Plays

Sonia Moore reveals the subtle tissue of ideas behind what Stanislavski regarded as his major breakthrough, the Method of Physical Actions. Moore's exhaustive analyses of Stanislavski's original texts, letters, journals and production notes have yielded a revised understanding of Stanislavki's method - and his secret of inspiration - the key to spontaneity on the stage and the path to fresh and naturalistic performance.

Stella Adler was one of the 20th Century's greatest figures. She is arguably the most important teacher of acting in American history. Over her long career, both in New York and Hollywood, she offered her vast acting knowledge to generations of actors, including Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro. The great voice finally ended in the early Nineties, but her decades of experience and teaching have been brilliantly caught and encapsulated by Howard Kissel in the twenty-two lessons in this book.

The Broadway sensation tells the tragicomedy story of a movie location shoot in Ireland, and the delightful, touching characters caught up in it. An inventive and riotously funny comedy. - Mike Kuchwara, Associated Press

The creator of Story Theater, the original director of Second City, and one of the greatest popularizers of improvisational theater, Paul Sills has assembled some of his favorite adaptations from world literature. Includes: The Blue Light and Other Stories, A Christmas Carol (Dickens), Stories of God, Rumi.

This book isn't a critical examination of high comedy. Rather, it's a collection of suggestions for the middlemen: the actors who have to catch the comic spark from the playwright and pass it on to the audience. The effort involved must be imperceptible: one has to acquire the cleverness, the articulacy, the febrility of the characters - and then make the whole laborious exercise seem like swimming through silk...The characters in high comedies don't find verbal sophistication difficult or unfamiliar; they enjoy it as you might enjoy slang.

This 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical was inspired by the painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat. A complex work revolving around a fictionalized Seurat immersed in single-minded concentration while painting the masterpiece, the production has evolved into a meditation on art, emotional connection, and community. This publication contains the entire score of the musical. Sunday is itself a modernist creation, perhaps the first truly modernist work of musical theatre that Broadway has produced ... a watershed event that demands nothing less than a retrospective, even revisionist, look at the development of the serious Broadway musical.- Frank Rich, The New York Times Magazine

Book by Hugh Wheeler Introduction by Christopher Bond Mr. Sondheim fearlessly explores psychic caverns where civilized people are not dying to go ... A naked Sweeney Todd stands revealed as a musical of naked rage, chewing up everyone in its path as it spits out blood and tears. - Frank Rich, The New York Times A work of such scope and such daring that it dwarfs every other Broadway musical that even attempts to invite comparison. - Rex Reed, New York Daily News

SWORD FIGHTING; A MANUAL FOR ACTORS AND DIRECTORS is a comprehensive new work on the art of creating realistic and exciting fight sequences for theatre, film and TV. This book is the product of thirty years research and experimentation into traditional European martial arts by acclaimed fight director John Waller and his associates, and possibly the most wide-ranging and practical book on stage combat ever published.

This new version of the long-lost three-act A qui ma femme?, one of Feydeau's earliest comedies, is a slice of marital life served up with the delicious incongruities and linguistic verve that were to characterize his later theatre.

Gordon Phillips begins with the qualities possessed by the most exciting actors and then proceeds to the practical acting tools needed to make those qualities work for every actor. Each tool is accompanied by a clarifying exercise. Many of these tools can be used to enhance life as well as stage life.