Plays

This book traces three tumultuous decades of avant-garde theatre in the U.S. It begins with the Living Theatre, and explores diverse ensembles such as The Open Theatre, The Performance Group, and Bread and Puppet Theatre. It also looks at the women's theatre movement, and examines the work of Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman and more. There are sections devoted to ritual concepts, theatre in the streets, radical participation of the spectator, workshops in prisons, spectacles such as the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, and much more. This giant colloquium involves the people who changed the face of theatre from the '60s onward. Filled with photos, drawings, private notes and fliers, it is part ongoing history, part document, part journal, part complaint and part blessing.

The first and only complete, fully authorized biography of one of TV's most beloved sitcoms, including the first complete viewer's guide to all 158 episodes, as well as special behind-the-scenes trivia and a full chapter concordance. 50 black and white photos.

Pull up a ringside seat to the exultant pageant of New York's night life, commerce and scoiety, from the Cotton Club to Wall Street to Broadway. Charles Wohlsetter was a young acolyte to George Gershwin, Bernard Baruch, Abe Burrows, J. Paul Getty and George S. Kaufman. He was admitted as a junior member of the Algonquin Round Table with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Franklin P. Adams and Alexander Woollcott. His Algonquin cohorts would have enjoyed the wit and warmth of this fascinating memoir on the front lines of the American twentieth century.

Leslie Fiedler pronounced it the first American tragedy. F.O. Mathiessen considered it the Puritan Faust. Until now, it appeared that Nathaniel Hawthorne's haunting drama of judgement, alienation, and redemption would be forever confined to the page. Now comes the stage version to do it justice. DeMaiolo's brooding choruses of superstition and doubt hover like the furies hungry for vengeance on the voluptuous Oriental woman whose fate would commingle with every life in Salem. The audience joins the chorus as they weigh the American contract of freedom against the fine print of convention and taboo. Performance rights available from Applause.

A collection of five stage plays from this brilliant writer: Middle of the Night, The Tenth Man, Gideon, The Passion of Josef D., and The Latent Heterosexual. Includes an introduction by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

It is virtually impossible to discuss modern acting or actor training without first mentioning the Russian thoerist and director Konstantin Stanislavsky. Complete in one volume, Mel Gordon explores the actor training systems of Stanislavsky and his two most important disciples, Evgeni Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov, tracing the major teachings and refinements over the first 50 years of use by actors. Gordon reconstructs the actual exercises taught at the Moscow Art Theatre and various Russian acting studios, and he clears away the myths and confusion about the practical use of Stanislavsky's System. This volume contains: The Stanislavsky System - First Studio Exercises 1912-1916; Vakhtangov as Rebel and Theoretician - Exercises 1919-1921; Michael Chekhov - Exercises 1919-1952; and Stanislavsky's Fourth Period - Theory of Physical Actions, 1934-1938.

The Applause edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest allows the reader and student to look beyond the scholarly reading text to the more sensuous, more collaborative, more malleable performance text which emerges in conjunction with the commentary and notes. Readers and students are faced with real theatrical choices in each speech as the editors point out the challenges and opportunities to the actor and director at each juncture. Readers will not only discover an enlivened Shakespeare, they will be empowered to rehearse and direct their own productions of the imagination in the process.

If there has ever been a groundbreaking edition that likewise returns the reader to the original Shakespeare text, it will be THE APPLAUSE FOLIO TEXTS. If there has ever been an accessible version of the Folio, it is this edition, set for the first time in modern fonts. The Folio is the source of all other editions. The Folio text forces us to re-examine the assumptions and prejudices which have encumbered over four hundred years of scholarship and performance. Notes refer the reader to subsequent editorial interventions, and offer the reader a multiplicity of interpretations. Notes also advise the reader on variations between Folios and Quartos. Prepared and annotated by Neil Freeman, Head, Graduate Directing Program, University of British Columbia.

From the origins of the Negro spiritual and the birth of the Harlem Renaissance to the emergence of a national black theatre movement, The Theatre of Black Americans offers a penetrating look at a black art form that has exploded into an American cultural institution. Among the essays: James Hatch - Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre; Shelby Steele - Notes on Ritual in the New Black Theatre; Sister M. Francesca Thompson OSF - The Lafayette Players; Ronald Ross - The Role of Blacks in the Federal Theatre.

Including Antoin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, E. Gordon Craig, Luigi Pirandello, Konstantin Stanislavsky, W. B. Yeats, and Emile Zolaing.