- Table View
- List View
How to Improvise a Full-Length Play: The Art of Spontaneous Theater
by Kenn AdamsForget the script and get on the stage! In How to Improvise a Full-Length Play, actors, playwrights, directors, theater-group leaders, and teachers will find everything they need to know to create comedy, tragedy, melodrama, and farce, with no scripts, no scenarios, and no preconceived characters. Author Kenn Adams presents a step-by-step method for long-form improvisation, covering plot structure, storytelling, character development, symbolism, and advanced scene work. Games and exercises throughout the book help actors and directors focus on and succeed with cause-and-effect storytelling, raising the dramatic stakes, creating dramatic conflict, building the dramatic arc, defining characters, creating environments, establishing relationships, and more. How to Improvise a Full-Length Play is the essential tool for anyone who wants to create exceptional theater.
How to Host a Viking Funeral: The Case for Burning Your Regrets, Chasing Your Crazy Ideas, and Becoming the Person You're Meant to Be
by Kyle ScheeleAn inspiring speaker and artist asked 20,000 people around the world to share the regrets they wanted him to burn in a mock Viking ship. This is the story of what he learned about letting go of the pain of the past and embracing the future with hope.Turning 30, artist and speaker Kyle Scheele wanted to do something unusual to mark this milestone. Instead of a birthday bash, he decided to hold a funeral to memorialize the decade of his life that was ending. Building a 16-foot Viking ship out of cardboard, he invited friends to help him set it on fire—a symbolic farewell to his 20s and all the grief, regret, and mistakes that accompanied those years. When video of his Viking funeral went viral, it encouraged many others to let go of past hurts as well. Moved by the response he received, Kyle planned a second funeral (this time with a 30-foot cardboard Viking ship) and asked people to share the things they carried—the bad choices, disappointments, heartaches, and negative thinking that they wanted to lay to rest. He received more than 20,000 responses from around the world—stories both heartbreaking and hilarious, painful and inspiring. In this entertaining and wise book, Kyle reflects on what he discovered about freeing ourselves from the pain of the past, interweaving anecdotes from those who participated with the story of his own journey of renewal. “This story involves multiple Viking funerals, thousands of square feet of cardboard, and enough hot glue to supply your mother-in-law's craft night for the rest of time,” he writes. “But it also involves regret, self-doubt, insecurity, and ultimately, redemption. So buckle up. It's about to get bumpy.”How to Host a Viking Funeral is the story of letting go of the people we used to be, but no longer want to be. It’s about renewal; where there was once regret there is now blank space—an opportunity for a fresh start.
How to Enjoy Shakespeare
by Robert Thomas FallonIn How to Enjoy Shakespeare, the author explores Shakespeare's familiarity in five sections dealing with language, theme, staging, character, and plot, each abundantly illustrated with episodes and quotations from the plays.
How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol
by Alice DaileyHow to Do Things with Dead People studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Alice Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare's English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things—technologies such as literary doppelgängers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning. By situating Shakespeare's historical drama in this intermedial conversation, Dailey challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes the context of a work of art and contests foundational models of linear temporality that inform long-standing conceptions of historical periodization and teleological order. Working from an eclectic body of theories, pictures, and machines that transcend time and media, Dailey composes a searching exploration of how the living use the dead to think back and look forward, to rule, to love, to wish and create.
How to do Shakespeare
by Adrian NobleThe author has worked on Shakespeare with everyone from Oscar-nominated actors to groups of schoolchildren. Here he draws on several decades of top-level directing experience to shed new light on how to bring some of theatre’s seminal texts to life. <p><p> He shows you how to approach the perennial issues of performing Shakespeare, including: wordplay – using colour and playing plain, wit and comedy, making language muscular; building a character – different strategies, using the text, Stanislavski and Shakespeare; shape and structure – headlining a speech, playing soliloquys, determining a speech’s purpose and letting the verse empower you; dialogue – building tension, sharing responsibility and ’passing the ball’. <p><p> This guided tour of Shakespeare’s complex but unfailingly rewarding work stunningly combines instruction and inspiration.
How to Direct a Musical
by David YoungHow to Direct a Musical is a lively and practical guide to the seemingly overwhelming task of directing a musical. David Young brings to this handbook his extensive experience as a director of over 100 productions and more than 250 workshops in the US, China, Senegal and Brazil. Young takes a pragmatic, do-it-yourself approach, guiding the reader from planning to casting, rehearsal to opening night. Topics covered include script analysis, collaboration with designers, musical directors, choreographers and crew, eliminating lengthy pauses between scenes, dress rehearsals and curtain calls.
How to Defend Yourself (Yale Drama Series)
by Liliana PadillaA Yale Drama Series-winning play about self-defense, desire, and healing in the aftermath of a college rape Seven college students gather for a DIY self-defense workshop after a sorority sister is raped. They practice using their bodies as weapons. They wrestle with their desires. They learn the limits of self-defense. This new play by writer, director, actor, and community builder Liliana Padilla explores the intersection of sex, community, and what it means to heal in a violent world. Padilla shows how learning self-defense becomes a channel for these college students&’ rage, anxiety, confusion, trauma, and desire. The play examines what one wants, how to ask for it, and the ways rape culture threatens one&’s body and sense of belonging. It is the thirteenth winner of the Yale Drama Series prize and the second one chosen by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar.
How to Catch Monsters
by Sharon BrinkerhoffThis book is a wonderful role-play reading adventure! Playbook stories are presented in a unique and colorful format and are read out loud by several readers like a play, without memorization, props, or a stage. <p><p>When you read the book, you and other readers bring the story to life and become the characters. As you read your part out loud, you will have fun expressing and acting like your character. You and the other readers will explore the story plot together and learn what will happen next. It's an exciting journey of discovery that pulls you into the story, and you'll want to read it out loud again and again! <p><p>Begin your reading adventure with the Character Summary at the beginning of the book. You'll notice right away that the words and sentences for each character appear in a different color here and throughout the book. This will make it easy to follow along and read your part with confidence and enthusiasm.
How to Be a Working Actor: The Insider's Guide to Finding Jobs in Theater, Film, and Television
by Mari Lyn Henry Lynne RogersThis comprehensive guide has been revised and expanded to include new information on enhancing your image; finding jobs in emerging markets; updated union rules and payscales; current living expenses; and an entirely new chapter on “Cyberbiz,” exploring the ways that the Internet has opened new doors for actors and enabled entirely new approaches to promotion. Establishing your acting career entails developing all aspects of your performing skills, but more than that, it means learning how to manage your career as an ongoing business. Plenty of schools and books teach you how to hone specific areas of your talent, but onlyHow to Be a Working Actorshows you the whole picture, from improving your image and your audition abilities to finding an agent and landing the roles; from surviving a screen test to making it through your first day on the set; from making your way around the big city to finding regional work. Cowritten by a leading casting director/agent and a seasoned actress/author,How to Be a Working Actoris still the bible of The Biz, with an insider’s viewpoint on all the essentials: assembling a dynamic resume, taking the perfect headshot, understanding the unions, finding a “day job” to supplement your income, learning how to live on a budget in New York or Los Angeles, networking, and much more. Countless tips on wardrobe, makeup, interview skills, and character analysis demonstrate how you can look and act your best for any audition or acting situation. Dozens of industry professionals offer authoritative advice gleaned from decades of experience. Anyone seeking to become—or remain—a working actor needs a copy of this indispensable book.
How to Be a Multi-Hyphenate in the Theatre Business: Conversations, Advice, and Tips from “Dear Multi-Hyphenate”
by Michael KushnerHow to Be a Multi-Hyphenate in the Theatre Business empowers theatre professionals to take hold of their own career and become successful ‘multi-hyphenates’– artists with multiple proficiencies, often cross-pollinating each other to help flourish professional capabilities. Discussing self-identity, networking, workflow, failure, passion, purpose, socially responsible artistry, social media, and the effects of COVID-19, Michael Kushner, award-winning theatre multi-hyphenate artist, sets the stage for artists of all disciplines and backgrounds to find personalized success in the theatre industry. Complete with informative and lively exercises and excerpts from Kushner’s popular podcast and workshop, Dear Multi-Hyphenate, this book addresses questions such as: How do we recover from a pandemic? How do we give more access to marginalized theatre creators? and What goes into producing our own projects? Featuring exclusive information from a myriad of theatre makers such as agents, managers, designers, actors, press representatives, producers, comedians, social media stars, writers, executive directors, CEOs, and lawyers, this book promotes the dismantling of gatekeeping and provides a specialized, hands-on experience to an innovative and lucrative approach to theatre making. How to Be a Multi-Hyphenate in the Theatre Business is an invaluable resource for theatre artists at any level in their careers, whether they are undergraduates, graduate students, professors, award-winning members of the theatre and film community, working professionals, high school students, or entrepreneurs.
How To Audition On Camera: A Hollywood Insider's Guide for Actors
by Sharon Bialy Bryan CranstonTo win a role in a movie or on network or cable TV, you must make a strong first impression in your brief, crucial audition--and the first person you have to impress is the casting director. In How to Audition On Camera, Casting Director Sharon Bialy answers the twenty-five questions actors ask most frequently about how to nail an audition. What is the casting director looking for? If you mess up, can you start over? What is the most common mistake experienced actors make? Should you audition off book or can you look at the page? Should you dress in character? How much can you improvise? Actors--both novice and professional--are often misled by myths and outdated prescriptions. This guide replaces such misinformation with concise and accurate advice from someone who is in the room helping to make the decision on who gets the job. Bialy gets readers started immediately on the road to screen acting success.
How To Audition On Camera: A Hollywood Insider's Guide for Actors
by Sharon Bialy Bryan CranstonFirst Time in Print Updated and expanded To win a role in a movie or on network or cable TV, you must make a strong first impression in your brief, crucial audition—and the first person you have to impress is the casting director. In How to Audition On Camera, Casting Director Sharon Bialy answers the twenty-five questions actors ask most frequently about how to nail an audition. What is the casting director looking for? If you mess up, can you start over? What is the most common mistake experienced actors make? Should you audition off book or can you look at the page? Should you dress in character? How much can you improvise? Actors—both novice and professional—are often misled by myths and outdated prescriptions. This guide replaces such misinformation with concise and accurate advice from someone who is in the room helping to make the decision on who gets the job. Bialy gets readers started immediately on the road to screen acting success.
How Theatre Educates
by Kathleen Gallagher David BoothCanada boasts a remarkable number of talented theatre artists, scholars, and educators. How Theatre Educates brings together essays and other contributions from members of these diverse communities to advocate for a broader and more inclusive understanding of theatre as an educative force.Organized to reflect the variety of contexts in which professionals are making, researching, and teaching drama, this anthology presents a wide range of articles, essays, reminiscences, songs, poems, plays, and interviews to elucidate the relationship between theatre practice and pedagogy, and to highlight the overriding theme: namely, that keeping 'education' - with its curriculum components of dramatic literature and theatre studies in formal school settings - separate from 'theatre' outside of the classroom, greatly diminishes both enterprises.In this volume, award-winning playwrights, directors, actors, and scholars reflect on the many ways in which those working in theatre studios, school classrooms, and on stages throughout the country are engaged in teaching and learning processes that are particular to the arts and especially genres of theatre. Situating theatre practitioners as actors in a larger socio-cultural enterprise, How Theatre Educates is a fascinating and lively inquiry into pedagogy and practice that will be relevant to teachers and students of drama, educators, artists working in theatre, and the theatre-going public.ContributorsMaja ArdalDavid BoothPatricia CanoDiane FlacksKathleen GallagherJohn GilbertSky GilbertJim GilesLinda GriffithsTomson HighwayJanice HladkiCornelia HooglandAnn-Marie MacDonaldLori McDougallJohn MurrellDomenico PietropaoloWalter PitmanRichard RoseJason ShermanLynn SlotkinLarry SwartzJudith ThompsonGuillermo VerdecchiaBelarie Zatzman
How the Hubba-Dubbas Saved Lake Ni-Ni
by Jeffrey Fuerst Anne Flounders Anita DufallaPerform this script about two tribes that must learn to live and work together.
How the Classics Made Shakespeare (E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series #3)
by Jonathan BateFrom one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare’s imaginationBen Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having “small Latin and less Greek.” But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatrical profession that had inherited the conventions and forms of classical drama, and he read deeply in Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca. In a book of extraordinary range, acclaimed literary critic and biographer Jonathan Bate, one of the world’s leading authorities on Shakespeare, offers groundbreaking insights into how, perhaps more than any other influence, the classics made Shakespeare the writer he became.Revealing in new depth the influence of Cicero and Horace on Shakespeare and finding new links between him and classical traditions, ranging from myths and magic to monuments and politics, Bate offers striking new readings of a wide array of the plays and poems. At the heart of the book is an argument that Shakespeare’s supreme valuation of the force of imagination was honed by the classical tradition and designed as a defense of poetry and theater in a hostile world of emergent Puritanism.Rounded off with a fascinating account of how Shakespeare became our modern classic and has ended up playing much the same role for us as the Greek and Roman classics did for him, How the Classics Made Shakespeare combines stylistic brilliance, accessibility, and scholarship, demonstrating why Jonathan Bate is one of our most eminent and readable literary critics.
How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays
by Peter LakeA masterful, highly engaging analysis of how Shakespeare's plays intersected with the politics and culture of Elizabethan England With an ageing, childless monarch, lingering divisions due to the Reformation, and the threat of foreign enemies, Shakespeare's England was fraught with unparalleled anxiety and complicated problems. In this monumental work, Peter Lake reveals, more than any previous critic, the extent to which Shakespeare's plays speak to the depth and sophistication of Elizabethan political culture and the Elizabethan imagination. Lake reveals the complex ways in which Shakespeare's major plays engaged with the events of his day, particularly regarding the uncertain royal succession, theological and doctrinal debates, and virtue and virt#65533; in politics. Through his plays, Lake demonstrates, Shakespeare was boldly in conversation with his audience about a range of contemporary issues. This remarkable literary and historical analysis pulls the curtain back on what Shakespeare was really telling his audience and what his plays tell us today about the times in which they were written.
How It Ends
by Debbie PattersonMost of us, when faced with death, wish we could just have a little more time. But what if this is the little more time that we wished for? What are you going to do with it? Grieving siblings Natalie and Bart have differing views on how we die. Natalie, a palliative care nurse, knows how drugs can help ease someone’s pain, and do so on their own terms; Bart, a minister, believes that surrendering to what may come can bring peace and wisdom. Through this immersive show about end-of-life choices, Natalie and Bart are guided by a disabled angel who helps them address their mother’s final decision and understand their own hopes and fears about death. Packed with relatable existential questions, this joyously engaging and reflective play offers a welcoming space to think about what comes next.
How I wish you had known me (DRAMA / Gay & Lesbian #1)
by Gilberto SantosIs it possible to fall in love with someone who's already gone? Lucas and Lauro never met, not in this life... But what would only be an uncompromising holiday trip in the interior of São Paulo turns around the life of Lauro, a psychologist always willing to help. His beliefs are to put to the test amid events that defy logic. After being involved in a mysterious suicide that would hit the small town of Vinhedo, his help to the dead's family would not end as expected; soon Lauro would be involved and in love with Lucas. On the other side, unknowingly, it would also be helping his soul mate to rise spiritually. Follow and be moved by this story, which leaves no doubt that death is just a journey and that soul mates really exist
How I Learned to Drive
by Paula VogelTHE STORY: A wildly funny, surprising and devastating tale of survival as seen through the lens of a troubling relationship between a young girl and an older man. How I Learned to Drive is the story of a woman who learns the rules of the road and l
How I Changed My Life
by Todd StrasserA knee injury has left football star Kyle Winthrop sitting on the sidelines of high school life. Bolita Vine has vowed to change her image. She loses weight and works on becoming more assertive. She even lands the job of stage managing the school play. When Kyle tries out for the play, he and Bo become friends. But when Bo tries to take the relationship one step further, she soon learns the difference between fantasy and reality.
How Green Was My Brownie
by Jack SharkeyComedy / 6m, 5f / Interior / A bit of madness is loose in the Flinder house. Winifred Flinder, supposedly just out of the hospital, insists she was living it up in Paris. Her husband thinks she is planning to go into the convent, while their daughter Bonnie suspects both of her parents are nuts. The nurse thinks the neighboring piano teacher is a great pediatric surgeon and the gynecologist gratefully accepts payment for an operation he may not have performed. Add to this a general handyman who insists the brownies have it in for the Flinders, a housekeeper who expects to be murdered in her bed, a neighbor whose purse contains anything from crowbars to teddy bears and an unsolicited appearance by the Headless Horseman and you have this jolly jaunt through a superstition ridden environs where anything can happen and eventually does.
How Greek Tragedy Works: A Guide for Directors, Dramaturges, and Playwrights
by Brian KulickHow Greek Tragedy Works is a journey through the hidden meanings and dual nature of Greek tragedy, drawing on its foremost dramatists to bring about a deeper understanding of how and why to engage with these enduring plays. Brian Kulick dispels the trepidation that many readers feel with regard to classical texts by equipping them with ways in which they can unpack the hidden meanings of these plays. He focuses on three of the key texts of Greek theatre: Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Euripides' The Bacchae, and Sophocles' Electra, and uses them to tease out the core principles of the theatre-making and storytelling impulses. By encouraging us to read between the lines like this, he also enables us to read these and other Greek tragedies as artists' manifestos, equipping us not only to understand tragedy itself, but also to interpret what the great playwrights had to say about the nature of plays and drama. This is an indispensable guide for anyone who finds themselves confronted with tackling the Greek classics, whether as a reader, scholar, student, or director.
How Good is David Mamet, Anyway?: Writings on Theater--and Why It Matters
by John HeilpernFirst Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
How Does The Show Go On?: An Introduction To The Theater (A Disney Theatrical Souvenir Book)
by Thomas Schumacher Jeff KurttiFilled with detailed explanations, captivating illustrations, and entertaining trivia, this clearly written, lively, and uniquely-designed book is a first-of-its-kind introduction to the world of the Theatre, from the box office to backstage, and beyond. From one side of the book, the reader enters via the front door, where the people and activities of the “front of house” can be examined. From the book’s other side, the reader enters the “Stage Door,” where the behind-the-scenes world of the “Back of house” is revealed. In exploring this visually-inviting “theatre of the mind,” readers encounter the people, places, occupations, and equipment of the theatre world, and have the opportunity to investigate them all. From the box office and the Usher Staff to the Dressing Rooms and the Backstage doorman, the reader may wander at will within this one-of-a-kind world, discovering the wonders of theatre all along the way.