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Ming Cho Lee
Regular price $75.00 Save $-75.00"A gorgeous volume [that] celebrates the legacy of Lee." Time Out New York
"Whether working in theater, opera or dance, Ming Cho Lee has made an incalculable contribution to the performing arts in America. This elegant coffee table book, written by Arnold Aronson, pays tribute in prose and photographs to his singular career." Los Angeles Times
"A comprehensive, compassionate and intelligent book... A book of major importance, a must-read for all theatre folk, indeed for anyone drawn to the mysteries of making art." Theatre Design & Technology
Ming Cho Lee is not only one of the most important American designers of the twentieth century, but one of the most significant influences on American theatre. As a designer, he drew upon his training in Chinese watercolor, the aesthetics of his mentors, Jo Mielziner and Boris Aronson, and the post-war developments in German design to develop a new approach to stage design that radically altered American scenography. He broke new ground, combined existing motifs in startling new ways and continued to explore new ideas throughout his entire career. Lee introduced a sculptural style with soaring verticality that had been largely unknown to American stages. The painterly image was replaced with a decidedly modern and industrial scenic vocabulary that emphasized stage-as-stage.
Lee has designed more than 300 productions of theatre, opera and dance, beginning with his first student work, The Silver Whistle at Occidental College in 1952, through his last productions in 2005. Unlike his predecessors, Lee did not make his mark on Broadway. Rather, it was achieved through some forty productions with the New York Shakespeare Festival, including eleven seasons at the Delacorte Theater from its opening in 1962; thirteen productions for New York City Opera, beginning with its inaugural production at Lincoln Center; five mainstage productions for the Metropolitan Opera, including Boris Godunov, which stayed in the repertoire for more than thirty years; twenty-one productions for Arena Stage in Washington D.C., and numerous other productions at regional theatres including the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and Actors Theatre of Louisville; and ten pieces for the Joffrey Ballet, as well as productions for Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Elliot Feld, the Pacific Northwest Ballet and Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan.
Called the dean of American set designers” by the New York Times, Lee had an impact that goes well beyond his own work. As a teacher, including more than forty years at the Yale School of Drama, Lee shaped generations of theatre artistsnot only set designers, but costume and lighting designers, as well as directors, writers and dramaturgs. It is through these students that he helped transform not only American scenography but the larger aesthetics of American theatre.
For this richly detailed exploration of Lee’s work, theatre historian Arnold Aronson spent hundreds of hours interviewing Lee at his legendary New York apartment. The book is both a study of and a conversation with Ming Cho Lee. Each image selected for this book was chosen personally by Lee from thousands of photos, drawings, sketches, renderings and models, all carefully cataloged by Lee’s wife and lifelong archivist, Betsy. Lee’s work has been showcased at the New York Public Library and the Yale School of Architecture, and his honors include a Tony Award for best scenic design of a play, an Outer Critics Circle Award, three Drama Desk Awards, a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement and the National Medal of the Arts, the highest national award given in the arts.
Between Riverside and Crazy (TCG Edition)
Regular price $28.00 Save $-28.00Written with humor, tenderness, grit and wonderment, Between Riverside and Crazy is an extraordinary new play: a dark comedy about a man trying to maintain control as the world unravels around him.
Radio Golf
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00A play in which history, memory, and legacy challenge notions of progress and country club ideals. With Radio Golf, Wilson's lifework comes full circle.
It's the late 1990s, and Aunt Ester's onetime home at 1839 Wylie Avenue (the setting of the cycle's first play) is slated for demolition. The goal of this slick real estate venture is to boost both the depressed Hill District and Harmond Wilks's chance of becoming Pittsburgh's first Black mayor.
The play is the final part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a foreword by Suzan-Lori Parks.
A Year of Creative Thinking
Regular price $46.95 Save $-46.95A treasure trove of prompts, provocations, and practical exercises to help you spark new ideas, hone your craft, and unleash your creativity.
In A Year of Creative Thinking, award-winning writer, director, and filmmaker Jessica Swale guides you through 366 fun and rewarding activities—one for every day of the year (including leap years!)—to fire up your imagination and flex your creative muscles.
You'll find a host of writing prompts and imaginative challenges to get you going, quick-fire exercises to help you focus on key aspects of craft (including inventing scenarios, writing dialogue, building subtext, creating atmosphere and plot, and developing your characters), and plenty of quirky and unusual challenges to test your limits and help you explore new avenues. Some are writing exercises, others encourage you to draw, to listen to music, to get outside and find inspiration in your surroundings. Work through the activities day by day, or dip in to suit your needs—the choice is yours!
Fun, engaging and pressure-free, this book is designed to supercharge your imagination and boost your creativity, helping you build a set of expressive tools that you can apply in all aspects of your life.
Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise
Regular price $24.95 Save $-24.95Harry Kondoleon has said his plays are “sad, scary, funny.” Though his work has been compared to that of Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde, John Guare and Christopher Durang, his acute and elegant voice has from the first been distinctively his own.
Kondoleon’s tragicomedies are peopled by extremists, their behavior bizarre. And yet these curious characters are driven by the most familiar of passions. Abandonment and betrayal define their pasts, shadow their present. They are needy and lonely and full of desire. They seek transcendence, and this impossible, fundamental longing takes forms both common and strange.
These plays are not only jet-black comedies. They are fairy tales, fables, passion plays, masquerades. Kondoleon’s intensely theatrical sensibility is, finally, romantic. He sees the contemporary world clearly; he also sees other worlds: prior, within, beyond.
This volume also includes: Christmas on Mars, The Vampires, Slacks and Tops and Anteroom.
Sweet William
Regular price $40.95 Save $-40.95A unique, personal guide to William Shakespeare's life and plays told through the experience of a leading classical actor. Michael Pennington illuminates each of Shakespeare's plays with his own considerable understanding of the theater then and now, and the result is an insightful examination of the man and his work.
Hot Irons
Regular price $34.95 Save $-34.95
Year of the Fat Knight
Regular price $34.95 Save $-34.95Year of the Fat Knight is legendary stage actor Sir Antony Sher's account—splendidly supplemented by his own paintings and sketches—of researching, rehearsing, and performing one of Shakespeare's most iconic characters for a 2014 Royal Shakespeare Company production. This follow-up to Sher's 1985 classic Year of the King is a terrific read, rich in humor and excitement, that also stands as a celebration of the craft of character acting.
Explosion of a Memory
Regular price $28.00 Save $-28.00
We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! And Other Works
Regular price $35.00 Save $-35.00
Pacific Overtures
Regular price $17.95 Save $-17.95“Priceless and peerless…a thrilling work of theatricality.” —Wayman Wong, San Francisco Examiner
For over three decades, Stephen Sondheim has been the foremost composer and lyricist writing regularly for Broadway. His substantial body of work now stands as one of the most sustained achievements of the American stage.
Pacific Overtures, originally produced in 1976, combines an unsurpassed mastery of the American musical with such arts as Kabuki theatre, haiku, dance, and masks to recount Commander Matthew Perry’s 1835 opening of Japan and its consequences right up to the present.
This new edition of Pacific Overtures incorporates substantial revisions made by the authors for the successful 1984 revival.
Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue
Regular price $28.00 Save $-28.00A lush and evocative tone poem about the way the landscape of the soul is transformed by war” Atlanta Journal Constitution
Back home in Philadelphia, Elliot Ortiz, a nineteen-year-old Marine, contemplates his return to Iraq for a second tour of duty after being seriously wounded. In this simple, poignant and achingly evocative play” (TimeOut New York), three Ortiz family members recount years of service to their country in wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, and the effects their service has had on the individual, the family and the community they live in. Melding a poetic dreamscape with a stream-of-consciousness narrative, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue takes us on an unforgettable journey across time and generations. This Pulitzer Prize finalist is the first installment in Quiara Alegria Hudes' The Elliot Trilogy, which continues in Water By the Spoonful (Pulitzer Prize-winner) and concludes with The Happiest Song Plays Last.
Quiara Alegría Hudes is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Water by the Spoonful, the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue. Her other works include Barrio Grrrl!, a children’s musical; 26 Miles; Yemaya’s Belly and The Happiest Song Plays Last, the third piece in her acclaimed trilogy. Hudes is on the board of Philadelphia Young Playwrights, which produced her first play in the tenth grade. She now lives in New York with her husband and children.
Jitney
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00Jitney is a richly textured play that follows a group of men trying to eke out a living by driving unlicensed cabs, or jitneys. When the city threatens to board up the business and the boss's son returns from prison, tempers flare, potent secrets are revealed, and the fragile threads binding these people together may come undone at last.
The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a foreword by Ishmael Reed.
Lincoln
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00Lincoln is a rough and noble democratic masterpiece. And the genius of Lincoln, finally, lies in its vision of politics as a noble, sometimes clumsy dialectic of the exalted and the mundane And Mr. Kushner, whose love of passionate, exhaustive disputation is unmatched in the modern theater, fills nearly every scene with wonderful, maddening talk. Go see this movie.” A.O. Scott, New York Times
A lyrical, ingeniously structured screenplay. Lincoln is one of the most authentic biographical dramas I’ve ever seen grand and immersive. It plugs us into the final months of Lincoln’s presidency with a purity that makes us feel transported as if by time machine.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
A decade-long collaboration between three-time Academy Award® winner Steven Spielberg and Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner, Lincoln is a revealing drama that focuses on the 16th President’s tumultuous final months in office. Having just won re-election in a country divided, Lincoln pursues a course of action designed to end the war, unite the country and abolish slavery. With the moral courage and fierce determination to succeed, his choices during this critical moment will change the fate of America, and generations, to come. Containing eight pages of color photos from the film and inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s critically acclaimed Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln is now a major motion picture by DreamWorks starring two-time Academy Award® winner Daniel Day-Lewis.
Tony Kushner's plays include Angels in America, Parts One and Two; A Bright Room Called Day; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols's film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg's Munich. Kushner is the recipient of a Pultizer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, and two Oscar nominations, among other honors. In 2008 he was the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award.
The Flick (TCG Edition)
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00Funny, heartbreaking, sly and unblinking The Flick may be the best argument anyone has yet made for the continued necessity and profound uniqueness of theater.” Jesse Green, New York
Hilarious and ineffably touching Ms. Baker’s peerless aptitude for exploring how people grope their way toward a sense of equanimity, even as they learn to accept disappointment, is among the things that make her such a gifted writer This lovingly observed play will sink deep into your consciousness.” Charles Isherwood, New York Times
This hypnotic, heartbreaking micro-epic about movies and moving on is irreducibly theatrical.” David Cote, TimeOut New York
In a rundown movie theater in central Massachusetts, three underpaid employees sweep up popcorn in the empty aisles and tend to one of the last thirty-five-millimeter projectors in the state. With keen insight and a ceaseless attention to detail, The Flick pays tribute to the power of movies and paints a heartbreaking portrait of three characters and their working lives. A critical hit when it premiered Off-Broadway, this comedy, by one of the country’s most produced and highly regarded young playwrights, was awarded the coveted 2013 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, an Obie Award for Playwriting and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
ANNIE BAKER’S works include The Aliens (Obie Award), Body Awareness, Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award), Nocturama, and an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Her work has been produced at more than a hundred theaters in the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries. Recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. She is a resident playwright at Signature Theatre.
Seven Guitars
Regular price $28.00 Save $-28.00Set in 1940s Pittsburgh, Seven Guitars is a play about the search for self-fulfillment and acceptance in a hostile world.
Winner of the New York drama Critics Circle award for Best New Play, it is a play whose epic proportions and abundant spirit remind us of what the American theater once was
(Vincent Canby The New York Times). Floyd Schoolboy
Barton has fallen on bad times since blowing the money he got for recording his song, That's All Right.
Now the song is a hit, and he has one more chance to make it in life.
The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a foreword by Tony Kushner.
The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II
Regular price $35.00 Save $-35.00
The Happiest Song Plays Last
Regular price $28.00 Save $-28.00"Ms. Hudes draws all her characters with precision and understanding... this warm-blooded play underscores how the disorienting flux of life can be navigated with the help of carefully tended family ties." Charles Isherwood, New York Times
"Delightful... Hudes is a very accomplished storyteller, a playwright with an emergent, fulsome American narrative." Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune
Hudes has a keen ear for dialogue and a gift for characterization.” Scotty Zacher, Chicago Theater Beat
At the dawn of the Arab Spring in an ancient Jordinian town, an Iraq War veteran struggles to overcome the traumas of combat by taking on an entirely new and unexpected career: an action-film hero. At the same time, halfway around the world in a cozy North Philadelphia kitchen, his cousin takes on a heroic new role of her own: as the heart and soul of her crumbling community, providing hot meals and an open door for the needy.
The final installment in Hudes’s three-play cycle, which began with the Pulitzer Prize-finalist Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue and Pulitzer Prize-winner Water By the Spoonful, The Happiest Song Plays Last is about the search for redemption, humility and one’s place in the world.
Quiara Alegría Hudes is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Water by the Spoonful, the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue. Her other works include Barrio Grrrl!, a children’s musical; 26 Miles; Yemaya’s Belly and The Happiest Song Plays Last, the third piece in her acclaimed trilogy. Hudes is on the board of Philadelphia Young Playwrights, which produced her first play in the tenth grade. She now lives in New York with her husband and children.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Regular price $28.00 Save $-28.00The time is 1927. The place is a run-down recording studio in Chicago. Ma Rainey, the legendary blues singer, is due to arrive with her entourage to cut new sides of old favorites. Waiting for her are her Black musician sidemen, the white owner of the record company, and her white manager. What goes down in the session to come is more than music. It is a riveting portrayal of black rage…of racism, of the self-hate that racism breeds, and of racial expression. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a play dealing with issues of race, art, religion and the historic exploitation of Black recording artists by white producers.
The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a Foreword by Frank Rich.
John (TCG Edition)
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00"Annie Baker's John is so good on so many levels that it casts a unique and brilliant light . . . By not rushing thingsby letting the characters develop as gradually and inevitably as rain or snowfallBaker returns us to the naturalistic but soulful theatre that many of her contemporaries and near-contemporaries have disavowed in their rush to be "postmodern."The New Yorker
"John, like any great play, raises a lot of questionsnot just about the human experience, but also about the state of contemporary theater, it doesn't provide many answers; it is not the playwright's responsibility to do so In John she co-opts the viewer for her own aesthetic use, heightening the tension onstage and deepening the quiet relationships between her characters. Through John, she displays an understanding that the audience is part of the theatrical experience, an inevitability as certain as a Chekhovian gun."Slate
The week after Thanksgiving. A bed & breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A cheerful innkeeper. A young couple struggling to stay together. Thousands of inanimate objects, watching.
The description by the playwright of the setting is simple but Annie Baker's compelling new work is revolutionary in theme and structure and challenges the boundaries of what theatre can be. A kind of magical super-realism permeates throughout this quietly evolving tale with both the actors and the audience fully vested together in a mesmerizing exploration of the frailty and loneliness of human experience.
Annie Baker's works include The Flick (Pulitzer Prize), The Aliens (Obie Award), Body Awareness, Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award), Nocturama, and an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Her work has been produced at more than a hundred theaters in the United States and in more than a dozen countries. Recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue
Regular price $25.95 Save $-25.95A collection of writings from the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America. This volume by Tony Kushner features the play Slavs!, a “comic, mordant and marvelously provocative” look at the crumbling of the Soviet Union (SF Chronicle), as well as several essays, two poems and a prayer.
Cousins
Regular price $19.95 Save $-19.95
Fences
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00A powerful, stunning dramatic work that won Wilson critical acclaim and the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and Black was to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But now, the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s This spirit is changing the world Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, adnd it's making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less…
The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a foreword by Samuel G. Freedman.
King Hedley II
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00The story of an ex-con in post-Reagan Pittsburgh, 1985, trying to rebuild his life.
The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a foreword by Marion McClinton.
Two Trains Running
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00It is Pittsburgh, 1969. Memphis Lee's diner—and the rest of his block—is scheduled to be torn down, a casualty of the city's renovation project that is sweeping away the buildings of a community, but not its spirit. Memphis stands his ground, determined to make the city pay him what the property is worth, refusing to be swindled out of his land as he was years before in Mississippi. Into this fray come Sterling, the ex-con who embraces the tenets of Malcolm X; Wolf, the bookie who has learned to play by the white man's rules; Risa, a waitress of quiet dignity; and Holloway, resident philosopher and fervent believer in the prophecies of a legendary 322-year-old woman down the street.
Just as sure as an inexorable future looms right around the corner, these people of loud voices and big hearts
continue to search, to falter, to hope that they can catch the train that will make the difference. With compassion, humor, and a superb sense of place and time, Wilson paints a vivid portrait of everyday lives in the shadow of great events, and of unsung men and women who are anything but ordinary.
The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a foreword by Laurence Fishburne.
Gem of the Ocean
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00Gem of the Ocean is the play that begins it all. Set in 1904 Pittsburgh, it is chronologically the first work in August Wilson’s decade-by-decade cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the 20th century—an unprecedented series that includes the Pulitzer Prize–winning plays Fences and The Piano Lesson. Aunt Esther, the drama’s 287-year-old fiery matriarch, welcomes into her Hill District home Solly Two Kings, who was born into slavery and scouted for the Union Army, and Citizen Barlow, a young man from Alabama searching for a new life.
The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a foreword by Phylicia Rashad.
Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00
The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a foreword by Romulus Linney.
The Piano Lesson
Regular price $28.00 Save $-28.00A powerful exploration of the legacy of slavery in America, The Piano Lesson centers on a brother and sister in 1930s Pittsburgh as they argue over whether to sell the family piano, an instrument tainted by the wages of slavery. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1990.
The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a foreword by Toni Morrison.