TPP 3310C - Directing for Theatre I

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Part 1. Introductory concepts. Developing your directorial vision ; The role of the director -- Part 2. Play analysis and its application. Introduction to play analysis ; Plot : how a play is constructed ; Character : the people of the play ; Thought : the idea of the play ; Diction : the language of the play ; Music : the sounds of a play ; Spectacle : the visual aspects of production -- Part 3. Preparing for production. The prompt book ; Auditions ; Casting ; Planning the rehearsal schedule -- Part 4. Rehearsing the production. Working with actors, part one : guidelines for rehearsals ; Working with actors, part two : developing character ; The ground plan ; Blocking the play, part one : principles ; Blocking the play, part two : techniques ; Rhythm, tempo, and pace ; Working with actors, part three : problem solving

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In this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores the multiple and overlapping meanings of performance, showing how it can convey everything from artistic, economic, and sexual performance, to providing ways of understanding how race, gender, identity, and power are performed.

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"Notes from the Field--originally performed as a one-person play--portrays a host of real-life figures who have witnessed, experienced, and fought the system that pushes students of color out of the classroom and into prisons. (As Smith put it in a recent interview: "Stuff that for middle-class kids or rich kids, it'd be considered mischief; for poor kids, it's really that road to prison.") We are introduced to these figures one by one: Sherrilyn Iffil, president of the NAACP; Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who spoke at the funeral of Freddie Gray; Niya Kenny, a high school student who was arrested for defending a classmate against a teacher's overzealous discipline; Bree Newsome, the activist who made headlines when she removed the Confederate flag from the state house grounds of South Carolina; and many others. Taken together, these voices bear powerful witness to a great injustice of our time--and inspire us with their accounts of perseverance, resistance, and progress"

Translated by David French
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Broadway Theater Archive, 116 minutes
Directors: John Desmond, Nikos Psacharopoulos
Performers: David Clennon, Blythe Danner, Olympia Dukakis, George Ede, Lee Grant, Frank Langella, Kevin McCarthy, Marian Mercer, William Swetland, Louis Zorich

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At the start of the Great Recession, one of the last auto stamping plants in Detroit is on shaky ground. Each of the workers have to make choices on how to move forward if their plant goes under. Shanita has to decide how she'll support herself and her unborn child, Faye has to decide how and where she'll live, and Dez has to figure out how to make his ambitious dreams a reality. Power dynamics shift as their manager Reggie is torn between doing right by his work family, and by the red tape in his office. Powerful and tense, Skeleton Crew is the third of Dominique Morisseau's Detroit cycle trilogy.

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New York. Today. Corporate lawyer Amir Kapoor is happy, in love, and about to land the biggest career promotion of his life. But beneath the veneer, success has come at a price. When Amir and his artist wife, Emily, host an intimate dinner party at their Upper East Side apartment, what starts out as a friendly conversation soon escalates into something far more damaging.

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A young playwright, Thomas, has written an adaptation of the 1870 novel Venus in Fur by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (after whom the term "masochism" was coined); the novel is the story of an obsessive adulterous relationship between a man and the mistress to whom he becomes enslaved. At the end of a long day in which the actresses Thomas auditions fail to impress him, in walks Vanda, very late and seemingly clueless, but she convinces him to give her a chance. As they perform scenes from Thomas's play, and Vanda the actor and Vanda the character gradually take control of the audition, the lines between writer, actor, director, and character begin to blur. Vanda is acting . . . or perhaps she sees in Thomas a masochist, one who desires fantasy in "real life" while writing fantasies for a living. An exploration of gender roles and sexuality, in which desire twists and turns in on itself, Venus in Fur is also a witty, unsettling look at the art of acting--onstage and off.