![]() It feels good, since my last update in December was a hard one for us. Pair this skill set with application to texts such as plays, which are made all the more difficult by the fact that the playwright thinks in terms more of making their production work when produced for an audience and less of making their script read and be easily graspable completely on the page, and this manual becomes immeasurably more useful on a basic and elemental level.This week we have taken two steps forward, zero backwards. Without having a defined sense of the tools contained within this book, these tasks would be much more difficult, complicated, vague and roundabout, thus slowing, weakening or perhaps ruining the final product. This skill can be taken and applied in various ways (as Ball describes in the introduction), some of which are immeasurably improved by the complex understanding that posessing these refined elements provides the reading a play to produce it, for example, or the writing of one yourself can be tremendously improved if one is constantly aware of what they are doing, why they're doing it, and what about their actions are correct, lacking, unnecessary or obtrusive. But Ball breaks down this seemingly natural sense into its component elements and explains them in easily digestible, well-paced segments, and to examine these elements does much in the way of re-learning and thus refining and fine-tuning one's seemingly natural reading skill. It seems like reading would require no specific techniques, that they would come naturally to one and go without saying, even when the task is more specified, as in the reading of plays. David Ball has done the theatre a great service by writing this valuable book. There is a great need to get back to basics. ![]() I think this book should be compulsory reading for the director, but it is also valuable to the playwright, the actor and the designer. He makes a point and then moves on to the next one. He does not pad the book by going off on tangents or use long anecdotes to illustrate a point. His advice is very straightforward and concise. Ball tells prospective directors what's important and how to recognize what's important. So many bad productions are bad simply because of a basic misreading of the script. So in very few pages, author David Ball gives some valuable and (I would say, essential) advice. There are 96 pages in this book and many of them are only partially filled. More specifically, it's about how to read a play whose production you are planning. ![]() The scope of BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS is narrow, but its ambition is important. 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. 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. 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. 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. The best-selling script analysis book for thirty-five yearsĬonsidered 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.īall 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.
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