Conversations with Thornton Wilder

Conversations with Thornton Wilder PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878055142
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Collected interviews with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright most widely known today for his play, Our Town

Conversations with Thornton Wilder

Conversations with Thornton Wilder PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878055142
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Collected interviews with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright most widely known today for his play, Our Town

Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder PDF Author: Penelope Niven
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062097776
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 791

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Book Description
"Thornton Wilder: A Life brings readers face to face with the extraordinary man who made words come alive around the world, on the stage and on the page." —James Earl Jones, actor "Comprehensive and wisely fashioned….A splendid and long needed work." —Edward Albee, playwright Thornton Wilder—three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, creator of such enduring stage works as Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and beloved novels like Bridge of San Luis Ray and Theophilus North—was much more than a pivotal figure in twentieth century American theater and literature. He was a world-traveler, a student, a teacher, a soldier, an actor, a son, a brother, and a complex, intensely private man who kept his personal life a secret. In Thornton Wilder: A Life, author Penelope Niven pulls back the curtain to present a fascinating, three-dimensional portrait one of America's greatest playwrights, novelists, and literary icons.

Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature

Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature PDF Author: Stephen J. Rojcewicz
Publisher: Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies
ISBN: 9781032014654
Category : Classical literature
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This book delineates how Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), a learned playwright and novelist, embeds himself within the classical tradition, integrating Greek and Roman motifs with a wide range of sources to produce heart-breaking masterpieces such as Our Town and comedy sensations such as Dolly Levi. Through this study of archival sources and close reading, readers will understand Wilder's avant-garde staging and innovative time sequences not as a break with the past, but as a response to the classics. The author traces the genesis of unforgettable characters like Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker, Emily Webb in Our Town, and George Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth. Vergil's expression, Here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart haunts Wilder's oeuvre. Understanding Vergil's phrase as tears for the beauty of the world, Wilder utilizes scenes depicting the beauty of the world and the sorrow when individuals recognize this too late. Wilder exhorts us to observe lovingly, alert to the wonder of the everyday. This work will appeal to actors and directors, professors and students in classics and in American literature, those fascinated by modern drama and performance studies, and non-specialists, theatre-goers, and readers in the general public.

Another Day's Begun

Another Day's Begun PDF Author: Howard Sherman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350123463
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
A work of startling originality when it debuted in 1938, Thornton Wilder's Our Town evolved to be seen by some as a vintage slice of early 20th Century Americana, rather than being fully appreciated for its complex and eternal themes and its deceptively simple form. This unique and timely book shines a light on the play's continued impact in the 21st century and makes a case for the healing powers of Wilder's text to a world confronting multiple crises. Through extensive interviews with more than 100 artists about their own experience of the play and its impact on them professionally and personally – and including background on the play's early years and its pervasiveness in American culture – Another Day's Begun shows why this particular work remains so important, essential, and beloved. Every production of Our Town has a story to tell beyond Wilder's own. One year after the tragedy of 9/11, Paul Newman, in his final stage appearance, played the Stage Manager in Our Town on Broadway. Director David Cromer's 2008 Chicago interpretation would play in five more cities, ultimately becoming New York's longest-running Our Town ever. In 2013, incarcerated men at Sing Sing Correctional Facility brought Grover's Corners inside a maximum security prison. After the 2017 arena bombing in Manchester UK, the Royal Exchange Theatre chose Our Town as its offering to the stricken community. 80 years after it was written, more than 110 years after its actions take place, Our Town continues to assert itself as an essential play about how we must embrace and appreciate the value of life itself. Another Day's Begun explains how this American classic has the power to inspire, heal and endure in the modern day, onstage and beyond.

Conversations with August Wilson

Conversations with August Wilson PDF Author: Jackson R. Bryer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781578068302
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his "four B's"-- the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards--Publisher description.

The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II

The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
ISBN: 1559368144
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The publication of volume two of this landmark collection celebrates the close of the centennial year of Thornton Wilder's birth. This volume collects 17 plays from the author's three-minute and five-minute plays for five actors series and includes the full-length play The Alcestiad, a major work by the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth which has long been unavailable.

Conversations with Sam Shepard

Conversations with Sam Shepard PDF Author: Jackson R. Bryer
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496837118
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943–2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593470958
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 103

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Book Description
This Pulitzer Prize-winning, fable-like short novel—by the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth—has been beloved around the world for nearly a century. This splendid and profoundly moving novel begins with a simple and seemingly senseless tragedy. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." A traveling monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe and becomes obsessed with investigating the lives of the five victims in order to prove that their deaths had meaning. His mission is doomed to fail, but over the course of the story, the five unlucky individuals—a noblewoman, a maid, an orphan, an old man, and a child—come to life for the reader in all of their glorious complexity. Their intertwined lives—snuffed out in one shattering moment—illuminate the biggest questions that we can ask ourselves about the nature of love and meaning of the human condition.

The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder

The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: Theatre Communications Grou
ISBN: 9781559361316
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Volume One of the collected short plays by one of the greatest American playwrights of the Twentieth Century.

The Angel that Troubled the Waters

The Angel that Troubled the Waters PDF Author: Thornton Wilder
Publisher: New York Coward-McCann 1928.
ISBN:
Category : Art, Classical
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
In his Foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, published in 1928, Wilder explained that almost all the playlets in the book are religious, "but religious in that dilute fashion that is a believer's concession to a contemporary standard of good manners." He wanted to explore religious themes and questions without being preachy, or didactic ... In fact, it was often his intention in such playlets as this one to stand the biblical story on its head -to shake up the language, as it were. He also said--about his plays dealing with religious themes and stories--that in "these matters beyond logic, beauty is the only persuasion."--Www.throntonwilder.com.