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Olivier

by Philip Ziegler

Hollywood superstar; Oscar-winning director; greatest stage actor of the twentieth century. The era abounded in great actors - Gielgud, Richardson, Guinness, Burton, O'Toole - but none could challenge Laurence Olivier's range and power. By the 1940s he had achieved international stardom. His affair with Vivien Leigh led to a marriage as glamorous and as tragic as any in Hollywood history. He was as accomplished a director as he was a leading man: his three Shakespearian adaptations are among the most memorable ever filmed. And yet, at the height of his fame, he accepted what was no more than an administrator's wage to become the founding Director of the National Theatre. In 2013 the theatre celebrates its fiftieth anniversary; without Olivier's leadership it would never have achieved the status that it enjoys today. Off-stage, Olivier was the most extravagant of characters: generous, yet almost insanely jealous of those few contemporaries whom he deemed to be his rivals; charming but with a ferocious temper. With access to more than fifty hours of candid, unpublished interviews, Philip Ziegler ensures that Olivier's true character - at its most undisguised - shines through as never before.

Grace & Glorie

by Tom Ziegler

Comedy / 2f / Estelle Parsons and Lucie Arnaz starred on Broadway in this charmer set in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Grace, a feisty 90 year old cancer patient, has checked herself out of the hospital and returned to her beloved homestead cottage to die alone. The volunteer hospice worker who appears with the pain medication Grace willfully left behind is a Harvard MBA recently transplanted to this rural backwater from New York. Glorie is tense, unhappy and guilt ridden, her only child having been killed in an auto accident when she was driving. As she attempts to care for and comfort the cantankerous rustic, this sophisticated urbanite gains new perspectives on values and life's highs and lows.

Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone

by Katherine A. Zien

Sovereign Acts explores how artists, activists, and audiences performed and interpreted sovereignty struggles in the Panama Canal Zone, from the Canal Zone’s inception in 1903 to its dissolution in 1999. In popular entertainments and patriotic pageants, opera concerts and national theatre, white U.S. citizens, West Indian laborers, and Panamanian artists and activists used performance as a way to assert their right to the Canal Zone and challenge the Zone’s sovereignty, laying claim to the Zone’s physical space and imagined terrain. By demonstrating the place of performance in the U.S. Empire’s legal landscape, Katherine A. Zien transforms our understanding of U.S. imperialism and its aftermath in the Panama Canal Zone and the larger U.S.-Caribbean world.

Erotic Politics: The Dynamics of Desire in the Renaissance Theatre

by Susan Zimmerman

Identifying the stage as a primary site for erotic display, these essays take eroticism in Renaissance culture as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity in early modern culture. Contributors examine how the Renaissance stage functioned as a decoder for erotic experience, both reinforcing and subverting expected sexual behaviour. They argue that the dynamics of theatrical eroticism served to deconstruct gender definitions, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent. In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire in terms of one another, these essays open up an attractive and distinctive perspective in cultural debate.

Introduction to Theatre Arts: A 36-Week Action Handbook

by Suzi Zimmerman

At last! A student-friendly, teacher-friendly workbook with study units for a full year of classroom drama activities. <p><p> The entire spectrum of theatre is covered in ten sections: 1. Getting Started, 2. Evaluation, 3. Scene Work, 4. Acting, 5. Characterization, 6. Publicity and Other Production Business, 7. Play Production, 8. Theatre History, 9. Games and Improvisation, 10. Planning for the Future. All units are complete with detailed instructions, examples, working forms, and photo illustrations. Students will learn all the basics of theatre history, play production, performing, and finding a career in theatre. This instructional program is classroom-tested and designed to fit the budgetary considerations of schools.

Introduction to Theatre Arts 2: An Action Handbook for Drama Students

by Suzi Zimmerman

Those who have already discovered the ease of teaching Theatre Arts with Suzi Zimmerman's first textbook will be thrilled to learn she has come out with this sequel! <p><p> This action handbook takes all the outstanding components you loved in the first book and applies it to seven new sections: 1. Theatre for Life s Lessons, 2. Movement Theatre for the Eyes, 3. Voice Theatre for the Ears, 4. Skill-Building Activities Theatre Projects, Mini-Units and Self-Guided Lessons, 5. Understanding and Writing Scripts, 6. Theatre Behind the Scenes, and 7. Production 101. Theory combined with hands-on is the style of every chapter. This series has been classroom-tested to fit the budgetary considerations of all schools.

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds: A Drama in Two Acts

by Paul Zindel

Beatrice was a mother...and the embittered ringmaster of the circus Hunsdorfer featuring three generations of crazy ladies living under the sloppiest big top on earth. Nanny was no problem. She sat and stared and stayed silent as a venerable vegetable should. Ruth was half-mad and easily bought with an occasional cigarette. But how is the world would Beatrice control Tillie--keeper of rabbits, dreamer of atoms, true believer in life, hope, and the effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds...<P><P> Pulitzer Prize Winner

Body Voice Imagination: ImageWork Training and the Chekhov Technique (A\theatre Arts Book Ser.)

by David Zinder

First published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

DreamWork: A Training for Directors

by David Zinder

DreamWork: A Training for Directors provides a theoretical basis and a highly detailed, practical, step-by-step blueprint for developing a directorial concept for a play.Directing is a complex, multi-staged artistic process which, for the most part, is a collaborative work of art. The director works with designers, composers, choreographers and actors to create the performance that is eventually shown to an audience. In this process, there is one stage of the director’s work which is uniquely personal and individual: the creation of a directorial concept. This book concentrates on this crucial stage of the director’s work, offering a template for the creation of a directorial concept prior to embarking on the collaborative stage of the director’s work. The book follows the process from the choice of the text, through a series of clearly documented and structured sets of strategies with attendant examples, up to the creation of the director’s version of the original play - the adaptation - that is the starting point for the director’s dialogue with designers, composers, choreographers and actors.DreamWork: A Training for Directors is intended for directing students at universities or theatre academies, both at undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as directors at the beginning of their careers.

Terrence McNally: A Casebook (Casebooks on Modern Dramatists #No. 22)

by Toby Silverman Zinman

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The People Speak: A Performance Piece

by Howard Zinn

To celebrate the millionth copy sold of Howard Zinn's great People's History of the United States, Zinn drew on the words of Americans -- some famous, some little known -- across the range of American history. These words were read by a remarkable cast at an event held at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York City that included James Earl Jones, Alice Walker, Jeff Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfre Woodard, Marisa Tomei, Danny Glover, Myla Pitt, Harris Yulin, and Andre Gregory.From that celebration, this book was born. Collected here under one cover is a brief history of America told through dramatic readings applauding the enduring spirit of dissent.Here in their own words, and interwoven with commentary by Zinn, are Columbus on the Arawaks; Plough Jogger, a farmer and participant in Shays' Rebellion; Harriet Hanson, a Lowell mill worker; Frederick Douglass; Mark Twain; Mother Jones; Emma Goldman; Helen Keller; Eugene V. Debs; Langston Hughes; Genova Johnson Dollinger on a sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan; an interrogation from a 1953 HUAC hearing; Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and member of the Freedom Democratic Party; Malcolm X; and James Lawrence Harrington, a Gulf War resister, among others.

Three Plays

by Howard Zinn

World-renowned historian Howard Zinn has turned to drama to explore the legacy of Karl Marx and Emma Goldman and to delve into the intricacies of political and social conscience perhaps more deeply than traditional history permits. Three Plays brings together all this work, including the previously unpublished Daughter of Venus, along with a new introductory essay on political theater, and prefaces to each of the plays.From the Trade Paperback edition.

A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations: Contemporary Suicide Protests by Fire and Their Resonances in Culture (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

by Grzegorz Ziółkowski

A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations investigates contemporary protest self-burnings and their echoes across culture. The book provides a conceptual frame for the phenomenon and an annotated, comprehensive timeline of suicide protests by fire, supplemented with notes on artworks inspired by or devoted to individual cases. The core of the publication consists of six case studies of these ultimate acts, augmented with analyses and interpretations hailing from the visual arts, film, theatre, architecture, and literature. By examining responses to these events within an interdisciplinary frame, Ziółkowski highlights the phenomenon’s global reach and creates a broad, yet in-depth, exploration of the problems that most often prompt these self-burnings, such as religious discrimination and harassment, war and its horrors, the brutality and indoctrination of authoritarian regimes and the apathy they produce, as well as the exploitation of the so-called "subalterns" and their exclusion from mainstream economic systems. Of interest to scholars from an array of fields, from theatre and performance, to visual art, to religion and politics, A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations offers a unique look at voluntary, demonstrative, and radical performances of shock and subversion.

Speaking Out: Storytelling and Creative Drama for Children

by Jack Zipes

In his successful Creative Storytelling, Jack Zipes showed how storytelling is a rich and powerful tool for self-expression and for building children's imaginations. In Speaking Out, this master storyteller goes further, speaking out against rote learning and testing and for the positive force within storytelling and creative drama during the K-12 years.For the past four years, Jack Zipes has worked with the Neighborhood Bridges Program of the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, taking his storytelling techniques into inner-city schools. Speaking Out is in part a record of the transformations storytelling can work on the minds and lives of young people. But it is also a vivid and exhilarating demonstration of a different kind of education - one built from deep inside each child. Speaking Out is a book for storytellers, educators, parents, and anyone who cares about helping kids find within themselves the keys to imagination.

Political Performance in Syria

by Edward Ziter

Political Performance in Syria, charts the history of a theatre that has sought the expansion of civil society and imagined alternate political realities. In doing so, the manuscript situates the current use of performance and theatre by artists of the Syrian Revolution within a long history of political contestation.

Fighting Light

by Greg Zittel

Drama / Greg Zittel / 4m, 2f / 1 Interior, 1 Exterior / It's 1930. Lovely, level headed Molley Farrell lives with her alcoholic father in Verona, New Jersey, and dreams of a better life. Molley's best friend dates a bootlegger who arranges a date for Molly with a thug named Al. Romance blooms between the brutish Al and the delicate Molley until Molley learns what Al does for a living. Al must decide if he can abandon his gangster life for Molly. / "One hell of a play in a straight line cinematic style that's quite in keeping with the time and place of the story. My heart was in my mouth from first to last, both because of the thundercloud violence and the against the odds romance forcing itself through the violence like a flower through grimy concrete." - New York Post

Sergei Radlov: The Shakespearian Fate of a Soviet Director

by David Zolotnistky

First Published in 1996. Professor Zolotnitsky provides a picture of the life and work of Sergei Radlov - one of the most outstanding interpreters of Shakespeare on the Soviet stage in the 1930s. Sergei Radlov started as one of the left-wing directors among the disciples and companions of Vsevolod Meyerhold in post-revolutionary Russia. He directed Jack London, Ernst Toller, Evgeni Zamyatin and updated Aristophanes. In the latter he did "modern" operas, such as "The Love for Three Oranges" by Sergei Prokofiev and "Der ferne Klang" by Franz Schrecker.

Ukufa kukaShaka

by Elliot Zondi

Ukufa kukaShaka is a historical drama by Elliot Zondi, first published in 1960 in the Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series by the University of the Witwatersrand Press. Its plot is based on the events surrounding the assassination of Shaka, the mighty Zulu king, by his two half-brothers, Dingane and Mhlangana, aided and abetted by his paternal aunt, Mkabayi, in 1828. The play explores the classic theme of the tragic hero’s fatal flaws: hubris and overconfidence. Shaka’s ruthless ambition led him to overstep human boundaries, kill with impunity, bar his warriors from having families and force them into endless wars. His blind spot seems to have been to put the survival and expansion of the Zulu kingdom first and the welfare of his subjects second.Against this backdrop Mkabayi, whose ambitions for a remarkable Zulu nation were more tempered, played a decisive role in his downfall. Zondi explores arguments both in favor of and against Shaka’s assassination in a way that allows the reader to sympathize with his greater vision and his thwarted plan to fight impending colonialism. His dramatization of the conflict between Shaka and Mkabayi highlights questions of leadership and nation-building that continue to be relevant today.

Don Juan Tenorio (Los mejores clásicos #Volumen)

by José Zorrilla

Los mejores libros jamás escritos. Heredera de una rica tradición literaria, en la que destacan nombres como el de Tirso de Molina, Molière o Lord Byron, Don Juan Tenorio de José Zorrilla es una de las versiones más populares de esta mítica figura, caracterizado como un personaje satánico redimido por el amor. De ello resulta una obra de teatro de sorprendentes recursos dramáticos, que se ha convertido en una de las más representadas en los escenarios españoles de todos los tiempos. La presente edición está a cargo de Ismael López Martín, profesor en el departamento de didáctica de las lenguas y de las ciencias humanas y sociales de la Universidad de Zaragoza y especialista en teatro español. Su estudio introductorio y el aparato de notas que ha diseñado constituyen una aportación fundamental que nos acerca aún más al mito de Don Juan.

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media

by Nizar Zouidi

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media studies the performative nature of evil characters, acts and emotions across intersecting genres, disciplines and historical eras. This collection brings together scholars and artists with different institutional standings, cultural backgrounds and (inter)disciplinary interests with the aim of energizing the ongoing discussion of the generic and thematic issues related to the representation of villainy and evil in literature and media. The volume covers medieval literature to contemporary literature and also examines important aspects of evil in literature such as social and political identity, the gothic and systemic evil practices. In addition to literature, the book considers examples of villainy in film, TV and media, revealing that performance, performative control and maneuverability are the common characteristics of villains across the different literary and filmic genres and eras studied in the volume.

In the Company of Actors: Reflections on the Craft of Acting (Stage And Costume Ser.)

by Carole Zucker

In the Company of Actors is a wonderful ensemble of entertaining and illuminating discussions with sixteen of the most celebrated and prestigious actors in contemporary theatre, film and television. The impressive list of actors includes: Eileen Atkins, Alan Bates, Simon Callow, Judi Dench, Brenda Fricker, Nigel Hawthorne, Jane Lapotaire, Janet McTeer, Ian Richardson, Miranda Richardson, Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Anthony Sher, Janet Suzman, David Suchet, and Penelope Wilton. Carole Zucker covers a wide range of topics including the actors' main childhood influences, their actor training, early acting experience, preparation for roles and sound advice for coping with actors' problems such as creative differences with other actors or directors.

Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Performance, and Philosophy (UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series)


To entertain an idea is to take it in, pay attention to it, give it breathing room, dwell with it for a time. The practice of entertaining ideas suggests rumination and meditation, inviting us to think of philosophy as a form of hospitality and a kind of mental theatre. In this collection, organized around key words shared by philosophy and performance, the editors suggest that Shakespeare’s plays supply readers, listeners, viewers, and performers with equipment for living. In plays ranging from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to King Lear and The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare invites readers and audiences to be more responsive to the texture and meaning of daily encounters, whether in the intimacies of love, the demands of social and political life, or moments of ethical decision. Entertaining the Idea features established and emerging scholars, addressing key words such as role play, acknowledgment, judgment, and entertainment as well as curse and care. The volume also includes longer essays on Shakespeare, Kant, Husserl, and Hegel as well as an afterword by theatre critic Charles McNulty on the philosophy and performance history of King Lear.

Hamilton and the Law: Reading Today's Most Contentious Legal Issues through the Hit Musical


Since its Broadway debut, Hamilton: An American Musical has infused itself into the American experience: who shapes it, who owns it, who can rap it best. Lawyers and legal scholars, recognizing the way the musical speaks to some of our most complicated constitutional issues, have embraced Alexander Hamilton as the trendiest historical face in American civics. Hamilton and the Law offers a revealing look into the legal community's response to the musical, which continues to resonate in a country still deeply divided about the reach of the law. A star-powered cast of legal minds—from two former U.S. solicitors general to leading commentators on culture and society—contribute brief and engaging magazine-style articles to this lively book. Intellectual property scholars share their thoughts on Hamilton's inventive use of other sources, while family law scholars explore domestic violence. Critical race experts consider how Hamilton furthers our understanding of law and race, while authorities on the Second Amendment discuss the language of the Constitution's most contested passage. Legal scholars moonlighting as musicians discuss how the musical lifts history and law out of dusty archives and onto the public stage. This collection of minds, inspired by the phenomenon of the musical and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, urges us to heed Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Founding Fathers and to create something new, daring, and different.

Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era


The profound political, economic, and social changes in China in the second half of the twentieth century have produced a wealth of scholarship; less studied however is how cultural events, and theater reforms in particular, contributed to the dynamic landscape of contemporary Chinese society. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform fills this gap by investigating the theories and practice of socialist theater and their effects on a diverse range of genres, including Western-style spoken drama, Chinese folk opera, dance drama, Shanghai opera, Beijing opera, and rural theater. Focusing on the 1950s and ’60s, when theater art occupied a prominent political and cultural role in Maoist China, this book examines the efforts to remake theater in a socialist image. It explores the unique dynamics between official discourse, local politics, performance practice, and audience reception that emerged under the pressures of highly politicized cultural reform as well as the off-stage, lived impact of rapid policy change on individuals and troupes obscured by the public record. This multidisciplinary collection by leading scholars covers a wide range of perspectives, geographical locations, specific research methods, genres of performance, and individual knowledge and experience. The richly diverse approach leads readers through a nuanced and complex cultural landscape as it contributes significantly to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of modern Chinese theater and performance.

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