“Leaves you moved, refreshed and, yes, maybe even enlightened.” —New York Times (Critic’s Pick) In the overwhelming quiet of the woods, six runaways from city life embark on a silent retreat. As these strangers confront internal demons both profound and absurd, their vows of silence collide with the achingly human need to connect. Filled with awkward and insightful humor, Bess Wohl’s beguiling and compassionate new play brilliantly captures the unique eloquence of a silent retreat and asks how we address life’s biggest questions when words fail us. A major hit of the 2015–16 Off Broadway season with two sold out extended runs, Small Mouth Sounds is “wry and observant . . . long on emotions and short on words” (Daily News).
At a toasted subs franchise in the local mall, three up-and-coming “sandwich artists”—a teenager, a single mom, and a downsized refugee from corporate banking—are perfecting the mustard-to-cheese ratio according to the company manual. But when their shot at the American dream is interrupted by a series of strange events, they become unlikely allies in a post-recession world. AMERICAN HERO is a supersized dark comedy about life, liberty, and the pursuit of sandwiches.
I'm a killer I told you I told you that all along You were the dummy to believe I could ever be anything else Two teenagers fall in love on Long Island. There's fun and dancing, sports and team spirit, there's the woods and beer and physical hard work. But it's 1938, the world is on the brink of war, and their wholesome summer camp is exclusively for American youth of German descent. As their mutual attraction deepens, so they become intoxicated by the Nazi ideology that fuels the camp, an ideology that will culminate in global atrocity and genocide. Inspired by the real Camp Siegfried, Bess Wohl's play premiered at the Old Vic Theatre, London, in September 2021.
Few institutions have as profound an impact on the American theatrical landscape as the Tony Award-winning Williamstown Theatre Festival, located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. New Plays from Williamstown Theatre Festival 2015-2021 provides a sample of the dozens of plays that have been created and/or premiered at the Festival during the Artistic Directorship of Mandy Greenfield. In addition to stories that shine a light into new or underexplored corners of the human condition, these plays frequently feature complex and boundary-pushing central roles for women actors. These six plays are manifestations of living, American playwrights grappling with and breathing dramatic life into the conflicts and questions at the heart of who we were, who we are, and who we will become. These plays imagine and interrogate pieces of the human experience we are still in the midst of unpacking and understanding. Complete with introductions by each of the authors reflecting on their work, these historic, award-winning, and groundbreaking plays now live in conversation with one another in this unique collection.
“Leaves you moved, refreshed and, yes, maybe even enlightened.” —New York Times (Critic’s Pick) In the overwhelming quiet of the woods, six runaways from city life embark on a silent retreat. As these strangers confront internal demons both profound and absurd, their vows of silence collide with the achingly human need to connect. Filled with awkward and insightful humor, Bess Wohl’s beguiling and compassionate new play brilliantly captures the unique eloquence of a silent retreat and asks how we address life’s biggest questions when words fail us. A major hit of the 2015–16 Off Broadway season with two sold out extended runs, Small Mouth Sounds is “wry and observant . . . long on emotions and short on words” (Daily News).
Few institutions have as profound an impact on the American theatrical landscape as the Tony Award-winning Williamstown Theatre Festival, located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. New Plays from Williamstown Theatre Festival 2015-2021 provides a sample of the dozens of plays that have been created and/or premiered at the Festival during the Artistic Directorship of Mandy Greenfield. In addition to stories that shine a light into new or underexplored corners of the human condition, these plays frequently feature complex and boundary-pushing central roles for women actors. These six plays are manifestations of living, American playwrights grappling with and breathing dramatic life into the conflicts and questions at the heart of who we were, who we are, and who we will become. These plays imagine and interrogate pieces of the human experience we are still in the midst of unpacking and understanding. Complete with introductions by each of the authors reflecting on their work, these historic, award-winning, and groundbreaking plays now live in conversation with one another in this unique collection.
What is the purpose of a stage direction? These italicized lines written in between the lines of spoken dialogue tell us a great deal of information about a play's genre, mood, tone, visual setting, cast of characters, and more. Yet generations of actors have been taught to cross these words out as records of previous performances or signs of overly controlling playwrights, while scholars have either treated them as problems to be solved or as silent lines of dialogue. Stage directions can be all of these things, and yet there are examples from over one-hundred years of American playwriting that show that stage directions can also be so much more. The Lines Between the Lines focuses on how playwrights have written stage directions that engage readers, production team members, and scholars in a process of embodied creation in order to determine meaning. Author Bess Rowen calls the products of this method “affective stage directions” because they reach out from the page and affect the bodies of those who encounter them. Affective stage directions do not tell a reader or production team what a given moment looks like, but rather how a moment feels. In this way, these stage directions provide playgrounds for individual readers or production teams to make sense of a given moment in a play based on their own individual cultural experience, geographic location, and identity-markers. Affective stage directions enable us to check our assumptions about what kinds of bodies are represented on stage, allowing for a greater multitude of voices and kinds of embodied identity to make their own interpretations of a play while still following the text exactly. The tools provided in this book are as useful for the theater scholar as they are for the theater audience member, casting director, and actor. Each chapter covers a different function of stage directions (spoken, affective, choreographic, multivalent, impossible) and looks at it through a different practical lens (focusing on actors, directors, designers, dramaturgs, and readers). Every embodied person will have a slightly different understanding of affective stage directions, and it is precisely this diversity that makes these stage directions crucial to understanding theater in our time.
I'm a killer I told you I told you that all along You were the dummy to believe I could ever be anything else Two teenagers fall in love on Long Island. There's fun and dancing, sports and team spirit, there's the woods and beer and physical hard work. But it's 1938, the world is on the brink of war, and their wholesome summer camp is exclusively for American youth of German descent. As their mutual attraction deepens, so they become intoxicated by the Nazi ideology that fuels the camp, an ideology that will culminate in global atrocity and genocide. Inspired by the real Camp Siegfried, Bess Wohl's play premiered at the Old Vic Theatre, London, in September 2021.
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