Books about Dramatists from Amazon.com

Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher, or a colleague   Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, helped you see the world as a more profound place, gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it.

For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago.

Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded, and the world seemed colder.  Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you, receive wisdom for your busy life today the way you once did when you were younger?

Mitch Albom had that second chance.  He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life.  Knowing he was dying, Morrie visited with Mitch in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college.  Their rekindled relationship turned into one final "class": lessons in how to live.

Tuesdays with Morrie is a magical chronicle of their time together, through which Mitch shares Morrie's lasting gift with the world..
Price: $7.12 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"A superb new drama written by John Patrick Shanley. It is an inspired study in moral uncertainty with the compellingly certain structure of an old-fashioned detective drama. Even as Doubt holds your conscious attention as an intelligently measured debate play, it sends off stealth charges that go deeper emotionally. One of the year's ten best."-Ben Brantley, The New York Times

"[The] #1 show of the year. How splendid it feels to be trusted with such passionate, exquisite ambiguity unlike anything we have seen from this prolific playwright so far. Blunt yet subtle, manipulative but full of empathy for all sides, the play is set in 1964 but could not be more timely. Doubt is a lean, potent drama . . . passionate, exquisite, important, and engrossing."-Linda Winer, Newsday

Chosen as the best play of the year by over 10 newspapers and magazines, Doubt is set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, where a strong-minded woman wrestles with conscience and uncertainty as she is faced with concerns about one of her male colleagues. This new play by John Patrick Shanley-the Bronx-born-and-bred playwright and Academy Award-winning author of Moonstruck-dramatizes issues straight from today's headlines within a world re-created with knowing detail and a judicious eye. After a stunning, sold-out production at Manhattan Theatre Club, the play has transferred to Broadway.

John Patrick Shanley is the author of numerous plays, including Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Dirty Story, Four Dogs and a Bone, Psychopathia Sexualis, Sailor's Song, Savage in Limbo, and Where's My Money?. He has written extensively for TV and film, and his credits include the teleplay for Live from Baghdad and screenplays for Congo, Alive, Five Corners, Joe Versus the Volcano (which he also directed), and Moonstruck, for which he won an Academy Award for original screenplay.

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Price: $5.06 [Notify me when price goes down.]

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.

Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunkerlike room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed.

Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases ("vanish into thin air," "foregone conclusion," "one fell swoop") that even today have common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else's—the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.

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Price: $7.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

While still in his twenties, the Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh has filled houses in New York and London, been showered with the theatre world's most prestigious accolades, and electrified audiences with his cunningly crafted and outrageous tragicomedies. With echoes of Stoppard and Kafka, his latest drama, The Pillowman, is the viciously funny and seriously disturbing tale of a writer in an unnamed totalitarian state who is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a number of child-murders occurring in his town.
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Price: $7.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

An anthology of the complete works of one of the most important and controversial dramatists of the late twentieth century. All the plays pushed to the limits the naturalistic boundaries of British theatre and are now widely studied at schools and colleges. This volume contains all of Sarah Kane's plays: Blasted, Phaedra's Love, Cleansed, Crave, 4.48 Psychosis, and Skin, written before her death in 1999.

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Price: $14.74 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"The deities of the theatre are the playwrights These gods have their own bible-the Dramatists Sourcebook."-Back Stage

"The Sourcebook is a treasure trove of sound advice and practical information for the working writer. It provides a road map for beginning writers and is an essential reference for those well traveled."-Donald Margulies, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Dinner with Friends

"If a playwright washes up on a desert island, one of her ten books must be the Dramatists Sourcebook. With the Sourcebook one could even publish from there."-Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of How I Learned to Drive

Called "the essential guide to professional opportunities and playscript procedures" by The Dramatists Guild of America, the Dramatists Sourcebook contains more than nine hundred opportunities for playwrights, translators, composers, lyricists, and librettists, including script-submission procedures for hundreds of professional theaters, more than one hundred prizes, and scores of publishers, fellowships, residencies, developmental programs, agents, service organizations, state arts agencies, and reference publications. This fully revised twenty-fifth edition is thoroughly indexed and contains an invaluable calendar of submission guidelines, as well as the "Simple Working Guide for Playwrights" by Tony Kushner.

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Price: $15.61 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Come on in ahead for yourselves. I'm just in the middle of shooting me Dad."

Who knocked the cat belonging to "Mad Padraic" over on a lonely road on the island of Inishmore and was it an accident? He'll want to know when he gets back from a stint of torture and chip-shop bombing in Northern Ireland: he loves his cat more than life itself.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore premiered at the RSC's The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, in April 2001.

Martin McDonagh is one of Britain's finest young playwrights and won a prestigious Olivier Award for The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which has had successful runs in both the USA and the UK.

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Price: $5.51 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A publishing event! The first and definitive collection of letters (most of them previously unpublished) both from and to the incomparable Noël Coward, a unique and irresistible portrait of a society and age—from the Blitz to the Ritz and beyond.

The range, charm, and vitality of his talents—he was a playwright, actor, composer, librettist, lyricist, director, painter, writer, cabaret singer, wit—brought him into close encounters, and often close friendship, with the great and the gifted. He knew everybody who was anybody in the theater and in the movies, in literature and in politics, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Among those at his “marvelous party”: George Bernard Shaw . . . T. E. Lawrence . . . Virginia Woolf . . . the Churchills . . . Daphne Du Maurier . . . Greta Garbo (she wrote asking him to marry her; he wrote back saying he almost accepted) . . . Ian Fleming . . . W. Somerset Maugham . . . Marlene Dietrich (he advised her, “To hell with God damned ‘L’Amour.’ It always causes far more trouble than it is worth”) . . . Tallulah Bankhead . . . Edith Sitwell . . . FDR . . . Gertrude Lawrence (in a cable about Private Lives: “Have written delightful new comedy stop good part for you stop wonderful one for me stop”), and many more.

There are letters about his productions of Bitter Sweet . . . Cavalcade . . . In Which We Serve . . . Brief Encounter . . . Private Lives, etc. . . . about his activities during World War II (he was a spy for the British government along with co-conspirator Cary Grant) . . . about the move to make him a knight that was endorsed in a personal letter from King George VI and blocked by Winston Churchill. Here are letters to and from his beloved mother, Violet . . . his longtime set and costume designer, Gladys Calthrop . . . his traveling companion from the 1930s on, Lord Amherst . . . and his business manager and onetime lover, Jack Wilson, in which he reveals his “secret heart.”

Profoundly savvy, witty, loving, bitchy, and often surprisingly moving, The Letters of Noël Coward gives us “Destiny’s Tot” at his crackling best. An irresistible portrait of a time, of the man himself, and of the world he lived in and enchanted.

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Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]