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No Exit and Three Other Plays
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Art Of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives
For many years, Lajos Egri's highly opinionated but very enjoyable The Art of Dramatic Writing has been a well-guarded secret of playwrights, scriptwriters, and writers for television Unlike many other books on playwrighting (several of which Egri criticizes during the course of this one), the author's systematic breakdown of the essentials for creating successful realistic plays and screenplays effectively demystifies the process of creative writing. Egri, who formulated his thoughts about "a well-made play" during its heyday (the 1940s and '50s), places a premium on an exhaustive analysis of characters and discussion of their psychological motivations. The writer is exhorted to find a premise to explore and to discover which characters will most effectively demonstrate this thesis, then is shown how most effectively to place them into conflict with each other. Conflict itself is also discussed, particularly how to create scenarios in which the crisis develops at a pace that feels unforced and natural. While Egri's view of the well-made play has little space for either the spare musings of Beckett and Pinter or the conscious excesses of non-narrative and other experimental writing, it nonetheless remains an essential text for writers drawn to realistic drama, and to any writer interested in the fundamental motivations of human behavior. --John Longenbaugh.
Price: $7.14
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Secret Lives of Great Authors: What Your Teachers Never Told You About Famous Novelists, Poets, and Playwrights
In the tradition of Quirk's bestselling Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents (100,000+ copies in print), here are outrageous and uncensored profiles of the world's greatest writers, complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright bizarre facts. Consider: Edgar Allan Poe was kicked out of West Point Military Academy. Louisa May Alcott was addicted to opium. W. B. Yeats paid surgeons to transplant monkey glands into his scrotum. J. R. R. Tolkien slept in his bathroom. Kurt Vonnegut managed a Saab dealership before hitting the big time. With chapters on everyone from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon, Secret Lives of Great Authors tackles all the tough questions your teachers were afraid to answer: What's the deal with Lewis Carroll and little girls? Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? Why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie's Angels? The classics were never this much fun in school!.
Price: $9.94
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Aeschylus I: Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides (The Complete Greek Tragedies)
"These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket "—Robert Brustein, The New Republic"This is it. No qualifications Go out and buy it everybody "—Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation"The translations deliberately avoid the highly wrought and affectedly poetic; their idiom is contemporary....They have life and speed and suppleness of phrase."— Times Education Supplement"These translations belong to our time. A keen poetic sensibility repeatedly quickens them; and without this inner fire the most academically flawless rendering is dead."—Warren D. Anderson, American Oxonian"The critical commentaries and the versions themselves...are fresh, unpretentious, above all, functional."— Commonweal"Grene is one of the great translators."—Conor Cruise O'Brien, London Sunday Times"Richmond Lattimore is that rara avis in our age, the classical scholar who is at the same time an accomplished poet."—Dudley Fitts, New York Times Book Review.
Price: $4.00
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Euripides I: Alcestis, The Medea, The Heracleidae, Hippolytus (The Complete Greek Tragedies)
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Sophocles I: Oedipus The King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (The Complete Greek Tragedies)
"These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket."—Robert Brustein, The New Republic
"This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody."—Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation
"The translations deliberately avoid the highly wrought and affectedly poetic; their idiom is contemporary....They have life and speed and suppleness of phrase."—Times Education Supplement
"These translations belong to our time. A keen poetic sensibility repeatedly quickens them; and without this inner fire the most academically flawless rendering is dead."—Warren D. Anderson, American Oxonian
"The critical commentaries and the versions themselves...are fresh, unpretentious, above all, functional."—Commonweal
"Grene is one of the great translators."—Conor Cruise O'Brien, London Sunday Times
"Richmond Lattimore is that rara avis in our age, the classical scholar who is at the same time an accomplished poet."—Dudley Fitts, New York Times Book Review .
Price: $3.00
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The Three Theban Plays (Penguin Classics)
Aristotle called "Oedipus The King," the second-written of the three Theban plays written by Sophocles, the masterpiece of the whole of Greek theater. Today, nearly 2,500 years after Sophocles wrote, scholars and audiences still consider it one of the most powerful dramatic works ever made. Freud sure did. The three plays--"Antigone," "Oedipus the King," and "Oedipus at Colonus"--are not strictly a trilogy, but all are based on the Theban myths that were old even in Sophocles' time. This particular edition was rendered by Robert Fagles, perhaps the best translator of the Greek classics into English..
Price: $1.40
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Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays
This guide to playreading for students and practitioners of both theater and literature complements, rather then contradicts or repeats, traditional methods of literary analysis of scripts.
Ball developed his method during his work as Literary Director at the Guthrie Theater, building his guide on the crafts playwrights of every period and style use to make their plays stageworthy. The text is full of tools for students and practitioners to use as they investigate plot, character, theme, exposition, imagery, motivation/obstacle/conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play. He includes guides for discovering what the playwright considers the play’s most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details.
Using Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for illustrating script-reading techniques as well as examples of the kinds of misinterpretation readers can fall prey to by ignoring the craft of the playwright. Of immense utility to those who want to put plays on the stage (actors, directors, designers, production specialists) Backwards and Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.
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Price: $10.00
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Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays
In addition to the morality play, Everyman, this volume contains a selection of fifteenth century biblical pageants: the very best from the cycles of York, Chester, Wakefield, Coventry and "N. town." A translation of the Cornish Death of Pilate rounds out this fascinating collection for admirers of theatre and of medieval literature..
Price: $1.31
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