Drama Books - Significant Practitioners

The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud [ABRIDGED]
by Jacques Derrida, Paule Thevenin (Contributor), Mary Ann Caws (Translator)

"This volume brings us face to face with one of the great artistic singularities of the modern age. One comparison is still possible, however: Derrida writing on Artaud is astonishing and definitive rather as Artaud himself was when he wrote on Van Gogh."
-- Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, All Souls College, Oxford

True and False : Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor

by David Mamet

Bertolt Brecht : His Life, His Art and His Times
by Frederic Ewen

Highly acclaimed when it was first published in 1967, Frederic Ewen's monumental biographical study of Bertolt Brecht has long been out of print. In response to national demand, Citadel Press is proud to reissue this complete and unabridged text.

Of "Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art, His Times, the critics wrote:

"The finest critical study of Brecht to date. This book is at least a worthy appreciation of a towering, poetic and dramatic genius." -Los Angeles Times

At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions
by Thomas Richards and Jerzy Grotowski

A first hand account of working with Jerzy Grotowski. An important addition to the canon of contemporary theatre production.

The legacy of Bertolt Brecht is much contested, whether by those who wish to forget or to vilify his politics, but his stature as the outstanding political playwright and poet of the twentieth century is unforgettably established in this major critical work. Fredric Jameson elegantly dissects the intricate connections between Brecht's drama and politics, demonstrating the way these combined to shape a unique and powerful influence on a profoundly troubled epoch.

"The finest critical study of Brecht to date. This book is at least a worthy appreciation of a towering, poetic and dramatic genius." -Los Angeles Times

"What is particularly striking about Frederic Ewen's biography is that it conveys the excitement, the turmoil and triumph of Brecht's career." -The New York Times

"The great thing about Frederic Ewen's luminous biography is that it gently frees Brecht from the bear hugs of the bigots and restores him to us as a whole man, his youth contained in his age." -The Nation.

The Cambridge Companions are a great series of books that provide a broad, yet authoritative overview of the subjects they address. This edition is no exception, addressing the works, the context, the people and the man it covers a very wide scope and is a useful start in any investigation of this significant 20th Century theatre practitioner.

This book focuses on the relationship of Bertolt Brecht to the theater of Russian director Vsevold E. Meyerhold. Eaton's analysis places Brecht's dramatic theory and practice in proper historical perspective, thereby increasing our understanding of the role of the Russian avant-garde in shaping modern theater. She clearly demonstrates the extent to which Meyerhold's influence on Brecht has been underestimated and she argues that the preservation of Meyerholdian theater should be numbered among Brecht's significant contributions to modern drama.

A study of Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold's stylized training method, Biomechanics, incorporating Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein's theoretical analysis of the method. Presents the basic principles of movement that Meyerhold and Eisenstein pioneered, traces the history of Biomechanics in relation to their aesthetic development, and describes basic Biomechanical exercises, drawing on newspaper accounts, letters, diaries, eyewitness accounts, and transcribed materials from public and private archives. Contains b&w photos and a glossary. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Meyerhold at Work
by Paul Schmidt (Editor), Ilya Levin (Translator), ve McGee

This wide-ranging volume covers Williams's works, from his early apprenticeship years through his last play before his death in 1983. In addition to essays on the major plays, the contributors also consider selected minor plays, short stories, poems, and biographical concerns. Plus, the book features a bibliographic essay surveying major critical statements on Williams and his work.

In this first complete, critical biography of one of America's finest playwrights, Donald Spoto reveals the intimate connections between Williams' personal dramas and his remarkably autobiographical art. From his birth into a genteel Southern family, through his success, celebrity, and wealth, Tennessee Williams lived a life as gripping as his plays. The Kindness of Strangers is "a work of honest reverence."--San Francisco Chronicle. 34 photos.

The bedrock, authoritative account of the little-known early life of Tennessee Williams. "Plainly a work of distinction...It will be great service to Williams's reputation and among other things may bring more of the young to an appreciation of his achievement."--Arthur Miller. Black-and-white photographs.

Sanford Meisner on Acting
by Sanford Meisner, Dennis Longwell (Contributor), Sydney Pollack (Introduction)

The author explains the techniques that can help an aspiring actor far from the stage as well as the professional.

A primer for aspiring and beginning actors, by one of the most renowned and beloved acting coaches in the U.S.

Veteran New York Times drama critic Mel Gussow enjoyed direct access to the great Irish dramatist, meeting with him a number of times over the course of a decade. The heart of this collection of essays are revealing remembrances of Gussow's conversations with Beckett. Also included are interviews with Jack McGowran and Billie Whitelaw, great performers of Beckett's work, and a collection of Gussow's critical writing on Beckett. Conversations with and about Beckett is a small book with remarkable depth.

This is the first authorized biography of Harold Pinter, Britain's foremost living playwright. Author Michael Billington has met the Herculean task of studying the vast body of Pinter's works alongside the progress of his life. He discusses groundbreaking plays like The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal as well as the extraordinary screenplays to The Servant, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and many others. Billington, a prominent theater critic and biographer who has been following Pinter for decades, demystifies Pinter's often difficult drama with perceptive psychological and critical analyses.

Samuel Beckett has always been something of an enigma. Born and raised in Ireland, he moved to France as a young man and remained there, risking his life during the war in his work with the French Resistance. Kind, generous, and often funny in real life, his plays and novels are implacably dark, filled with despair, need, and isolation. In Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, biographer Anthony Cronin limns a deft portrait of the great writer using Beckett's letters, early fiction, and Cronin's own acquaintance with both his subject and several of Beckett's friends in Dublin. Taken together, these sources reveal a multifaceted man.

Beckett passed through many phases on his way to greatness: a French teacher at Dublin College, a member of the Paris circle that formed around James Joyce in the late 1920s, and later an active participant in the French Resistance. The years following World War II proved a fertile time in Beckett's creative life, encompassing his transition from the autobiographical to the modernist impersonal--perhaps his greatest works. Anthony Cronin admirably balances his portrayal of the man and the artist, rendering the details of Beckett's uneventful life and his rich imagination in a way that fleshes out the man even as it celebrates the genius.

Stanislavski on Opera
by Constantin Stanislavski, Pavel Rumantsev (Contributor), Elizabeth R. Hapgood

Practiced by such actors of stature as Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Julie Harris, Dustin Hoffman, and Ellen Burstyn (not to mention the late James Dean) the Method offers a practical application of the renowned Stanislavsky technique.

On Method Acting demystifies the "mysteries" of Method acting -- breaking down the various steps into clear and simple terms, including chapters on:

In the last several years, numerous books have been published about this great actor and director. In "My Life in Art", Constantin Stanislavski reveals his expression of his own ideas and experience in his outstanding autobiography.

The first volume of Stanislavski's enduring trilogy on the art of acting defines the "System," a means of mastering the craft of acting and of stimulating the actor's individual creativeness and imagination.

Strasberg, the father of Method Acting, explains in this book his Method--for the first time in his own words. "Essential reading for actors, directors and students of theater."--Publishers Weekly. Advertising in newspapers and theater publications. Two 8-page photo inserts.

How is performance used in politics, medicine, religion, entertainment and individual interactions? In The Future of Ritual, Schechner explores ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics, studying the interactions--sometimes easy, sometimes tense--among authors, directors, performers, and spoectators. A brilliant examination of cultural expression and communal action, The Future of Ritual asks pertinent questions about art, theatre and the changing meaning of "culture''

Richard Schechner's Environmental Theater provides the exercises which began as radical departures from standard actor-training etiquette and which stand now as classic means through which the performer discovers his or her true power of transformation. Environmental Theater offers a new generation of theatre artists the gospel according the Schechner, the guru whose principles and influence have survived a quarter-century of reaction and debate. Schechner's work is situated within a rich theoretical framework in the tradition of Meyerhold, Brecht, Grotowski, as well as potent non-Western performance genres. He reflects on his seminal experience as the founder of The Performance Group to consider the major issues of audience participation, performer training, directing and the formation (and dissolution) of groups. And always integrated throughout the text is a relevant compendium of practical exercises designed for performers, directors and environmentalists. Environmental Theater will be of long enduring interest.

Contributors to this exhaustive study of performance behavior consider the relationships among training and the finished performance, ritual and aesthetics, popular entertainment and religion, sports and theater and dance.

When Dario Fo won the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature, establishments everywhere erupted in anger. Here was an anticlerical, obscene, communist clown receiving the world's top literary accolade. As this collection of his essays and lectures shows, Fo has such a unique vision that his mission as clown/playwright requires him to be all those other things. What's interesting about The Tricks of the Trade is not his politics, but the incredible amount of research he's done on 2,000 years' worth of jesters, minstrels, and political clowns, whom he believes have changed the course of history.