A Life in a Wooden O - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook A Life in a Wooden O write by Ben Iden Payne. This book was released on 1977-01-01. A Life in a Wooden O available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Ben Iden Payne spent more than seventy years in the theatre in England and America. On his retirement at the age of ninety it was a very different theatre from the one he entered at nineteen on joining Frank Benson's touring Shakespeare company. That change was due in no small part to his own efforts. Payne could point to many experiences that would have guaranteed him a place in theatre annals: He was a director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He staged plays for such stars as John Drew, William Gillette, John and Ethel Barrymore, Otis Skinner, and Helen Hayes. And for eight years he was general director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. Though Payne's career fills three columns in Who's Who in the Theatre, two unique achievements stand out from the others. In 1907, as director of Miss Horniman's Gaiety Theatre company in Manchester, he initiated the repertory movement in England. In four years he brought it to a peak of excellence that has never been surpassed. Later, in America, he began a career in educational theatre that would span half a century. At the Carnegie Institute of Technology he developed his "modified Elizabethan staging" - a technique that has left an indelible mark on the production of Shakespeare's plays. In this memoir Payne recalls the English theatre at the turn of the century with wit and affection. His accounts of the popular actor-managers, the fit-up companies, the Playboy riots, and of Yeats, Miss Horniman, and William Poel vividly depict an era. He captures the spirit of the American theatre of the teens, twenties, and thirties - the flamboyance of its producers, the foibles of its stars, and the casting practices that reduced able actors to types. Above all, Payne tells of his consuming desire to recreate the basic conditions of Shakespeare's own theatre in order to present his plays most effectively. No antiquarian, he does not quibble over structural details of the "wooden O's" that housed Elizabethan stages. Instead he writes as a practical theatre man determined to achieve the continuous and fluid movement needed to preserve the "melodic line" of Shakespeare's plays. The success with which he pursued this ambition has influenced theatre design and inspired others to carry on his work. Yet, in spite of the distinction of his long career, Payne recalls it with the modest simplicity that endeared him to generations of actors and students.
Strutting and Fretting
Strutting and Fretting - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Strutting and Fretting write by Kevin McKeon. This book was released on 2017-08-04. Strutting and Fretting available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "At the forefront of all the serious new fiction released this year." - Midwest Book Review School's over, and Bob has landed an acting job at a major repertory theatre on the California coast. But instead of relishing his success, Bob is preoccupied with doubts about his talent, his life choices and his future. And his wife has left him. And he's broke. But hey - four months of solid work is something, right? Maybe, just maybe, Bob can turn his life around over the summer - and perhaps be invited to keep his job in the fall. But it may take a resolve and a determination that Bob does not, at this point in his life, have an abundance of: "Who am I to think I can do this? My marriage is failing, my tenure in the Ivory Tower of Education is over and my MFA degree is really a great credential for a career in fast food. What does it matter to the deep fryer guy that I've done the definitive Macbeth at age 24?" Life to Bob: Make something happen. October is bearing down fast. "McKeon times these beats impeccably; he writes with a kinetic energy that propels Bob's darkest and funniest moments at the same pace, making for both a fully realized narrator and a compulsive read." - Kirkus Reviews "This superb work of fiction peels back the layers of [Bob's] carefully guarded soul for readers to explore. It is a masterful examination of a young man struggling to balance chronic low self-esteem with a performer's perpetual need for approval." - Publishers Daily Reviews
The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare with a Life of the Poet
The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare with a Life of the Poet - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare with a Life of the Poet write by William Shakespeare. This book was released on 2024-09-11. The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare with a Life of the Poet available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Reprint of the original, first published in 1839.
Joe Papp: An American Life
Joe Papp: An American Life - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Joe Papp: An American Life write by Helen Epstein. This book was released on 2019-07-31. Joe Papp: An American Life available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Joseph Papp (1921-1991), theater producer, champion of human rights and of the First Amendment, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and Public Theater, changed the American cultural landscape. Born Yussel Papirofsky in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he discovered Shakespeare in public school and first produced a show on an aircraft carrier during World War II. After a stint at the Actors’ Lab in Hollywood, he moved to New York, where he worked as a CBS stage manager during the golden age of television. He fought Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (as well as Mayors Wagner, Lindsay, Beame and Koch) winning first the right to stage free Shakespeare in New York’s Central Park, then municipal funding to keep it going. He built the Delacorte Theater and later rebuilt the former Astor Library on Lafayette Street, transforming it into the Public Theater. In addition to helping create an "American" style of Shakespeare, Papp pioneered colorblind casting and theater as a not-for-profit institution. He showcased playwrights David Rabe, Elizabeth Swados, Ntozake Shange, David Hare, Wallace Shawn, John Guare, and Vaclav Havel; directors Michael Bennett, Wilford Leach and James Lapine; actors Al Pacino, Colleen Dewhurst, George C. Scott, James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Sam Waterston, and Denzel Washington; and produced Hair, Sticks and Bones, for colored girls, The Normal Heart, and A Chorus Line, the longest running musical in Broadway history. "This first biography of the late Joseph Papp will be a hard act to follow." — Booklist "The final portrait that emerges might have been jointly painted by Goya, Whistler and Francis Bacon." — Benedict Nightingale, front-page New York Times Sunday Book Review Playwright Tony Kushner called Papp "one of the very few heroes this tawdry, timid business has produced" and the book, a "nourishing and juicy biography." "Helen Epstein recounts [Papp's] career in [this] definitive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography. [...] It is a tribute to Epstein’s narrative skill that the detailed account of Papp’s decline and eventual defeat by cancer [...] reads as both riveting and horrifying." — Ellen Schiff, All About Jewish Theatre Oklahoma-born Paul Davis created 51 iconic posters for Joseph Papp, starting in 1975 with the New York Shakespeare Festival production of "Hamlet" starring Sam Waterston. "It was inspiring to work with Joe," says Davis. "We would discuss what he wanted to achieve in a production, and he trusted me to find a way to express it. And he respected the poster as its own dramatic form." The artist’s work has been exhibited in the U.S., Europe and Japan. He is a recipient of a special Drama Desk award created for his theater art. Davis was elected to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Pittsburgh in Stages
Pittsburgh in Stages - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Pittsburgh in Stages write by Lynne Thompson Conner. This book was released on 2010-06-04. Pittsburgh in Stages available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Pittsburgh has a rich and diverse theatrical tradition, from early frontier performances by officers stationed at Fort Pitt through experimental theater at the end of the twentieth century. Pittsburgh in Stages offers the first comprehensive history of theater in Pittsburgh, placing it within the context of cultural development in the city and the history of theater nationally.By the time the first permanent theater was built in 1812, Pittsburgh had already established itself as a serious patron of the theatrical arts. The city soon hosted New York and London-based traveling companies, and gained a national reputation as a proving ground for touring productions. By the early twentieth century, numerous theaters hosted 'popular-priced' productions of vaudeville and burlesque, and theater was brought to the masses. Soon after, Pittsburgh witnessed the emergence of myriad community-based theater groups and the formation of the Federation of Non-Commercial Theatres and the New Theater League, guilds designed to share resources among community producers. The rise of local theater was also instrumental to the growth of African American theatrical groups. Though victims of segregation, their art flourished, and was only later recognized and blended into Pittsburgh's theatrical melting pot.Pittsburgh in Stages relates the significant influence and interpretation of urban socioeconomic trends in the theatrical arts and the role of the theater as an agent of social change. Dividing Pittsburgh's theatrical history into distinct eras, Lynne Conner details the defining movements of each and analyzes how public tastes evolved over time. She offers a fascinating study of regional theatrical development and underscores the substantial contribution of regional theater in the history of American theatrical arts.
