Cutting Plays for Performance: A Practical and Accessible Guide

Cutting Plays for Performance offers a practical guide for cutting a wide variety of classical and modern plays. This essential text offers insight into the various reasons for cutting, methods to serve different purposes (time, audience, story), and suggests ways of communicating cuts to a production team.

Dealing with every aspect of the editing process, it covers structural issues, such as plot beats, rhetorical concepts, and legal considerations, why and when to cut, how to cut with a particular goal in mind such as time constraints, audience and storytelling, and ways of communicating cuts to a production team. A set of practical worksheets to assist with the planning and execution of cuts, as well as step-by-step examples of the process from beginning to end in particular plays help to round out the full range of skills and techniques that are required when approaching this key theatre-making task.

This is the first systematic guide for those who need to cut play texts. Directors, dramaturgs, and teachers at every level from students to seasoned professionals will find this an indispensable tool throughout their careers.

Toby Malone holds a PhD in Shakespearean textual analysis from the University of Toronto and is Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy at the State University of New York at Oswego. Select favorite cuts include The Comedy of Errors (Canadian Stage Company, Toronto), Romeo + Juliet (Driftwood Theatre, Toronto), Hamlet (Variorum) (Poorboy Theatre, Glasgow and Toronto), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Soulpepper, Toronto), #R3 (University of Waterloo), and King Lear (Stratford Festival, Canada). He is a founding partner in subTEXT Dramaturgy Solutions and the Entertainment Engineering Collective, and is an active member of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas and the Dramatists Guild of America.

Aili Huber holds an MFA in directing from Mary Baldwin University and the American Shakespeare Center. She has been directing for over 20 years. Favorite credits include Sperm Donor Wanted with Slow Your Role Theater Co., Romeo and Juliet, The Duchess of Malfi, Antony and Cleopatra, and Richard III with Pigeon Creek Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale at Bridgewater College, Noye’s Fludde at Eastern Mennonite High School, and JB at Eastern Mennonite University. She is an associate member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and the Shakespeare Theater Association, and a Tier 3 member of Directors Gathering.