Theatre studies Books

A youth encounters a girl who is delivering flowers to his celebrated diva mother. They fall in love. The youth leaves for war and the diva brings the young wife into the theatre where she is dazzled by the lustre and social gaiety. She embraces it with...

Geoffrey Jones, M.P. and sometime architect, is convinced that the Russians are about to launch a nuclear strike against England. He builds a bomb shelter equipped with everything he, his wife, and his wifes old mother will need to last out such a strike...

Successful Long Island businessman Joe Benjamin is a modern-day 'Job' with a demanding wife, ungrateful children, and wise-cracking household employees. Just when it seems things couldn't get any worse, he is visited by Sidney Lipton, a.k.a. A Messenger...

Drama / 10m, 4f, extras This evocative play charting the rocky romance between headstrong farmgirl Laurey and cocky cowhand Curley in a tale of early America during the settlement of the midwest was the basis of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein...

Comedy / 5m, 7f / Interior The Reardons are a typical American family whose eccentricities, if hilarious, are only normal. Laura, the mother, is a social climber. The youngest, Penelope, is a demon with a slingshot and the piano. Harry, the son, is...

The semi-autobiographical, riotous account of stage-struck young David Kolowitz, originated on Broadway by Alan Arkin, working as a delivery boy in a sewing machine factory. Denying his parent's wishes for a druggist in the family, he leaves their dreams...

The Hilliards are a typical family living on the outskirts of Indianapolis; abruptly, their pleasant home becomes a jungle full of cunning and violence.

This is a witty version of the story of a suave vampire whose passion is sinking teeth into the throats of young women. There are many surprising but uncomplicated stage effects including mysterious disappearances, secret panels, howling wolves and bats...

Herman Wouk Full Length, DramaCharacters:19 male (6 non-speaking) Simple set The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a court martial has been adapted by the author into suspenseful evening of theatre. A young lieutenant is relieved his captain of command...

This lunatic show poses a fascinating mystery. When Barnaby Folcey is murdered at a family gathering at Marlgate Manor, it transpires that he had a motive to murder everybody else, but no one had a reason to want him dead.

Cal and Ellen are the owners and sole staff of a small, elegant gourmet restaurant. Cals main preoccupation is paying back the $75,000 it cost to start it up, and that means packing in the customers. Chef Ellen is preoccupied with the foods quality and...

A prima donna, a young man, an old man, an old lady, and a young lady are all trying to get into a bathroom in a hotel. The door will not open, and at last the prima donna declares that her husband, with whom she has had a quarrel, must have locked...

Oscar WildeFull Length, Farce comedy Charcters: 5 male, 4 female Exterior Set and 2 Interior Sets This masterpiece is probably the most famous of all comedies. It revolves wittily around the most ingenious case of "manufactured" mistaken identity ever...

Julia Dowling has an unexpected visitor who intends to escort her off to the afterlife. Infusing comedy into the classic Death Takes a Holiday, The Christmas Spirit is set in contemporary Long Island. Julia persuades Death to give her one more day to...

Plays included in this collection: The Daughters of Edward D. Boit The Green Man Hieronymus Bosch Specter The Woodman and the Goblins

A collection of two short plays. In the first of these one act comedies, The Line Thats Picked Up 1000 Babes And How It Can Work for You, six people in a bar are in search of companionship, a one night stand or a life-long relationship. Benny is...

Comedy thriller / 5m, 8f or 4m, 9f or 6m, 7f Thirteen people gather on Friday the 13th at the Travers mansion in New York for the reading of Josiah's will which is a wall chart rendered in the form of a rebus (a part word, part drawing puzzle) that...

Drama Characters: 8 male, 3 female Unit set. Harold Prince staged this drama on Broadway with Donald Moffat starring as a Canadian salesman and father determined to drink himself to death. Cam MacMillan he is full of pride for in his heritage as a...

Meet George and Maggie Antrobus of Excelsior, New Jersey, a suburban, commuter-town couple (married for 5,000 years), who bear more than a casual resemblance to that first husband and wife, Adam and Eve: the two Antrobus children, Gladys (perfect in...

This version of the Dracula legend, based on the 1897 Bram Stoker novel, is set in the English countryside in 1911, where several village girls have died under mysterious circumstances. Dr. Seward presides over a nearby mental hospital, and the locality...

Zany, madcap events transpire at the Reverend Lionel Toop's vicarage in Merton-cum-Middlewick. The plot revolves around Lionel's wife, Penelope, who dabbles in a football pool with the help of their maid, Ida, and Ida's suitor, the droll Willie Briggs...

Comedy / 7m, 5f (performed on Broadway with 3m, 2f) / Scenery: InteriorHilarity abounds in this portrait of three couples successively occupying a suite at the Plaza. A suburban couple take the suite while their house is being paintedandit turns out to...

Full Length, Black Comedy / Casting: 4m, 2f, extras / Scenery: 2 int. Wealthy, overbearing Madame Rosepettle with her stuttering, awkward son Jonathan at her heels, arrives at a posh hotel with a man-eating tropical plant, pirahna fish and coffin in tow...

Brilliant painter Paul Sorodin dies; indecently close to deaths heels come Sorodins relatives, his business manager and others who, their grief not entirely untinged with greed, anxiously await the reading of the will. Sebastian, valet and companion...

Genre: Melodrama Characters: 12m, 2f An ingenious idea is employed to accommodate the sweep of this classic story on the stage. A Shakespearean company puts down their rehearsal sides of Lear and curiously take up those of a new play entitled Moby Dick...

Full Length, ComedyCharacters: 2 male, 1 fmale Interior Set All is fair in love? Even murder? That's the question posed by this light and funny suspense comedy about a love triangle in a Howard Johnson Motor Inn. In the first episode, Mitchell, an...

Herb, a Hollywood scriptwriter currently “at liberty,” is surprised when his forgotten past reappears in the form of Libby, a teenage daughter who’s trekked from Brooklyn with dreams of movie stardom. With Steffy, his sometime paramour, at his side, Herb...

This is a stage adaptation of the movie about the suicidal 19 year old boy who finally learns how to truly live when he meets that delightfully wacky octogenarian, Maude. Harold is the proverbial poor little rich kid. His alienation has caused him to...

Tragedy Alfred Hayes, adapted from his best seller Characters: 7 male, 4 female Complete interior set Here is a merciless picture of hardened American conquerors abroad and their impact on pitifully defenseless people. A young American soldier takes on...

Drama / Characters: 1 male, 8 femaleScenery: InteriorIn a small town dime store in West Texas, the "Disciples of James Dean" gather for their twentieth reunion. Now middle-aged women, they were teenagers when Dean filmed Giant two decades ago in nearby...

Death suspends activities for three days during which he falls in love with a beautiful girl, and through her realizes why mortals fear him.

Melodrama / Character: 7 male, 7 female, extrasHere's the dramatization of a bloodthirsty dime novel just like those Grandfather used to read in secret. The lure of the Old West of heroes, of redskins biting the dust, of lily pure maidens and black...

Shining in the bewitching repartee between two great wits, Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne played Mrs. Campbell and Shaw on Broadway. The play toured this hemisphere and Europe for two years before its return to Off-Broadway. It is a masterful...

"This psychological chamber piece explores the secret world of childhood through the prism of a dyed-in-the-wool British dowager Mrs. St. Maugham and her precocious and equally eccentric granddaughter Laurel. When enigmatic Miss Madrigal is hired as...

Who were the giants of the twentieth-century stage, and exactly how did they influence modern theatre?Robert Leach's Makers of Modern Theatre is the first detailed introduction to the work of the key theatre-makers who shaped the drama of the last...

This book explores the notion that the emergent language of contemporary theatre, and more generally of modern culture, has links to much earlier forms of storytelling and an ancient worldview.

Towards an Ecocritical Theatre investigates contemporary theatre through the lens of Anthropocene-oriented ecocriticism. It assesses how Anthropocene thinking engages different modes of theatrical representation, as well as how the theatrical apparatus...

Theatre and Internationalization examines how internationalization affects the processes and aesthetics of theatre, and how this art form responds dramatically and thematically to internationalization beyond the stage. With central examples drawn from...

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...

Theatrical Improvisation provides an in-depth analysis of short form, long form, and sketch-based improv--tracing the development of each form and the principles that define and connect the styles of performance. Brimming with original interviews from...

Eighteenth-century drama is often dismissed as homogenous, aesthetically uninteresting, or politically complacent. This book reveals the incredibly intriguing and intricate nature of the periods history plays and their often messy dramatisaton of the...

This is the first book to explore the relationship between experimental theatre and performance making in France. Reflecting the recent return to aesthetics and politics in French theory, it focuses on how a variety of theatre and performance...

Contents Preface Acknowledgements Personal Narrative I: Ambiguous Applause Popular Shakespeares Personal Narrative II: Stand-up Shakespeare Text and Metatext: Shakespeare and Anachronism Personal Narrative III: Jeffrey Archer: The One That Got Away 'A...

A border is a force of containment that inspires dreams of being overcome and crossed; motivates bodies to climb over; and threatens physical harm. This book critically examines a range of cultural performances produced in relation to the tensions and...

List of illustrations Series editors' preface Acknowledgements Notes on contributors Introduction: Framing 'America': Between Exilic Imaginary and Exilic Collective; S.Jestrovic & Y.Meerzon PART 1: 'AMERICA' BETWEEN THE EXILIC IMAGINARY AND THE EXILIC...

This book explores the changing representation on the early modern stage of the built environment of London. It covers a period in which the city underwent rapid growth to become the country's first metropolis, and it examines how the urban environment...