Plays

A collection of eleven short plays from 1989. Includes: The Author's Voice, San Antonio Sunset, There is No John Garfield, The Mask of Hiroshima, Penguin Blues, Haiku, Chemical Reactions, Dolores, April Snow, Trout and A Poster of the Cosmos.

This first-of-its kind collection includes a wide range of works, from an early examination and critique of American society after World War II to plays that reflect socio-political concerns that kept pace with historical events, like the sit-in demonstrations, the bus boycotts, black nationalism, and the women's liberation movement. A hybrid of comedic forms including satire, farce, comedy of manners, romantic comedy, dark comedy, and tragicomedy are presented through vernacular language, stand-up performance art, masks, broad humor, as well as the minstrel show. Essays, articles and interviews complement this critical edition.

Collected here for the first time are plays - many of which have been unavailable for decades - which pronounce a black American struggle for freedom, advancement and equality from the days of slavery to the era of civil rights. Includes: Emperor of Haiti by Langston Hughes; Nat Turner by Randolph Edmonds; In Splendid Error by William Branch; Harriet Tubman by May Miller; Paul Robeson by Phillip Hayes Dean; I, Marcus Garvey by Edgar White; and Roads of the Mountain Top by Roy Milner.

Lawrence J. Quirk delves into every personal and professional aspect of Bob Hope's long, complex and dramatic life; rising by sheer dint of will to great wealth and fame. Why did Hope become so identified with sponsoring the Vietnam War? What's the real scoop on his relationship with Bing Crosby? How far astray did Hope's frankly oversexed nature lead him from the marriage he successfully maintained with Dolores for over sixty years? Quirk writes about Hope based on long experience. He knew and interviewed Bob Hope while serving as an army seargeant during the Korean war and later as entertainment editor, and interviewer of top stars for over forty years. Quirk approaches his subject with original observations born of years of studying this most celebrated, yet in some ways most mysterious of entertainment giants.

Breathing, Movement, Exploration is a groundbreaking approach to how to use your body. Barbara Sellers-Young combines body mechanics and eastern and western philosophy to create a new visceral awareness of the performance process. Its simple, step-by-step structure enables the reader to learn the concepts of Laban and Stanislavski while exploring eastern ideas of breath and energy. Breathing, Movement, Exploration is a useful blueprint for how to use your body on stage. It speaks to professionals as well as anyone fascinated by the inner-process of an actor's training or to gain cognitive and physical insight into one's own self.

As a boy growing up in the East Bronx, Harold Thau dreamed the American Dream. In Bronx to Broadway, he pays homage to that experience which carried him from a sea of tenements to the exciting Great White Way and a successful career as a theatre producer. Rich in colorful inside stories of show business personalities, Harold Thau provides a portrait of the entertainment industry seldom evoked and largely unseen, told with insight, humor, and a sense of humanity about the business of show business.

The script to the touching and funny play by Alan Zweibel about his relationship with famed comiedienne Gilda Radner.

In a series of funny, tender, and touching dialogues, former Saturday Night Live writer Zweibel recalls his buddy-and-almost-lover friendship with SNL actress Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer. Zweibel claims he merely scribbled the dialogues playing in my head, and, indeed, these recreated conversations have a neurotic, sarcastic, and vulnerable air of aunthenticity. The actress and writer become fast friends on the SNL set and segue into personal revelation.

C.A. Lejeune was among the first professional film critics in the world, her columns in the Observer commanding a huge readership. Her career spanned the rise, the great days and the beginning of the decline of the industry, and the start of the television age. She saw the coming of sound and color, of the star system and the wide screen. Her column was eagerly read for its percipience, humor, kindliness and good writing, by people who never went to the cinema at all. This comprehensive selection of her articles, essays and reviews, from silent film days through to the 1960s, has an autobiographical shape. She tells how she became a critic and what criticism means; she recalls her long acquaintance with Alfred Hitchcock and Alexander Korda, Leslie Howard and Robert Donat, personalities - unforgettable and unforgotten - who gave British cinema its finest hours. For students of film history, this is essential reading. For lovers of old films, it is an instructive and nostalgic delight. And, like C.A. Lejeune's column, it will appeal to any reader who appreciates good writing and civilized values.

As Greek tragedy, says a Spanish writer, was composed from the crumbs that fell from Homer's table, so the Spanish drama owed its earliest forms to La Celestina (1499). Fernando de Rojas' tragi-comedy - which has also been called a novel in dialogue - runs to about three hundred pages in the James Mabbe translation, here adapted to the stage by Eric Bentley in a five-act, 93-page version. The central and pervasive situation is a simple one: a dirty old woman is helping a courtly young gentleman to seduce a girl. The wonder of the thing lies in the art with which Fernando do Rojas derives, from such commonplace materials, a towering tragedy - or rather, tragi-comedy.