This groundbreaking text examines how artists on stage consciously perform age and aging. From Shakespeare to Beckett, dialogue and stage directions reveal varying understandings of age. "Staging Age "explores how performers respond to audience expectations, offering conscious--and unconscious--portrayals of the spectrum of age to their audiences. This essay collection is the first to address issues of age and performance in a variety of media, including theatre, film, and dance.

The first ever full-length study of the Royal Court Theatre's International Department, covering the theatre's unique programming of international plays and seasons, its London-based residences for writers from overseas, and the legacies of workshops conducted in more than 30 countries.

Real life teen dilemmas written as comedy. These thirty short plays give teenage performers a chance to portray the drama of their everyday lives. They may act crazy, push boundaries and discover themselves as the plays permit them to show off their talents. The actors can create outrageous characters in the context of situations they know so well. Sample titles include: "The Kissing Booth", "Four Boyfriends", "Last Free Summer" and "The Babysitter". Inexperienced actors will come alive as performers because they playlets offer natural dialog and believable situations. The plays are for two to six actors. It is excellent for contest use.

Oklahoma! opened nearly sixty years ago and instantly made musical theatre history. It was a daring ahead-of-its-time piece of dazzlingly inventive theatre that exploded every myth about what constitutes a successful musical. Revised and updated to include a special section on the Roayl National Theatre's production that Cameron Mackintosh is presenting on Broadway in spring of 2002, OK! The Story of "Oklahoma!" celebrates this watershed work that has taken its place in the pantheon of American musical theatre.

What work did physically disabled characters do for the early modern theatre? Through a consideration of a range of plays, including Doctor Faustus and Richard III, Genevieve Love argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related 'likeness problems' that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The figure of disability stands for the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled characters with names such as Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of thefictional and the material, embodied world of the theatre. When the figure of the disabled body exits the stage, it also mediates a second problem of likeness, between plays in their performed and textual forms. While supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays have been characterized as 'lame', the dynamic movement of prosthetic disabled characters in the theatre expands the figural role which disability performs in the relationship between plays on the stage and on the page. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability reveals how attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works, while illuminating in turn how theatre offers a reframing of disability as metaphor.

Author and voice teacher Gloria Bennett has taught Axl Rose of Guns N'Roses, Vince Neil of Motley Crue, Exene Cervenka of X, Steve Wynn of Dream Syndicate, Dexter Holland of The Offspring, and Anthony Keidis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others. Her comprehensive and practical book, now in its second edition, offers a clear explanation of the voice as an instrument and proper vocal technique. Through examples, anecdotes and exercises, Breaking Through provides for both the novice and professional vocalist a vital sourcebook for maintaining and enhancing the quality of the voice. Topics covered include: pitch problems and solutions, evening your range, projection without strain, how to stay vocally healthy on the road, how to find a good vocal coach, and much more.

The innovative work of the Pioneer Players, a London-based theater society founded in 1911 by Edith Craig, is explored here for the first time, drawing on original archive research and taking an interdisciplinary approach to women's involvement in theater during British women's suffrage movement. This book tests the claim that the Pioneer Players was a "women's theater," and investigates in a literary context the Pioneer Players' relationships to the women's suffrage movement, feminism, and women's writing.

A cinema without cameras, without actors, without screen frames and without narratives almost seems like an antithetical impossibility of what is usually expected from a cinematic spectacle. This book defines an emergent field of post-cinematic theatre and performance, challenging our assumptions and expectations about theatre and film.

Shakespeare's plays were written some four hundred years ago, and while his characters are enduring, they are also alien. In grappling with the text of his plays, the modern actor must bring Shakespeare's Renaissance characters to life for a modern audience. And while it is difficult enough for twentieth-century spectators to make sense of the plays, it is also hard for modern actors to understand the Elizabethan world that created the personalities so vividly sketched in Shakespeare's texts. This reference is a convenient and practical guide for actors faced with the task of playing Shakespeare's characters.

The volume begins with an overview of Elizabethan theatrical conventions, including the training of actors. It then looks at the dramatic tradition of personification, which Shakespeare's world inherited from the medieval stage. Later chapters give special attention to how language reveals character and to the social and cultural contexts of the Renaissance. Throughout, the emphasis is on how to translate Shakespeare's text into action on the stage. While the volume contains much useful information, that information is presented to meet the special needs of theater professionals.

Why is folly essential to the functioning of a healthy society? Why is theatre a natural home for madness? The answers take the reader on a journey embracing Shakespeare and Jonson, Brecht and Beckett, Buchner and Boal. From Falstaff to Fo via Figaro, this study examines the art of telling truth to power and surviving long enough to have a laugh.

This book explores the mythology, story, music, characters and language of Wagner's monumental work. At its heart is a concordance of the keywords in the four librettos, a powerful reference tool. The volume also includes a brief synopsis of each of the four operas, a presentation of the 145 principal musical motives in order of appearance, and a discussion of the characters and their relationships, listing their appearances and the musical motives associated with them.

The Harlem Renaissance, from 1910 to 1927, was the time when Harlem came alive with theater, drama, sports, dance, and politics. Looking at events as diverse as the prizefight between Jack Johnson and Jim “White Hope” Jeffries, the choreography of Aida Walker and Ethel Waters, the writing of Zora Neale Hurston and the musicals of the period, Krasner paints a vibrant portrait of those years. This was the time when the residents of northern Manhattan were leading their downtown counterparts at the vanguard of artistic ferment while at the same time playing a pivotal role in the evolution of Black Nationalism. This is a thrilling piece of work, a classic destined to become the standard work on the Harlem Renaissance for years to come.

"Comedy Matters" traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind's darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be mobilized against belligerent cultural forces. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare, Stoppard, and a number of other comic masters, "Comedy Matters" demonstrates how comedy continues to work against cultural regimentation by striving to re-calibrate our decision-making processes and challenging the stultifying rigidity of human economy in the broadest sense of the term.

From oral culture, through the advent of literacy, to the introduction of printing, to the development of electronic media, communication structures have radically altered culture in profound ways. As the first book to take a critical realist approach to culture, "Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism" examines theatre and its history through the interaction of society's structures, agents, and discourses. Tobin Nellhaus shows that communication structure--a culture's use and development of speech, handwriting, printing, and electronics--explains much about why, when, and how theatre has transformed.

(Amadeus). In this volume, Father M. Owen Lee writes for the 21st-century operagoer, briskly and stylishly telling the stories of 100 of the world's greatest music dramas from Aida to Die Zauberflote . The stories told in music by Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini and Strauss are brought to life here with wit, insight and boundless enthusiasm. When compiling and composing this pocket-sized handbook, Fr. Lee considered the unique needs of the modern operagoer. Contemporary text-translating services have made pure synopses somewhat redundant. Fr. Lee, therefore, has focused his commentaries less on the comings and goings of plot than on subtext, motivation and background information. He also suggests his single favorite recording for each of the 100 operas discussed. In all, he has written a guide that will prove invaluable to the opera novice and useful even for the aficionado.

A far-reaching examination of exoticism, cultural internationalism and modernism's encounters with Indonesian tradition, "Performing Otherness "examines how Indonesia entered world stages through imperialism as an antimodern phantasm and through nationalism became a means of intercultural communication and cultural diplomacy.

Combine Kafka's eerie vision with a soulless world run by computers and the result is this comic nightmare of a play. Strand's play - revolving around a bug in the system - premiered at the Actor's Theatre in Louisville Humana Festival, and has been produced by other theatres across the country.

How has contemporary American theatre presented so-called undocumented immigrants? By placing theatre artists and their work within a context of ongoing debate, Guterman shows how theatre fills an essential role in a critical conversation by exploring the powerful ways in which legal labels affect and change us.

Beginning with John Dryden's valuation of the importance of Beaumont and Fletcher for Restoration playwrights like himself, this book traces the genealogy of Restoration drama back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. It shows how tragicomedy was a means of deliberating on the political issues that define the seventeenth century, of increasingly understanding the effects of trade in the wake of the founding of the East India Company (1600), and a means of linking Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, published in 1628, with both of these concerns. Tragicomedy is also shown to be a key to understanding William Davenant, Dryden's predecessor as Poet Laureate. The book concludes with a reading of six individual Restoration plays to show how the habits of the tragicomic tradition became the means of deliberating on the nature of late Stuart power, and its increasing implication in the world of seaborne commerce.

How do theatre and performance transmit and dispute ideologies of neoliberalism? The essays in this anthology examine the mechanisms and rhetorics of contemporary multinational and transnational organizations, artists, and communities that produce theatre and performance for global audiences.

Kerry Muir, who brought together scenes and monologues for children in her highly successful 'Childsplay' presents three complete short plays for older children and teenagers. They include: 'Promenade' by Josh Adell (6 girls, 4 boys), 'Summer' by Gideon Brower (5 girls, 4 boys), and 'Befriending Bertha' by Kerry Muir herself (4 girls, 1 boy). Serious, comic, and thoroughly contemporary, all of these plays were successfully performed at The Young Actor's Studio in Los Angeles.