Technical Difficulties: Plays for Online Theatre

Technical Difficulties: Plays for Online Theatre
Author: Leah Barker
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
Total Pages: 111
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822241935

This collection of socially distant shorts is designed to be performed on the internet as well as the stage. Playful and inventive, TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES taps into the delights and frustrations of staying connected. HEY STRANGER by Steph Del Rosso. Years after a messy breakup, Eve and Gideon reunite. What could go wrong? Possibly everything. A comedy about mixed signals and bad internet, loneliness and autonomy. And one very precocious high schooler. (1M, 2W.) OYSTER by Elaine Romero. Marisela negotiates a potential opportunity in a border world where kids live in government cages and being bilingual comes at a price. (1W.) INTRO TO FICTION (VIRTUAL) by Ken Urban. During office hours, a professor discusses his student’s short story. When her characters feel too close for comfort for the professor, teacher and student must reckon with how to write a good ending. (1M, 1W.) A REAL ESTATE OPPORTUNITY FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION by Leah Barker. Are you in the market for a new home, and with that home, a new you? Would you like that new home-slash-you to be a charming saltbox Cape? Audience votes guide this interactive tour and auction, complete with special guests, updated appliances, and a realtor’s long hidden secret. (1W, flexible casting.) BLACK IN BLUE by Aurin Squire. After one act of police brutality too many, one man decides to do something. But in trying to get “street justice,” he threatens his life, his brother, and his job. (2M.) LOOKING BACK by Arlene Hutton. Kath was the last visitor to leave a major theme park before the pandemic lockdown. While reminiscing about life pre-Covid, two roommates challenge each other’s ideas of what truly makes a person happy. (2 n/s.) ARTFUL by Christina Quintana (CQ). In the wake of her ex-husband’s departure, Taani logs on to a Metropolitan Museum of Art webinar. Suddenly in conversation with the art itself, she finds the event is more personal than she ever could have imagined. (1M, 3W.) BOREDOM, FEAR AND WINE by Craig Pospisil. When you’re stuck at home during a pandemic, everything happens online— even therapy. Harper is suffering, and can’t reconcile feelings about the terrifying disease with the monotony of lockdown. Jess tries to be sympathetic, but the session goes off the rails. (2 n/s.) FORCED by John Cameron Mitchell. When the author was invited to attend Russia’s first queer film festival, he was prepared for trouble: The hosting cinema had pulled out after a national film figure derided the event as a “festival for child molesters.” Inspired by the courage of the organizers, Mitchell agreed to attend, bringing his Russian friend Sasha along. This monologue is derived from his diary. (1M.) TELEPHONES WITH CORDS by Mashuq Mushtaq Deen. Bozz and Banjo, best friends and fellow puppets, are feeling the separation of a Zoom existence. Frustrated, Bozz wants to talk by phone, and Banjo can’t help but sense their friend’s growing existential despair. Usually the optimist, even Banjo begins to wonder about the hands at work in their lives. (2 n/s.)

Digital Storytelling, Applied Theatre, & Youth

Digital Storytelling, Applied Theatre, & Youth
Author: Megan Alrutz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2014-09-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1135053863

Digital Storytelling, Applied Theatre, & Youth argues that theatre artists must re-imagine how and why they facilitate performance practices with young people. Rapid globalization and advances in media and technology continue to change the ways that people engage with and understand the world around them. Drawing on pedagogical, aesthetic, and theoretical threads of applied theatre and media practices, this book presents practitioners, scholars, and educators with innovative approaches to devising and performing digital stories. This book offers the first comprehensive examination of digital storytelling as an applied theatre practice. Alrutz explores how participatory and mediated performance practices can engage the wisdom and experience of youth; build knowledge about self, others and society; and invite dialogue and deliberation with audiences. In doing so, she theorizes digital storytelling as a site of possibility for critical and relational practices, feminist performance pedagogies, and alliance building with young people.

An Introduction to Technical Theatre

An Introduction to Technical Theatre
Author: Tal Sanders
Publisher: Pacific University
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2018-09
Genre: Arts
ISBN: 9781945398872

"An Introduction to Technical Theatre draws on the author's experience in both the theatre and the classroom over the last 30 years. Intended as a resource for both secondary and post-secondary theatre courses, this text provides a comprehensive overview of technical theatre, including terminology and general practices. Introduction to Technical Theatre's accessible format is ideal for students at all levels, including those studying technical theatre as an elective part of their education. The text's modular format is also intended to assist teachers approach the subject at their own pace and structure, a necessity for those who may regularly rearrange their syllabi around productions and space scheduling" -- From publisher website.

Moment Work

Moment Work
Author: Moises Kaufman
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1101971789

A detailed guide to the collaborative method developed by the acclaimed creators of The Laramie Project and Gross Indecency--destined to become a classic. A Vintage Original. By Moisés Kaufman and Barbara Pitts McAdams with Leigh Fondakowski, Andy Paris, Greg Pierotti, Kelli Simpkins, Jimmy Maize, and Scott Barrow. For more than two decades, the members of Tectonic Theater Project have been rigorously experimenting with the process of theatrical creation. Here they set forth a detailed manual of their devising method and a thorough chronicle of how they wrote some of their best-known works. This book is for all theater artists—actors, writers, designers, and directors—who wish to create work that embraces the unbridled potential of the stage.

Play Readings

Play Readings
Author: Rob Urbinati
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Acting
ISBN: 9781138841284

Play Readings: A Complete Guide for Theatre Practitioners demystifies the standards and protocols of a play reading, demonstrating how to create effective and evocative readings for those new to or inexperienced with the genre. It examines all of the essential considerations involved in readings, including the use of the venue, pre-reading preparations, playwright/director communication, editing/adapting stage directions, casting, using the limited rehearsal time effectively, simple "staging" suggestions, working with actors, handling complex stage directions, talkbacks, and limiting the use of props, costumes, and music. A variety of readings are covered, including readings of musicals, operas, and period plays, for comprehensive coverage of this increasingly prevalent production form.

Digital Performance

Digital Performance
Author: Steve Dixon
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 1027
Release: 2007-02-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0262303329

The historical roots, key practitioners, and artistic, theoretical, and technological trends in the incorporation of new media into the performing arts. The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of new media art. Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms of theatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallels between contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentieth century. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on the work of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixon considers changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considers virtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artists including Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatrical spectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematic performances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and online drama communities, and considers the "extratemporal" illusion created by some technological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominant theoretical approaches to digital performance—including what he calls postmodernism's denial of the new—and offers a series of boldly original arguments in their place.

Appropriate/An Octoroon: Plays (Revised Edition)

Appropriate/An Octoroon: Plays (Revised Edition)
Author: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2024-07-16
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1636702384

Includes Revised Broadway version of Appropriate. Winner of three 2024 Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Play. A double-volume containing two astonishing breakout plays from one of the theatre's most exciting and provocative young writers. In Appropriate, strained familial dynamics collide with a tense undercurrent of socio-political realities when the Lafayettes gather at a former plantation home to sift through the belongings of their deceased patriarch. An Octoroon is an audacious investigation of theatre and identity, wherein an old play gives way to a startlingly original piece. Also includes the short play I Promise Never Again to Write Plays About Asians...

Drama Menu

Drama Menu
Author: Glyn Trefor-Jones
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781848422858

Packed full of drama games, ideas and suggestions, Drama Menu is a unique new resource for drama teachers.

Actors and the Art of Performance

Actors and the Art of Performance
Author: Susanne Granzer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2016-05-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137596341

Actors and the Art of Performance: Under Exposure combines the author's two main biographical paths: her professional commitment to the fields of both theatre and philosophy. The art of acting on stage is analysed here not only from the theoretical perspective of a spectator, but also from the perspective of the actor. The author draws on her experience as both a theatre actor and a university professor whose teachings in the art of acting rely heavily on her own experience and also on her philosophical knowledge. The book is unique not only in terms of its content but also in terms of its style. Written in a multiplicity of voices, the text oscillates between philosophical reasoning and narrative forms of writing, including micro-narratives, fables, parables, and inter alia by Carroll, Hoffmann and Kleist. Hence the book claims that a trans-disciplinary dialogue between the art of acting and the art of philosophical thinking calls for an aesthetical research that questions and begins to seek alternatives to traditionally established and ingrained formats of philosophy.

Buyer & Cellar

Buyer & Cellar
Author: Jonathan Tolins
Publisher: Diversion Publishing Corp.
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2014-10-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1626813981

The original script of the award-winning off-Broadway play—“irresistibly entertaining [and] surprisingly moving” (Paul Rudnick). Alex More has a story to tell. A struggling actor in LA, he takes a job working in the Malibu basement of a beloved megastar. One day, the Lady Herself comes downstairs to play. It feels like real bonding in the basement—but will their relationship ever make it upstairs? A winner of the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show, Buyer & Cellar is an outrageous comedy about the price of fame, the cost of things, and the oddest of odd jobs. “Jonathan Tolins has concocted an irresistible one-man play from the most peculiar of fictitious premises . . . This seriously funny slice of absurdist whimsy creates the illusion of a stage filled with multiple people, all of them with their own droll point of view.” —The New York Times “A gorgeous play: funny and beautifully observed and richly insightful.” —Moisés Kaufman “Tolins’s writing is smart, sharp, and hilarious—and he paints a vivid picture that even a perfectionist like Barbra would have to applaud.” —James Lapine