Modern Theatre Practice: A Handbook for Nonprofessionals - Third Edition

501 pages indexed. Cloth green boards with gold lettering. Front endpaper has owners name an top right corner torn off. Back endpaper has scribbled pencil notes on both sides. Spine to endpapers slightly loose from use. Cover edges are worn at corners. Interior pages are tight, white and clean. No marks or underlining. January 1946 Edition. With an appendix on costume and make-up by Fairfax Poudfit Walkup, Pasadena Community Playhouse. Textbook style illustrated with black and white photographs, drawings and tables. Views the whole art of play production as a planned and orderly execution of an effective design. Within this design all the elements of a performance acting, scenery, lighting, properties, music, dancing are harmonized and orchestrated toward producing in the audience an aesthetically satisfying emotional effect. In the modern theatre practice no single element in the production of a play may be left unconsidered or allowed to make an inharmonic disturbance in the symphonic effect of the whole. In this there is no question of relative importance; every element is important, for the play the whole performance— is the thing. In this volume the discussion is limited to three of the most important aspects of production: directing, scenery, and lighting, in order to cover each of these subjects more thoroughly than is often done in text books concerned with play production. At the same time the discussion in each case is elementary and comparatively brief, because the book has been planned as a text book for college courses in play production. The material presented and the organization adopted will, however, make it useful as a reference book for directors and other workers in the nonprofessional theatre, and for high school courses in dramatics. Towards those ends the basic fundamentals of directing and production have been treated in a simple and thorough manner.The book should be used as a basis of class discussion and in conjunction with actual practical work in the theatre. In this way it may become a manual and guide to students in the theatre and workshop and a text serving as a basis for lectures and elucidations by the teacher in the classroom. The best results will be obtained when students are assigned practical projects in conjunction with portions of the text under study. Thus, when the class is studying the problems of play selection, each student should be required to prepare a program of plays that may be produced in the theatre and community with which he is familiar. In the study of the designing of the production, each student should be required to make a thorough study of an acceptable play, design a complete production of that play, and incorporate his results in a complete Prompt Book or Director’s Copy. In Three Parts: Part One presents and discusses the nature of the task confronting the director of a theatre. Part Two covers the method of designing and building the senery for a production. Part Three is hte designing of the lighting equipment and the selection and use of the eequipment in executingthe design.…