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Plays / Theatre
"There is a muscularity, not to mention wisdom and truth, to Seth's techniques. He is a wonderful teacher, and I know that having him as my first guide is one of the luckiest things to have happened to me in my career and life." --Anne Hathaway, from her Foreword "Seth Barrish has coached me on almost every TV project, film or audition I've done since we met ten years ago. When it comes to wisdom about acting, there's no one I hold in higher regard." --Mike Birbiglia, comedian, director, actor "Seth's approach and understanding is awesome. He makes it very easy to act by telling you not to act and be natural. It could be as simple as having something in your hand, creating business while you deliver a line to make it seem natural and comfortable. His book is amazing--it's basically the actor's blueprint." --Jay Pharoah, actor, comedian "In Seth's class I often watch him transform a student's good, yet average performance into a precise and exhilarating one, with just one simple adjustment. I am constantly blown away by how he does this. This book explains it." --Sarita Choudhury, actor "This book is truly unlike anything else I know--these pieces are haikus on specific elements of performance and character building." --Philip Himberg, Sundance Theatre Institute An Actor's Companion is ideal for both seasoned professionals and beginning actors. The tips and exercises are simple and direct, and easy to apply in both rehearsal and performance. Seth Barrish is an actor, director and co-founder of The Barrow Group, a theater company and acting school, in New York City. During his near forty-year career he has directed the award-winning My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, Sleepwalk with Me, The Tricky Part, Pentecost, All the Rage and Old Wicked Songs.
Often called the most autobiographical of Arthur Miller's plays, After the Fall probes deeply into the psyche of Quentin, a man who ruthlessly revisits his past to explain the catastrophe that is his life. His journey backward takes him through a troubled upbringing, the bitter death of his mother, and a series of failed relationships.
"After the Revolution is a smart, funny and provocative play...Herzog deftly avoids simple-minded polemics in favor of richly detailed people who are as ready to examine their relationships as they are their consciences." --Variety
"A funny, moving new play...4000 Miles is a quiet meditation on mortality. But it's hardly a downer: Ms. Herzog's altogether wonderful drama also illuminates how companionship can make life meaningful, moment by moment, in death's discomforting shadow." --New York Times
Known for delicately detailed character studies that subtly balance humor and insight, Amy Herzog is swiftly emerging as a striking new voice in the American theater. After the Revolution, an astute and ironic drama about how society appropriates history for its own psychological needs, was heralded by The New York Times as one of the Ten Best New Plays of 2010. Herzog's other critical hit, 4000 Miles, is a quiet rumination on mortality in which twenty-one-year-old Leo seeks solace from his feisty ninety-one-year-old grandmother Vera in her New York apartment.
Revived in 1998 to acclaim at New York's Lincoln Center Ah Wilderness! is a sharp departure from the gritty reality of the author's renowned dramas. Taking place over the July 4th weekend of 1906 in an idyllic Connecticut town it offers a tender retrospective portrait of small town family values teenage growing pains and young love.
AIAS, translated by award-winning poet James Scully, is one of Sophocles's seven surviving works, and one of the most celebrated plays of ancient Athens.
Still powerful and remarkably timely thousands of years after its creation, Aias is the moving story of a soldier returning home victorious from the Trojan War, only to discover he has lost his life's purpose. This is Sophocles, vibrant and alive, for a new generation.
Thought-provoking and electrifying...Ain't No Mo' both honors its ancestors and loudly makes a stand for its own unique perspective. --Greg Evans, Deadline
The time is the near future, and African American Airlines Flight 1619 has been chartered to take Black Americans "back to Africa." Organizing the boarding process is Peaches, a flight agent in drag who is juggling the passengers' excitement and reluctance, as well as her own. Presented in eight vignettes, Jordan E. Cooper's Ain't No Mo' is both a satire and a serious investigation examining the ever-varying facets of the Black American experience: lives affected by violence, class tensions, the prison-industrial complex, and culture vultures.
Airline Highway is a rollicking play that, with great insight, humor, and subtlety, examines a tight knit community of "outsiders" over the course of a single, legendary day. The Hummingbird Hotel is the figurative or literal home for a group of strippers, French Quarter service workers, hustlers, and poets who are bound together by their bad luck, bad decisions, and complete lack of pretense. Presiding over them is Miss Ruby, a beloved former burlesque performer who has requested a funeral before she dies. As the people whose lives she has touched gather to celebrate her, they must face themselves, each other, and the consequences of the choices they have made. Airline Highway shows us the tenuous hold that community, authenticity, and real-time ritual have on a rapidly gentrifying New Orleans.
With an Introduction by the author. "The prolific master of suburban mayhem has still got his mojo."--Evening Standard Time of My Life "One of Mr. Ayckbourn's most virtuosic experiments in postmodern narrative."--Wall Street Journal Neighbourhood Watch "Ayckbourn's tartly topical, pitch-black comedy, a startling evocation of the panic induced by nightmarish notions of "broken Britain"... An arresting, nastily comic cautionary tale."--The Times Arrivals and Departures "Ayckbourn's genius lies in his ability to write what you might call 'sad comedies, ' uproariously funny farces that are at second glance deeply serious, at times despairing portraits of modern middle-class life and its discontents. On occasion, as in Arrivals & Departures, he puts the despair at centre stage, and what results is a play that at bottom can no longer be called a comedy at all."--Wall Street Journal Hero's Welcome "Alan Ayckbourn is the poet laureate of missed connections. In play after pensive, droll and acid play, Ayckbourn anatomizes how we fail to understand and trust our lovers and friends."--Guardian A Brief History of Women "As A Brief History of Women follows Spates at twenty year intervals through the next sixty years, it becomes progressively more funny, more tender, more Ayckbourn... Ayckbourn knows that moments of real connection between people are hard-won and hard to forget."--The Times
In this third volume of his collected plays, Alan Ayckbourn takes his signature acerbic wit into the territory of the lonely and isolated, focusing on everyone from the fantastically famous to the lowliest of Eleanor Rigbys. Collected here are "Haunting Julia, Sugar Daddies, Drowning on Dry Land, "and the universally acclaimed "Private Fears in Public Places," described by "Newsday"'s Linda Winer as "an exquisitely modulated chamber sextet about the unpredictable depths and overlapping absurdities of middleage melancholy."
Alice in Bed is a free dramatic fantasy which merges the life of Alice James, the brilliant sister of William and Henry James, with the heroine of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It is a play about the anguish and grief and rage of women; and about the triumphs and limitations of the imagination.
In this first play from the award-winning memoirist and poet Nick Flynn, four strangers meet during a blackout on a New York City sidewalk. Gideon finds himself locked out of his apartment, stranded on the street with nothing but a television and the company of three individuals, each mysterious in their own way: the specter-like Alice, ringleader of the neighborhood; Esra, a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother is MIA--again; and Ivan, a stranded businessman trying to make his way home. As Gideon makes futile attempts to break into an apartment that may or may not be his, an unsettling connection between Ivan and Esra develops while Alice and Gideon look on helplessly. Unable to make sense of their predicament, let alone alter it, the four float aimlessly in and out of seeming reality only to find themselves more lost when the electricity finally comes back on.
Once again exploring the tenuous membrane that separates comfortable, everyday existence from the desperate margins of society, Flynn portrays an urban dystopia disturbingly similar to our own world while poignantly tapping into the loneliness and peril of city life.
The 14 short plays collected here introduce readers to one of the most intelligent and anarchically funny playwrights of the last decade and his "utterly delightful one-act plays that percolate with comic brio" (The New York Times.
Celebrating the Arthur Miller centennial year, an eye-catching new Penguin Plays edition of the work that established him as a leading voice in the American theater In 1947, Arthur Miller exploded onto Broadway with his first major work, All My Sons, winning both the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play and the Tony for Best Author. The play introduced themes that would preoccupy Miller throughout his career: the relationships between fathers and sons and the conflict between business and personal ethics. This striking new edition adds All My Sons to the elegant Penguin Plays series--now in beautifully redesigned covers. Joe Keller and Steve Deever, partners in a machine shop during World War II, turned out defective airplane parts, causing the deaths of many men. Deever was sent to prison while Keller escaped punishment and went back to business, making himself very wealthy in the ensuing years. A love affair between Keller's son, Chris, and Ann Deever, Steve's daughter; the bitterness of George Deever, who returns from the war to find his father in prison and his father's partner free; and the reaction of Chris Keller to his father's guilt escalate toward a climax of electrifying intensity.
Two couples, each with a twelve-year-old child, travel to Paris; within a few moments of discovering each other in a crowd, one of their children disappears. A day later, one of the mothers disappears, too. The story that follows is a wonderfully strange, beautifully composed examination of happiness and desperation, complete with a man in a bear suit, a teen pop star, and eight really excellent songs. Sheila Heti's debut play was first commissioned in 2001, for a feminist theater company that never ended up staging it. Its turbulent creation became the backdrop of Heti's last novel, How Should a Person Be?, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and the New Yorker--and now the play itself can be revealed at last. With new introductions by Sheila Heti and director Jordan Tannahill, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid offers a novel's worth of wisdom and humor, of wild hope and dreamlike confrontations, and page after page of unforgettable lines. Seen until now only by a lucky few, its publication is a cause for celebration.
A series of monologues for young people to perform. 'First Date' by Anne-Marie O'Connor: Sometimes friendship comes with a heavy price tag. 'Getting It Right' by Peter Spafford: Luke can't choose between his shirts, let alone his parents. 'Results Day' by Aelish Michael - Karly's mum thinks she's an angel, but what if she flaps her wings? 'Close To Home' by Mary Cooper - Jay's little sister is pregnant and he's livid - who's he going to punish? 'Weighed Down' by Carla Monvid-Jenkinson/ Mary Cooper - When Claire's dad left, she thought that he was all she would lose; 'Giggsy's Legs' by Michael Harvey - Do you choose everything you are or does it choose you?
These contemporary translations of four Greek tragedies speak across time and connect readers and audiences with universal themes of war, trauma, suffering, and betrayal. Under the direction of Bryan Doerries, they have been performed for tens of thousands of combat veterans, as well as prison and medical personnel around the world. Striking for their immediacy and emotional impact, Doerries brings to life these ancient plays, like no other translations have before.
Alan J. Pakula's political thriller All the President's Men (1976) was met with immediate critical and commercial success upon its release, finishing second at the box office and earning seven Academy Award nominations.
Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert B. Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs. noise; stationary vs. moving camera; dark vs. well-lit scenes and shallow vs. deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design crucial to the film's achievement. They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood film-makers such as Coppola and Scorsese. Instead, All the President's Men more closely resembles a studio-era film, the result of a collaboration between a producer (Robert Redford), multiple scriptwriters, a skilful director, important stars (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), a distinctive cameraman (Gordon Willis), an imaginative art director (George Jenkins) and ingenious sound designers, who together created an enduringly great film.
How can we look afresh at Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets? What new light might they shed on his career, personality, and sexuality? Shakespeare wrote sonnets for at least thirty years, not only for himself, for professional reasons, and for those he loved, but also in his plays, as prologues, as epilogues, and as part of their poetic texture. This ground-breaking book assembles all of Shakespeare's sonnets in their probable order of composition. An inspiring introduction debunks long-established biographical myths about Shakespeare's sonnets and proposes new insights about how and why he wrote them. Explanatory notes and modern English paraphrases of every poem and dramatic extract illuminate the meaning of these sometimes challenging but always deeply rewarding witnesses to Shakespeare's inner life and professional expertise. Beautifully printed and elegantly presented, this volume will be treasured by students, scholars, and every Shakespeare enthusiast.