Stagecraft I

Twenty chapters detailing all of the fundamentals -- everything the aspiring stage technician needs to know to get started in backstage work! All sections highlighted with photographs, illustrations and diagrams. Major topics include: stage and rigging; production staff; properties; sound; lumber, tools and hardware; scenery construction; lighting instruments; control of light and colour; electricity and devices. The what, when and why of all backstage equipment and how to use it to maximum effect with safety, speed and efficiency.

Stagecraft Fundamentals Second Edition tackles every aspect of theatre production with Emmy Award-winning author Rita Kogler Carver's signature witty and engaging voice. The history of stagecraft, safety precautions, lighting, costumes, scenery, career planning tips, and more are discussed, illustrated by beautiful color examples that display step-by-step procedures and the finished product. This second edition offers even more in-demand information on stage management, drawing and drafting (both by hand and CAD), lighting fixtures, and special effects. Also new to this edition are current articles from Lighting and Sound America, brand new diagrams that illustrate hard-to-grasp concepts, and a plethora of information on European conversions, standards, and practices, making the skills you learn applicable to stage jobs on either side of the ocean! The accompanying website, www.stagecraftfundamentals.com is bursting with additional material such as an instructor's manual, CAD drawings, color theory, manufacturing information, and so much more to help you along the way as you learn all about the world of theatre production! Praise for the Book: Beautifully written! The author has succeeded in relaying technical theatre information without being too technical and putting the reader to sleep. I read three sentences and instantly knew this book was for me and the way I teach. When I think back on the insufferable intro to tech theatre books I had to read, I feel cheated I didn't have this one as a student. I will be using this text in my class! -- Rob Napoli, Designer and Technical Director at Penn State University, Berks Campus This text has temped me to return to teaching with a textbook for the first time in seven years. The language is both accessible and informal yet the text goes a long way in debunking some of the typical jargon that may alienate students just getting into the field, or trying it out for the first time. The illustrations (the text is full of them) coupled with the stories reinforce the fundamental information being conveyed. -- John Paul Devlin, Associate Professor of Theatre at Saint Michael's College What a great idea! Thank heavens someone is doing this for students at that impressionable age. That has been one of my mantras - education of teachers and students on the use of scenic materials. The teachers don't have enough time in college to learn and do everything they have to teach. Most get thrown into the theatre area by default and struggle with designing/building/painting the scenery. -- Jenny Knott, Rosco Stagecraft Fundamentals is beautifully illustrated throughout, and the pofusion of color on every page gives this textbook the appearance of a coffee table book. The writing is clear and personal, which should be very appealing to students. Rita Carver covers all aspects of theatre production from scenery, to lighting, to an actor's makeup. Her close ties to the New York theatre scene gives this book a special insight into the professional world, one that goes well beyond what is found in most college textbooks. -- John Holloway, Professor in the Theatre Department at the University of Kentucky and President of the International Association of Theatrical stage Employees (IATSE) Local 346. I can't thank you enough for Stagecraft Fundamentals. I have been teaching stagecraft since 1976 and you have saved me from the nightmare of writing a text to suit my class needs..After two semesters with your text, I have found that I had more time to develop the skills necessary within the classroom than before. The humor that you have infused in the book has enticed my students to read on. That alone makes this text invaluable. --Meta Lasch, Assistant Professor, West Liberty University

SHAW 21 offers readers an eclectic perspective on Shaw, his works, and his contemporaries. Basil Langton, actor and director, reminisces about his early development as an actor, his meeting with Shaw, and his career as director of many of Shaw's plays. He focuses upon Shaw's stagecraft, augmenting his views with those of Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson, whom he interviewed in 1960. Galen Goodwin Longstreth analyzes the correspondence between Shaw and Ellen Terry and argues that the exchange is itself a literary genre, a dramatic performance that reveals their personal identities. The next two contributors, Stanley Weintraub and Andrea Adolph, examine the Shaw/Virginia Woolf relationship. Weintraub focuses on those occasions when their respective lives touched each other, what their feelings for each other were, and how those occasions were obliquely woven into Shaw's plays, most notably Heartbreak House. Professor Adoph argues that in Woolf's only dramatic text, Freshwater: A Comedy, she was conforming to the traditional theatrical mode of the day, dominated, of course, by Shaw, but that she subverted his traditional literary depiction of paternity as, for example, the paternity dramatized in Major Barbara. Sidney Albert and Bernard Dukore provide unique perspectives on reading Major Barbara. Albert shows how John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress serves as Shaw's source for Barbara's progress toward enlightened understanding. Dukore, focusing on the perspective of the familial relationship within the play, concludes that Shaw's dialectic gives the kids the future and not the dad. It will be the next generation, not Father Undershaft, who will determine where society will go next. Julie Sparks and Martin Bucco approach Shaw from a comparative basis, juxtaposing him with two American writers, contemporaries of Shaw, Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis, respectively. Sparks explores the commonality that exists in Shaw's and Twain's thinking about evolution, namely, their heretical visions of a post-Darwinian Eden. Both viewed conventional Christianity iconoclastically, but both arrived at different conclusions about human origin and destiny, a view Sparks describes as emanating from the deist-pessimist-evolutionary-determinist perspective versus the mystic-optimistic-creative-evolutionist perspective, or the Personal Godhead versus the Impersonal Force. Professor Bucco enumerates the many references Sinclair Lewis makes to Bernard Shaw throughout his writings, both prose and fiction, to underscore the American novelist's admiration for the Irish playwright, both recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The final two contributors to SHAW 21, Rodelle Weintraub and William Doan, provide the readers with distinctive perspectives on John Bull's Other Island and The Doctor's Dilemma, respectively. Weintraub recasts the play into a dream sequence whereby Doyle's dream becomes an artifice for problem solving. Implied within Father Keegan's lines in the play, "Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time," is the resolution of Doyle's problem with Nora, the girl he had left behind, and of the dream of modernizing Roscullen. Doan suggests that in The Doctor's Dilemma Shaw uses the idea of unconsummated adultery to argue for the efficacy of art over science. In the conflict between the artist and the scientist, the latter plans to have the artist's muse. In the end, not only is he deprived of the wife but also of the works of art themselves and the spirit that animates them. SHAW 21 also includes three reviews of recent additions to Shavian scholarship as well as John R. Pfeiffer's "Continuing Checklist of Shaviana."

Senegalese Stagecraft explores the theatrical stage in Senegal as a site of poetic expression, political activism, and community engagement. In their responses to the country’s colonial heritage, as well as through their innovations on the craft of theater‐making, Senegalese performers have created an array of decolonizing stage spaces that have shaped the country’s theater history. Their work has also addressed a global audience, experimenting with international performance practices while proposing new visions of the role of culture and stagecraft in society. Through a study of the innovative work of Senegalese theater-makers from the 1930s onward, Senegalese Stagecraft explores a wide range of historical contexts and themes, including French colonial education, cultural Pan‐Africanism, West African Sufism, uses of television and mass media, and popular theater and activism. Using a multidisciplinary approach that includes field, archival, and literary methods, Valente‐Quinn offers a fresh look at performance cultures of West Africa and the Global South in a book that will interest students and scholars in African, Francophone, and performance studies.

Illustrated guide to all aspects of constructing a stage set: the four primary stage configurations - proscenium, thrust, arena and environmental; flying scenery and moving floors; organizing the scene shop; shop tools and safety; scaled drawings, models and other communications tools used to translate the designers vision into a set; materials used in building scenery; construction techniques for flats, platforms and other standard scenic units; installing and rigging scenery; maintaining an inventory of stock scenery.

Reading a play and watching it performed onstage are quite different experiences. Likewise, studying a country's theatrical tradition with reference only to playtexts overlooks the vital impact of a play's performance on the audience and on the whole artistic community. In this performance-centered approach to Brazilian theatre since the 1940s, David George explores a total theatrical language—the plays, the companies that produced them, and the performances that set a standard for all future stagings. George structures the discussion around several important companies. He begins with Os Comediantes, whose revolutionary 1943 staging of Nelson Rodrigues' Vestido de Noiva (Bridal Gown) broke with the outmoded comedy-of-manners formula that had dominated the national stage since the nineteenth century. He considers three companies of the 1950s and 1960s—Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia, Teatro de Arena, and Teatro Oficina—along with the 1967 production of O Rei da Vela (The Candle King) by Teatro Oficina. The 1970s represented a wasteland for Brazilian theatre, George finds, in which a repressive military dictatorship muzzled artistic expression. The Grupo Macunaíma brought theatre alive again in the 1980s, with its productions of Macunaíma and Nelson 2 Rodrigues. Common to all theatrical companies, George concludes, was the desire to establish a national aesthetic, free from European and United States models. The creative tension this generated and the successes of modern Brazilian theatre make lively reading for all students of Brazilian and world drama.

Announcements for the following year included in some vols.