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Dreamwork for Dramatic Writing: Dreamwrighting for Stage and Screen teaches you how to use your dreams, content, form, and structure, to write surprisingly unique new drama for film and stage. It is an exciting departure from traditional linear, dramatic technique, and addresses both playwriting and screenwriting, as the profession is increasingly populated by writers who work in both stage and screen. Developed through 25 years of teaching award-winning playwrights in the University of Missouri's Writing for Performance Program, and based upon the phenomenological research of renowned performance theorist Bert O. States, this book offers a foundational, step-by-step organic guide to non-traditional, non-linear technique that will help writers beat clichéd, tired dramatic writing and provides stimulating new exercises to transform their work.

This book is ideal for anyone keen to understand how contemporary plays and playwrights work, particularly those wanting to write for the stage themselves. Drawing heavily on contemporary practice, it considers moments from a range of plays, with a focus on those from the National Theatre's repertoire. The book embraces a range of different dramaturgical structures and styles popular today; plays by a diverse selection of writers; and the current openness of dramatic form. A book of tools, rather than rules, this guide provides suggestions and provocations, exercises and tricks, examples and discussions. An ideal text for playwrights to hone their craft.

Contemporary Australian Playwriting provides a thorough and accessible overview of the diverse and exciting new directions that Australian Playwriting is taking in the twenty-first century.In 2007, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was William Shakespeare. In 2019, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was Nakkiah Lui, a Gamilaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman. This book explores what has happened both on stage and off to generate this remarkable change. As writers of colour, queer writers, and gender diverse writers are produced on the mainstage in larger numbers, they bring new critical directions to the twenty-first century Australian stage. At a politically turbulent time when national identity is fractured, this book examines the ways in which Australia's leading playwrights have interrogated, problematised, and tried to make sense of the nation. Tracing contemporary trends, the book takes a thematic approach to the re-evaluation of the nation that is dramatized in key Australian plays. Each chapter is accompanied by a duologue between two of the playwrights whose work has been analysed, to provide a dual perspective of theory and practice.

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.

Shortlisted for the STR Theatre Book Prize 2023A manifesto for the future of playwriting, this book challenges you to be a part of that future in the belief that it is fundamentally important to write plays. Plays help us understand ourselves, others, and the world around us. Reading this book, you will be challenged to learn your craft, explode what you know, prioritise what is important to you, and write in the way that only you can write.Most books on playwriting explain how to create a believable character in a story driven by plot. This book, however, goes even further in its exploration of the playwright's most valuable tool: theatricality. By learning from the past, and the present, the playwrights of tomorrow can create new, vivid, theatrical drama for the future.This manifesto also examines the process of writing, the art of collaboration, and the impact of writing on a playwright's mental health. It identifies the highs and lows, as well as the trials and tribulations, of life as a playwright in today's world. Theatre is a living artform. It is time for playwrights to acknowledge that fact and to celebrate the unique, primal thrill that a live theatre experience offers us. The future of playwriting is in your hands. Do you accept the challenge?

This accessible and engaging text covering sketch, sitcom and comedy drama, alongside improvisation and stand-up, brings together a panoply of tools and techniques for creating short and long-form comedy narratives for live performance, TV and online.Referencing a broad range of comedy from both sides of the Atlantic, spanning several decades and including material on contemporary internet sketches, it offers all kinds of useful advice on creating comic narratives for stage and screen: using life experience as raw material; constructing comedy worlds; creating comic characters, their relationships and interactions; structuring sketches, scenes and routines; and developing and plotting stories.The book's interviewees, from the UK and the USA, feature stand-ups, sketch comics, improvisers and TV comedy producers, and include Steve Kaplan, Hollywood comedy guru and author of The Hidden Tools of Comedy, Will Hines teacher and improviser from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and Lucy Lumsden TV producer and former Controller of Comedy Commissioning for BBC.Written by “the ideal person to nurture new talent” (The Guardian), Creating Comedy Narratives for Stage & Screen includes material you won't find anywhere else and is a stimulating resource for comedy students and their teachers, with a range and a depth that will be appreciated by even the most eclectic and multi-hyphenated writers and performers.

Why are so many theatre productions adaptations of one kind or another? Why do contemporary practitioners turn so frequently to non-dramatic texts for inspiration? This study explores the fascination of novels, short stories, children's books and autobiographies for theatre makers and examines what'becomes'of literary texts when these are filtered into contemporary practice that includes physical theatre, multimedia performance, puppetry, immersive and site-specific performance and live art.In Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre, Frances Babbage offers a series of fresh critical perspectives on the theory of adaptation in theatre-making, focusing on meditations of prose literature within contemporary performance. Individual chapters explore the significance and impact of books as physical objects within productions; the relationship between the dramatic adaptation and literary edition; storytelling on the page and in performance; literary space and theatrical space; and prose fiction reframed as'found text'in contemporary theatre and live art. Case studies are drawn from internationally acclaimed companies including Complicite, Elevator Repair Service, Kneehigh, Forced Entertainment, Gob Squad, Teatro Kismet and Stan's Cafe.Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre is a compelling and provocative resource for anyone interested in the potential and the challenges of using prose literature as material for new theatrical performance.

The long-awaited follow-up to the perennially bestselling writers'guide Story, from the most sought-after expert in the art of storytelling.Robert McKee's popular writing workshops have earned him an international reputation. The list of alumni with Oscars runs off the page. The cornerstone of his program is his singular book, Story, which has defined how we talk about the art of story creation. Now, in Dialogue, McKee offers the same in-depth analysis for how characters speak on the screen, on the stage, and on the page in believable and engaging ways. From Macbeth to Breaking Bad, McKee deconstructs key scenes to illustrate the strategies and techniques of dialogue. Dialogue applies a framework of incisive thinking to instruct the prospective writer on how to craft artful, impactful speech. Famous McKee alumni include Peter Jackson, Jane Campion, Geoffrey Rush, Paul Haggis, the writing team for Pixar, and many others.

New Playwriting Strategies has become a canonical text in the study and teaching of playwriting, offering a fresh and dynamic insight into the subject. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition explores and highlights the wide spread of new techniques that form contemporary theatre writing, as well as their influence on other dramatic forms.Paul Castagno builds on the innovative plays of Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to investigate groundbreaking new techniques from a broad range of contemporary dramatists, including Sarah Ruhl, Suzan Lori-Parks and Young Jean Lee. New features in this edition include an in-depth study of the adaptation of classical texts in contemporary playwright and the utilizing new technologies, such as YouTube, Wikipedia and blogs to create alternative dramatic forms.The author's step-by-step approach offers the reader new models for: narrative dialogue character monologue hybrid plays This is a working text for playwrights, presenting a range of illuminating new exercises suitable for everyone from the workshop student to the established writer. New Playwriting Strategies is an essential resource for anyone studying and writing drama today.

This volume makes available for the first time a complete translation in English of a key text for our understanding of Kabuki, viz. Kezairoku, Sakusha Shikihô (Valuable Notes on Playwriting, A Playwrights'Methodology, written 1801), being the only extant treatise fully devoted to the subject of Kabuki playwriting.At the hand of this vital text, the author addresses the history, methodology, and practitioners of Kabuki playwriting of the Edo Period (1603-1867.) The reader will find a critical examination of Kezairoku, and discussions regarding the connections between the Kabuki and literary worlds of Edo Japan, and between playwriting and the oral arts. The availability of the entire Kezairoku in English, together with a full contextualization of its teachings and meanings, offers a volume of great significance to both Japan and theatre scholars.

This book is a comprehensive guide to the nature, practice and therapeutic effects of reminiscence theatre. Drawing on examples from real-life case studies, Pam Schweitzer provides practical advice on the process of taking an oral history, creating from it a written script and developing that into a dramatic production, on whatever scale.

This practical guide provides the principles of dramatic writing. Playwrights and screenwriters will discover these essential principles and acquire the tools to put them to use. Sam Smiley incorporates extensive new material in Playwriting: The Structure of Action, a revised edition of the book that dramatists in theatre and film have relied on for more than twenty-five years. No writer, director, critic, or teacher concerned with dramatic writing should be without this intelligent and inspiring guide.Sam Smiley offers insights derived from a lifetime of writing, teaching, and consulting. While preserving the best of the earlier edition of the book, he offers new discussion on contemporary playwrights (Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard), on copyright law, on new writing approaches, and on nontraditional dramatic forms.Reaching far beyond simplistic how-to instructions, the book focuses on identifying and explaining principles essential to creating dramas: plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. Smiley explains these classic topics and provides the modern keys for realizing each element in effective dramatic scripts.

Pirandello's masterpiece, a study in illusion and reality, follows a group of characters who try to fashion their fife stories into acceptable drama. Mr. Brustein's new rendering is accessible, contemporary, and highly speakable while retaining the flavor of the Italian original.

Women playwrights speak about their art and the theatre in this collection of interviews about a key decade of British drama.Twenty leading contemporary dramatists discuss their work from the perspective of being both writers and women. Each talks about the state of the theatre now, the craft of playwrighting, and the pressures of working within a male dominated environment. The book also features Sarah Kane's very last public interview.'What I think is so exciting about the response to a number of the plays written by women in the last ten years is that they are popular with audiences - because they've got this quality, this energy and this culture that hasn't been seen much on stage before: a humour, sexiness and wit that's been missing'- Charlotte Keatley