Theatre & Film

In A Younger Ten: Writing the Ten-Minute Play, Gary Garrison distills the playwriting guidance pioneered in his widely consulted Perfect Ten (2001) and A More Perfect Ten (2008), here recast for the needs of aspiring ten-minute playwrights at the high school level. Not satisfied with merely telling how such a play is crafted, Garrison includes a new all-star lineup of eight complete ten-minute plays by a variety of playwrights, emerging as well as established, that can serve as models for writers just starting out in the genre.

"No book can teach anyone how to speak, but the lessons herein, practically applied, will help everyone who reads it become a better actor, speaker, and communicator. This is an exciting, invigorating book which will be required reading for all my acting students. I predict it will become a celebrated text of great worth to educators and students." —Murray McGibbon, Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance, Indiana University, Bloomington

"A must-have for all actors who encounter speeches that are longer than three sentences. On the surface, that would be classic works from Sophocles through Shakespeare—with the 17th and 18th centuries thrown in. Dig deeper and the book’s value to actors of modern and contemporary drama is inescapable. Ibsen, Shaw, Williams, Miller, Shepard, Wilson, Kushner, and Suzan-Lori Parks all wrote plays that are filled with powerful rhetorical devices that demand lively, thorough, and specific consideration. This book is a guide that unfolds the mysteries of classical rhetoric in a clear, concise, and effective manner, a book for speakers who want to move their audiences. It is aimed at actors, but also belongs on the shelf of lawyers, advertising copywriters, and, of course, public officials. I will use it in my classes and workshops and enthusiastically recommended it to all actors and actor trainers."
 —Leslie Reidel, Department of Theatre, University of Delaware

Listen to Milan Dragicevich discuss The Persuasive Actor on The State of Shakespeare podcast (September 2020).

In Stage Directing: A Director's Itinerary, the student of theatrical directing will find a step-by-step guide to directing a production, from choosing a play to opening night. Unlike other directing textbooks, it provides practical advice on organizing tasks throughout the directorial process, including budgeting, writing casting notices, and auditioning. It moreover includes an abundance of helpful examples and tried-and-true exercises, as well as information on how to organize a director’s documents into a production notebook.

The second edition builds on the strengths of the first edition by elaborating on key analytical, organizational, and strategic steps in a successful director’s itinerary, with special attention to the direction of musicals.

Like its French-language companion volume Le Cinéma français contemporain: Manuel de classe, Alan Singerman and Michèle Bissière's Contemporary French Cinema: A Student's Book offers a detailed look at recent French cinema through its analyses of twenty notable and representative French films that have appeared since 1980. Sure to delight Anglophone fans of French film, it can be used with equal success in English-language courses and, when paired with its companion volume, dual-language ones.

Clips from each film covered in the textbook are available to qualified instructors in a password-protected Vimeo collection. Instructors wishing to access clips from the films for course use may request access by using the online form here. The film clip request page also includes a complete list of the films covered. 

Two additional clips referenced in the introduction from the films Rules of the Game and Breathless are available at the links below:

Rules of the Game Excerpt 4: The servants’ meal—sequence shot (2’55”)

Breathless Excerpt 2: Michel driving the stolen car; the murder of the motorcycle policeman (3:00)

"The New Kittredge series is both a delight and a steal. Kittredge's textual authority, updated by eminent scholars sensitive to classroom needs and alert to staging choices, is once again available in these slim, elegant, inexpensive, user-friendly volumes. With lucid notes and incisive introductions geared especially to popular film versions, the series also offers an overview of both stage and film performances of each play. A must for any Shakespeare class."
     —Laury Magnus, Contributing Editor, New Kittredge Shakespeare and Hamletworks.org

"Kirby reproduces in simple, clear English—and almost always line for line—the meaning of Goethe's German text, with metrical variations that evoke the shifting meters of the original."
      —Jane Brown, University of Washington

"This is a book for dramaturgs of new work, but it is also a particularly effective book for anyone working on new plays: playwrights, directors, producers, even actors. Lenora skillfully dissects the process of workshopping new writing, and clearly defines the roles for all involved. I learned not only how to make a new play workshop more effective, but how to approach my writing and my directing, and how to meaningfully collaborate with others in this unique process. This is a necessary handbook for anyone working on new plays today."
     —Anne Marie Cammarato, Director

"Few people live as passionately in the world of writing as Michael Wright, and this exploration of the sensory dimension of creativity enhances any discussion of dramatic writing. Sensory Writing for Stage and Screen through its clever use of a series of 'etudes' invites us into the close-to-the-bone world of human experience on its most intimate level. What we smell, taste, hear, see and feel takes center stage here. Mr. Wright challenges us to create characters as complex as we ourselves are—both celebrants and victims of our own senses. His book evokes the lushness of every human life and reminds us that all great characters (like ancient cities) are composed of layers and layers of their own experience."
     —Lee Blessing, Playwright, A Walk in the Woods, Eleemosynary

George Lyman Kittredge's insightful editions of Shakespeare have endured in part because of his eclecticism, his diversity of interests, and his wide-ranging accomplishments—all of which are reflected in the valuable notes in each volume. The plays in the New Kittredge Shakespeare series retain the original Kittredge notes and introductions, changed or augmented only when some modernization seems necessary. These new editions also include introductory essays by contemporary editors, notes on the plays as they have been performed on stage and film, and additional student materials.

George Lyman Kittredge's insightful editions of Shakespeare have endured in part because of his eclecticism, his diversity of interests, and his wide-ranging accomplishments—all of which are reflected in the valuable notes in each volume. The plays in the New Kittredge Shakespeare series retain the original Kittredge notes and introductions, changed or augmented only when some modernization seems necessary. These new editions also include introductory essays by contemporary editors, notes on the plays as they have been performed on stage and film, and additional student materials.

"This is a terrific edition that really brings King John and Henry VIII to life. Consistently inviting student participation, the edition makes the plays wonderfully accessible, through explanations of the language, descriptions of context, topic guides, plot outlines, illustrations, and genealogies. A particular strength is the emphasis on performance. Thanks to the insightful histories provided, King John and Henry VIII are richly illuminated as stage and screen creations, allowing for genuinely imaginative engagement with these most fascinating Shakespearean dramas."
     —Ramona Wray, Reader in English at Queen's University, Belfast

An Actor's Task provides a framework for studying the dual arts of acting: inhabiting a character both physically and psychologically. Actors at all levels can use this book to explore, develop, and review the sensory tools and training that enable them to be the best versions of themselves and, ultimately, to bring that understanding of "self" to their art. 

"Through a series of engaging exercises, this book filters out the complexities of various acting techniques and offers up an appealing hands-on approach."
     —Tonya Pinkins, Tony Award–winning actress

"Experiencing Theatre completely engages the beginning theatre student in the art of theatre. Students become playwrights, dramaturges, actors, directors, designers, adapters and collaborators through dynamic readings and excercises. This text gives them a great awareness of the work of being a theatre artist. Teachers have long strived towards creating these opportunities for their Intro students—finally a text that will make it happen."
      —Barbara Burgess-Lefebvre, Robert Morris University

"No one, but no one, ever translated ancient comedy like Douglass Parker, and his death left a chasm in the landscape. This posthumous publication of three of Greek theatre's wildest plays, edited and presented by a scholar as eminent and learned as Timothy Moore, is not just something to welcome, it is something to celebrate."
     —William Levitan, Grand Valley State University

"Even as the New Kittredge Shakespeare series glances back to George Lyman Kittredge's student editions of the plays, it is very much of our current moment: the slim editions are targeted largely at high school and first-year college students who are more versed in visual than in print culture. Not only are the texts of the plays accompanied by photographs or stills from various stage and cinema performances: the editorial contributions are performance-oriented, offering surveys of contemporary film interpretations, essays on the plays as performance pieces, and an annotated filmography. Traditional editorial issues (competing versions of the text, cruxes, editorial emendation history) are for the most part excluded; the editions focus instead on clarifying the text with an eye to performing it. There is no disputing the pedagogic usefulness of the New Kittredge Shakespeare's performance-oriented approach."
     —Studies in English Literature, Tudor and Stuart Drama

"J. Michael Drew's edition of Titus Andronicus in the New Kittredge Shakespeare series refreshes Kittredge's text with extensive and helpful explanatory notes as well as a thorough and enlightening introduction. A distinctive and attractive feature of Drew's edition is its generously illustrated focus on Julie Taymor's famous film adaptation. With its detailed and engaging questions for further study, this is an edition perfectly designed for classroom use."
     —Matthew Wikander, University of Toledo

"This compact book combines a lively, colloquial transition of Chekhov's late play Three Sisters with an informative and insightful introduction. Actor-focuses but broad in coverage, this edition should be required reading for any ensemble producing the play in English. It is also highly recommended for a general reader and for classroom use. Although this is not a scholarly work, it has a lot to offer scholars and Chekhov veterans."
     —Carol Apollonio, Duke University, in The Russian Review

"Peter Meineck has given us a superbly vivid rendering of the play, informed throughout by his practical experience in the theater. His is a Philoctetes that is supremely alive, from start to finish. . . . [I]deal for classroom use. . . . accompanied by a new and thoughtful introduction from philosopher and classicist Paul Woodruff. Woodruff anchors the play in the complex web of fears and anxieties of 409 BCE, as both Sophocles' life and Athens' imperial heyday drew to a close. . . . [A]n exceptionally fine work of translation and scholarship that will go far toward demolishing dismissals of the play as inaccessible or unengaging for the modern reader. Sophocles, Meineck and Woodruff eloquently remind us, speaks to every age, not least our own."
     —Thomas R. Keith, Loyola University Chicago in CJ-Online

"The Winter's Tale is a kind of miracle play in which performance is of the essence of an exciting, imaginative, and inspiring plot embodied in visionary dialogue. In creating a course in Shakespeare Performed (2010) with his students staging an abridged Winter's Tale, Mark Muggli was in an ideal position to edit the play especially from the perspective of performance, as he did. This is a twenty-first-century edition up-to-date enough to include the Guthrie Theater's production of 2011 together with the solid twentieth-century scholarship of G. L. Kittredge. Kittredge's introduction, lightly edited, begins with Muggli's 'Spoiler Alert' about plot revelations the reader might prefer to experience first in the play itself. His notes are designed less to interpret than 'to facilitate the reader's interpretation,' and the reader and the play are primary in this presentation of The Winter’s Tale."
     —Tom Clayton, Regents Profesor, University of Minnesota

"Carol Rosenfeld has a singular gift for discerning and nurturing in her students the live connections that release emotionally charged experience into active and meaningful play. Her book is a bottomless resource for the actor who aspires to that seamless merging of self and character that can make the theatre thrilling. It is hard and vulnerable work that she demands, but she is there with you as a guide, saying 'search here, observe there, sense this, question, question, question, and allow'—If you trust her, you will surprise yourself."
     —Edith Meeks, Executive and Artistic Director, HB Studio

Featuring Cecelia Eaton Luschnig's annotated verse translations of Euripides' Electra, Iphigenia among the Tauri, and Orestes, this volume offers an ideal avenue for exploring the playwright's innovative treatment of both traditional and non-traditional stories concerning a central, fascinating member of the famous House of Atreus.

This excellent book contains 64 monologues designed specifically for auditions where the actor desires exciting monologues that are fresh and unfamiliar. The monologues are catalogued by gender and age. These monologues were selected from the Last Frontier Theatre Conference monologue workshop. The Last Frontier Conference is one of the longest running theater conferences of its kind. It has been held every year in Valdez, Alaska for the last 20 years.

"Michèle Willems's edition of The First Part of King Henry the Sixth offers valuable insights into this little-known and puzzling play. Like G. L. Kittredge, on whose work this edition is based, she sees it as mainly Shakespearean. The play we are shown here is no simple exaltation of patriotic feeling, but, more tellingly, a somber and incisive account of a kingdom staggering under the effects of the death of Chivalry. Willems astutely sees an interaction of the play's two main plots that are centered around Lord Talbot and Joan of Arc. She rightly underscores the overwhelming presence in the play of ambivalence, contradiction, irony, and multiple angles of vision. Her account of the play in performance tells a similarly disillusioning story in theatrical terms. Illustrations from performance history help bring to life this underrated and fascinating historical saga."
     —David Bevington, University of Chicago

On Acting is written to support a new generation of actors/acting teachers by coupling fresh ideas and new approaches with the best proven methods and practices. It is primarily for the contemporary American actor and strives to address the acting process with an eye toward the performance culture and requirements that exist today. It is a book for the new twenty-first century artist--the serious practical artist who seeks to pursue a career that is both fulfilling and viable.

 "Battles, Betrayals, and Brotherhood is a brilliant introduction to one of China’s best-loved heroic traditions. And of course the translations are wonderful—very lively!" —Katherine Carlitz, University of Pittsburgh

"[A] veritable treasure trove of materials in English for those interested in exploring the immediate predecessors of the Ming novel [The Romance of the Three Kingdoms]. The translations in Battles, Betrayals, and Brotherhood are, as is typical of Idema and West's work, colloquial and lively while simultaneously meticulously researched. This volume is a welcome addition to our resources on early drama and the Three Kingdoms story cycle alike, and will no doubt continue to inspire lively class discussions and productive research for some time to come." —CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral & Performing Literature

"Gayle Gaskill offers appropriate tribute to G.L. Kittredge by updating his classic edition with a mastery, thoroughness, and verve worthy of the original. This excellent edition is marked by impeccable scholarship that everywhere displays careful attention to detail and keen sensitivity to the needs of modern readers."
     —John W. Mahon, Senior Editor, The Shakespeare Newsletter, and Professor of English, Iona College

"An extraordinary artistic achievement, Richard II remains one of Shakespeare's most satisfyingly ambiguous plays and expertly-penned exercises in shifting audience sympathies. Pendleton's even-handed introduction and judicious supplements to Kittredge's annotations lay out the play's issues in a way that make its delightful poignancy even more available to readers. Especially useful are Pendleton’s extensive in-text performance notes, which recount how film versions deal with the challenges and possibilities the play presents."
     —James Wells, Muskingum University

"Adding entirely new annotations to the text, providing a lucid overview of the play's production history, concluding with an instructive essay on a theatrical understanding of reading plays, and illustrated with suggestive film stills throughout, Kathleen Kalpin Smith's All's Well that Ends Well is a welcome edition to the New Kittredge Shakespeare series, richly setting the play in the context of stage and screen performance."
     —W. B. Worthen, Barnard College, Columbia University

"Professor Jeffrey Kahan's expertise in the history of Shakespearean acting complements Kittredge's lucid [introduction and text] to create an edition of Coriolanus that centers modern readers in the play’s performance. Kahan's introduction to the edition both recounts historical performances and carefully details recent directorial choices—choices that reappear in the course of his footnotes providing acting choices for key scenes. These notes, together with photographs of compelling performances, fix the reader's imagination firmly in the midst of Shakespeare’s chilling theatrical portrayal of Republican Rome. This highly accessible edition will prove invaluable for actors, students, and lovers of Shakespeare."
     —Cyndia Clegg, Pepperdine University

"This most problematic of Shakespeare's plays, a comedy filled with dark corners, has been beautifully presented by Laury Magnus and the late Bernice Kliman. Scholars will admire their editorial skill while students will benefit greatly from their ample notes, useful timeline of the play's plot, and cogent performance history. As the editors explain, the fiercely interlocked themes of the play—sex, money, justice, and religion—make this play a measure not only of Shakespeare's time but of our own."
     —Anthony DiMatteo, New York Institute of Technology

“This is the best Prometheus Bound in English. Deborah Roberts’ translation is accurate, readable, and true to the original in idiom, imagery, and the combination of a high style with occasional colloquialism. The informative notes and perceptive Introduction will help readers to experience the play with heightened pleasure and understanding.” —Seth L. Schein, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis

"This is an outstandingly useful edition of Prometheus Bound. The translation is both faithful and graceful, and the introduction to this difficult play is a model of clarity, intelligence, and a profound familiarity with the workings of Greek myth, Greek literature, and literature in general." —Rachel Hadas, Department of English, Rutgers University

"The language is rich and poetic without being overly stylized. The result is a beautiful rendition of the tragic language. . . . The Introduction provides everything one would want and expect to find for this play." —Kathryn Mattison, McMaster University, in Mouseion

Diane Arnson Svarlien’s translation of Euripides’ Andromache, Hecuba, and Trojan Women exhibits the same scholarly and poetic standards that have won praise for her Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus. Ruth Scodel’s Introduction examines the cultural and political context in which Euripides wrote, and provides analysis of the themes, structure, and characters of the plays included. Her notes offer expert guidance to readers encountering these works for the first time.

Includes the unabridged text of Diane Arnson Svarlien's Hecuba, a translation featured in Patrick Wang's critically acclaimed film, A Bread Factory.

"Wang tracks a scene from a Bread Factory production of Hecuba from an uncertain rehearsal, to a breakthrough for its actors, to a searching discussion of the text and the characters, to a final performance so thrilling that I found myself wishing, while watching, that Wang would just shoot the whole play. Happily, he lets this Hecuba keep going." —Alan Scherstuhl, LA Weekly

To see Patrick Wang's article "Hecuba: A Film Record" in Didaskalia, click here. To see clips from the Arnson Svarlien Hecuba featured in A Bread Factory, click here.

"By adding comments on recorded performances to Kittredge's notes . . . [which] were fun and helpful to my early study of Shakespeare . . . Kenneth Sprague Rothwell gives students and researchers the means to explore how performance can elucidate 'the script' of King Lear."
     —Harry Keyishian, Fairleigh Dickinson University

Scene Design: Rendering and Media is intended to help students or practitioners improve their skills at making finished renderings of scene designs for theater. The book demonstrates the process of creating the renderings through real world methods and techniques. Chapters are dedicated to a detailed discussion of various tools including drawing, light and shadow, color mixing, painting, figures, and other media, and the book is rife with colorful and inspirational examples.

"In this splendid edition, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick gives us a comprehensive primer on Shakespeare's performance craft and an ideal text for teaching Richard III, particularly to students new to Shakespeare. Her introductory materials make a century of scholarship and filmmaking both accessible to the newcomer and illuminating for the experienced student or performer. Her keen understanding of the original performance circumstances of Shakespeare's plays and insightful accounts of salient stage and film productions work together to open up the rich array of possibilities and choices in performance, both then and now."
     —Catherine S. Burriss, California State University, Channel Islands

"The real strength of this book is the focus on developing critical and creative thinking by making the process of script analysis enjoyable. The authors make analysis understandable. Students will be able to apply the skills they learn to other aspects of life and study."
      —Robin D. Stone, Associate Professor of Theatre, Roger Williams University

This is a brief, but handy book outlining the task of viewing theatrical performances and evaluating them. Although aimed primarily at the festival level respondent, it is a book that can enhance the ability to evaluate and respond to the theatre experience, creating at the broadest level a sensitive and enriched audience.

"This student-friendly edition of a difficult play includes a clear, helpful introduction and notes elucidating the complicated imagery and wordplay. Notes and illustrations refer the reader to various staging options enabling him or her to imagine Love’s Labour’s Lost in performance."
     —Katharine E. Maus, James Branch Cabell Professor of English Literature, University of Virginia

The four late plays of Euripides collected here, in beautifully crafted translations by Cecelia Eaton Luschnig and Paul Woodruff, offer a faithful and dynamic representation of the playwright’s mature vision.

"Kittredge's admirably full notes, supplemented by Peter Kanelos's user-friendly introduction and references to film and television versions of the play, add up to a very accessible edition. I particularly liked the discussion of 'How to read Much Ado as performance,' which opens up a lot of possibilities for the student and teacher."
     —Lois Potter, Ned B. Allen Professor Emeritus, University of Delaware

"This is an edition of Othello whose conversational introduction and unobtrusive but thorough notes will make the first-time visitor to the text an expert on the play. By keeping her own focus on the issue of performance—including her nuanced descriptions of the major films—editor Gretchen Schulz not only helps readers see Othello in the theatre of the imagination, she helps them to direct it as well."
     —Ralph Alan Cohen, American Shakespeare Center, Co-founder and Director of Mission; Gonder Professor of Shakespeare, Mary Baldwin College

Playwrighting Master Class is a book for the active playwright. It explores the process of playwrighting, the evolution of the play as the playwright engages with it, and the choices the playwright makes in creating the play. Through the use of a number of case studies of playwrights engaged in writing and rewriting plays, Wright focuses on different individual approaches to their work, fostering their own unique visions and voices as a means of helping the working playwright find her or his own voice. 

"Kahan has presented the performance and printing issues with directness and clarity, leaving many technical details that might discourage some students to the footnotes. The result is a very readable "Introduction" to one of Shakespeare's late romances."
     —Stanley Stewart, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside

"Now, in the twenty-first century, Patricia Lennox broadens that understanding in her excellent edition of As You Like It where she draws on her knowledge of international film and television. She offers new meaning for modern readers who, while they savor Shakespeare’s language also understand visual signals from contemporary media."
     —Irene G. Dash, Hunter College, CUNY, retired

"Finding a decent Cherry Orchard which is not part of an anthology is valuable. Prof. Carnicke's introduction materials are highly helpful for teaching this in a theatre history or play analysis course." —Erith Jaffe-Berg, University of California, Riverside

Odysseus at Troy is centered on the mythological Greek warrior, Odysseus, hero of the Trojan War. This book contains three plays: Sophocles' Ajax, Euripides' Hecuba, and Euripides' Trojan Women. The plays are complete, with notes and introductions for each. An additional introduction to the volume gives background on this popular theme, and on Ajax, one of the most written-about hero in Greek literature. 

This annotated collection of three early modern English plays allows readers to explore the relationship between Shakespeare's Shrew and two closely related plays of the same genre, the earlier of which, the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew (whether inspired by Shakespeare's play or vice-versa), once enjoyed a level of popularity that likely surpassed that of Shakespeare's play. The editors' Introduction brilliantly illuminates points of comparison between the three, their larger themes included, and convincingly argues that Shakespeare's Shrew is seen all the more vividly when the anonymous A Shrew and Fletcher's table-turning The Tamer Tamed are waiting in the wings.

"Author Rich Amada has done a remarkable job in de-mystifying the legal system and basic law for creative types. Amada has written this work in a very clear and even humorous manner, making it a surprisingly easy, quick read. Anyone can readily understand the basics to how to protect one’s work and potentially maximize profits from creative labor after reading Amada’s book."
     —Andy Rodriguez, New Phoenix Filmworks

"This is the first real text, the first real primer for how to be a dramaturg in a variety of settings—from production to new plays. It takes a student from a close reading (really directing that reading) to formulating questions, to meeting with directors, playwrights, designers, to formulating acting packets and finally to opening night. I don't think any other book on the market does such a complete job with such research and in such a great format."
      —Mark Charney, Clemson University

"Laury Magnus's edition of The Comedy of Errors is a treasure—it gives us all the footnotes Kittredge never himself wrote along with a superb collection of production photographs of a wide variety of performances and extended production notes. The introduction is comprehensive in establishing the various ideas and dimensions of a play mistakenly thought to be the simple Roman farce of a young playwright. And teachers will find the extended list of assignments as suggestively fruitful as students reading the play for the first time. This combination is a real winner."
     —Arthur F. Kinney, University of Massachusetts, Amherst