Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl was born in Chicago in 1974. She studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University and did graduate work at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is among the most acclaimed and accomplished young playwrights on the contemporary scene. "A recent winner of MacArthur "genius" grant, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for the comedy " The Clean House," which has been seen at many regional theaters. Some of her other plays have a particular style that blends a vibrant emotionalism with quirky comedy in theatrically adventurous ways." As of today, Ruhl lives in New York City and is married to a physician at New York University. Sarah wrote her first play in forth grade but it was never produced.

     Ruhl and Mother

Description by Paula Vogel

"Sarah Ruhl came into my intensive advanced playwriting seminar some 15 years ago. A sophomore, but i thought at first she was a senior: she was quiet and serious, but so obviously possessed a mind that came at aesthetics from a unique angle. I assigned an exercise: to write a short play with a dog as protagonist. Sarah Ruhl wrote of her father's death from that unique angle: a dog is waiting by the door, waiting for the family to come home, unaware that the family is at his master's funeral, unaware of the concept of death."
"I have worked with many stunning young voices, but i have been blessed with a continuing conversation with Ruhl over the years. I think of discussions in booths over tea that became talks in bistros in New york and Las Angeles over wine- a hungry exchange of viewpoint and experience, rushed for lack of time, between two playwrights in the field, and now i turn to Sarah as a trusted and beloved colleague who 

still has one of the most unique minds in theater I've encountered."

Discussion with Paula Vogel and these are some interesting words by Sarah Ruhl:

"The longer I do theater, the more shocked I am that you can get the play’s punctuation, the story, the casting, even the director right. Still, you have to deal with variables like: Is this the right audience? Do I have the right month of the year, the right city? Is the right reviewer coming? So much of it is chance in terms of how the aesthetic object is received. Sometimes it makes you just want to write a slim volume of poetry."

"Every production prepares you for the next production, and in that sense it’s cumulative. We think: Oh, New York is definitive. In a way, it’s just another production of one of my plays in another city. I’ve worked so much regionally that it gives me less of a sense of living or dying by one interpretation."

"I come into the theater wanting to feel and think at the same time, to have the thought affect the emotion and the emotion affect the thought. That is the pinnacle of a great night at the theater."

" I felt that theater was actually a place where the voice could be attached to emotion. Theater is still a living tradition of speech and emotion. It’s something that deeply attracts me."

"I’ve worked with so many actors with different methods and vocabularies. In almost all the productions I’ve had, it’s been the usual mode: You cast the play out of L.A. and New York, and the actors meet each other on the first day of rehearsal. I’ve been very pleased and honored and moved by the integrity of all the productions. But I’d like to discover what would happen if I worked with the same actors and designers over and over in a concentrated way. If the actor and I were able to know exactly what we meant if I said, “Give this line a little more space.” As opposed to one actor who thinks space is a subtext and another who thinks space is a technical pause."

"I had a remarkable time going to the Goodman production of The Clean House, directed by Jessica Thebus. It was exactly the play and yet more so, because there were elements I would never have thought of that were so sublime. For instance, there’s a scene where Lane, a doctor married to a doctor, imagines her husband kissing the breast of his new lover, who is one of his patients. The stage direction says, “Ana wears a gown. Is it a hospital gown or a ballroom gown?” Well, Marilyn Dodds Frank, who plays Ana, walked out in a renaissance ball gown made of lavender hospital-gown material. It had a train that was about 20 yards long. So she begins walking out in this purple gown, and it just keeps coming and coming and coming. I would never have thought of that. That was a high point of my life really, watching that production and thinking: They really read my mind. Also, the living room was very architectural, spare and abstract. There had been a beautiful skylight in Act One and in the second act it cantilevered down and became the balcony. It was so shocking—you wouldn’t think that it could just come out of the air like that. The designer completely understood abstraction and transformation of space."

"This is why I love having a baby. Anna laughs at things, even though she doesn’t understand language. I think that at the most primal level, the intention to be funny, to share wit, is beyond language. When I wrote The Clean House and began it with the joke in Portuguese that probably no one would understand, that was part of the impulse. But people do laugh. Some nights they don’t; that’s a night when we’re in trouble."

Sources: 

http://www.bombsite.com/issues/99/articles/2902

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Ruhl

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/sarah_ruhl/index.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4967202

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=sarah%20ruhl&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufddr9k6rbE

Conor McPherson

Conor McPherson was born in Dublin in 1971 and is an Irish playwright and director.  He was educated at the University College Dublin, however, "he hated school and didn't impress his teachers."

"McPherson did well on his exams and went on to do a Masters in Philosophy and ended up teaching ethics for two years.  During his time there he began acting, writing, and directing for the theatre."  McPherson began writing his first plays at University College of Dublin, but they never received a professional production outside UCS.  A little later, however, he found Fly By Night Theatre Company whom produced many of his plays.  He is considered by many to be one of the best contemporary Irish playwrights.  He has gotten great reviews and has performed his plays internationally.  

In 2006, McPherson made his National Theatre debut as both an actor and director with The Seafarer at the Cottesloe getting nominated for both the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Play.  In 2007, McPherson came to Broadway as director, receiving rare reviews including statements like "McPherson is quite possibly the finest playwright of his generation."

Honors/Awards:

The Weir won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play for 1999.

Shinning City in 2006 and was nominated for two Tony Awards, including Best Play.

The Seafarer- nominated for both the Olivier and Evening Standards Awards for Best Play.

The Seafarer was also recognized for a Tony Award in 2008 for Best Featured Actor. 

Saltwater won the CICAE award for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival.

List of Films:

I Went Down (1997) Writer

Endgame (2000) Director

The Actors (2003) Writer and Director

The Eclipse (2009) Writer and Director

List of Plays:

Rum and Vodka (1992)

The Good Thief (1994)

This Lime Tree Bower (1995)

St. Nicholas (1997)

The Weir (1997)

Dublin Carol (2000)

Port Authority (2001)

Come on Over (2001)

Shining City (2004)

The Seafarer (2006)

Sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3afa9gqKzo

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/theater/reviews/10shin.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conor_McPherson

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=conor%20mcpherson&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wihttp://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5501

Paula Vogel

"Paula Vogel was born November of 1951.  She was born in Washington, D.C. and is a graduate of The Catholic University of America, Cornell University and also attended Bryn Mawr College.  Vogel is an American playwright as well as a university professor.  She was married to Brown University professor and author, Anne Fausto-Sterling in 2004."

"Paula Vogel is a productive playwright and has been since the 1970s. She often examines traditionally controversial issues such as sexual abuse and prostitution in her work, but has no particular theme that dominates her work.  She only writes about things that directly impact her life.  Vogel's family is known to serve as an influence to her writings.  She writes her plays for emotional circumstances and character to craft narrative structure.  She tends to select sensitive and difficult issues to write about.  Her works embrace theatrical devices such as puppetry, omniscient narration, and fantasy sequences."

How I Learned to Drive:

"Paula Vogel's play How I Learned to Drive opened in New York in 1997.  The play concerns an affair between its protagonist, names Li'l Bit, and her uncle Peck.  The affair takes place over the course of years, with the characters of Li'l Bit maturing from age eleven to eighteen before she puts an end to it.  In spite of the serious situation, there are many comical elements of the play, which avoids the expected condemnation of this situation to look at the basic humanity that binds these two characters.  It uses innovative staging techniques to fade from one time frame to another and one place to the next.  It also uses just three actors, in addition to those playing Li'l Bit and Peck, to represent all of the other characters who affect their lives, especially their quirky, intimidating rural Maryland family.  The addition of popular music from the early-and-late-1960s, such as "Dream Baby" and "Little Surfer Girl," helps audiences understand the prevailing mood of the era that Vogel covers in this play: it is romantic and sexist, emphasizing youth and fun, the sort of social message that would make a girl like Li'l Bit, who has many feelings of insecurity, turn to a flawed relationship where she can bask in the reverence of an older man." 

http://www.topic/how-i-learned-to-drive#Notes_on_DramaAwards:

Awards:

Paula Vogel received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, How I Learned to Drive.

Obie Award for Best Play (1992)

Pulitzer Prize in Drama (1998)

The American Academy of Arts and Letter in (2004)

Sources:

http://www.enotes.com/drama-criticism/vogel-paula

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vogel

http://www.http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsV/vogel-paula.html.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=16679

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=4dDbZ47txvU&feature=PlayList&p=C1BDCE81D25C13FE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1

http://www.topic/how-i-learned-to-drive#Notes_on_Drama

Tony Kushner

"Tony Kushner was born in 1956 and is an American playwright and screenwriter."  Kushner spent his childhood in Louisiana and moved to New York in 1974 to begin his undergraduate college education at Columbia University.  There he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Medieval Studies.  He studied directing at New York's Graduate School and graduated from there in 1984.  

Kushner's style:

"Kushner's plays and screenplays are often a departure from typical Realism.  These plays and screenplays experime

nted with conventional storytelling b

y using shorter episodes.  For example, the Angels in America plays together contain almost 50 scenes.  Like Henrik Ibsen, Kushner creates stories which give rise to social discussion, instead being simply "issue plays."

Awards:

1993 Drama Desk Award Outstanding New Play- Angels in America.

1993 Kushner received the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1992 for his play, Angels in America.

1993 Tony Award for Best Play- Angel in America.

1994 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Play- Angels in America.

1994 Tony Award for Best Play- Angels in America.

2004 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special.

2005 Golden Flobe Award for best Screenplay.

2007 Laurence Oliver Award for Best New Musical- Caroline, or Change. 

2008 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. 

Angels in America has been filmed several times.  

Kushner' Current Works:

Kushner is currently working with Steve Spielberg, writing the screenplay for a new movie about the complex icon Abraham Lincoln.  

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Kushner

http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc51.html

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1065785/

http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=8918

http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=4569

Sam Shepard

"Sam Shepard was born in 1943.  He is an American playwright, actor, and director of stage and screen.  He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs.  Sam Shepard was born in Illinois and worked on a farm as a teenager.  After high school Shepard briefly attended college, but dropped out to join a traveling theater group.  One thing that was extremely interesting was that he avoided the draft during the Vietnam era by claiming to be a heroin addict; however,  Shepard  was using illicit drugs during the time. "

"At the age of nineteen, Shepard became very involved in NY's off-off-Broadway theater scene.  Shepard acted prior to the 1970s but then his interests were almost strictly confined to writing.  Lots of his writing was for the stage but after three years, he relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and was known as playwright in residence at the Magic Theatre where many of his works received their premier productions.  Shepard's play's that were known as notable works include Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, and A Lie of the Mind."

"At the start of his playwrighting career, Shepard did not direct his own plays.  His earliest plays were directed by a number of different directors but most often by Ralph Cook.  However, later Shepard formed a playwright relationship with Robert Woodrudd, and he had him direct the premiere of Buried Child."

Awards:

"Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play, Buried Child."

"He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1983 for the film The Right Stuff."

"He was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1984 for the film Paris."

"Shepard w

as elected to the American Aca

demy of Arts and Letters.  He received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in 1992."

"In 1994 he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame."

"He was nominated for two Tony Awards for Buried Child in 1996, and for True West in 2000."

"He received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for "Best Actor in a Miniseries or Movie."

"He won a Dram Desk Award for his play A Lie of the Mind."

"In 2008 he was a SAG nomination for "Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a TV Movie or Miniseries" for his performance as Frank Whiteley in Ruffian."

References:

http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=8584 

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001731/ 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Shepardhttp://www.

departments.bucknell.edu/theatre_dance/shepard/shepard.html

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter was born in 1930 and died in 2008.  Pinter was a very famous English playwright in addition to a screewriter, actor, director, poet, author, and a political activist.  He began his theatrical career in the middle 1950s as an actor and used the stage name David Baron.  

Over his lifetime, Pinter produced 29 original stage plays, 2

7 screenplays, several dramatic sketches, radio and TV plays, poetry, one novel, short fiction, essays, speeches, and letters.  In addition to producing, he directed nearly 50 stage, television, and film productions, as well as acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his works as well as others.  "Pinter's dramas often involve strong conflicts among ambivalent characters who struggle for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own versions of the past; stylistically, these works marked by theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, irony, and menace."  

In the middle 1980s, Pinter took a new direction incorporating political interests into his personal life.  He was greatly recognized for his cultural influence and achievements across genres and media.  Pinter had many memories from when he was growing up of having to evacuate his family home.  "Prime memories of evacuation being of loneliness, bewilderedness, separation and loss: themes that carry throughout his works."

Awards:

Pinter received the Nobel Prize in Literature

20 honorary degrees

Training and Experience:

- 1948 attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art

- 1949 dropped out

- 1949-1950 role in Dick Whittington and His Cat

- 1951 six months in Central School of Speech and Drama

- 1951-1952 toured Ireland with Anew McMaster

- 1952 began acting in England

- 1953-1954 worked for Donald Wolfit Company

- 1954-1959 Acted under stage name David Baron

Some of Pinter's works:

The Room- Pinter's first play in 1957

Pinter as an actor:

The Servant (1963)

Turtle Diary (1985)

Accident (1967)

The Tailor of Panama (2001)

Beckett On Film (2001)

Pinter as a director:

The Homecoming (1965)

Life Support (1997)

The Late Middle Class (1999)

The Old Masters (2004)

Twelve Angry Men (1996)

In 2001, Pinter was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and passed away in 2008.  

Source

August Strindberg

August Strindberg was not only a playwright but also famous as a Swedish painter, and sculptor as well as a playwright. He had no art training, but learned from artist friends after abandoning his studies at the University of Uppsala in 1872. After he stopped painting he became Sweden's leading are critic and the ideological leader of the radical Swedish artists' movement. During this time, he was producing sketches in words and pictures as illustrations to his own writings. The Red Room, was Sweden's first realistic novel, a scandal that made him famous overnight. Later, however, he began to make enemies, especially when he went into history-writing from a radical point of view. Soon after The Red Room was produced, he came up with another, The New Kingdom, which was much more bitter and personal than The Red Room, which stirred up lots of hostility. He then left Sweden with his family, but before he left he published a collection of angry poems which, in form and style, were completely new in Swedish literature.
In 1884 Strindberg published a collection of stories, which reflected their bold treatment of sexual matters the influence of French naturalism. However, what struck the public was the evidence in the stories of Strindberg's hatred of the feminist moverment and the emancipated women. Because of his strong opinions, Strindberg lost the support of many liberal friends.  Up until Strindberg's death in 1912, he wrote 29 plays, a large amount of poetry, and close to 15 volumes of prose. The most important plays of his last period, which was also the expressionistic period, are To Damascus I-II (1898-1904), There Are Crimes and Crimes (1899), Easter (1901), The Dance of Death (1901), Crown Bride (1902), A Dream Play.  In addition to his collection of poetry, he also wrote several historical dramas, the best which is Gustaf Vasa, and The Great Highway (1909).

Of his speeches or prose work, were his personal novels Alone (1903) and The Scapegoat (1907) as well as one of his diary's.  Strindberg's last years were rather calm beside the "feud" novel Svarta fanor (1907) which was a final savage. He died alone on May 14, 1912, in Stockholm.

Marin Hinkle & Reg Rogers 

by Craig Lucas

Sarah Sutherland & Daniel Frediksen at Red Stitch Theatre

Some of Miss Julie Productions:

Miss Julie (1999) Film
Froken Julie (1951) Sweden
Miss Julie (1972) Film
Miss Julie (1986) TV

Froken Julie (1912) Sweden

Miss Julie (1987) TV

Miss Julie (1991) TV

Miss Julie (2009)

Film: Miss Julie- Swedish-Directed by Alf Sjoberg. January 22, 2008
Film: After Miss Julie- American Airlines- Director Mark Brokaw. October 22
Film: Miss Julie- Two river Theater NJ- Directed Mercedes Murphy
Film: Miss Julie- Actors theatre of Louisville- December 11, 1966

Film: After Miss Julie- Sienna Miller. Director: Patrick Marber 2009-10.

Sienna Miller as Miss Julie

-The 1888 play Miss Julie has become of the world's most performed and respected stage works. The play Miss Julie was banned in Sweden for almost twenty years because of class conflict and sexual abandonment.

Stage: Miss Julie- Australian- Belvoir Theatre- June 5, 2008

Stage: Miss Julie-Aurora Theatre Company, Berkeley, CA. April 11, 2009

Opera: Miss Julie- Manhattan School of Music Opera Theatre. NY

Strindberg's Drama:

The Outlaw, 1871 

Master Olof, 1872
Lucky Peter's Travels, 1882 

The Father, 1887
Miss Julie, 1888 Comrades, 1888
Creditors, 1888 

Pariah, 1888
The Stronger, 1888-1889

Motherly Love, 1892 

The First Warning, 1892 

To Damascus, 1898-1902
Gustav Vasa, 1899
Erik XIV, 1899 

The Dance of Death, 1900 

Easter, 1900 

Engelbrekt, 1901
Carl XII, 1901
A Dream Play, 1901
Swan Blood, 1902
The Chamber Plays, 1907

The Storm
The Burned Site

The Pelican
The Ghost Sonata
Merry Christmas

The Great Highway, 1909

Strindberg's Poetry, Fiction, and Autobiography:

From Fjerdingen and Svartbacken, 1877
The Red Room, 1879

Swedish People at Work and Play, 1881-1882
The New Country, 1882

Swedish Destiny and Adventure, 1882-1891
Poetry in Verse and Prose, 1883
Sleepwalker Awakens to the Day, 1884
Married I-II, 1884-1886Utopian on Reality, 1885
Son of a Servant I-V
Natives of Hemso, 1887
The Defense's Speech of a Fool
Life of an Island Lad
Among French Peasants, 1889
By The Open Sea, 1890
Inferno, 1890

Video

The Republic Theatre Company, New York City

Sources:
http://www.answers.com/topic/august-strindberg
http://www.hometheaterforum.com/ronsreviews/covers/1452235.jpg
http://images.broadwayworld.com/upload/43269/1_Miss-Julie_th.jpg
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/05/20/arts/Julie184.jpg
http://blog.jaman.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/picture-33.png
http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2007/04/19/RED_STITCH_wideweb__470x279,0.jpg http://www.brockleyjack.co.uk/Miss%20Julie%2019%20copy.jpg https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht17TpPAuaG0dmHeLE7FnMDN8b1WK-mvQXPKuoD10T9kCAtij8yUzMAXIScTbbHZrVoAQFfoTBmYgPI1VaxDF_tUqJpiIbTDQIa7vCIMP7bG6LIQf-y3HMLxFJRuHhjArFh3crvsjNAWk/s320/Front.jpg http://www.methuenbookshop.co.uk/images/475/0413666107.jpg
http://www.brockport.edu/theatre/~Julie1.JPG
http://aura.gaia.com/photos/36/354078/large/Jean_in_Miss_Julie.jpg https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK0uzfifX4Pw_lAGn6FQ88PqJ0O-87dE2NPxG6nuHqCLVO2x59Q90Cd1TOoFcFAx7MtumT_CNb5sMYIzd29ucji9-IK1Nn9BY69-k20OO19YcI6gVTslzE_zS3vlJ0F288vnJApG5TOarz/s400/510itxKn2BL__SL500_AA240_.jpg

Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller 1915 and grew up in New York City.  Miller' father, owned a shop of women's coat; however, he lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929.  Miller was forced to work several jobs to support himself, including being a farm hand.  Miller began writing his plays in the 1930s.  He was a student at the University of Michigan but returned back to New York to write plays for the stage shortly after graduation.  Miller's plays were mainly focused around social and political issues.  

Miller wrote Act I of Death of a Salesman, within six weeks, he completed the rest of the play.  Death of a Salesman then appeared on Broadway in 1949 at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Kazan.  Miller's play Death of a Salesman won three Tony awards and the Pulitzer Prize which made Miller famous.  He wrote novels, essays and short stories and was one of the most recognizable playwrights in America.  Miller's works are known for their strong commitment to social justice, and their concern for the ordinary person, and the inner lives of their characters.  

Miller was married three times.  He married Mary Grace Slattery in 1940.  They had two children, Robert and Jane, before they got divorced in 1955.  Miller then married Marilyn Monroe in 1956.  They got a divorce in 1961, and in 1962 he married the photographer Inge Morath.  They have one cild, Rebecca Miller, who is an actress.  

In 2005, Miller died of congestive heart failure at his home in Connecticut at the age of 89.  The date of his death happened to be the 56th anniversary of the Broadway opening of "Death of a Salesman".

"As a dramatist, Miller had a lot in common with Ibsen, Shaw, Chekov, and Brecht.  What they share in common is the philosophy that the fate of a person is social and that the stage should be considered as a medium more important for ideas than for just entertainment.  Miller, however, is more of a moralist, and his plays have a serious intellectual purpose.  Miller focused on the expression of free ideas in the theatre, and also decided to write plays of social protest.  In the Death of a Salesman, Miller criticizes the falsity of the American Dream and the emphasis placed on financial success in the United States."

(http://thebestnotes.com/booknotes/Death_Of_A_Salesman_Summary/Death_Of_A_Salesman_Miller04.html

Tennessee Williams Blog

Thomas Lanier Williams was born in 1911 in Mississippi.  His family life was, what some would call, disastrous.  Williams was the second born, of three children.  His parents often fought and would engage in violent arguments that frightened his sister Rose.  In 1929, Williams saw one of Henrik Ibsen's prod

uctions and soon after decided he would become a playwright himself.  After Williams graduated, he moved to New Orleans and changed his name from Thomas Lanier Williams to "Tennessee Williams."  In 1944, one of his most well known plays, The Glass Menagerie, has an extremely successful show in Chicago and a year following made its way onto Broadway.  It was said that Tennessee used his own family relationships as an inspiration for the play.  "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life."  Williams struggled with depression throughout most of his life and lived with a fear that he thought he might one day go insane like his sister Rose.  During this battle in his life, he struggled with the addiction to prescription drugs and alcohol.  In 1983, Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap in New York City.  

Tennessee Williams wrote twenty-five full length plays, produced dozens of short plays and screenplays, two novels, a novella, sixty short stories, over one-hundred poems and an autobiography.  Along with several other awards, he won two Pulitzer Prizes and four New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards.  

Williams Plays: Baby Doll & Tiger Tail, Battle of Angels, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Dragon Country: A Book of Plays, Eccentricities of a Nightingale, The Glass Menagerie, The Gnadiges Fraulein, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, I Rise in Flame Cried the Phoenix, Kingdom of Earth, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated, Night of the Iguana, Not About Nightingales, The Notebook of Trigorin, A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot, Period of Adjustment, The Red Devil Battery Sign, The Rose Tatoo, Small Craft Warnings, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, A Streetcar and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Two-Character Play, Vieux Carre.

Williams is known as a great playwright because of his creative use of literary teniques and his unique style.  In particular, Tennessee Williams' use of the literary techniques, imagery, and foreshadowing.  His use of these literary techniques give his audience an interesting, exciting and realistic play to follow.  However, "Williams is referring to a drama that was more than just a picture of reality: he insists that his ideal theatre make use of all the stage arts to generate a theatrical experience grater than just Realism.  From Glass Menagerie on, his plays are very theatrical.  His scenic descriptions draw on metaphors from the world of art and painting, and his use of sound and light is symbolic and evocative, not just realistic in its effects.  In several of Williams' plays, he consciously exploits non-realistic styles like expressionism, surrealism, and absurdism, which he calls upon playwrights to use in their search for truth.  Indeed, Williams's stage directions in the original script of Glass Menagerie called for decidedly plastic elements, including dozens of slide projections, film-like soundtrack music, and dissolving and fading lighting.  In order to express his universal truths, Williams created what he termed plastic theater, a distinctive new styler of drama.  He insisted that setting, properties, music, sound, and visual effects- all the elements of staging - must combine to reflect and enhance the action, theme, characters, and language.

"http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2002/3kramer_print.htm

Bertolt Brecht Blog

Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898, in the city of Augsburg which is a section of the German Empire. His father was Catholic and worked in a paper factory, and his mother was a Protestant ill with breast cancer most of his younger years. While his mother was struggling with cancer, Brecht wasn't heathy himself, struggling with a congenital heart condition. He suffered a heart attack at the age of twelve but as soon as he recovered he continued strong with his education. Uniquely, Brecht was exposed at a young age to the German translation of the Bible. Due to his education of the German translation of the Bible, Brecht's work reflects some quotes and references to the Bible which can be found primarily in Mother Courage. By the age sixteen he was writing for a local newspaper and had written his first play. One of his plays reflects on his mothers illness and excessive sexual pleasures. Brecht himself, was known to have no less than three mistresses at a time. We have learned throughout his writings that his mother used to smell his clothing to determine the extent of his sexual activities. He is known to have experimented with homosexuality; however, he later pursued his first marriage with an opera singer named Marianne Zoff. He was obsessed with the idea of abandonment and left his wife and children at the age of thirty one. In 1933 Brecht took his family and traveled around the world escaping from Nazi rule. In 1950, Brecht and Weigel were given Australian citizenship, and in 1951 Brecht received the National Prize, first class. In addition, in 1954 he won the international Lenin Peace Prize. Aside from his family relationships, he spent most of his time studying Chinese, Japanese, and Indian theatre focusing a lot on Shakespeare. Brecht, however, died of a heart attack on August 14, 1956.

One of his finest works, Mother Courage and Her Children, was written during the early years of the Second World War and reflects on the "darker times". Brecht's influence was not only in the realm of political playwriting. He was also a theorist who introduced the concepts of Epic Theatre, "gestures". He opened up more possibilities of how the stage could be used and for what purpose. It is said, that Brecht was a wonderful poet and song writer as well, and was probably the closest equivalent to Shakespeare the rest of Europe has produced. Within theatre, Brecht took a revolutionary stance-not only towards class struggle, but also toward s his representation of realism on stage. "Brecht argued that Realistic theatre presented and reinforced a particular political vision, a view of society as the inevitable product of evolution and history, and therefore not susceptible to change. For Brecht, the realism of the time, which was based on bourgeois ideals and characters, was a biased representation of social reality." "Brecht stated that his theatre work is based on a "radical separation of the elements of production," (see alienation effect in the notes below) rather than the unity of action seen in Realism. This realistic illusion Brecht found to be dishonest, in that it seduced the audience to accept subliminally its representation of reality as a natural andapolitical view of the world. He wanted the audience to rethink and redefine its world view. By contrast to the Realistic theatre, Brecht's theatre always shows dramatic illusion in its characterisation, setting, action and techniques such as the alienation effect of using screens featuring captions to reveal the forthcoming action."

"His plays tend to be episodic, written as a seemingly disconnected, open-ended montage of scenes presented in a non-naturalistic, non-chronological way. The audience needs to arrive at its own conclusion of how the events are linked together."

"Brecht usually left the stage bare in his productions as a means of preventing the audience from experiencing a detailed illusion of reality, of some fictional dramatic location. He exposed stage machinery, opened up the physical staging to the wings and often exposed the back wall. He also exposed the lighting grid above the stage so the audience could see how lights influence the mood of the scene and influence the audience's judgment."

"Brecht also developed his own acting style for his work. He urged his actors not to empathise totally with their characters, but to stand outside them and illustrate their behaviour. Brecht's actors were asked to go beyond the Stanislavsky system of acting, where the actor identifies entirely with their character and represents the character entirely from his or her point of view. Rather Brecht encouraged a more demonstrative acting method, one that enables the actor topresent the character from a number of perspectives."

http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/drama/hsc/studies/brecht/2758/Brecht.htm#m2
This video below, tells a little about Bertolt Brecht's background.

Luigi Pirandello Blog

Luigi Pirandello was born into an upper-class family.  "He was an Italian short-story writer and novelist, a secondary school teacher, and finally a playwright".  In 1886 he began to work with his father in the sulphur mines of Porto Empedocle.  A year later, he moved to Rome to expand and continue his education and studies.  While in Rome, he had a conflict with his Latin professor and was forced to leave the University.  In 1891 he received his doctorate and joined a group of writer-journalists and within the group met Luigi Capuana, who encouraged him to dedicate himself to narrative writing.  In 1924, Pirandello became an important public figure  opening his own Art Theatre in Rome .  Pirandello supported fascism, and supported by Mussolini, his relationship to the dictator definitely kept the public talking.  Due to his wife's illness, Parandello has been greatly influenced, causing the themes of his plays to be mainly about madness, illusion and isolation . His play, Six Characters In Search Of An Author, marked the height of his career.  He was awarded the Noble Prize in 1934, and passed away shortly after in 1936.  Although no one will ever be exactly like Pirandello, his influence has been passed along to writers such as Beckett and Ionesco.  

Luigi Pirandello's play, Six Characters In Search Of An Author, is more than theory, it is a dramatization for the stage and for the novel. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dapmK1pavsY.

Quote:
Lee A. Jacobus, The Bedford Introduction to DRAMA, sixth edition.