Download or read book Let Me Down Easy TCG Edition written by Anna Deavere Smith and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled from dozens of interviews conducted by the author, Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy is a bracing, tender, melancholy, and triumphant exploration of death and dying. The speakers Smith inhabits include healthcare professionals, theologians, artists, athletes, and activists. They speak of the body as a battleground, a tool, a weapon, a joy, a burden. Smith’s great gift has always been her ability to break down her subjects’ defenses and present them in their full, complicated beauty. Whether channeling Lance Armstrong, Lauren Hutton, Peter Gomes, or others who are not in the public eye, Smith reminds us again and again that in learning to die we learn to live.
Download or read book Playwriting with Purpose written by Jacqueline Goldfinger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-16 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Playwriting with Purpose: A Guide and Workbook for New Playwrights provides a holistic approach to playwriting from an award-winning playwright and instructor. This book incorporates craft lessons by contemporary playwrights and provides concrete guidance for new and emerging playwrights. The author takes readers through the entire creative process, from creating characters and writing dialogue and silent moments to analyzing elements of well-made plays and creating an atmospheric environment. Each chapter is followed by writing prompts and pro tips that address unique facets of the conversation about the art and craft of playwriting. The book also includes information on the business of playwriting and a recommended reading list of published classic and contemporary plays, providing all the tools to successfully transform an idea into a script, and a script into a performance. Playwriting with Purpose gives writers and students of playwriting hands-on lessons, artistic concepts, and business savvy to succeed in today’s theater industry.
Download or read book Sweat TCG Edition written by Lynn Nottage and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama Nominee for 3 Tony Awards including Best Play “Lynn Nottage’s best work. She offers a powerful critique of the American attitude toward class, and how it affects the decisions we make. Sweat has fraternity at its heart, but also the violence, and the suspicion that can result from class aspirations.” –Hilton Als, New Yorker Lynn Nottage has written one of her most exquisitely devastating tragedies to date. In one of the poorest cities in America, Reading, Pennsylvania, a group of down-and-out factory workers struggle to keep their present lives in balance, ignorant of the financial devastation looming in their near future. Based on Nottage’s extensive research and interviews with residents of Reading, Sweat is a topical reflection of the present and poignant outcome of America’s economic decline. Lynn Nottage is the recipient of two Pulitzer Prize Awards for Drama for Sweat and Ruined. She is the first woman playwright to be honored twice. Her other plays include Intimate Apparel; By the Way, Meet Vera Stark; Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; and Las Meninas.
Download or read book Passion Play TCG Edition written by Sarah Ruhl and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the "Ten Best Plays of 2008" by The New Yorker “Sarah Ruhl’s bold, inventive, and ironic triptych [is] a meditation on devotion and its appropriation by the state. . . . Ruhl is an original; a storyteller with a fine mind evolving her own theatrical idiom.”—John Lahr, The New Yorker “It’s a different kind of morality play . . . an often wondrous work . . . with [Ruhl’s] own special lyrical blend of poetry, humor and grace.”—Frank Rizzo, Variety Passion Play is Sarah Ruhl’s “biggest, most ambitious effort yet” (The New York Times), a three-and-a-half hour intimate epic, plunging the depths of the timely intersection of politics and religion. Ruhl dramatizes a community of players rehearsing their annual staging of the Easter Passion in three different eras: 1575 northern England, just before Queen Elizabeth outlaws the ritual; 1934 Oberammergua, Bavaria, as Hitler is rising to power; and Spearfish, South Dakota, from the time of Vietnam through Reagan’s presidency. In each period, the players grapple in different ways with the transformative nature of art, and politics are never far in the background, as Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Reagan each appear, played by a single commanding actor. Sarah Ruhl’s plays include Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Eurydice, and The Clean House, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been widely produced both throughout the country and internationally, and she is the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.
Download or read book Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven TCG Edition written by Stephen Adly Guirgis and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Guirgis, a lifelong New Yorker and a properly profane bard of the city, is a wizard at getting language to flow hot, funny, and fast…Guirgis’s rough-cut gem of a play is rich with revelation and barbed empathy.” —Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker Stephen Adly Guirgis brings his prodigious gifts for exploring the lives of social outcasts to new heights in this play about the inner workings of a women’s halfway house in New York City, where the unmoored residents struggle with addiction, abuse, and mental illness. Between daily therapy sessions, they clash with the staff and each other, form alliances, and fall in love. Harrowing, humorous, and heartbreaking, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven roaringly brings to life the experiences of women who society has tried to shuffle out of sight and out of mind.
Download or read book Prodigal Son TCG Edition written by John Patrick Shanley and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'What I admire most is that his plays are beautifully well made, economical, sharp and coherent. He's not a misanthrope, but he's in pursuit of why people behave as badly as they do along with having a great compassion for them. That's an unusual and interesting combination.'—Tony Kushner, on John Patrick Shanley When a troubled but gifted boy from the South Bronx finds himself shipped off to a private school in New Hampshire, the adjustment to the alien environment will lead to his ultimate dissolution or redemption. Teachers in the affluent institution do not know what to make of the new boisterous student, though the challenge really lies in his self-perception. Like his most celebrated play, Doubt, the author has based this new work on his own personal experiences of growing up as a teenager in the South Bronx and his time spent at a prep school in New England. Shanley has created an elemental study of a young's man search for his place in the world. John Patrick Shanley's plays include Outside Mullingar, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, and Dirty Story, along with his "Church and State" trilogy, Doubt, Defiance, and Storefront Church. For his play Doubt, he received both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He has nine films to his credit, including the five-time Oscar-nominated Doubt, and Moonstruck, which received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The Writers Guild of America awarded Shanley the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing.
Download or read book Brooklyn Boy TCG Edition written by Donald Margulies and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2012-07-25 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A terrific production . . . American playwright Donald Margulies’ self-reflective, dream reverie comedy drama Brooklyn Boy is tough, insightful, bittersweet, funny and ultimately wise.”—The Hollywood Reporter “Those who know Margulies’ plays will find his familiar themes here: the inevitable transformations wrought by aging, the complex hands linking parents and children, the uneasy dance between commercial and artistic success. The story unfolds with an uncanny resonance that distinguishes all great theatre.”—Orange County Register This new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dinner with Friends is slated for a Broadway run in January 2005. Brooklyn Boy follows the career of Eric Weiss, a writer whose novel hits the bestseller list the same time his life begins to unravel. His wife is out the door, his father is in the hospital and his childhood friend thinks he has sold himself to the devil. A funny and emotionally rich look at family, friends and fame. Donald Margulies received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends. The play received numerous awards, including the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk nomination, and has been produced all over the United States and around the world. In addition to his adaptation of God of Vengeance, his many plays include Collected Stories, Sight Unseen, The Model Apartment, The Loman Family Picnic, What’s Wrong with This Picture? and Two Days. Mr. Margulies currently lives with his wife and their son in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University.
Download or read book Talk Radio TCG Edition written by Eric Bogosian and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2012-09-15 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Your fear, your own lives, have become your entertainment.”—Talk Radio “More timely today than it was twenty years ago . . . Radio crackles with intensity.”—Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News “The most lacerating portrait of a human meltdown this side of a Francis Bacon painting. . . . This revival, like the original production, allows its star to grab an audience by the lapels and shake it into submission.”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio—his breakthrough 1987 Public Theater hit that was made into a film by Oliver Stone—has been revived in a “mesmerizing” (Newsday) production on Broadway, with Liev Schreiber playing the role of the late-night shock jock that Bogosian himself originated. The drama is set in the studio of Cleveland’s WTLK Radio over the course of Barry Champlain’s two-hour broadcast, being scrutinized that night by producers with an interest in taking the show national, and fueled as always by coffee, cocaine, and Jack Daniel’s. Barry’s jousts with his unseen callers—ranging from a white supremacist to a woman obsessed with her garbage disposal—are peppered with insights into his character from his ex-deejay pal and his sometime girlfriend/producer, and punctuated with a transformative visit from an embodied voice. Eric Bogosian is a writer and actor who over the last twenty years has authored five full-length plays and created six full-length solos for himself, including subUrbia; Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead;and Drinking in America. He is the recipient of three OBIE Awards and a Drama Desk Award, and has toured throughout the United States and Europe.
Download or read book Wakey Wakey TCG Edition written by Will Eno and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will Eno's latest work is an existential meditation on the way human beings tend to labor through life forgetting to appreciate the smaller things -- moments of laughter, the natural beauty of the world, and especially one other. In Wakey, Wakey, the joyful and moving new play by master of seriocomedy Will Eno, a man in hospice care resolves to spend the remainder of his dwindling days on Earth discovering ways to celebrate his life.
Download or read book Topdog Underdog TCG Edition written by Suzan-Lori Parks and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2001-06-01 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future. Suzan-Lori Parks is the author of numerous plays, including In the Blood and Venus. She is currently head of the A.S.K. Theater Projects Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.
Download or read book By the Way Meet Vera Stark TCG Edition written by Lynn Nottage and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic, and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won't expect."—Time Out New York "Lynn Nottage's work explores depths of humanness, the overlapping complexities of race, gender, culture and history—and the startling simplicity of desire—with a clear tenderness, with humor, with compassion."—Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright In her first new play since the critically acclaimed Ruined, Lynn Nottage examines the legacy of African Americans in Hollywood in a dramatic stylistic departure from her previous work. Fluidly incorporating film and video elements into her writing for the first time, Nottage's comedy tells the story of Vera Stark, an African American maid and budding actress who has a tangled relationship with her boss, a white Hollywood star desperately grasping to hold onto her career. Stirring audiences out of complacency by tackling racial stereotyping in the entertainment industry, Nottage highlights the paradox of black actors in 1930s Hollywood while jumping back and forward in time and location in this uniquely theatrical narrative. By the Way, Meet Vera Stark premiered in New York in 2011 and will receive productions at Los Angeles's Geffen Playhouse in fall 2012 and Chicago's Goodman Theatre and The Lyric Stage Company of Boston in spring 2013. Lynn Nottage's plays include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined; Intimate ApparelFabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por'Knockers; and POOF!
Download or read book Ruined TCG Edition written by Lynn Nottage and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama “A powerhouse drama. . . . Lynn Nottage’s beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports.”—Linda Winer, Newsday “An intense and gripping new drama . . . the kind of new play we desperately need: well-informed and unafraid of the world’s brutalities. Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won’t expect.”—David Cote, Time Out New York A rain forest bar and brothel in the brutally war-torn Congo is the setting for Lynn Nottage’s extraordinary new play. The establishment’s shrewd matriarch, Mama Nadi, keeps peace between customers from both sides of the civil war, as government soldiers and rebel forces alike choose from her inventory of women, many already “ruined” by rape and torture when they were pressed into prostitution. Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congo refugees, Nottage has crafted an engrossing and uncommonly human story with humor and song served alongside its postcolonial and feminist politics in the rich theatrical tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. Lynn Nottage’s plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Fabulation, and Intimate Apparel, winner of the American Theatre Critics’ Steinberg New Play Award and the Francesca Primus Prize. Her plays have been widely produced, with Intimate Apparel receiving more productions than any other play in America during the 2005-2006 season.
Download or read book Illyria TCG Edition written by Richard Nelson and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1958, and New York City is in the midst of a major building boom; a four-lane highway is planned for the heart of Washington Square; Carnegie Hall is designated for demolition; entire neighborhoods on the West Side are leveled to make room for a new "palace of art." Meanwhile, a young Joe Papp and his colleagues face betrayals, self-inflicted wounds, and anger from the city’s powerful elite as they continue their free Shakespeare productions in Central Park. From the creator of the most celebrated family plays of the last decade comes a drama about a different kind of family – one held together by the simple and incredibly complicated belief that the theater, and the city, belong to all of us.
Download or read book Superior Donuts TCG Edition written by Tracy Letts and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It is a meditation on Chicago’s old soul . . . a witty, seductive, live-wire and greatly entertaining dark comedy that you just don’t want to end.” –Chicago Tribune “Superior Donuts is a soulful play, full of humor and humanity… drawn with deep affection. Letts is a writer whose words are alive with poignancy and wit.” – David Rooney, Variety “A source of comic bliss.” – Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times Superior Donuts takes place in the historic Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, where Arthur Przybyszewski runs the donut shop that has been in his family for sixty years. Franco Wicks, a young black man and Arthur's only employee, wants to modernize the shop, while Arthur is more content to spend the day smoking weed and reminiscing about his Polish immigrant father. This provocative comedy, set in the heart of one of Chicago's most diverse communities, explores the challenges of embracing the past and the redemptive power of friendship. Tracy Letts was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play for August: Osage County, which premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2007 before playing Broadway, London's National Theatre, and a forty-week US tour. Other plays include Pulitzer Prize finalist Man from Nebraska; Killer Joe, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed film; and Bug, which has played in New York, Chicago, and London and was adapted into a film. Letts is an ensemble member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company and garnered a Tony Award for his performance in the Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Download or read book My Children My Africa TCG Edition written by Athol Fugard and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The search for a means to an end to apartheid erupts into conflict between a black township youth and his "old-fashioned" black teacher.
Download or read book Mary Jane TCG Edition written by Amy Herzog and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The most profound and harrowing of Ms. Herzog’s many fine plays.” —Jesse Green, New York Times Armed with medicines, feeding tubes, and various medical equipment, Mary Jane is a single mother and indefatigable force when it comes to caring for her young, sick child. A moving play about the stalwart endurance of a devoted mother, Mary Jane demonstrates the prevailing strength of the human will when fueled by unconditional love.
Download or read book Letters to a Young Artist written by Anna Deavere Smith and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inspiring and no-nonsense guide for aspiring artists of all stripes—from “the most exciting individual in American theater” (Newsweek). In vividly anecdotal letters to the young BZ, Anna Deavere Smith addresses the full spectrum of issues that all artists starting out will face: from questions of confidence, discipline, and self-esteem, to fame, failure, and fear, to staying healthy, presenting yourself effectively, building a diverse social and professional network, and using your art to promote social change. At once inspiring and no-nonsense, Letters to a Young Artist will challenge you, motivate you, and set you on a course to pursue your art without compromise.
