Sidney Homan

Sidney Homan defines a pivotal line as “a moment in the script that serves as a pathway into the larger play ... a magnet to which the rest of the play, scenes before and after, adheres.” He offers his personal choices of such lines in five plays by Shakespeare and works by Beckett, Brecht, Pinter, Shepard, and Stoppard. Drawing on his own experience in the theatre as actor and director and on campus as a teacher and scholar, he pairs a Shakespearean play with one by a modern playwright as mirrors for each other. One reviewer calls his approach “ground-breaking.” Another observes that his “experience with the particular plays he has chosen is invaluable” since it allows us to find “a wedge into such iconic texts.” Academics and students alike will find this volume particularly useful in aiding their own discovery of a pivotal line or moment in the experience of reading about, watching, or performing in a play.

Finding the Heart of the Play

Pivotal Lines in Shakespeare and Others

This volume explores how and why we deny, or manipulate, or convert, or enhance reality. Finding it important to come to terms with reality, with what is there before us, and, with reality however defined, to live responsibly, this collection takes a truly multidisciplinary approach to examining the idea that history, the truth, facts, and the events of the present time can be refashioned as prismatic, theatrical, something we can play with for agendas either noble or ignoble. An international team of contributors considers the issue of how and why, in dealing what is there before us, we play with reality by employing theatre, fiction, words, conspiracy theories, alternate realities, scenarios, and art itself. Chapters delve into issues of fake news, propaganda, virtual reality, theatre as real life, reality TV, and positive ways of refashioning and enhancing your own reality. Drawing on examples from film studies to sociology, from the social sciences to medicine, this volume will appeal to scholars and upper-level students in the areas of communication and media studies, comparative literature, film studies, economics, English, international affairs, journalism, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theatre.

Denying, Manipulating, Converting, and Enhancing What Is There

Playing with Reality

Bernard J. Paris

Norman Norwood Holland

00 What sort of person was William Shakespeare? Although we know few of the facts of his life, modern psychological techniques enable us to glimpse the man behind the works. The essays in this volume explore the conflicts he dealt with, the defenses he used, and the way writing, acting, and directing served him psychologically. What sort of person was William Shakespeare? Although we know few of the facts of his life, modern psychological techniques enable us to glimpse the man behind the works. The essays in this volume explore the conflicts he dealt with, the defenses he used, and the way writing, acting, and directing served him psychologically.

Shakespeare's Personality

In this performance criticism, the author examines his own work in the theatre as actor and director, as well as that of others. The book offers a topical approach to various issues, both artisitc and philosophical, involved in staging modern dramatists.

From Director's Concept to Performance

Staging Modern Playwrights

The Modern Theater of Beckett, Brecht, Genet, Ionesco, Pinter, Stoppard, and Williams

The Audience as Actor and Character

Cindy Homan

This work complements Sidney Homan's earlier prize-winning study, Beckett's Theatres: Interpretations for Performance, which combined metadramatic and performance criticism emerging from a tour of Florida's ten state prisons with a production of Waiting for Godot. The present volume grew out of the author's own sense that his work in the theater was distorting his understanding of Beckett's plays for television, that here the aesthetics of the medium were inseparable from the options for interpretation each play offered. If in the theater the rehearsal process is a way of "discovering" the play, of suggesting alternative readings, would the same hold true if the critic encountered works like Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, or Quad by going through the actual process of filming and then editing them? The resulting book charts the director's voyage into this important medium in Beckett's canon, from the moment he developed his "director's concept" for each work, informed as it was by scholarly and critical studies of the playwright, to the process of understanding Beckett's intentions as manifest not only in the scripts but also in his very specific directions for the camera and the actor's movements. The process then became public as rehearsals were held, followed by preproduction meetings with the technical staff, and the actual filming, followed in turn by postproduction work and then the responses of audiences. Encompassing performance criticism as it emerges from the gamut of activities involved in a production, from conception to filming to audience response, this study underscores the human factor, the intrusion of real-life into Beckett's stark, aesthetically tight dramatic worlds. In Quad, for example, the distinct personalities of the four actors, or "dancers" as the script calls them, somehow managed to resist the precise, dehumanized pacings specified by the playwright. The actor's physical strain in showing no outward emotion, let alone movement, as the off-camera voice berates him, was manifest involuntarily in his face as the camera in Eh Joe makes its nine four-inch moves toward a final close-up. Feeling too confined by Beckett's direction for the camera, the director tried variations on three of the works, substituting, for example, cuts for the slower dissolves in . . . but the clouds . . ., only to realize just why Beckett is always "right" no matter how much he may seem to limit the director or actor. Even as it recounts the circumstances leading up to the production, the preface of Filming Beckett's Television Plays puts this work within the context of contemporary performance-theory criticism. The copious notes provide a detailed review of the existing scholarship and critical commentary on Beckett's work for television.

A Director's Experience

Filming Beckett's Television Plays

The work focuses on the practical and philosophic sides of performance, set within the context of Beckett's own aesthetic theory, his fiction and poetry, as well as a history of the critical and scholarly studies of his work. Winner of the Bucknell University Press Award.

Interpretations for Performance

Beckett's Theaters

Why the Theatre is a collection of 26 personal essays by college teachers, actors, directors, and playwrights about the magnetic pull of the theatre and its changing place in society. The book is divided into four parts, examining the creative role of the audience, the life of the actor, director, and playwright in performance, ways the theatre moves beyond the playhouse and into the real world, and theories and thoughts on what the theatre can do when given form onstage. Based on concrete, highly personal examples, experiences, and memories, this collection offers unique perspectives on the meaning of the theatre and the beauty of weaving the world of the play into the fabric of our lives. Covering a range of practices and plays, from the Greeks to Japanese Butoh theatre, from Shakespeare to modern experiments, this book is written by and for the theatre instructor and theatre appreciation student.

In Personal Essays, College Teachers, Actors, Directors, and Playwrights Tell Why the Theatre Is So Vital to Them

Why the Theatre

What happens when a theatrical production moves both literally and aesthetically off the stage and into the world surround the playhouse? Fourteen scholars and theater professionals address an issue that has aesthetic, philosophical, historical, psychological, social, and political implications for all those interested in the theater.

The Theater as a Presence or Factor in the Real World

Playing Offstage

Hernán Vera

This book examines portraits of Hitler and how we try to "explain" him in the movies, including comedies, fantasies, psychological studies, documentaries, and docudramas. It then considers how this film Hitler lives on in our culture, in everything from politics to merchandise.

Finding Der Führer on Film

Hitler in the Movies

Developing the interrelationship of Shakespeare scholarship, performance, and teaching, the contributors to this collection, including scholars of the People's Republic of China, share the perspective that Shakespeare's plays be viewed as texts to be enacted, whether on the theater stage or the stage of the mind's eye.

From Study to Stage to Classroom

Shakespeare and the Triple Play

The storyteller has a fascinating place in our world. Storyteller Sidney Homan tells tales of growing up in Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50sa€""accounts of Bruzzy the Bully; of John Crapp, the television salesman; of Leslie Doober and his rotten banana; of drunken Uncle Eddie, and of the Queen of the mushrooms. Sometimes comic, sometimes bittersweet, A Fish in the Moonlight illuminates the growth of both storyteller and listener.

Sidney Homan

Books

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