The storyteller has a fascinating place in our world. Storyteller Sidney Homan tells tales of growing up in Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50saâ'¬accounts of Bruzzy the Bully; of John Crapp, the television salesman; of Leslie Doober and his rotten banana; of drunken Uncle Eddie, and of the Queen of the mushrooms. Sometimes comic, sometimes bittersweet, A Fish in the Moonlight illuminates the growth of both storyteller and listener.
In How and Why We Teach Shakespeare, 19 distinguished college teachers and directors draw from their personal experiences and share their methods and the reasons why they teach Shakespeare. The collection is divided into four sections: studying the text as a script for performance; exploring Shakespeare by performing; implementing specific techniques for getting into the plays; and working in different classrooms and settings. The contributors offer a rich variety of topics, including: working with cues in Shakespeare, such as line and mid-line endings that lead to questions of interpretation seeing Shakespeare’s stage directions and the Elizabethan playhouse itself as contributing to a play’s meaning using the "gamified" learning model or cue-cards to get into the text thinking of the classroom as a rehearsal playing the Friar to a student’s Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet teaching Shakespeare to inner-city students or in a country torn by political and social upheavals. For fellow instructors of Shakespeare, the contributors address their own philosophies of teaching, the relation between scholarship and performance, and—perhaps most of all—why in this age the study of Shakespeare is so important.
Sidney Homan defines a pivotal line as “a moment in the script that serves as a pathway into the larger play ... a magnet to which the rest of the play, scenes before and after, adheres.” He offers his personal choices of such lines in five plays by Shakespeare and works by Beckett, Brecht, Pinter, Shepard, and Stoppard. Drawing on his own experience in the theatre as actor and director and on campus as a teacher and scholar, he pairs a Shakespearean play with one by a modern playwright as mirrors for each other. One reviewer calls his approach “ground-breaking.” Another observes that his “experience with the particular plays he has chosen is invaluable” since it allows us to find “a wedge into such iconic texts.” Academics and students alike will find this volume particularly useful in aiding their own discovery of a pivotal line or moment in the experience of reading about, watching, or performing in a play.
Professor Homan recounts the experience of staging King Lear accompanied by a musical score for piano, violin, and cello played live onstage. He discusses the challenge of making and trying to justify cuts in Hamlet. The chapter on The Comedy of Errors shows the ways in which scholarly and critical writings can contribute to a director's decisions on everything from casting to acting styles. A casual remark from an actress leads to a feminist production of a Midsummer Night's Dream. He describes the delicate collaboration between director and performer as he works with actors preparing for The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Hamlet. Other chapters treat a set designer's bold red drapes that influenced the director's concept for Julius Caesar, and the cross-influence of back-to-back runs of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Hamlet."--BOOK JACKET.
In this performance criticism, the author examines his own work in the theatre as actor and director, as well as that of others. The book offers a topical approach to various issues, both artisitc and philosophical, involved in staging modern dramatists.
Pinter's Odd Man Out records Sidney Homan's experience directing the playwright's Old Times for both stage and television. His most commercially successful play, and surely one of his best, no other work of Pinter's has generated more critical and scholarly commentary - or more varied, sometimes conflicting readings." "In the two opening chapters Homan surveys the theatrical and critical history of the play before describing the "generic" world of Pinter that provides the context of Old Times: secluded rooms, their occupants, and the visitor who, in seeking entrance, challenges the room's exclusive yet deceptive serenity; the outside and the threat it poses; the subtext pressing on the dialogue; the power of the past and perception; the "presence" of the play itself; characters who function as artists; the issue of gender; mother and father figures; and the silence of Pinter's pauses." "Homan then describes his company's preparations for the performance, ranging from the director's concept, the set, props, costumes, lighting, and music to blocking and the rehearsal period. After his own account of the stage production and the ways in which the audience "taught" the performers through their reactions to and discoveries about the play, Homan turns to his actors (Stephanie Dugan, Thomas Pender, and Sandra Langsner) who, in their own words, describe how they wrestled with the characters of Kate, Deeley, and Anna from rehearsals to performance." "A chapter on "The Camera as Guest" records the experience of filming the stage play. Here the focus is on the technological and aesthetic differences between the media of television and the stage, and what effect such differences had on the filmed version of Old Times. To what degree does the camera allow the director to assert more control? What changes in blocking, set, and lighting were required?" "In an appendix Homan looks at Carol Reed's 1950s film Odd Man Out, which figures prominently in Old Times, and which may have been a source (in a highly flexible use of that term) for the play." "On the surface, Pinter's Odd Man Out concentrates on a single play. In reality, it is about the ways in which people in the theatre approach a production, the process they go through from rehearsals to opening night, and the complex interaction among playwright, director, actors, and audience. It also raises the issue of what happens when a work intended for the stage is translated to another medium, such as television. If the book at times suggests that the worlds of the scholar and the theatre professional are different, indeed incompatible in some ways, it also shows how the two professions can learn from each other."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
In Hitler in the Movies: Finding Der Führer on Film, a Shakespearean and a sociologist explore the fascination our popular culture has with Adolf Hitler. What made him … Hitler? Do our explanations tell us more about the perceiver than the actual historical figure? We ask such question by viewing the Hitler character in the movies. How have directors, actors, film critics, and audiences accounted for this monster in a medium that reflects public tastes and opinions? The book first looks at comedic films, such as Chaplain’s The Great Dictator or Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), along with the Mel Brooks’s 1983 version. Then, there is the Hitler of fantasy, from trash films like The Saved Hitler’s Brain to a serious work like The Boys from Brazil where Hitler is cloned. Psychological portraits include Anthony Hopkins’s The Bunker, the surreal The Empty Mirror, and Max, a portrait of Hitler in his days in Vienna as a would-be artist. Documentaries and docudramas range from Leni Reinfenstahl’s iconic The Triumph of the Will or The Hidden Führer, to the controversial Hitler: A Film from Germany and Quentin Tarantino’s fanciful Inglourious Basterds. Hitler in the Movies also considers the ways Der Führer remains today, as a ghostly presence, if not an actual character. Why is he still with us in everything from political smears to video games to merchandise? In trying to explain this and the man himself, what might we learn about ourselves and our society?
Analysing why we laugh and what we laugh at, and describing how performers can elicit this response from their audience, this book enables actors to create memorable – and hilarious – performances. Rooted in performance and performance criticism, Sidney Homan and Brian Rhinehart provide a detailed explanation of how comedy works, along with advice on how to communicate comedy from the point of view of both the performer and the audience. Combining theory and performance, the authors analyse a variety of plays, both modern and classic. Playwrights featured include Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Christopher Durang, and Michael Frayn. Acting in Shakespeare's comedies is also covered in depth.
The work focuses on the practical and philosophic sides of performance, set within the context of Beckett's own aesthetic theory, his fiction and poetry, as well as a history of the critical and scholarly studies of his work. Winner of the Bucknell University Press Award.
A metadramatic study of nine of Shakespeare's plays, focusing on aesthetic metaphors created by the union of the playwright, actor-character, and audience.
If in the theater the rehearsal process is a way of "discovering" the play, of suggesting alternative readings, would the same hold true if the critic encountered works like Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, or Quad by going through the actual process of filming and then editing them?
The work focuses on the practical and philosophic sides of performance, set within the context of Beckett's own aesthetic theory, his fiction and poetry, as well as a history of the critical and scholarly studies of his work. Winner of the Bucknell University Press Award.
A metadramatic study of nine of Shakespeare's plays, focusing on aesthetic metaphors created by the union of the playwright, actor-character, and audience.
The storyteller has a fascinating place in our world. Storyteller Sidney Homan tells tales of growing up in Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50saâ'¬accounts of Bruzzy the Bully; of John Crapp, the television salesman; of Leslie Doober and his rotten banana; of drunken Uncle Eddie, and of the Queen of the mushrooms. Sometimes comic, sometimes bittersweet, A Fish in the Moonlight illuminates the growth of both storyteller and listener.
In How and Why We Teach Shakespeare, 19 distinguished college teachers and directors draw from their personal experiences and share their methods and the reasons why they teach Shakespeare. The collection is divided into four sections: studying the text as a script for performance; exploring Shakespeare by performing; implementing specific techniques for getting into the plays; and working in different classrooms and settings. The contributors offer a rich variety of topics, including: working with cues in Shakespeare, such as line and mid-line endings that lead to questions of interpretation seeing Shakespeare’s stage directions and the Elizabethan playhouse itself as contributing to a play’s meaning using the "gamified" learning model or cue-cards to get into the text thinking of the classroom as a rehearsal playing the Friar to a student’s Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet teaching Shakespeare to inner-city students or in a country torn by political and social upheavals. For fellow instructors of Shakespeare, the contributors address their own philosophies of teaching, the relation between scholarship and performance, and—perhaps most of all—why in this age the study of Shakespeare is so important.
In this performance criticism, the author examines his own work in the theatre as actor and director, as well as that of others. The book offers a topical approach to various issues, both artisitc and philosophical, involved in staging modern dramatists.
Pinter's Odd Man Out records Sidney Homan's experience directing the playwright's Old Times for both stage and television. His most commercially successful play, and surely one of his best, no other work of Pinter's has generated more critical and scholarly commentary - or more varied, sometimes conflicting readings." "In the two opening chapters Homan surveys the theatrical and critical history of the play before describing the "generic" world of Pinter that provides the context of Old Times: secluded rooms, their occupants, and the visitor who, in seeking entrance, challenges the room's exclusive yet deceptive serenity; the outside and the threat it poses; the subtext pressing on the dialogue; the power of the past and perception; the "presence" of the play itself; characters who function as artists; the issue of gender; mother and father figures; and the silence of Pinter's pauses." "Homan then describes his company's preparations for the performance, ranging from the director's concept, the set, props, costumes, lighting, and music to blocking and the rehearsal period. After his own account of the stage production and the ways in which the audience "taught" the performers through their reactions to and discoveries about the play, Homan turns to his actors (Stephanie Dugan, Thomas Pender, and Sandra Langsner) who, in their own words, describe how they wrestled with the characters of Kate, Deeley, and Anna from rehearsals to performance." "A chapter on "The Camera as Guest" records the experience of filming the stage play. Here the focus is on the technological and aesthetic differences between the media of television and the stage, and what effect such differences had on the filmed version of Old Times. To what degree does the camera allow the director to assert more control? What changes in blocking, set, and lighting were required?" "In an appendix Homan looks at Carol Reed's 1950s film Odd Man Out, which figures prominently in Old Times, and which may have been a source (in a highly flexible use of that term) for the play." "On the surface, Pinter's Odd Man Out concentrates on a single play. In reality, it is about the ways in which people in the theatre approach a production, the process they go through from rehearsals to opening night, and the complex interaction among playwright, director, actors, and audience. It also raises the issue of what happens when a work intended for the stage is translated to another medium, such as television. If the book at times suggests that the worlds of the scholar and the theatre professional are different, indeed incompatible in some ways, it also shows how the two professions can learn from each other."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This book brings the study of American politics and government alive by presenting American politics as a dramatic narrative of conflict and change. It adopts an American political development approach in order to show how the past, present, and visions of the future interact to shape governing institutions and political forces. There is a strong emphasis on the role of ideas. Two key political development principles - path dependency and critical choice - are central to explaining how and why the past affects the present and future. Each chapter begins with an opening vignette that epitomizes the key themes of the chapter. The book's developmental approach does not diminish the attention it gives to current matters but it does provide a richer context for the appreciation and understanding of the whole gamut of attitudes, behaviors, organizational activities, and institutional relationships that comprise American political and governmental life.
Contact and clash, amalgamation and accommodation, resistance and change have marked the history of the Caribbean islands. It is a unique region where people under the stress of slavery had to improvise, invent and literally create forms of human association through which their pasts and the symbolic interpretation of their present could be structured. Caribbean Transformations is divided into three major parts, each preceded by a brief introductory chapter. Part One begins with a look at the African antecedents of the Caribbean, then discusses slavery and the plantation system. Two chapters deal with slavery and forced labor in Puerto Rico and the history of a Puerto Rican plantation. Part Two is concerned with the rise of a Caribbean peasantry--the erstwhile slaves who separated themselves from the plantation system on small plots of land. This creative adaptation led to the growth of a class of rural landowners producing a large part of their own subsistence but also selling to and buying from wider markets. Mintz first discusses the origins of reconstructed peasantries, and then proceeds to the specifics of the origins and history of the peasantry in Jamaica. Part Three turns to Caribbean nationhood--the political and economic forces that affected its shaping and the social structure of its component societies. A separate chapter details the case of Haiti. The book ends with a critique of the implications of Caribbean nationhood from an anthropological perspective, stressing the ways that class, color and other social dimensions continue to play important parts in the organization of Caribbean societies. Caribbean Transformations--lucidly written and presenting broad coverage of both time and space--is essential reading for anthropologists, sociologists, historians and all others interested in the Caribbean, in black studies, in colonial problems, in the relationships between colonial areas and the imperial powers, and in culture change generally. Sidney W. Mintz is currently professor emeritus, department of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He founded the department there in 1975. He has done extensive field research in Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Haiti, as well as in Iran. He recently launched a research program in Hong Kong to study the consumption and production of soybean and is now examining soy products in the United States.
As Sidney Greidanus points out, the biblical book of Ecclesiastes is especially relevant for our contemporary culture because it confronts such secular enticements as materialism, hedonism, cut-throat competition, and self-sufficiency. But how can preachers best convey the ancient Teacher's message to congregations today? A respected expert in both hermeneutics and homiletics, Greidanus does preachers a great service here by providing the foundations for a series of expository sermons on Ecclesiastes. He walks students and preachers through the steps from text to sermon for all of the book's fifteen major literary units, explores various ways to move from Ecclesiastes to Jesus Christ in the New Testament, and offers insightful expositions that help the preacher in sermon production but omit the theoretical and often impractical discussions in many commentaries.
Originally published in 1990, Medieval English Drama is an exhaustive bibliography of scholarship on medieval English drama. Each item has been annotated in the bibliography with considerable care; these annotations are descriptive rather than critical and give a clear synopsis of the content of each reference, the texts with which it deals, and a brief indication of its critical position. The bibliography is divided into two sections; editions and collections of plays, and critical works. The bibliography is exhaustive rather than selective and provides English annotations for foreign language works, as well as a list of reviews for most books. The book covers liturgical and folk drama, other forms of entertainment, and related material useful to researchers in the field. The book provides an update of sources not listed in Carl J. Stratman's comprehensive Bibliography of Medieval Drama published in 1972.
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