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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.
The New Soviet Theatre (Routledge Revivals)
by Joseph MacleodFirst Published in 1943, The New Soviet Theatre presents Joseph Macleod’s take on the development and rapid changes in the Soviet Theatre since late 1930s. Through scattered articles and reports, books and bulletins, and his own visits to the USSR, Macleod showcases what we know as ‘Socialist Realism’. He brings themes like the shortcomings of the old theatre; the audience beyond the Caucasus; new socialist audiences; Alexey Popov of the Central Theatre of the Red Army; new writers and new plays; and popularity of Shakespeare both in the central theatres and in remoter and unexpected places. Written graphically but founded on scholarship this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of history of theatre, European theatre, theatre and performance studies.
A New Style for Murder
by Thomas HischakDrama / 2m, 9f / Interior / Ladies gather at Cassie and Dee Nolan's beauty salon in Lilac Junction to hear the local gossip and, incidentally, get their hair done. Today they've really got something to get their tongues wagging Hannah Carlson, the high school principal's wife, dies under the hair dryer murdered! Who did it? And how was the dastardly deed accomplished? Lt. Elizabeth Roberts, assistant to Inspector Trigg from St. Louis, thinks she has a few clues. She does not want for suspects since nearly everyone in town detested the victim, including her husband.
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 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.
The New Trial
by Peter WeissThe New Trial is Peter Weiss's final drama, completed only months before his death in 1982 and never before published in English. One of Europe's most important twentieth century playwrights--often considered as influential as Brecht and Beckett--Weiss is best known to American audiences as the author of the Broadway play Marat/Sade and the three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, which has elicited comparison with Joyce's Ulysses and Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Initially influenced by Franz Kafka and later by the American Henry Miller, Weiss worked to expose the hypocrisy, the deception, and the nature of aggression in the contemporary world. A transformative "updating" of Kafka's novel The Trial, The New Trial presents a surreal, hallucinatory look at the life of "Josef K. ," chief attorney in an enormous multinational firm that exploits both his idealism and his self-doubt in order to present to the world a public face that will mask its own dark and fascistic intentions. Fusing Marxist and capitalist perspectives in a manner that anticipates aspects of the current global market expansion, Weiss evokes a world in which nothing is private and everything is for sale. This edition of The New Trial is designed to facilitate theatrical teaching and stage production of the play. An extensive introduction by James Rolleston and Kai Evers situates the work in the full context of Weiss's life, including his Swedish exile during the regime of the Third Reich. In addition, the play's text is followed by interviews with Weiss and his original codirector (and wife) Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, as well as an account of the challenges of the first English staging by director Jody McAuliffe.
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.
The New War Plays: From Kane to Harris
by Julia BollHow can war be represented on stage? How does the theatre examine the structures leading to violence and war and explore their transformation of societies? Springing from the discussion about 'New Wars' in the age of globalisation, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how these 'New Wars' bring forth new plays about war.
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.
The New York Times Theater Reviews 1997-1998
by C. S. SmithFirst published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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!
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)
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 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 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.
A Nice Family Gathering
by Phil OlsonComedy / Winner of the 2000 Rochester Playwright Festival / 4m, 3f / Interior Set / A NICE FAMILY GATHERING is a story about a man who loved his wife so much, he almost told her. It's Thanksgiving Day and the first family gathering at the Lundeen household since the Patriarch died. At the gathering, Dad comes back as a ghost with a mission; to tell his wife he loved her, something he neglected to tell her while he was alive. After all, they were only married for 41 years. The problem is, she can't hear or see him. The trouble begins when Mom invites a date for dinner. / "Hilarious and touching!" - LA Weekly Pick of the Week.
Nice Fish: A Play (Books That Changed the World)
by Louis Jenkins Mark Rylance“A quirky charmer of a play [that] contains, beneath its homely surfaces, larger meanings that glide softly into your mind and heart.”—The New York Times (Critics’ Pick)On a frozen Minnesota lake, the ice is beginning to creak and groan. It’s the end of the fishing season and on the frostbitten, unforgiving landscape, two friends are out on the ice, angling for something big, something down there that, had it the wherewithal, could swallow them whole. With the existentialism of a Beckett two-hander but set in the icy and folksy depths of the Midwest, Nice Fish is a unique portrayal of a friendship forged out of boredom, bad jokes, and an ability to wait for a really nice fish. Nice Fish premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge Massachusetts, directed by Claire van Kampen; played to rave reviews in a sold-out extended run in New York in February 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, starring Mark Rylance and Jim Lichtscheidl, and featuring Louis Jenkins; and transferred to London for a run in the West End at the Harold Pinter Theatre, beginning in November 2016.
Nicholas Nickleby
by Charles Dickens Jonathan HollowayNicholas Nickleby is newly employed as a teacher at Dotheboys' Hall in Yorkshire thanks to his manipulative and avaricious uncle Ralph, a businessman. There he witnesses the cruel treatment of boys at the hands of despotic headmaster Wackford Squeers and his wife. In coming to the defence of one boy, Smike, Nicholas assaults Squeers. Thinking he has killed him, he escapes with Smike to London and on to Portsmouth where the pair join the Crummles Theatre Company. Ralph uses Nicholas's sister Kate as bait further to ensnare a young and wealthy lord who is already in his debt. Learning of the abuse Kate has been exposed to, Nicholas goes to London and her aid, but even greater dangers lurk around the corner. This stunning adaptation of Charles Dickens's third novel toured the UK in 2001 and 2002 in a production by Red Shift Theatre Company.
Niedecker
by Kristine ThatcherDrama / 1 m., 3 f. / Interior and Exterior combined / This is a lovely play about an obscure but fine American poet, Lorine Niedecker. It focuses on the relationship between the poet and a young woman who is determined to make the world acquainted with Ms. Niedecker's work. Produced Off Broadway. / "A lovely play." N.Y. Post.