The Importance of Being Earnest (Dover Thrift Editions) Review

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(More customer reviews)One thing happens when you read Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest"; you are amazed to remember that this play was authored over 100 years ago. For most plays of that era, the average reader tends to lose references and it tends to be stodgy and irrelevant. Not so Earnest, due to the brilliance and imagination of it's playwright.
The Importance of Being Earnest is a tour de force of comedy, misidentifications, and farce. Algernon and Jack are friends, and each has invented an imaginary person as an excuse of getting out of engagements. Jack's person is Ernest, a brother with a wild past. The two conspire to woo the ladies that they love, and through a series of happenstances, must gently deceive to get want they want. The end result is a play of uncomperable quality, chock full of witticisms that are highly quotable out of context. In fact, I dare suggest the entire play is quotable, such its brilliance.
Wilde pulled no punches when writing Earnest. Often, when a play is filled with memorable quotes, it takes away from the realism of the scenes because the characters then become merely conduits for the writer's intellect. Not so in Earnest. Wilde manages to make the characters say exactly what they would say in each situation, true to their persona. That alone is quite an accomplishment, one not often seen.
Misidentities, witty banter, love, all conspire to one of English's most brilliant comedies ever to have seen the stage. We should be so lucky the world had Oscar Wilde in it, and even more so, that he wrote at all.

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Witty and buoyant comedy of manners is brilliantly plotted from its effervescent first act to its hilarious denouement, and filled with some of literature's most famous epigrams. Widely considered Wilde's most perfect work, the play is reprinted here from an authoritative early British edition. Note to the Dover Edition.

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All in the Timing: Fourteen Plays Review

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(More customer reviews)So what if Christopher Durang, Dorothy Parker and David Sedaris combined DNA? You just might get David Ives.
Witty and cerebral, Ives comments on relationships, language and mortality in some of the cleverest one-acts to ever find their way into print. All the works have a Tom Stoppardian-esque command of the English language. Especially in "Foreplay, Or The Art of the Fugue" and "Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread" is his impeccable command of ordering words into almost symphonic patterns best displayed.(Hey, it also helps to know a little about Philip Glass, who was a postmodern musical innovator and it is his musical phrasing Ives mimics in "...Buys A Loaf...")
Some of these plays deal with modern relationships. "Sure Thing" continually backtracks the forming of its 2 characters' relationship with each other by allowing them unlimited "re-dos" when they make a social or relational faux pas, until the "perfect" pattern for falling in love is found.
"Ancient History" is perhaps my favorite out of all the plays. It has two very real, very funny, very sympathetic romantic characters that will constantly remind you of yourself. Jack and Ruth argue, banter and raise issues we're all familiar with in a way that makes you laugh until you realize how sad it really is.
Ives has no trouble taking fellow playwrights down a peg or two as well. "Speed-The-Play" requires an elementary knowledge of David Mamet to really appreciate how hilarious (and accurate) it is.
All of the other pieces are wonderful and hilarious. "English Made Simple" and "Variations on the Death of Trotsky" were probably meant to be read anyway. "Mere Mortals" is a witty commentary on man's ego and inner thought life. "Words, Words, Words" is an exestential little work where Ives explores the actual possiblity of chimps, left alone with typewriters long enough, cranking out 'Hamlet'.
Think of it as excersize for your mind. Do a few yoga stretches and enjoy!

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The world according to David Ives is a very add place, and his plays constitute a virtual stress test of the English language -- and of the audience's capacity for disorientation and delight. Ives's characters plunge into black holes called "Philadelphias," where the simplest desires are hilariously thwarted. Chimps named Milton, Swift, and Kafka are locked in a room and made to re-create Hamlet. And a con man peddles courses in a dubious language in which "hello" translates as "velcro" and "fraud" comes out as "freud."At once enchanting and perplexing, incisively intelligent and side-splittingly funny, this original paperback edition of Ives's plays includes "Sure Thing," "Words, Words, Words," "The Universal Language," "Variations on the Death of Trotsky," "The Philadelphia," "Long Ago and Far Away," "Foreplay, or The Art of the Fugue," "Seven Menus," "Mere Mortals," "English Made Simple," "A Singular Kinda Guy," "Speed-the-Play," "Ancient History," and "Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread."

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24 Favorite One Act Plays Review

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(More customer reviews)The book was very cool. In fact it was so kooky that I could not put it down. I was able to use it in all of my eighth grade classess. I am a language arts teacher at Turlock Junior High, and it was extremly easy to find a 'cool' play that related to what we were learning at the time. I have been using this book for about 10 years now, and I have never grown old of it. My class this year has recently used it to put on a few short plays for the rest of the school.

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Two dozen classic dramas by some of the finest and most famous playwrights of the last hundred years--Anton Chekhov, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, and A.A. Milne.

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Sam Shepard : Seven Plays (Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, La Turista, Tongues, Savage Love, True West) Review

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(More customer reviews)These are the best dark comedy plays I have ever seen. The true west is a work of art. All of these plays are top of the line. Dark comedy at it's best. If you are an actor, or just interested in the arts I suggest this book. You won't find this many well written plays in one book in a long time. Sam Shepard is a true genius.

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Brilliant, prolific, uniquely American, Pulitzer prizewinning playwright Sam Separd is a major voice in contemporary theatre.And here are seven of his very best."One of the most original, prolific and gifted dramatists at work today."—The New Yorker"The greatest American playwright of his generation...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft, [he] is the writer whose work most accurately maps the interior and exterior landscapes of his society."—New York Magazine"If plays were put in time capsules, future generations would get a sharp-toothed profile of life in the U.S. in the past decade and a half from the works of Sam Shepard."—Time"Sam Shepard is the most exciting presence in the movie world and one of the most gifted writers ever to work on the American stage."—Marsha Norman, Pulitzer prizewinning author of ‘Night, Mother."One of our best and most challenging playwrights...his plays are a form of exorcism: magical, sometimes surreal rituals that grapple with the demonic forces in the American landscape."—Newsweek"His plays are stunning in thier originality, defiant and inscrutable."—Esquire"Sam Shepard is phenomenal..the best practicing American playwright."—The New Republic

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Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays Review

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(More customer reviews)David Ball's book on script analysis should be read and understood by anyone who directs plays. He explains how to read a play through the very simple technique of reading it from start to finish--and then backwards, from finish to start. By doing so, he points out, the reader learns how one scene leads logically and progressively to the next. While the concept is simple and straightforward, you have to read Ball's book to see how this process can be used to ferret out every important detail of plot and character development.

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This guide to playreading for students and practitioners of both theater and literature complements, rather then contradicts or repeats, traditional methods of literary analysis of scripts.Ball developed his method during his work as Literary Director at the Guthrie Theater, building his guide on the crafts playwrights of every period and style use to make their plays stageworthy. The text is full of tools for students and practitioners to use as they investigate plot, character, theme, exposition, imagery, motivation/obstacle/conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play. He includes guides for discovering what the playwright considers the play's most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details.Using Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for illustrating script-reading techniques as well as examples of the kinds of misinterpretation readers can fall prey to by ignoring the craft of the playwright. Of immense utility to those who want to put plays on the stage (actors, directors, designers, production specialists) Backwards and Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.

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Tom Stoppard: Plays 5 : Arcadia, The Real Thing, Night & Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a great collection of Tom Stoppard plays, and includes some of his best works.
Arcadia is one of Stoppard's greatest plays - a bizarre combination of physics, mathematics, poetry, a good old-fashioned academic stoush and romance (or lust) to boot. A fantastic play to see, but very good to read also.
The Real Thing, Hapgood and Indian Ink are also among Stoppard's more mature and better plays, and nicely round out this collection. These are some of Stoppard's better known plays (and you can read reviews of them on their own pages) but I'll just summarise by saying that I think they are fantastic.
Night and Day is an earlier Stoppard play and maybe not quite as good - it is concerned with journalism in war-torn Africa and does take a deep look at issues faced by a journalist in that situation. However, in comparison to the other plays in this volume, it just doesn't seem quite as good - however it is still a fine play in its own right and does make for interesting reading nonetheless.
Overall, I definitely reccomend this volume, particularly since it's cheaper than buying each of the plays individually.

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Plays Five:ArcadiaThe Real ThingNight & Day; Indian Ink; Hapgood This fifth collection of Tom Stoppard's plays brings together five classic plays by one of the most celebrated dramatists writing in the English language.Arcadia received the Evening Standard, the Oliver, and the Critics Awards and The Real Thing won a Tony Award.

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