Best Play & Scriptwriting Writing Reference Books
Here you will get Best Play & Scriptwriting Writing Reference Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Character: The Art of Role and Cast Design for Page, Stage, and Screen
Author: by Robert Mckee
Twelve (May 25, 2021)
English
336 pages
The long-awaited third volume of Robert McKee’s trilogy on the art of fiction. Following up his perennially bestselling writers’ guide Story and his inspiring exploration of the art of verbal action in Dialogue, the most sought-after expert in the storytelling brings his insights to the creation of compelling characters and the design of their casts.
CHARACTER explores the design of a character universe: The dimensionality, complexity and arcing of a protagonist, the invention of orbiting major characters, all encircled by a cast of service and supporting roles.
2. My Broken Language: A Memoir
Author: by Quiara Alegría Hudes
One World (April 6, 2021)
English
336 pages
GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK The Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright and co-writer of In the Heights tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse.
Quiara Alegria Hudes is in her own league. Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories. Lin-Manuel Miranda, award-winning creator of Hamilton and In the Heights Quiara Alegra Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced in her grandmother’s tight North Philly kitchen.
She was awed by her aunts and uncles and cousins, but haunted by the secrets of the family and the unspoken, untold stories of the barrioeven as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars.
Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their storiesbut first she’d have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She’d have to find her language.
3. Working on a Song: The Lyrics of HADESTOWN
Author: by Anaïs Mitchell
Plume
English
272 pages
“Working On A Song is one of the best books about lyric writing for the theater I’ve read.”Lin-Manuel MirandaAnas Mitchell named to TIME’s List of the 100 Most Influential People in the World of 2020An illuminating book of lyrics and stories from Hadestownthe winner of eight Tony Awards, including Best Musicalfrom its author, songwriter Anas Mitchell with a foreword by Steve Earle On Broadway, this fresh take on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has become a modern classic.
Heralded as The best new musical of the season, by The Wall Street Journal, and Sumptuous.Gorgeous. As good as it gets, by The New York Times, the show was a breakout hit, with its poignant social commentary, and spellbinding music and lyrics.
In this book, Anas Mitchell takes readers inside her more than decade’s-long process of building the musical from the ground updetailing her inspiration, breaking down the lyrics, and opening up the process of creation that gave birth to Hadestown. Fans and newcomers alike will love this deeply thoughtful, revealing look at how the songs from the underground evolved, and became the songs we sing again and again.
4. The Art Of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives
Author: by Lajos Egri
Touchstone
English
320 pages
Learn the basic techniques every successful playwright knows! Amid the hundreds of “how-to” books out there, there have been very few which attempted to analyze the mysteries of play construction. Lajos Egri’s classic, The Art of Dramatic Writing, does just that, with instruction that can be applied equally well to a short story, novel, or screenplay.
Examining a play from the inside out, Egri starts with the heart of any drama: its characters. All good dramatic writing hinges on people and their relationships, which serve to move the story forward and give it life, as well as an understanding of human motiveswhy people act the way that they do.
Using examples from everything from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Egri shows how it is essential for the author to have a basic premisea thesis, demonstrated in terms of human behaviorand to develop the dramatic conflict on the basis of that behavior.
Using Egri’s ABCs of premise, character, and conflict, The Art of Dramatic Writing is a direct, jargon-free approach to the problem of achieving truth in writing.
5. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Author: by Tom Stoppard
Grove Press
English
128 pages
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the most enduring and frequently performed plays of contemporary theater and has firmly established itself in the dramatic canon. Acclaimed as a modern masterpiece, it is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm’s-eye view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play.
In Tom Stoppard’s best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, where reality and illusion intermix, and where fate leads our two heroes to a tragic but inevitable end.
Revised and reissued to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the play’s first performance, this definitive edition includes a new introduction and previously unpublished ancillary material.
6. Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays
Author: by David Ball
English
112 pages
0809311100
The best-selling script analysis book for thirty-five years Considered an essential text since its publication thirty-five years ago, this guide for students and practitioners of both theater and literature complements, rather than 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, conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play.
Also included are guides for discovering what the playwright considers a play’ s most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details. Using Shakespeare’s Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for clarifying script-reading techniques as well as exemplifying the kinds of misinterpretation readers can fall prey to by ignoring the craft of the playwright.
7. The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better
Author: by Will Storr
B07WXJTR9Q
March 10, 2020
English
The compelling, groundbreaking guide to creative writing that reveals how the brain responds to storytellingStories shape who we are. They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions and mold our beliefs. Storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human.
So, how do master storytellers compel us? In The Science of Storytelling, award-winning writer and acclaimed teacher of creative writing Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can write better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellersand also our brainscreate worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change.
Will Storr’s superbly chosen examples range from Harry Potter to Jane Austen to Alice Walker, Greek drama to Russian novels to Native American folk tales, King Lear to Breaking Bad to children’s stories. With sections such as The Dramatic Question, Creating a World, and Plot, Endings, and Meaning, as well as a practical, step-by-step appendix dedicated to The Sacred Flaw Approach, The Science of Storytelling reveals just what makes stories work, placing it alongside such creative writing classics as John Yorke’s Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story and Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing.
8. A Raisin in the Sun (Thirtieth Anniversary Edition)
Author: by Lorraine Hansberry
Samuel French, Inc.
English
162 pages
Drama / 7m, 3f, 1 boy / Int. This groundbreaking play starred Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeill, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands in the Broadway production which opened in 1959. Set on Chicago’s South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family: son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena, called Mama.
When her deceased husband’s insurance money comes through, Mama dreams of moving to a new hom
9. Long Day's Journey into Night
Author: by Eugene O'Neill
Yale University Press
English
192 pages
The definitive edition (Boston Globe) of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work. First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies.
This edition includes a foreword by Harold Bloom. By common consent, Long Day’s Journey into Night isEugene O’Neill’s masterpiece…. The helplessness of family love to sustain, let alone heal, the wounds of marriage, of parenthood, and of sonship, have never been so remorselessly and so pathetically portrayed, and with a force of gesture too painful ever to be forgotten by any of us.
Harold Bloom, from the foreword Only an artist of O’Neill’s extraordinary skill and perception can draw the curtain on the secrets of his own family to make you peer into your own. Long Day’s Journey into Night is the most remarkable achievement of one of the world’s greatest dramatists.
10. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
Author: by Ntozake Shange
0684843269
Scribner
English
This revolutionary, award-winning play by a lauded playwright and poet is a fearless portrayal of the experiences of women of colorextraordinary and wonderfulthat anyone can relate to (The New York Times) and continues to move and resonate with readers today more than ever.
From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country.
Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975 when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing… Every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come.
Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
11. The Inheritance
Author: by Matthew Lopez
English
336 pages
0571362265
Inspired by E.M.Forster’s novel Howards End, and set in New York three decades after the height of the AIDS epidemic, The Inheritance wrestles with what it means to be a gay man today, exploring relationships and connections across age and social class and asking what one generation’s responsibilities may be to the next.
Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance premiered at the Young Vic Theatre, London, in 2018, before transferring to the West End’s Noel Coward Theatre. It premiered on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 2019. This edition includes revisions made for the Broadway production.
12. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Author: by Edward Albee
Berkley (March 1, 1983)
English
272 pages
NOTE: This ISBN has been Revised by the Author for The 2005 Broadway Revival. Twelve times a week, answered Uta Hagen, when asked how often she’d like to play Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like her, audiences and critics alike could not get enough of Edward Albee’s masterful play.
A dark comedy, it portrays husband and wife George and Martha in a searing night of dangerous fun and games. By the evening’s end, a stunning, almost unbearable revelation provides a climax that has shocked audiences for years. With the play’s razor-sharp dialogue and the stripping away of social pretense, Newsweek rightly foresaw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
As a brilliantly original work of artan excoriating theatrical experience, surging with shocks of recognition and dramatic fire [that] will be igniting Broadway for some time to come.
13. The Idea: The Seven Elements of a Viable Story for Screen, Stage or Fiction
Author: by Erik Bork
Overfall Press
English
226 pages
Most screenwriting books tend to focus on story structure, scene writing, navigating the business, and other parts of the craft that come AFTER the initial choice of the central concept for a story. Multiple Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning writer/producer Erik Bork (HBO’s Band of Brothers) takes a different approach.
His experience in the industry and as a screenwriting professor and coach have led him to recognize that it’s the selection of the initial idea that is the most important part of the process – with the most impact on the project’s chance of success.
And as Mr. Bork knows from experience, this choice takes a lot more understanding and work to get “right” than it might seem. Most screenwriters and fiction writers have difficulty getting their work read and accepted by agents, editors and producers mainly because their idea for a story presented in a query or pitch doesn’t excite these “gatekeepers” like it would need to, for them to want to engage.
And when they do read the whole story, their core reasons for “passing” are usually also about the basic idea (although lack of professional-level execution matters, too). But writers are usually in the dark about this, not realizing that the project they spent months or years on had fundamental flaws on a concept level, in the eyes of the people they most hoped to impress with it.
14. Tom Stoppard: A Life
Author: by Hermione Lee
Knopf (February 23, 2021)
English
896 pages
One of our most brilliant biographers takes on one of our greatest living playwrights, drawing on a wealth of new materials and on many conversations with him. One of our most brilliant biographers takes on one of our greatest living playwrights, drawing on a wealth of new materials and on many conversations with himTom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure.
Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations-Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love-remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at age eight. Skipping university, he embarked on a brilliant career, becoming close friends over the years with an astonishing array of writers, actors, directors, musicians, and political figures, from Peter O’Toole, Harold Pinter, and Stephen Spielberg to Mick Jagger and Vclav Havel.
