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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
Excellent and easy to read.:
I've been acting for ten years and got my first directing assignment. I know a lot about directing from having been directed, but this book was a great guide for script analysis with the big picture in mind, not just one character. The show was a success and the actors still like me.
Immeasurably Useful on a Basic and Elemental Level:
It seems like reading would require no specific techniques, that they would come naturally to one and go without saying, even when the task is more specified, as in the reading of plays. But Ball breaks down this seemingly natural sense into its component elements and explains them in easily digestible, well-paced segments, and to examine these elements does much in the way of re-learning and thus refining and fine-tuning one's seemingly natural reading skill. This skill can be taken and applied in various... more info
Concise fabulous script analysis text:
This book would serve a Script Analysis class very well. I plan to use it for mine in the fall. It also is reader friendly enough to serve an actor/director/designer wanting a different perspective, perhaps, on a script; or could be a different way of explaining what we were generally taught as undergrads.
Short & Oh So Sweet!:
I have read a lot of books on the subjects of writing and acting. This book contains almost every important point in the tens of thousands of pages I have read when it comes to structure. If you are a writer you have to own this book! There is no wasted space in it. No actor or director on the planet should live without it either. You can read it in a day, but you'll read it again and again.
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