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Aaron Copland: A Reader: Selected Writings, 1923-1972
by Richard Kostelanetz Steve SilversteinThis book presents a selection of the best writings, of the American composer and music legend Aaron Copland, on a wide variety of topics. It features excerpts from his correspondence and recommendations he wrote for other composers.
The Abduction
by Billy St. JohnThriller \ 5m, 2f \ Interior \ What begins as a pleasant anniversary dinner for novelist Allen Grant, his wife Sheila and her daughter Cindy ends in terror when Cindy is forced off the road and abducted while driving back to college during a thunderstorm. Cindy and the icily determined kidnapper both speak with Allen and Sheila during the abduction via cell phones, the horrifying voice of the abductor coming through their speaker phone eerily distorted by a synthesizer. Tension mounts as Allen tries to raise the demanded ransom by the kidnapper's deadline. Cindy's boyfriend searches for clues to her whereabouts and Shelia, who never fully recovered from the tragic accident that killed her first husband, Cindy's father, totters on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Unrelenting phone calls and a horrifying "souvenir" from the abductor push this thriller to a shattering climax.
Abe: A New Musical
by Lee GoldsmithMusical / 16m, 9f "The founding fathers got their own musical with 1776, so why not Abe?" - Playbill.com Abe is a new musical about the early life of Abraham Lincoln. The show explores his youth as a flatboat pilot on the Mississippi, his early love for Ann Rutledge, his troubled marriage to the difficult and mentally fragile Mary Todd, and his attempt to be a good father to his sons. The story follows Abe from his earliest attempts at self-improvement through the 1860 election which made him the 16th president of an already fracturing United States. The score is fully orchestrated and uses bold, melodic and traditional musical theatre styles that embrace the story's period and Americana roots. It can be produced fully staged or as a concert performance. The musical features a large cast and requires strong singers: baritone, soprano, mezzo-soprano, 3 adult male singing roles, 3 male children singing roles, male/female chorus with many speaking roles.
Abelard and Heloise
by Helen WaddellHistorical Drama \ 12m, 9f \ Single Set \ One of the greatest love stories of all time, this play was inspired by Helen Waddell's Peter Abelard and the letters of the 12th century lovers: a monastic scholar and poet and the innocent girl who came to adore him. Abelard loses his heart and his reason to Heloise, has a child by her and, in violation of his vows, enters into a secret marriage. Heloise's vengeful uncle alerts the ecclesiastical authorities. The lovers are separated and Abelard is castrated. She enters a nunnery and he a monastery. They meet again years later when he turns over to her, as abbess, a community he founded at their parting. \ "Will please people who like tragedy with their love and wit with their history." - The New York Times
Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Dissident Acts)
by Leticia AlvaradoIn Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects—shame, disgust, and unbelonging—to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility.
About Shakespeare: Bodies, Spaces and Texts (Elements in Shakespeare Performance)
by Robert ShaughnessyThis Element addresses the question of what Shakespeare in contemporary performance is about, and whether it really is, as it may claim to be, about Shakespeare. Far from charting a smooth journey from page to stage, the work of making Shakespeare into performances often involves deflection, evasion and circumnavigation. Drawing upon the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe and the Schaubühne Berlin, About Shakespeare examines theatrical bodies, the spaces inhabited by actors and audiences, and the texts that circulate around and between them.
Above the Clouds
by Kitty Higgins Anne Flounders Karen LeonPerform this script about a weather reporter's turbulent ride in a hot air balloon.
Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre
by Chantal Bilodeau Larry TremblayAbsurd, hilarious and haunting, Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre is an unforgettable mystery that asks the question: How can we ever know who we are and what is true when the world we know is shifting beneath us? Its answer is simple: John Wilkes Booth was the ?rst American star-the actor who kidnapped reality to transform it into theatre.
The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence
by Susan L. ColeHere is presented a new theory of the origins of tragedy, based on its perceived kinship with mourning ritual. Mourners and tragic protagonists alike journey through dangerous transitional states, confront the uncanny, express themselves in antithetical style, and, above all, enact their ambivalence toward their beloved dead. Elements common to both tragedy and mourning ritual are first identified in actual Chinese, African, and Greek funerary rites and then analyzed in tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen, O'Neill, Miller, Beckett, and Ionesco. Included is a firsthand account of exploration of the tragedy-mourning link in the rehearsal process of the great experimental theater director, Joseph Chaikin. Opening her first chapter, Dr. Cole says, "The grave is the birthplace of tragic drama and ghosts are its procreators. For tragedy is the performance of ambivalence which ghosts emblematize: what we fear in particular--the revenant, the ghost returning to haunt us--is also what we desire--the extending of life beyond the moment of death. "
Abstract Expressions
by Theresa RebeckAfter a scathing review 15 years ago, a once-celebrated painter faded into impoverished obscurity. Can one chance encounter resurrect this volatile artist from obscurity and re-launch him to overnight success? Theresa Rebeck skillfully compares the gritty urban realities of lives lived on the edge with the capricious intrigues of the uptown gallery scene where fame might just be a matter of who you know and reputations can be bought and sold.
Academia Nuts
by Gregg KreutzComedy \ 2m, 2f \ Interior \ Professor Peter Smedforson lives in a quiet New England college town in the former home of poet E.R. Lennox, whose writings are the subject of his scholarly life's work. Reclusive Peter finds his sedate life is suddenly turned upside down when he is invaded by Tammi, a free spirit from Atlantic City whose luck has run out, by Judith, another Lennox scholar determined to unearth a lost manuscript in his home, and by Stuart, Judith's reprehensible ex-husband who is trying to beat her to the manuscript. Peter is confronted with house breakers, mistaken identities, hide and seek chases and unexpected romance. Laughter abounds as Tammi Life won't leave me alone and Peter Life? Sorry, I'm busy find each other amid the chaos created by the manuscript hunting rivals. The discovery of the manuscript and the revelation of its surprising secret provide a hilarious climax to this urbane and quick witted comedy by the author of the popular farce Bottoms Up! \ "Double over with laughter funny." WSTV/WRKY.
Accidents Happen
by J. Michael Deangelis John P. Dowgin Pete BarryCollection of short playsComedyWinner! 2009 NJACT Perry Award for Outstanding Production of an Original Play Seven of The Porch Room's best short plays collected together into an evening of comedy that proves that no matter what you plan for - accidents happen.Shorts include: Accidents Happen - Please beware of all safety procedures and take note of the emergency exits. Nine Point Eight Meters Per Second Per Second - Balthazar Kent, ejected from an airplane, tries to regain control of his life through his cellphone. Reunion Special - A desperate former child actor reunites with his now adult co-stars at a funeral. The Clive Way - A motivational speaker mistakenly tries to empower a group of newly rehabilitated anger-management patients. Hangman - A budding teenage philosopher-scientist searches for the truth by experimenting on his friend with a hallucinogenic cocktail. Tricks of the Trade - Ralph teaches Eddie how to sell your soul for success. The Banderscott - An infomercial marketer is pitched an astonishing product. The shorts can be performed together as a full-length show or on their own as one acts.
The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales
by Laurie ShannonShakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word OC animalOCO itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in "The Accommodated Animal," the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with DescartesOCOs famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: OC I think, therefore I am. OCO Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity. aWith Shakespeare as her touchstone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering OC the question of the animalOCO historically, "The Accommodated Animal" makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies. "
Accommodations
by Nick HallNick Hall . Full Length, Comedy. . Characters: 2 male, 2 female . Interior Set. Lee Schallert, housewife, feeling she may be missing out on something, leaves her husband, Bob, and her suburban home and moves into a two room Greenwich Village apartment with two roommates. One roommate, Pat, is an aspiring actress, never out of character or costumes; but through an agency mix up, the other roommate is a serious, young, graduate student male. The ensuing complications make a hysterical evening. . "An amusing study of marital and human relations. . . . A gem." Labor Herald. . "The audience laughed until it hurt." News American. . "Superior theatre.... It is light comedy at its best." The Sun, Baltimore.
Acha Bacha
by Bilal BaigFor years, Zaya has delicately balanced his relationship with his Muslim faith and queer identity by keeping his genderqueer lover and manipulative mother apart. But when his mother ends up in the hospital on the same day his partner is leaving for pilgrimage, Zaya’s worlds come crashing in on each other, opening a space for traumatic memories to resurface. Acha Bacha boldly explores the intersections between queerness, gender identity and Islamic culture in the Pakistani diaspora. It’s about the way we love, the way we are loved and what it takes to truly accept love.
The Acharnians
by AristophanesWriting at the time of political and social crisis in Athens, Aristophanes was an eloquent yet bawdy challenger to the demagogue and the sophist. The Achanians is a plea for peace set against the background of the long war with Sparta.
The Acorn-Planter: A California Forest Play
by Jack LondonJack London was an American novelist, journalist, social-activist and short-story writer whose works deal romantically with elemental struggles for survival. At his peak, he was the highest paid and the most popular of all living writers. Because of early financial difficulties, he was largely self educated past grammar school. London drew heavily on his life experiences in his writing. He spent time in the Klondike during the Gold Rush and at various times was an oyster pirate, a seaman, a sealer, and a hobo. His first work was published in 1898. From there he went on to write such American classics as Call of the Wild, Sea Wolf, and White Fang.
Acoustic Interculturalism
by Marcus Cheng Chye TanAcoustic Interculturalism is a study of the soundscapes of intercultural performance through the examination of sound's performativity. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, the book examines an akoumenological reception of sound to postulate the need for an acoustic knowing - an awareness of how sound shapes the intercultural experience.
acquiesce
by David YeePlagued by the success of his first book and haunted by his past, Sin Hwang arrives in Hong Kong with some unusual cargo and a lot of emotional baggage. Featuring a surreal cast of characters, from a foul-mouthed Paddington Bear to a wisecracking Buddhist monk, this sharply comedic and heartbreakingly poignant tale of self, familial, and spiritual discovery reflects the cycles from which we must all break free as we find our way.
An Acrobat of the Heart: A Physical Approach to Acting Inspired by the Work of Jerzy Grotowski
by Stephen Wangh"The actor will do, in public, what is considered impossible. " When the renowned Polish director Jerzy Grotowski began his 1967 American workshop with these words, his students were stunned. But within four weeks they themselves had experienced the "impossible. " In An Acrobat of the Heart, teacher-director-playwright Stephen Wangh reveals how Jerzy Grotowski's physical exercises can open a pathway to the actor's inner creativity. Drawing on Grotowski's insights and on the work of Stanislavski, Uta Hagen, and others, Wangh bridges the gap between rigorous physical training and practical scene and character technique. Wangh's students give candid descriptions of their struggles and breakthroughs, demonstrating how to transform these remarkable lessons into a personal journey of artistic growth. Courageous and compelling, An Acrobat of the Heartis an invaluable resource for actors, directors, and teachers alike.
Act 3
by Andrew Keenan-Bolger Ben Kirchner Kate WetherheadA show-stopping middle-grade series about life in and out of the spotlight from Broadway stars and Internet sensations Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Kate Wetherhead.Two weeks at Camp Curtain-Up is just what Jack and Louisa need to fuel their passion for theater: Broadway musical sing-alongs, outdoor rehearsals, and tons of new MTNs (musical theater nerds) to meet... maybe even a special someone. It almost feels like fate when the two friends return home to find local auditions for The Sound of Music. But as Louisa fantasizes about frolicking in the Alps, Jack gets tempted by a student-run drama competition that would reunite the two with their camp friends. Will Jack get Louisa to skip an audition? Can Lou handle Jack as her director? And will someone finally get a big, Broadway happy ending?
Act as a Feminist: Towards a Critical Acting Pedagogy
by Lisa PeckAct as a Feminist maps a female genealogy of UK actor training practices from 1970 to 2020 as an alternative to traditional male lineages. It re-orientates thinking about acting through its intersections with feminisms and positions it as a critical pedagogy, fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. The book draws attention to the pioneering contributions women have made to actor training, highlights the importance of recognising the political potential of acting, and problematises the inequities for a female majority inspired to work in an industry where they remain a minority. Part One opens up the epistemic scope, shaping a methodology to evaluate the critical potential of pedagogic practice. It argues that feminist approaches offer an alternative affirmative position for training, a via positiva and a way to re-make mimesis. In Part Two, the methodology is applied to the work of UK women practitioners through analysis of the pedagogic exchange in training grounds. Each chapter focuses on how the broad curriculum of acting intersects with gender as technique to produce a hidden curriculum, with case studies on Jane Boston and Nadine George (voice), Niamh Dowling and Vanessa Ewan (movement), Alison Hodge and Kristine Landon-Smith (acting), and Katie Mitchell and Emma Rice (directing). The book concludes with a feminist manifesto for change in acting. Written for students, actors, directors, teachers of acting, voice, and movement, and anyone with an interest in feminisms and critical pedagogies, Act as a Feminist offers new ways of thinking and approaches to practice.
Act Cool
by Tobly McSmithA trans teen walks the fine line between doing whatever it takes for his acting dream and staying true to himself in this moving, thought-provoking YA novel from the acclaimed author of Stay Gold. Aspiring actor August Greene just landed a coveted spot at the prestigious School of Performing Arts in New York. There’s only one problem: His conservative parents won’t accept that he’s transgender. And to stay with his aunt in the city, August must promise them he won’t transition. <p><p> August is convinced he can play the part his parents want while acting cool and confident in the company of his talented new friends. But who is August when the lights go down? And where will he turn when the roles start hitting a little too close to home?
Acting: The First Six Lessons
by Richard BoleslavskyThe classic text on the craft of Method acting by the founder of The American Laboratory Theatre.After studying at the Moscow Art Theatre under Konstantin Stanislavski, Richard Boleslavsky became one of the most important acting teachers of his or any generation. Bringing Stanislavski&’s system to America in the 1920s and 30s, he influenced many of the titans of American drama, from his own students—including Lee Strasburg and Stella Adler—to Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and many others.In Acting: The First Six Lessons, Boleslavsky presents his acting theory and technique in a series of accessible and engaging dialogues. Widely considered a must-have for any serious actor, Boleslavsky&’s work has long helped actors better understand their craft.
Acting: Documents from the American Laboratory Theatre
by Richard Boleslavsky Rhonda BlairActing: The First Six Lessons was first published in 1933 and remains a key text for anyone studying acting today. These dramatic dialogues between teacher and idealistic student explore the field of acting according to one of the original teachers of Stanislavsky’s System in America. <p><p> This new edition of an essential text is edited by Rhonda Blair and supplemented for the very first time with documents from the American Laboratory Theatre. These collect together a broad range of exciting unpublished material, drawn from Boleslavsky’s pivotal and unprecedented teachings on acting at the American Laboratory Theatre.