "This raw, haunting, richly poetic, deeply emotional play affected me as no other entry did. "
New Magic Valley Fun Town
by Daniel MacIvorFrom the acclaimed playwright behind A Beautiful View, The Best Brothers, and This is What Happens Next comes a moving portrait about what we choose to forget and how we decide to move on. Cape Bretoner Dougie hasn’t seen his childhood best friend Allen in thirty years. Based on what can be seen on Facebook, things have changed, but Dougie has no doubt they’ll easily reconnect when Allen comes to visit. With the added flair of Dougie’s ex-wife Cheryl and daughter Sandy, the group spends a night reminiscing, drinking, and dancing. But as the party progresses, shadows from Dougie and Allen’s past come out to play, bringing along tough questions that have to be answered.
New Media Dramaturgy
by Peter Eckersall Helena Grehan Edward ScheerThis book illuminates the shift in approaches to the uses of theatre and performance technology in the past twenty-five years and develops an account of new media dramaturgy (NMD), an approach to theatre informed by what the technology itself seems to want to say. Born of the synthesis of new media and new dramaturgy, NMD is practiced and performed in the work of a range of important artists from dumb type and their 1989 analog-industrial machine performance pH, to more recent examples from the work of Kris Verdonck and his A Two Dogs Company. Engaging with works from a range of artists and companies including: Blast Theory, Olafur Eliasson, Nakaya Fujiko and Janet Cardiff, we see a range of extruded performative technologies operating overtly on, with and against human bodies alongside more subtle dispersed, interactive and experiential media.
New Native American Drama: Three Plays
by Hanay GeiogamahThis first collection of plays by an Indian playwright presents a spectrum of Indian life that ranges in time from the past to the present and on into the future. <p><p>Body Indian, the earliest, most widely performed, and most highly acclaimed of Geiogamah's plays, deals with a problem of the present -Indian alcoholism. But the play is not so much about alcoholism as it is about the social and moral obligations that Indian people owe to one another. <p><p>Foghorn, through the use of humor rather than bitterness, tries to exorcise the harmful stereotyping that often stands in the way of non-Indians' understanding of Indians, and even on occasion of Indians' own appreciation of themselves. <p><p>In the play 49 the author links the past with the present and points a road to the future. Here the approach is synchronic rather than diachronic. The value of Indian traditions is emphasized—but only where those traditions are used imaginatively and not treated as ossified relics to be blindly venerated. 49 celebrates the continuity of Indian life in the vigor of new forms and with an abiding optimism. <p><p>This collection of plays-all widely performed and seriously and extensively reviewed-adds a new and important voice to the small body of Indian authors who write about their own people.
New Play Development: Facilitating Creativity for Dramaturgs, Playwrights, and Everyone Else
by Lenora Inez Brown"This is a book for dramaturgs of new work, but it is also a particularly effective book for anyone working on new plays: playwrights, directors, producers, even actors. Lenora skillfully dissects the process of workshopping new writing, and clearly defines the roles for all involved. I learned not only how to make a new play workshop more effective, but how to approach my writing and my directing, and how to meaningfully collaborate with others in this unique process. This is a necessary handbook for anyone working on new plays today." --Anne Marie Cammarato, Director
New Playwriting Strategies: A Language-Based Approach to Playwriting
by Paul C. CastagnoNew Playwriting Strategies offers a fresh and dynamic approach to playwriting that will be welcomed by teachers and aspiring playwrights alike.
New Playwriting Strategies: Language and Media in the 21st Century (A\theatre Arts Book Ser.)
by Paul C. CastagnoNew Playwriting Strategies has become a canonical text in the study and teaching of playwriting, offering a fresh and dynamic insight into the subject. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition explores and highlights the wide spread of new techniques that form contemporary theatre writing, as well as their influence on other dramatic forms. Paul Castagno builds on the innovative plays of Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to investigate groundbreaking new techniques from a broad range of contemporary dramatists, including Sarah Ruhl, Suzan Lori-Parks and Young Jean Lee. New features in this edition include an in-depth study of the adaptation of classical texts in contemporary playwright and the utilizing new technologies, such as YouTube, Wikipedia and blogs to create alternative dramatic forms. The author’s step-by-step approach offers the reader new models for: narrative dialogue character monologue hybrid plays This is a working text for playwrights, presenting a range of illuminating new exercises suitable for everyone from the workshop student to the established writer. New Playwriting Strategies is an essential resource for anyone studying and writing drama today.
New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by James Newlin and James W. StoneIt has been over two decades since the publication of the last major edited collection focused on psychoanalysis and early modern culture. In Shakespeare studies, the New Historicism and cognitive psychology have hindered a dynamic conversation engaging depth-oriented models of the mind from taking place. The essays in New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains seek to redress this situation, by engaging a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic theory and criticism, from Freud to the present, to read individual plays closely. These essays show how psychoanalytic theory helps us to rethink the plays’ history of performance; their treatment of gender, sexuality, and race; their view of history and trauma; and the ways in which they anticipate contemporary psychodynamic treatment. Far from simply calling for a conventional "return to Freud," the essays collected here initiate an exciting conversation between Shakespeare studies and psychoanalysis in the hopes of radically transforming both disciplines. It is time to listen, once again, to seething brains.
New Russian Drama: An Anthology (Russian Library)
by Richard SchechnerNew Russian Drama took shape at the turn of the new millennium—a time of turbulent social change in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Emerging from small playwriting festivals, provincial theaters, and converted basements, it evolved into a major artistic movement that startled audiences with hypernaturalistic portrayals of sex and violence, daring use of non-normative language, and thrilling experiments with genre and form. The movement’s commitment to investigating contemporary reality helped revitalize Russian theater. It also provoked confrontations with traditionalists in society and places of power, making theater once again Russia’s most politicized art form.This anthology offers an introduction to New Russian Drama through plays that illustrate the versatility and global relevance of this exciting movement. Many of them address pressing social issues, such as ethnic tensions and political disillusionment; others engage with Russia’s rich cultural legacy by reimagining traditional genres and canons. Among them are a family drama about Anton Chekhov, a modern production play in which factory workers compose haiku, and a satirical verse play about the treatment of migrant workers, as well a documentary play about a terrorist school siege and a postdramatic “text” that is only two sentences long. Both politically and aesthetically uncompromising, they chart new paths for performance in the twenty-first century. Acquainting English-language readers with these vital works, New Russian Drama challenges us to reflect on the status and mission of the theater.
New Sites For Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia
by John Russell BrownIn the course of exploring the theatrical cultures of South and East Asia, eminent Shakespeareanist John Russell Brown developed some remarkable theories about the nature of performance, the state of Western 'Theatre' today, and the future potential of Shakespeare's plays. In New Sites for Shakespeare he outlines his passionate belief in the power of theatre to reach mass audiences, based on his experiences of popular Asian performances. It is a personal polemic, but it is also a carefully argued and brilliantly persuasive study of the kind of theatrical experience Shakespeare's own contemporaries enjoyed. This is a book which cannot be ignored by anyone who cares about the live performing arts today. Separate chapters consider staging, acting, improvisation, ceremonies and ritual, and an analysis of the experience of the audience is paramount throughout.
New Theatre Vistas: Modern Movements in International Literature (Studies in Modern Drama)
by Judy L. OlivaFirst Published in 1996. Part of a series of ‘Studies in Modern Drama’, Volume 7 This volume Studies in Modern Drama collects essays on contemporary theatre which reveal the changing face of the world, as well as challenges to the boundaries of traditional stage production. Authors examine familiar texts in new settings, discovering what editor Judy Lee Oliva calls “the effect of cultural- specific gestures, stances and the nuance of words,” so that audiences and critics are forced to recognize stereotypes and re-evaluate older critical methods. Topics range from directing gay and working-class theatre in Scotland to producing American and British drama in Holland, Belgium, and Poland. New voices in the theatre are heard, and old ones are put to new tests. What remains is the power of performance to inspire emotional and intellectual response. Writers, directors, costume designers, producers, and critics provide an uncommon range of perspectives to the changing roles of theatre in an increasingly global community.
New Theatre in Italy: 1963–2013 (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Valentina ValentiniNew Theatre in Italy 1963-2013 makes the case for the centrality of late-millennium Italian avant-garde theatre in the development of the new forms of performance that have emerged in the 21st Century. Starting in the Sixties, young artists and militants in Italy reacted to the violence in their streets and ruptures in the family unit that are now recognized as having been harbingers of the end of the global post-war system. As traditional rituals of State and Church faltered, a new generation of cultural operators, largely untrained and driven away from political activism, formed collectives to explore new ways of speaking theatrically, new ways to create and experience performance, and new relationships between performer and spectator. Although the vast majority of the works created were transient, like all performance, their aesthetic and social effects continue to surface today across media on a global scale, affecting visual art, cinema, television and the behavioural aesthetics of social networks.
New Visions In Performance: The Impact Of Digital Technologies (Innovations in Art and Design)
by Gavin Carver Colin BeardonNew Visions in Performance features the work of twelve performers and academics who are concerned with the integration of digital technologies into theatrical performance.
New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849
by Elizabeth Maddock DillonIn New World Drama, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon turns to the riotous scene of theatre in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to explore the creation of new publics. Moving from England to the Caribbean to the early United States, she traces the theatrical emergence of a collective body in the colonized New World--one that included indigenous peoples, diasporic Africans, and diasporic Europeans. In the raucous space of the theatre, the contradictions of colonialism loomed large. Foremost among these was the central paradox of modernity: the coexistence of a massive slave economy and a nascent politics of freedom. Audiences in London eagerly watched the royal slave, Oroonoko, tortured on stage, while audiences in Charleston and Kingston were forbidden from watching the same scene. Audiences in Kingston and New York City exuberantly participated in the slaying of Richard III on stage, enacting the rise of the "people," and Native American leaders were enjoined to watch actors in blackface "jump Jim Crow." Dillon argues that the theater served as a "performative commons," staging debates over representation in a political world based on popular sovereignty. Her book is a capacious account of performance, aesthetics, and modernity in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
New York
by David Rimmer7m, 8f / Drama / Simple Set / David Rimmer, a Pulitzer Prize finalist author for Album, originally wrote New York to raise funds for volunteer psychiatrists dedicated to helping the overwhelming number of patients psychologically affected by 9/11. Depicting the reactions of 15 individuals to the events of that day, the characters all speak to a central psychiatrist. The play has been performed at theaters, schools and colleges throughout New York and the Northeast to great acclaim,called "brilliantly written... a thought-provoking event avoiding the sentimental and capturing realistic portraits of how we're all dealing with it... a touching exploration of the effects of September 11 on the lives of average New Yorkers" by The New York Resident.
New York City and the Hollywood Musical
by Martha ShearerIn examining the relationship between the spectacular, iconic and vibrant New York of the musical and the off-screen history and geography of the real city--this book explores how the city shaped the genre and equally how the genre shaped representations of the city. Shearer argues that while the musical was for many years a prime vehicle for the idealization of urban density, the transformation New York underwent after World War II constituted a major challenge to its representation. Including analysis of 42nd Street, Swing Time, Cover Girl, On the Town, The Band Wagon, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story and many other classic and little-known musicals--this book is an innovative study of the relationship between cinema and urban space.
New York Stories: Five Plays About Life In New York
by Jason MilliganComedy drama / 4m, 3f / Includes: Best Warm Beer in Brooklyn, John's Ring, Next Tuesday, Nights in Hohokus and Shoes.
New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway
by Edna NahshonIn the early decades of the twentieth century, a vibrant theatrical culture took shape on New York City's Lower East Side. Original dramas, comedies, musicals, and vaudeville, along with sophisticated productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, were innovatively staged for crowds that rivaled the audiences on Broadway. Though these productions were in Yiddish and catered to Eastern European, Jewish audiences (the largest immigrant group in the city at the time), their artistic innovations, energetic style, and engagement with politics and the world around them came to influence all facets of the American stage. Vividly illustrated and with essays from leading historians and critics, this book recounts the heyday of "Yiddish Broadway" and its vital contribution to American Jewish life and crossover to the broader American culture. These performances grappled with Jewish nationalism, labor relations, women's rights, religious observance, acculturation, and assimilation. They reflected a range of genres, from tear-jerkers to experimental theater. The artists who came of age in this world include Stella Adler, Eddie Cantor, Jerry Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers. The story of New York's Yiddish theater is a tale of creativity and legacy and of immigrants who, in the process of becoming Americans, had an enormous impact on the country's cultural and artistic development.
Next Stop, Murder
by Frank Semerano3m, 3f / Comedy, Murder Mystery - Thriller / Unit set / Myron Amberworth, a professor of paleontology at the local city college, is about to lose his job. It is only through what he believes is the fortuitous recruitment of two additional students, Dena and Knuckles, that he is allowed to keep his class. But Dena and Knuckles are in fact two members of a street gang known as the Scorpions, whose only motivation in enrolling is to heist the contents of a museum scheduled in a field trip. But Dena is enjoying her new life as a student much to the dismay of her father, Knuckles and Tilly, Myron's jealous girlfriend. Dena, thrown out of her house by her temperamental father, is forced to take up temporary residence at Myron's run down apartment. Dena's father, devoted as he is stubborn, practically moves in himself to keep an eye on his daughter and an increasingly distraught Myron. As Dena goes "good", Myron's colleague and department head goes "bad", and entrusts a stolen gem to the unknowing Myron. Lilah Davenport, a journalist, is murdered while chasing down the stolen gem and her ghost has fallen in love with the mortal Myron and searches desperately for a way to communicate the danger he now faces.
Next Year's Man of Steel
by David BelkeAugust 1940, New York. Struggling and opportunistic writer Everett Gardner is given the chance to make a mark in the still infant comic book industry. All he has to do is create a hero. But creating a real hero turns out to be much more difficult than he expects. And while badgered by a desperate publisher and partnered with an uncooperative artist, the task might prove to be impossible. Especially with distraction of the artist's intriguing young wife. But heroes can arise in the most unexpected places... A full length play about creativity, collaboration and every day courage.
Next to Normal
by Tom Kitt Brian YorkeyWinner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama"Rock is alive and rolling like thunder in Next to Normal. It's the best musical of the season by a mile...an emotional powerhouse with a fire in its soul and a wicked wit that burns just as fiercely."-Rolling Stone"No show on Broadway right now makes as a direct grab for the heart-or wrings it as thoroughly-as Next to Normal does. . . . [It] focuses squarely on the pain that cripples the members of a suburban family, and never for a minute does it let you escape the anguish at the core of their lives. Next to Normal does not, in other words, qualify as your standard feel-good musical. Instead this portrait of a manic-depressive mother and the people she loves and damages is something much more: a feel-everything musical, which asks you, with operatic force, to discover the liberation in knowing where it hurts."-Ben Brantley, The New York TimesWinner of three 2009 Tony Awards, including Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre, Next to Normal is also available in an original cast recording. It was named Best Musical of the Season by Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.Brian Yorkey received the 2009 Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work on Next to Normal and was also nominated for Best Book of a Musical. His other credits include Making Tracks and Time After Time.Tom Kitt received two 2009 Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations for Next to Normal. He also composed the music for High Fidelity and From Up Here. His string arrangements appear on the new Green Day album 21st Century Breakdown, and he is the leader of the Tom Kitt Band.
Next!
by Jason MilliganCollection of monologues / One hundred original one-character plays, each approximately two minutes long, provide ideal audition monologues. As in other popular collections by the author, half of the material is for men and half for women. Included are guidelines for successful auditions. (No royalty for auditions)