30 Plays For Child Actors

For over thirty-five years, Gorman John Ruggiero trained child actors. The many productions are represented in this collection of his plays. These works include folktales, mythology, religious stories, and original works that can help children learn some of life’s lessons by acting them out on stage. Ruggiero spent many years working with children on the autism spectrum, and many of these plays were performed jointly with typically developing children to great success. This process truly enhanced the communication skills of the child actors, as well as helped develop in them an understanding of autism. Many friendships were created during the rehearsal and performance process as children learned about one another’s differences and commonalities. In a world where communication is sorely lacking, Ruggiero believes that physical, emotional, and intellectual expression, found in the performing arts, is crucial for the success in personal and professional relationships. Helping children perform these plays will advance that notion.

A collection of fifteen short plays for young adults including works by Thornton Wilder, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and David French.

Includes playwriting, directing, designing, producing, and managing of theatres for children.

Thirty-five one-act plays, most with fifteen or twenty minutes playing time, including fantasies, comedies, and several appropriate for different holidays. Includes production notes.

A study of Shakespeare’s child figures in relation to their own political moment, as well as our own. Politicians are fond of saying that “children are the future.” How did the child become a figure for our political hopes? Joseph Campana’s book locates the source of this idea in transformations of childhood and political sovereignty during the age of Shakespeare, changes spectacularly dramatized by the playwright himself. Shakespeare’s works feature far more child figures—and more politically entangled children—than other literary or theatrical works of the era. Campana delves into this rich corpus to show how children and childhood expose assumptions about the shape of an ideal polity, the nature of citizenship, the growing importance of population and demographics, and the question of what is or is not human. As our ability to imagine viable futures on our planet feels ever more limited, and as children take up legal proceedings to sue on behalf of the future, it behooves us to understand the way past child figures haunt our conversations about intergenerational justice. Shakespeare offers critical precedents for questions we still struggle to answer.

Acting Companies and their Plays in Shakespeare's London explores the intimate and dynamic relationship between acting companies and playwrights in this seminal era in English theatre history. Siobhan Keenan's analysis includes chapters on the traditions and workings of contemporary acting companies, playwriting practices, stages and staging, audiences and patrons, each illustrated with detailed case studies of individual acting companies and their plays, including troupes such as Lady Elizabeth's players, 'Beeston's Boys' and the King's Men and works by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Brome and Heywood. We are accustomed to focusing on individual playwrights: Acting Companies and their Plays in Shakespeare's London makes the case that we also need to think about the companies for which dramatists wrote and with whose members they collaborated, if we wish to better understand the dramas of the English Renaissance stage.

"Take example, all ye that this do hear or see..." The Morality Play was popular in England between 1400 and 1600. It offers moral instruction and spiritual teaching with personal abstractions representing good and evil. Surviving plays from that period number about sixty and the three in this edition were among the first ten. Mankind is a plain, honest farming man who struggles against worldly and spiritual temptation. The bawdy humour and violent action in the play serve to make the moral point and instruct by example. Everyman portrays a man's struggles in the face of death to raise himself to a state of grace so that he may experience everlasting life. It is exceptional among the Moralities for this narrow focus on the last phase of life, and conveys its message with awe-inspiring seriousness. Mundus et Infans is more typical of the Morality genre. It shows an arrogant, bullying protagonist led astray by a single evildoer into a life of debauchery, before the inevitable conversion to virtue. In showing the whole of man's life it is the antithesis of Everyman, the action of which seems to take place in a single day.

Presents a collection of monologues and scenes from familiar plays and books for young actors to perform.