Author : Motti Lerner
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 78 pages
File Size : 26,16 MB
Release : 2015-04-02
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1329037685
"This stirring monograph is about the means which playwrights who desire to create change in the world can implement their purpose. Lerner argues that the most potent tool to profoundly mobilize an audience is the catharsis, which he explores and redefines here in a revolutionary way, clarifying the basic Aristotelian principles as to how a playwright might create it."--Publisher's description
Author : Jacqueline Goldfinger
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 118 pages
File Size : 39,45 MB
Release : 2021-08-16
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1000425061
Playwriting with Purpose: A Guide and Workbook for New Playwrights provides a holistic approach to playwriting from an award-winning playwright and instructor. This book incorporates craft lessons by contemporary playwrights and provides concrete guidance for new and emerging playwrights. The author takes readers through the entire creative process, from creating characters and writing dialogue and silent moments to analyzing elements of well-made plays and creating an atmospheric environment. Each chapter is followed by writing prompts and pro tips that address unique facets of the conversation about the art and craft of playwriting. The book also includes information on the business of playwriting and a recommended reading list of published classic and contemporary plays, providing all the tools to successfully transform an idea into a script, and a script into a performance. Playwriting with Purpose gives writers and students of playwriting hands-on lessons, artistic concepts, and business savvy to succeed in today’s theater industry.
Author : Joan Herrington
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 24,48 MB
Release : 2013-05-13
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1136542124
August Wilson penned his first play after seeing a man shot to death. Horton Foote began writing plays to create parts for himself as an actor. Edward Albee faced commercial pressures to modify his scripts-and resisted. After Wit, Margaret Edson swore off playwriting altogether and decided to keep her day job as a kindergarten teacher, instead. The Playwright's Muse presents never-before-published interviews with some of the greatest names of American drama-all recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize. In these scintillating exchanges with eleven leading dramatists, we learn about their inspirations and begin to grasp how the creative process works in the mind of a writer. We learn how their first plays took shape, how it felt to read their first reviews, and what keeps them writing for theater today. Introductory essays on each playwright's life and work, written by theater artists and scholars with strong professional relationships to their subjects, provide additional insight into the writers' contributions to contemporary theater.
Author : Bruce Graham
Publisher : Heinemann Educational Books
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 29,37 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Education
ISBN :
The interaction between the ideas of the playwright and the know-how of the dramaturg is vital to the success of any production. But not every writer is accustomed to thinking like a dramaturg. The Collaborative Playwright changes that by offering a lively dialogue between a highly successful playwright, Bruce Graham, and an equally accomplished dramaturg, Michele Volansky, supported by hands-on exercises to get you thinking and writing in new ways. The Collaborative Playwright gives you professional advice on how to get started with a play, how to structure it to be performed, and how to work with a dramaturg to turn it into a staged production. Graham and Volansky's fun, smart conversation offers step-by-step advice on each of the components of the craft - exposition, rhythms, characterization, structure, and story generation - all illustrated with clear examples from Graham's own plays. But unlike other books that advise playwrights, The Collaborative Playwright is written from two points of view: the playwright's and the dramaturg's. It's both friendly and packed with indispensable nuggets of information, including interviews with more than thirty current theatre artists whose collective advice articulates some of the more practical aspects of working in the theatre - knowledge that playwrights need as they write. Want to write plays that work as well on stage as they do in your head? Read The Collaborative Playwright, listen in as two theatre veterans discuss the crucial characteristics of good writing, and find out why, if you're writing for the theatre, it pays to listen to your dramaturg.
Author : George Orwell
Publisher : Renard Press Ltd
Page : 15 pages
File Size : 16,58 MB
Release : 2021-01-01
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 1913724263
George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times
Author : Andrew Biss
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 28,97 MB
Release : 2018-05-15
Category :
ISBN : 9781987438499
You won't find a lot of pontificating over Aristotelian theory in this book. What you will find is straightforward, practical guidance to help aspiring and early-career playwrights hone their craft and steer their plays toward successful productions. While many playwriting books focus solely on stagecraft, this one also examines the nuts and bolts of getting your plays produced. After all, writing a play is one thing, but it won't have fulfilled its purpose until it's been brought to life on a stage. Examining everything from structure, dialogue, and creating well-rounded characters to formatting, writing synopses and preparing your plays for submission, A Practical Guide to Becoming a Playwright offers a comprehensive explanation of the often challenging process of writing plays and getting them into the hands of producers. Using knowledge and insight gained from more than two decades of writing for the stage and garnering successful productions, award-winning playwright Andrew Biss shares with you everything that he's learned - not from teaching or hypothesizing, but from actually doing. A Practical Guide to Becoming a Playwright is your go-to guide for navigating the frequently nebulous world of playwriting and production.
Author : Buzz Mclaughlin
Publisher : Back Stage Books
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 28,71 MB
Release : 2011-11-23
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0307799522
Here is the first and only manual for playwrights ever designed to draw directly from the wisdom of leading contemporary dramatists. Interwoven with hundreds of quotations from the author's own in-depth interview series at the Dramatists Guild, in New York City, The Playwright's Process offers a fresh and lively discussion of the indispensable ingredients of strong dramatic writing. Every essential step the writer must take to create a well-written, stageworthy play is examined and explored. Also mining his own experience as a dramatist and a teacher of playwriting, author Buzz McLaughlin details the entire process of developing the kernel of an idea into a fully realized play—from the writer's very first jottings to the readings and workshops that lead to a professional production. Laying in the basic building blocks of dramatic structure, the exploration of character, the elements of good dialogue writing, and much, much more, McLaughlin reinforces every lesson with the words of: Edward Albee Lee Blessing Horton Foote Athol Fugard John Guare Tina Howe David Ives Romulus Linney Emily Mann Terrence McNally Arthur Miller Marsha Norman John Patrick Shanley Wendy Wasserstein Michael Weller Lanford Wilson A resource for beginning and experienced writers, The Playwright's Process is a virtual guided tour of the dramatist's challenging and often mysterious creative process, chock-full of specific techniques, practical exercises, and candid observations on craft and method straight from the mouths of working, award-winning playwrights. No book on playwriting has offered so much before, or in such an illuminating and integrated way.
Author : Arthur H. Ballet
Publisher : Playwrights for Tomorrow
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 42,65 MB
Release : 1972-12
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780816606528
Playwrights for Tomorrow was first published in 1972. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Three playwrights are represented in this, the eighth volume of the continuing series Playwrights for Tomorrow, which makes available the work of playwrights who have been sponsored by the University of Minnesota Office for Advanced Drama Research. Under the program of the O.A.D.R., which is aided by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, writers are given the opportunity to work on their scripts and have their plays produced by cooperating theater companies. The program is directed by Arthur H. Ballet, the series editor. The three plays in this volume are A Gun Play by Yale M. Udoff, Anniversary on Weedy Hill by Allen Joseph, and The Nihilist by William N. Monson. Professor Ballet provides an introduction in which he explains the purpose and scope of the O.A.D.R. program, recounts some of its history and accomplishments, and tells a little about the O.A.D.R. productions of each of the plays included here. A Gun Play was produced by the Hartford Stage Company in Hartford, Connecticut, under the direction of Paul Weidner. Later it had an off-Broadway run in New York City, staged by commercial producers. The author, Yale Udoff, is a professional writer primarily involved in the mass media. Anniversary on Weedy Hill was produced by Theatre West, a professional company in West Hollywood, California. Allen Joseph, the author, a professional actor in film and television, turned to playwriting in the midst of a well-established career in the theater. The Nihilist was the second play of the O.A.D.R. offered through the facilities of the University of California at Davis Theatre under the direction of Alfred Rossi. William Monson, the playwright, is from the world of academe.
Author : Jean-Claude van Italie
Publisher : Hal Leonard Corporation
Page : 108 pages
File Size : 25,48 MB
Release : 2000-05-01
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1476844836
(Applause Books). A series of 13 written workshops covering: conflict and character: the dominant image: Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller; Overheard voices: Ibsen and Shakespeare; The solo performance piece: listening for stories; Terror and vulnerability: Ionesco; The point of absurdity: creating without possessing: Pinter and Beckett; and much more.
Author : Frank Pike
Publisher : Plume Books
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 22,57 MB
Release : 1985
Category : Playwriting
ISBN :
A guide for writers at all phases of their careers - from those who have never written for the stage to those who want to grow beyond their current productions - The Playwright's Handbook helps you craft a script into a successful theatrical work and get it produced. Written by Frank Pike, an award-winning playwright, and Thomas G. Dunn, founder of the prestigious Minneapolis Playwrights Center, this guide contains the expertise of professionals actively working in the theater. Their positive, up-to-date advice is reality based, effective, and tells you up front how to make money with your talent.
