Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays - Softcover

David Ball

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809311100 ISBN 13: 9780809311101

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983

Synopsis

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. Of immense utility to those who want to put plays on the stage (actors, directors, designers, production specialists) Backwards & Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.
 

About this title

About the Author

David Ball wrote Backwards and Forwards when he was  Professor of playwriting, acting, theater history, and literature at Carnegie-Mellon University. He had earlier been on the senior directing and literary staffs at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and more recently was Head of Drama at Duke University during that department's "Golden Years." His students have gone on to win  Emmies, Oscars, Obies, and Tony awards in every area of theater, TV, and film.  Backwards and Forwards has been the field's standard text for a quarter century, making Dr. Ball one of the most influential and respected of theater and film theorists, educators, and trainers of his generation. His own professional directing, producing, and writing credits encompass Broadway, off-Broadway, regional theater, and film; and his landmark adaptation of Moliere's The Miser was staged in major regional theaters from coast to coast as one of Theatre de la Jeune Lune's Tony-award-winning productions.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809311100
• ISBN 13: 9780809311101
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112