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Bookville – Drama & Plays
Handpicked, award-winning Canadian plays and, for the DIY dramaturge, how-to books on theatre from the best in the business.
All Books in this Collection
Showing all 7 results
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among men
$18.951959, Ameliasburgh, Prince Edward County, Canada. On the edge of spring, two men are finishing an A-frame cabin on Roblin Lake. In the coming decade all three of them—Al, Milt, and the A-frame—will become famous and change the face of Canadian poetry. But for now all they have is the stench of sweat, whiskey, and words. From Governor General’s Literary Award–winner David Yee, among men is a poetic and charged portrait of male friendship in uncertain times, and a story of how Canadian literature was changed forever.
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Half-Cracked
$18.95Sisters Sissy and Yewina have been on their own for who knows how long exactly. It’s just them (and their hens) in a weathered farmhouse miles from town. Their rural, woodsy East Coast community has been losing residents for years, but the almost-forgotten stories have lived on for the sisters in different ways. While Yewina is more guarded and level-headed, dreamer Sissy has a flair for twisting fact with fantasy. When Scott, a folklorist from Scottsdale, Arizona, shows up at their door in hopes of chronicling whispers, he’s in for much more of a story than he expected. This unique and quirky ode to folklore storytelling and to small lives lived large illuminates how living our own truths can make us legends.
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Queen Goneril
$18.95Set seven years before King Lear, Queen Goneril centres the struggles of Lear’s daughters as they negotiate patriarchal systems built to keep them relegated to the sidelines. In Goneril, we find a natural-born leader. In Regan, a boundary pusher. And in Cordelia, a reluctant peacekeeper. As the three work to dismantle their individual constraints, a storm of inner reckoning begins to brew that reflects their deepest yearnings and mirrors our contemporary world.
Whip smart and wide awake, Queen Goneril is another deliciously disruptive adaptation from Erin Shields. In her signature revisionist style, Shields investigates some of our most urgent feminist issues by reimagining the roles of women in classic texts—shifting them from subjects, objects, or witnesses to central figures of both their own lives and the story’s narrative. Queen Goneril lays bare the challenges of maintaining authenticity while achieving authority—how we retain a strong sense of self while twisting around systems meant to make us play small. A compelling story about complicated characters struggling—the way we all struggle—to find their place in this world.
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Stages
$24.95Stages is packed with drama exercises and ideas that work, tested on the harshest of criticsÑhigh school students. Laid out in a clear, concise manner, they are categorized according to their purpose.
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Text and Context
$22.95A handbook for script work and directing in the theatre, Text and Context: The Operative Word is essential reading for post-secondary students and young directors in the theatre, as well as an effective resource for other disciplines, including actors, designers, and production personnel. Part 1: Text describes the method of text investigation that Greenblatt has developed and employed over his four-and-a- half decade career, including a variety of exercises. It is a highly pragmatic and non-academic approach to discovering the essence of a script in order to reveal its potential for interesting and unique interpretations. Part 2: Context explores the various ideas, philosophies and precepts Greenblatt uses when directing for the stage, following the order and rhythm of most rehearsal processes. It challenges misconceptions about the position of the director, and debunks traditional assumptions that are harmful to a truly creative and inclusive process. Part 3: New Text examines three genres of theatrical works: Theatre for Young Audiences, New Play Development, and Devised Work, which utilize the principles of text analysis and directing found in the first two parts.
Sprinkled with personal anecdotes, Text and Context: The Operative Word offers theatre practitioners techniques for communication and artistic collaboration, reimagines traditional hierarchical structures, and provides tools to create healthy, truly creative, highly productive, and more equitable processes of theatrical practice.
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Two Ways About It
$22.95Like most Canadian playwrights of his generation, John Lazarus figured out the craft on his own. In doing that, he discovered a technique involving a dual approach: constructing plot on the one hand and improvising dialogue on the other. He’s been using that technique since 1977 and teaching it to others since 1990, and it works–for himself and for generations of Canada’s most successful theatre creators. In this book, John explains each of these “Two Ways” in detail, explaining why your characters won’t invent your story for you, how to construct a plot using cause-and-effect, and how to refine your dialogue for the actors by chewing on it yourself first. He also guides the reader through other aspects of the profession–from current issues around creativity, originality and cultural appropriation, to nuts-and-bolts concerns like script submissions, workshops, readings, rehearsals and opening nights. Informed by over 50 years of professional experience as an award-winning Canadian playwright, teacher and critic, and delivered with John’s breezy, informal style and sense of humour, Two Ways About It will give the beginner a dependable way into the profession and offer the more experienced playwright new and refreshing approaches to the art form.
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William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Radical Retelling
$18.95The title of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It holds a double meaning that teasingly suggests the play can please all tastes. But is that possible? With his subversive updating of the Bard’s classic, Indigenous creator and cultural provocateur Cliff Cardinal seeks to find out. The show exults in bawdy humour, difficult subject matter, and raw emotion; Cardinal is not one to hold back when it comes to challenging delicate sensibilities.