Ten award winning Australian playwrights talk candidly about their best known plays. Each writer reveals their writing process and discusses the themes and characters within their work. The dynamic presenter, Dr. Tess Brady, provides a critical commentary for each play. Jack Hibberd talks about bringing down the forth wall in Dimboola and the existential clown in A Stretch of the Imagination. Debra Oswald explores the ugly ducking story underlying...

Ten award winning Australian playwrights talk candidly about their best known plays. Each writer reveals their writing process and discusses the themes and characters within their work. The dynamic presenter, Dr. Tess Brady, provides a critical commentary for each play. Joanna Murray-Smith discusses the power of words in Nightfall and explores love, identity and belonging in Honour. Louis Nowra talks about shedding the misconceptions of childhood...

The Book of Dialogue is an invaluable resource for writers and students of narrative seeking to master the art of effective dialogue.

Includes: Lee Breuer, Christopher Durang, Richard Foreman, Maria Irene Fornes, Charles Fuller, John Guare, Joan Holden, David Henry Hwang, David Mamet, Emily Mann, Richard Nelson, Marsha Norman, David Rabe, Wallace Shawn, Stephen Sondheim, Megan Terry, Luis Valdez, Michael Weller, August Wilson and Lanford Wilson.

Brimming with advice and techniques, this essential reference for book-and songwriters clearly explains the fundamentals of the three crafts of a musical, book, music, and lyrics. Using copious examples from classic shows, Frankel has created the quintessential musical writers' how-to. Among the topics: definitions of musical theater; differences between musical books and straight plays and between poetry and lyrics; what a score is and how it develops;...

Between rehearsals for the school play and managing her divided family, seventeen-year-old Megan meets aspiring playwright Owen Okita, who agrees to help her attract the attention of a cute stagehand in exchange for help writing his new script. All Megan Harper's exes find their one true love right after dating her. She refuses to waste time feeling sorry for herself. Instead, she focuses on pursuing her next fling, directing theater, and fulfilling...

Perhaps some day I'll disappear forever,' muses the master-builder Psymmachus in Cyprian Kamil Norwid's Cleopatra and Caesar, 'Becoming one with my work...' Today, exactly two hundred years from the poet's birth, it is difficult not to hear Norwid speaking through the lips of his character. The greatest poet of the second phase of Polish Romanticism, Norwid, like Gerard Manley Hopkins in England, created a new poetic idiom so ahead of his time, that...

Barbara J. Smith is the eldest of eight children of who all have a great sense of humor. She was born in Mobile. Alabama to Jellene and the late James Norwood Sr. Barbara graduated high school in 1967, and came to New York to work for the summer and never went back to Alabama to live. She married Jeffrey E. Smith in 1973 and they have one son Jeffrey Jr. and 1 grandson Jeffrey III. She attended Monroe Business Inst., while working during the day at...

Here's how to write salable plays, skits, monologues, or docu-dramas from life experiences, social issues, or current events. Write plays/skits using the technique of ethno-playography, which incorporates traditions, folklore, and ethnography into dramatizing real events. The sample play and monologues portray events as social issues. One true-life example for a skit is the scene in the sample play written from first-person point-of-view about a 1964...

For this book, Lawrence Harbison has interviewed successful playwrights who have developed relationships with theaters that regularly produce their plays, have had at least one major New York production, have their plays published by a licensor such as Dramatists Play Service or Samuel French, have received commissions, and have an agent. Harbison asks each of them the same question: How did you do it? How I Did It features an introduction by Theresa...