Library

Plays and commentaries on a diverse selection of dramatic literature.

The latest edition of America's best-selling monologue series for men. All monologues are excerpted from plays produced during the 2000 theatrical season.

The thirteen ten-minute plays in this collection--comedies of various ilk--are the best of the scripts written for Gardner-Webb University's "24 HOURS," a bi-annual play festival in which the entire event is created in just twenty-four hours. "24 HOURS" is an initiative of the theater program at GWU dedicated to developing new plays and training undergraduates in the craft of play production. The plays in this collection were created by students for students and express the worldview of a generation coming of age.

The merging of still photography with mechanized projection instruments in the late nineteenth century gave us what became the rich and exciting art of cinema. Here is its story, starting with the Lumiere brothers in Paris and Thomas Edison in America. Early experiments evolved into film classics such as The Great train Robbery (1903), the Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton comedies, the expressionist films of Fritz Lang and Sergey Eisenstein, and the early "talkies". A century of film-making is reviewed in words and pictures that cover the comedies, musicals, and drama. Readers learn how film-making technique has changed over time, from the magic lantern to advanced methods of computer animation, rear projection, Technicolor, 3D, special effects, camera panning and perspective, script-writing and directing.

Compilation: The Methurn Drama Book of New American Plays

Blue Room is a brilliant meditation on men and women, sex and social class, actors and the theater.

Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn't have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Codell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare's plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They'll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.

The Boys Next Door is a play by Tom Griffin, first produced in the 1988/89 season. Set in the Boston area, it deals with four men with various mental disabilities who live in a group home. It takes place over roughly a two-month period and consists of brief vignettes about the men's lives. The play provides a humorous commentary on the men's lives, taking a surprising turn as Barry's father comes to visit and as Jack (their caretaker) accepts a new job.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a parable inspired by the Chinese play Chalk Circle. Written at the close of World War II, the story is set in the Causasus Mountains of Georgia, and retells the tale of King Solomon and a child claimed by two mothers. A chalk circle is metaphorically drawn around a society misdirected by its priorities. Brecht's statements about class are cloaked in the innocence of a fable that whispers insistently to the audience.

The Ranyevskayas, a land owning family, are at the point of bankruptcy and are about to lose their estate. Lopakhin, a businessman, suggests they chop down the orchard and build houses. The family is horrified; the orchard represents the pleasant past, before the mysterious forces of the changing times threatened their idyllic existence. Lopakhin buys the land and proceeds to carry out his plan to destroy the orchard.