Take Stage! is the first comprehensive "how-to" book for lesbians wanting to produce or direct lesbian theatre. Controversial and anecdotal, Take Stage! is written for the lesbian with no previous experience with theatre or lesbian organization. In addition to chapters on auditioning, rehearsals, selecting the script, booking space, and assembling a staff, the book includes chapters on issues of special interest to lesbians. Take Stage! includes information on how to challenge the "isms"-lookism, racism, classism, ageism, and other prejudices with which lesbian culture is currently engaged. It also looks at problems of accountability in non-hierarchal structures, boundary-setting among all-volunteer staffs, sabotage via hidden agendas or disassociative behaviors, horizontal hostility, and internalized homophobia. The appendix contains sample contracts, audition forms, light plots, budgets, and schedules. From the decision to produce the play to opening night and touring, Take Stage! covers all the bases and provides a healthy dose of moral support.

Too often directors and stage designers approach the architectural layout of theatres as obstructive to the creative process. Condee's book teaches theater professionals to work creatively within even the most restrictive theatrical space and transform it into an asset rather than an obstacle. Condee has interviewed hundreds of prominent American and British directors, designers, and actors, and provides photographs and groundplans of major American theatres. Each chapter tackles a different set of problems, offering thoughtful solutions to common obstacles. Theatrical Space is not only a useful textbook for students of theatre, but also a valuable resource for all directors and designers, both young and experienced. Paperback edition available April 2002. Cloth version previously published in 1995.

This practical, accessible and far-reaching guide to making site-specific theatre and performance emphasises the diversity of approaches to the practice, and explores key principles of space and site. Phil Smith draws on a wide range of interdisciplinary and international performance examples, and uses an innovative variety of exercises, to show students and aspiring performance-makers how to find a site and generate a performance beyond the theatre building.

How do audiences look at actors in costume onstage? How does costume shape theatrical identity and form bodies? What do audiences wear to the theatre? This lively and cutting-edge book explores these questions, and engages with the various theoretical approaches to the study of actors in performance. Aoife Monks focuses in particular on the uncanny ways in which costume and the actor's body are indistinguishable in the audience's experience of a performance. From the role of costume in Modernist theatre to the actor's position in the fashion system, from nudity to stage ghosts, this wide-ranging exploration of costume, and its histories, argues for the centrality of costume to the spectator's experience at the theatre. Drawing on examples from paintings, photographs, live performances, novels, reviews, blogs and plays, Monks presents a vibrant analysis of the very peculiar work that actors and costumes do on the stage.

Learn how to create historically accurate costumes for Elizabethan period productions with Elizabethan Costume Design and Construction! Extensive coverage of a variety of costumes for both men and women of all social classes will allow you to be prepared for any costuming need, and step-by-step instructions will ensure you have the know-how to design and construct your garments. Get inspired by stunning, hand-drawn renderings of costumes used in real life productions like Mary Stuart as you're led through the design process. Detailed instructions will allow you to bring your designs to life and create a meticulously constructed costume.

Special effects have become an increasingly important part of both film and theatre production. With storylines becoming more sensational and technology more sophisticated, the market for high-quality special effects is huge. In this book Janus Vinther provides step-by-step guidelines for achieving a wide variety of grotesque and outlandish effects, including bullet holes, body fluids and burns. In addition there is a chapter on specialised character make-up, ranging from Dracula to the Terminator. With detailed explanation of techniques and materials and illustrated throughout, this book contains everything you need to know to look your worst.

For more than 30 years, the Wing has produced the Working in the Theatre seminars, a series that features the greatest names in theatre. This is presented in book form, for the first time, compact, and at an affordable-paperback price. Spanning the range of these seminars, with a concentration on the most recent shows and current stars, the information, anecdotes, gossip (yes!), heartaches, and triumphs are all here. We learn: What a career in the theatre is really about, from inspiration to a Tony or Pulitzer Prize; How actors prepare? What actors have found to be the best techniques? How writers get their work staged? How playwrights and cast interact with the director?

"This book is entirely unique, very well written, dramatic, and, at the same time, philosophical. It is likely to appeal to a very large audience, including anybody interested in the visual arts, in film, in theater, in philosophical problems of transformation, and in the unconscious generally." -- Melvin R. Lansky, M.D., UCLA Medical School and Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute

Wearing a mask-- putting on another face-- embodies a fundamental human fantasy of inhabiting other bodies and experiencing other lives. In this extensively illustrated book, Thomas Morawetz explores how the creation of transformational makeup for theatre, movies, and television fulfills this fantasy of self-transformation and satisfies the human desire to become "the other."

Morawetz begins by discussing the cultural role of fantasies of transformation and what these fantasies reveal about questions of personal identity. He next turns to professional makeup artists and describes their background, training, careers, and especially the techniques they use to create their art. Then, with numerous before-during-and-after photos of transformational makeups from popular and little-known shows and movies, ads, and artist's demos and portfolios, he reveals the art and imagination that go into six kinds of mask-making-- representing demons, depicting aliens, inventing disguises, transforming actors into different (older, heavier, disfigured) versions of themselves, and creating historical or mythological characters.