Download or read book Conversations with Beth Henley written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2023-03-24 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far has written twenty-five produced plays that are always original, usually darkly comic, and often experimental. In these interviews, Henley speaks of the plays, from her early crowd-pleasers, Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, to her more experimental plays, including The Debutante Ball and Control Freaks, to her brilliant and time-bending play, The Jacksonian. Henley is a master at writing about the duality of human experience—the beautiful and the grotesque, the cruel and the loving. This duality provokes in Henley both amazement and compassion. She discusses here not only her admiration for Chekhov and other influences, but also her process of bringing a play from notebooks of images and bits of dialogues through rumination, writing, and rewriting to rehearsals and previews. The interviews range from 1981, just before she won the Pulitzer Prize, to 2020 and cover nearly forty years of a creative life, which, as Henley remarks in the most recent interview, is “such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process.”
Download or read book Beth Henley written by Julia A. Fesmire and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beth Henley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play for her first full-length play, Crimes of the Heart, yet there has been no book-length consideration of her body of work until now. This volume includes original essays that contextualize and analyze her works from a variety of perspectives, focusing on her vexed status as a southern writer, her use of the comic grotesque, and her alleged feminist critiques of modern society. Receiving special attention are lesser-known plays which are crucial to understanding Henley's development as a playwright and postmodern thinker.
Download or read book Abundance written by Beth Henley and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 1991 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: Bess Johnson and Macon Hill are mail-order brides who meet while waiting for their husbands to pick them up to start life in a small town in the Wyoming Territory in the 1860s. Bess is a romantic while Macon Hill is exuberant and determi
Download or read book Crimes of the Heart written by Beth Henley and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1982 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: The scene is Hazlehurst, Mississippi, where the three Magrath sisters have gathered to await news of the family patriarch, their grandfather, who is living out his last hours in the local hospital. Lenny, the oldest sister, is unmarried
Download or read book Conversations with Thornton Wilder written by Thornton Wilder and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1992 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected interviews with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright most widely known today for his play, Our Town
Download or read book Am I Blue written by Beth Henley and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 1982 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Lucky Spot written by Beth Henley and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1987 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: The place is Pigeon, Louisiana, the time Christmas 1934--at the low point of the American Depression. Reed Hooker, a compulsive gambler, has won a rundown rural dance hall in a poker game, and hopes that it will make his fortune. Assisted
Download or read book Conversations with August Wilson written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his "four B's"-- the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards--Publisher description.
Download or read book The Jacksonian written by Beth Henley and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jackson, Mississippi, 1964. When his wife kicks him out, respectable dentist Bill Perch moves into the seedy Jacksonian Motel. There, his downward spiral is punctuated by encounters with his teenage daughter, a gold-digging motel employee, a treacherous bartender, and his now-estranged wife. Revolving around the night of a murder, THE JACKSONIAN brims with suspense and dark humor and unearths the eerie tensions and madness in a town poisoned by racism.
Download or read book Understanding Beth Henley written by Robert J. Andreach and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beth Henley remains best known for 'Crimes of the Heart', a play that won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and later was made into a major motion picture. This introduction to the Mississippi-born playwright and her body of work presents Henley's plays as a unified whole.
Download or read book The Plays of Beth Henley written by Gene A. Plunka and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beth Henley's twelve complete plays (three of which have been turned into films) have achieved worldwide production. At age 29, she produced her first full-length drama, Crimes of the Heart, which won a Pulitzer Prize and garnered three Academy Award nominations as a film. Her Mississippi upbringing and her penchant for the eccentricities of southern culture, however, have caused critics to categorize her writing as a kind of southern gothic folklore inspired by feminist ideology. This book, the first critical study of Henley's complete plays, attempts to dispel the common stereotypes that associate Henley's work with regional drama and sociological treatises. It argues instead that Henley can best be perceived as a dramatist who delineates an existential despair manifested in various forms of what Freud calls the modern neurosis. The book maintains that Henley's plays must be understood as universal statements about the angst of modern civilization, and Henley's characters are assessed in light of Freud's proposition that cultural restrictions create neurotic individuals. The introduction provides a brief account of Henley's childhood and career. Early chapters summarize the theory of the modern angoisse espoused in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, while later chapters relate this theory to thematic and stylistic elements of Henley's most popular play, Crimes of the Heart, as well as Am I Blue, The Wake of Jamie Foster, The Miss Firecracker Contest, The Debutante Ball, The Lucky Spot, Abundance, Signature, Control Freaks, Revelers, L-Play, and Impossible Marriage.
Download or read book Conversations with Lillian Hellman written by Lillian Hellman and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1986 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-six interviews with the outspoken writer range over six decades of her life and career.
Download or read book Conversations with Sam Shepard written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943–2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.
Download or read book Mississippi Writers Talking Interviews with Eudora Welty Shelby Foote Elizabeth Spencer Barry Hannah Beth Henley written by John Griffin Jones and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1982 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Elizabeth Spencer, Barry Hannah, and Beth Henley
Download or read book Beth Henley written by Beth Henley and published by Heinemann Drama. This book was released on 1992 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These four plays by one of American theatre's most celebrated writers are populated by people who lead lives of distinctly unquiet desperation. The plays are: The Lucky Spot, The Miss Firecracker Contest, The Wake of Jamey Foster, and Abundance.
Download or read book A Study Guide for Beth Henley s The Miss Firecracker Contest written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on 2016 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Beth Henley's "The Miss Firecracker Contest," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book Conversations with Neil Simon written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neil Simon (1927–2018) began as a writer for some of the leading comedians of the day—including Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Phil Silvers, and Jerry Lewis—and he wrote for fabled television programs alongside a group of writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Sid Caesar. After television, Simon embarked on a playwriting career. In the next four decades he saw twenty-eight of his plays and five musicals produced on Broadway. Thirteen of those plays and three of the musicals ran for more than five hundred performances. He was even more widely known for his screenplays—some twenty-five in all. Yet, despite this success, it was not until his BB Trilogy—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound—that critics and scholars began to take Simon seriously as a literary figure. This change in perspective culminated in 1991 when his play Lost in Yonkers won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In the twenty-two interviews included in Conversations with Neil Simon, Simon talks candidly about what it was like to write commercially successful plays that were dismissed by critics and scholars. He also speaks at length about the differences between writing for television, for the stage, and for film. He speaks openly and often revealingly about his relationships with, among many others, Mike Nichols, Walter Matthau, Sid Caesar, and Jack Lemmon. Above all, these interviews reveal Neil Simon as a writer who thought long and intelligently about creating for stage, film, and television, and about dealing with serious subjects in a comic mode. In so doing, Conversations with Neil Simon compels us to recognize Neil Simon’s genius.
