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Book DescriptionBob Smith grew up in a town named for Shakespeare?s birthplace, Stratford, Connecticut. His troubled childhood was spent in a struggle to help his devastated parents care for his severely retarded sister. But at age ten, Smith stumbled onto a line from The Merchant of Venice and found a window through which to view the world. A few years later, the American Shakespeare Festival moved into Stratford, and Smith became Hamlet?s dresser. As he watched the plays from backstage, his life?s passion took shape. He left home to travel with the Shakespeare Festival, and in the decades since, without a college credit to his name, he has taught the plays in universities and acting schools and prisons. For the past several years, he has probed the texts with thousands of the elderly in senior centers all over Manhattan. Here, in gorgeous, tender, and lyrical prose, Smith tells the story of a life shaped by poetry. Melding tragedy and comedy, he gracefully...

Book Description1922. Illustrated with photographs and numerous drawings by the author. The memoirs of Augustus Thomas, prolific playwright, who is best known for his explorations of American character.

Book DescriptionOriginally published in the Soviet Union in 1963, this is a Stanislavsky centennial collection. It contains excerpts from memoirs referring to the great Russian actor and stage director. There are passages by Maxim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Sergei Eisenstein, Emile Verhaern, Maurice Maeterlinck, Max Reinhardt, Jacques Copeau, etc. Most of the materials presented in this collection, including the brilliant letters by Stanislavsky, are little known abroad, and appear in English for the first time. The collection is lavishly illustrated. "The theatre is the finest medium of intercourse between nations. It reveals their most cherished aspirations. If only these aspirations were revealed more often ... the nations would shake hands, and lift their caps, instead of training guns on each other." - Konstantin Stanislavsky

Book DescriptionKenneth Tynan (1927?1980) lived one of the most intriguing theater lives of his century. A brilliant writer, critic, and agent provocateur, he made friends or enemies of nearly every major actor, playwright, impresario, and movie mogul of the 1950s, ?60s, and ?70s. He wrote for the Evening Standard, the Observer, and the New Yorker; served eleven years as dramaturg for Britain?s newly formed National Theatre, and spent his final years in Los Angeles. This biography offers the first complete appraisal of Tynan?s powerful contribution to post-war British theater, set against the context of the fifties, sixties, and seventies and his own turbulent life. Dominic Shellard highlights Tynan?s writings of 1952?1963, when the coruscating young critic came to prominence. He discusses how Tynan took his place at the vanguard of the new realist movement, helped to establish subsidized theater, fought censorship, and assisted in the...

Book DescriptionIn his outstanding autobiography, Konstantin Stanislavsky reveals his own ideas and experience. Written with the same warmth, liveliness and ability to re-create reality that made Stanislavski a great actor, his autobiography tells of his childhood in the world of Moscow's wealthy merchants, his successes and failures as an amateur actor, how he studied human beings, and developed what has come to be known as the "Stanislavski Method," how his group of dedicated amateurs became "perhaps the greatest acting group the world has ever known (Washington Post)," The Moscow Art Theatre.

Book DescriptionGroundbreaking, contentious, and a work seep scholarship and understanding, this will change the way we think about the English language's greatest artist.

Book DescriptionDorothy Heathcote is the most public drama-teaching figure in the world. She has taught classes of children in five continents. The numbers must run into millions. In addition, innumerable teachers have watched her teach in person or on video and television. How did someone who left elementary school at 14 become a world authority? Heathcote has now asked Gavin Bolton, who has worked extensively - and co-authored several books with her to write that story. Dr. Bolton describes DorothyHeathcote's upbringing, her work as a mill girl, her theater training, her unprecedented appointment to Durham and Newcastle Universities and her extraordinary rise to fame. He examines the basis for her genius and shows how being a wife and mother contributed to her work.

Book DescriptionIn this first book-length biography of Mercedes de Acosta, theater historian Robert A. Schanke adroitly mines lost archival materials and mixes in his own interviews with de Acosta?s intimates to correct established myths and at lastconstruct an accurate, detailed, and vibrant portrait of the flamboyantly uninhibited early-twentieth-century author, poet, and playwright. Born to wealthy Spanish immigrants, Mercedes de Acosta (1893?1968) lived in opulence and traveled in the same social circles as the Astors and Vanderbilts. Introduced to the New York theater scene at an early age, her dual loves of performance and of women informed every aspect of her life thereafter. Alice B. Toklas?s observation, "Say what you will about Mercedes, she?s had the most important women in the twentieth century," was well justified, as her romantic conquests included such internationally renowned beauties as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, and Eva Le...

Book DescriptionActor, playwright, director, novelist, wit and raconteur, Peter Ustinov is a show business polymath. Born in England in 1921 of Russian immigrant parents, he discovered an ability to mimic while at school. He wrote his first play before he was 20 - he has since had more than a dozen produced, three of which were later filmed. As an actor his films include SPARTACUS and TOPKAPI (Academy Awards for Best Supporting actor), QUO VADIS, DEATH ON THE NILE (one of three appearances as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot) and BILLY BUDD (which he also wrote and directed). More recently he has directed operas in every major opera house in Europe. His one-man show, AN EVENING WITH PETER USTINOV has been a hit in London and on Broadway. He has published several novels and one early volume of memoirs.

Book DescriptionThe first English biography of Edmond Rostand, creator of _Cyrano de Bergerac_. Thoroughly researched and annotated, but written for non-specialists, it shows how Rostand strove in his plays to revive idealism in the modern world.