A concise guide to playwriting to awaken creativity, from a playwright who has taught the subject for over a decade.
"If you want to be a playwright, here's your bible." —David Lindsay-Abaire, author of Fuddy Meers and Wonder of the World
During the more than ten years that Sturt Spencer has taught playwriting, he has struggled to find an effective handbook for his courses. Although most of the currently popular...

On this episode of Camera Three, Sam Shepard, Jerome Max, Herb Gardner, Justin Mamis, and Rosalyn Drexler discuss aspects of their craft. Topics include: becoming a playwright, improving their writing, the audience's role, and helping emerging playwrights.

Useful tips and writing prompts show young writers how to use images to inspire dramatic writing.

On this episode of Camera Three, Rolf Hochhuth and Hannah Arendt examine the controversial themes surrounding Hochhuth's play, The Deputy. Hochhuth provides evidence that Pope Pius XII refused to protest the extermination of the Jews in Germany during the reign of the Third Reich.

This documentary, filmed in a cinema verite style at the National Theatre Conservatory, follows eight student-actors through their first year of the master's degree program, an intensive daily regimen of voice, dance, elocution, and acting instruction. Initially uncomfortable with the strangeness of acting together and with some of the classes, such as trapeze work, the students begin to gel as a group and demonstrate why they were selected out of...

Not long after the start of the 20th century, playwrights, influenced by the horrors of two world wars, began to experiment with theater in a way which depicted many long-held historical, social, and cultural beliefs and practices as being meaningless and chaotic. Incorporating interviews with influential directors Bijan Sheibani, Steven Berkoff, and others, this program traces the evolution of modern theater from its existentialist roots through...

Explore the life and legacy of August Wilson, the playwright some call America's Shakespeare, who chronicled the 20th-century black experience. Features James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Laurence Fishburne, Viola Davis, new dramatic readings and rare footage.

Comedy is the complement of tragedy, and tragedy is one of the oldest forms of ritual in the Western world. However, while tragedy is linked to the sacred, comedy is often linked to the profane and sometimes even the sacrilegious. This program explores comedy, from Aristophanes and Cicero to the Christian ban on humor. The Feast of Fools and Carnival as Christian institutions that celebrate the profane are examined, along with the role of the Fool...

A documentary portrait of this bold theatrical innovator and his work. The program shows his roots and the theatrical and social background of his formative years, and analyzes the development of his vision of the theatre-episode in place of Aristotelian plot, the use of nonliterary devices, new techniques in character portrayal, and new aims for the very concept of theatre.

David Hugh Jones directs the adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's 1897 play. The American Revolutionary war is in its second year, affecting even the smallest communities. In a New Hampshire village, Dick Dudgeon, the "black sheep" of his family, believes in the right to happiness and proclaims himself a rebel against the British. Despite Dick's self-proclaimed apostasy, the local minister Anthony Anderson treats him with courtesy. When soldiers mistake...