The Playwright S Art

In these passionate and witty essays on the theatre, J B Priestley distills his experience as playwright, producer, director and actor. This new collection is part defense of theatre, part incisive criticism, and, part instructive guide for would-be playwrights. The extracts are filled with Priestley's characteristic wit and, above all, good sense.

On the evening of January 29, 1948, a new musical, 'Look, Ma, I'm Dancin'!', opened at New York's New Adelphi Theatre, marking the Broadway debut of a young playwriting team, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, who were responsible for the show's book. Forty-six years later, Lawrence and Lee are reworking their most recent play, Whisper In The Mind, for a potential New York production, but the intervening decades have seen major changes in the landscape of the American theatre. Many of these changes are discussed and debated in this collection of interviews and are exemplified in the careers of the dramatists included.

Provides practical knowledge for new and inexperienced playwrights.

This book examines how debates over copyright law in the United States during the nineteenth century, particularly over the lack of an international copyright law, intersected with the business practices and political and artistic beliefs of American authors. These debates shaped a discourse of literary property rights that forced authors to negotiate their copyrights not only with their publishers, but with their readers as well. The author argues that the act of taking out a copyright was more than a mere legal mechanism marking a transition from amateur to professional or artist to businessperson. Taking out a copyright had a profound impact on how audiences viewed authors, how authors perceived their profession, and how they represented individual rights and property ownership within their texts. The book is unique in the scope of its research, tracking developments from the 1820s through the 1890s, and in the way it approaches the work and careers of well-known authors. The author employs research from the American Antiquarian Society, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, and the Government and Special Collections at the University of Iowa, drawing on an array of documents including newspaper editorials, legislative hearings, court decisions, and the public and private writing of James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Clemens, and Emily Dickinson to demonstrate how authors found themselves in an uneasy opposition to their reading public.

Excerpt from Art of the Play: An Anthology of Nine Plays The dedication of this book is a necessary acknowledgment. Many years ago, in Barker's lectures On Dramatic Method, I met for the first time the agreeable proposition that a playwrights work must be approached through the theater of his time rather than the codes of later criticism. And in his celebrated Prefaces to Shakespeare he had demonstrated that his various talents and experiences as actor, playwright, director, and scholar collaborated to shed new light on old and much abused texts. However, it was almost accidentally that the more general value of his understanding of dramatic art was revealed to me. One blacked-out and comfortless winter night during World War II he was discussing some of the prefaces to Shakespeare that he would never have time to write. Not without a recognition of both irony and the "pathetic fallacy," our conversation turned to The Tempest. By coincidence we had both been reading, or rereading, some of the critical essays this last work in the Shakespearean canon had provoked, and were struck by the variety and occasional absurdity of the critical conclusions. Is it a romantic image of the artist surrendering his powers at the end of his career? or a Christian allegory? Can its unity be discovered through the analysis of Freudian symbols? or by applying Marxist dialectic? Or is it, as Dr. Johnson seemed to think, a mere exercise of the fancy, and - "of these trifles enough." Barker was at once intrigued and baffled by these critical propositions, but his bafflement did not proceed from an imperfect sympathy with the premises of the authors. His constant question was, how would such-or-such interpretation be conveyed by Shakespeare's actors in Shakespeare's theater? As the most progressive of producers in his own active years in the English theater he was not of course suggesting a return to the horse-and-buggy conditions of Shakespeare's stage. But he was constantly aware of the drama as an art and of the text of the play as only a partial record of the artistic whole. To say that the drama is an art is to imply that it does something more than follow the course of events of a narrative, something more than hold a simple reflector up to mankind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Jeffrey Hatcher knows the nuts and bolts of writing for the theater. Here, he shares his views on it all--from building tension and plotting a scene, right down to moving a character from one side of the stage to the other. From crafting an intriguing beginning to delivering a satisfying ending. In Hatcher's one-on-one discussions with acclaimed American playwrights Lee Blessing, Marsha Norman and Jose Rivera, you'll find a wealth of practical advice, tricks of the trade and insight that will help you in your own creative efforts.

The Art of Writing Drama is an indispensable textbook for wherever writing for the stage is taught, but also serves as a foundational book for any student taking courses in performance media - radio, television and film. Coupling theory with practice, the book opens with a survey of the current methodologies of teaching playwriting and of textual analysis. The theories of Bakhtin, Foucault and Derrida are examined as are the agendas of play reviewers from the national press. In the second section of the book, a wealth of guidance with practical exercises on the skills of writing for the stage is provided. Throughout the text, Wandor draws on her extensive experience as both playwright and teacher of creative writing to provide a guide that is both a scholarly and an immensely practical guide to writing for the theatre.