A01=David Ball
acting
actor
Author_David Ball
breaking down a play
Category=ATDC
Category=DSG
directing
director
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
hamlet
important
pre production
read this book
reading plays
script analysis
short and sweet
theatre
understanding dramatic work
useful
writers and readers
Product details
- ISBN 9780809311101
- Weight: 155g
- Dimensions: 137 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jul 1983
- Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The best-selling script analysis book for thirty-five years Considered an essential text since its publication thirty-five years ago, this guide for students and practitioners of both theater and literature complements, rather than 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, conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play. Also included are guides for discovering what the playwright considers a play’ s most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details. Using Shakespeare’s Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for clarifying script-reading techniques as well as exemplifying 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 & Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.
David Ball was one of the nation’s first theater literary directors when he served under Michael Langham at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater. He later taught acting, directing, and script analysis at Lawrence, Carnegie Mellon, and Duke Universities. He was the artistic director of Pittsburgh’s renowned Metro Theater and the literary director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater. David Ball’s plays and adaptations have been frequently staged at professional repertory theaters throughout the United States and in Europe, including most recently his landmark adaptations of Moliere’s Tartuffe, The Miser, and The Imaginary Invalid. His former theater and film students hold Oscars, Obies, Tonys, and Emmys, and his own work has been supported by the Ford, McKnight, and Shubert Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
