How to Teach a Play - Essential Exercises for Popular Plays

Featuring more than 80 teaching exercises for the 75 most popularly-taught plays, How to Teach a Play will teach you how to animate a play in the classroom and develop students' performative imagination

Most students encounter drama as they do poetry and fiction as literature to be read but never experience the performative nature of theater

Ranging from classical through to contemporary drama, How to Teach a Play provides new strategies for teaching dramatic literature and offers practical, play-specific exercises that demonstrate how performance illuminates close reading of the text

This practical guide provides a new generation of teachers and theatre professionals the tools to develop their students' performative imagination

Developed by contributors from a range of disciplines, these exercises reveal the variety of practitioners that make up the theatrical arts

Contributors include playwrights, theater directors, and artistic directors, as well as by dramaturgs and drama scholars

In bringing together so many different perspectives, this book highlights the distinctive qualities that makes theater such a dynamic genre

The Collection offers an array of proven approaches for anyone teaching drama ...

Literature and theater professors

High school teachers

Dramaturgs and directors

Written in an accessible and jargon-free style, both instructors and directors can immediately apply the activity to the classroom or rehearsal room

Whether you specialize in drama or only teach a play every now and again, the exercises will inspire you to modify, transform, and reinvent your own role in the dramatic arts

80 EXERCISES RELATING TO 75 PLAYS:

Hubris and Hamartia based on Aristotle's Poetics
Agamemnon ~ Aeschylus
The Eumenides ~ Aeschylus
Antigone ~ Sophocles
Oedipus the King ~ Sophocles
Medea ~ Euripides
Lysistrata ~ Aristophanes
The Twin Menaechmi ~ Plautus
The Second Shepherd's Play ~ The Wakefield Master
Atsumori ~ Zeami Motokiyo
Everyman ~ Anonymous
A Midsummer Night's Dream (I) ~ William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream (II) ~ William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet ~ William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice ~ William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Hamlet (I) ~ William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Hamlet (II) ~ William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Othello ~ William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure ~ William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of King Lear ~ William Shakespeare
The Tempest ~ William Shakespeare
Life is a Dream ~ Pedro Calderón de la
Tartuffe ~ Moliere
The Misanthrope ~
Restoration Theater Audiences
The Country Wife ~ William Wycherley
The Rover ~ Aphra
The Way of the World ~ William Congreve
The School for Scandal ~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Woyzeck ~ Georg
A Doll's House ~ Henrik Ibsen
Miss Julie ~ August Strindberg
Hedda Gabler ~ Henrik Ibsen
The Importance of Being Earnest ~ Oscar Wilde
Three Sisters ~ Anton Chekhov
The Cherry Orchard ~ Anton Chekhov
Pygmalion ~ George Bernard Shaw
Trifles ~ Susan
Six Characters in Search of an Author ~ Luigi Pirandello
Juno and the Paycock ~ Sean O'Casey
Machinal ~ Sophie Treadwell
The House of Bernarda Alba ~ Federico García
Our Town ~ Thorton Wilder
Mother Courage and Her Children ~ Bertolt Brecht
Long Day's Journey Into Night ~ Eugene O'Neill
The Glass Menagerie ~ Tennessee Williams
Death of a Salesman ~ Arthur Miller
Waiting for Godot (I) ~ Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot (II) ~ Samuel Beckett
The Crucible ~ Arthur Miller
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ~ Tennessee Williams
Endgame ~ Samuel Beckett
The Birthday Party ~ Harold Pinter
Rhinoceros ~ Eugene Ionesco
A Raisin in the Sun ~ Lorraine Hansberry
The Zoo Story ~ Edward Albee
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ~ Edward Albee
Dutchman ~ Amiri Baraka
The Homecoming ~ Harold Pinter
The House of Blue Leaves ~ John Guare
Death and the King's Horseman ~ Wole Soyinka
Fefu and Her Friends ~ María Irene Fornés
And the Soul Shall Dance ~ Wakako Yamauchi
Zoot Suit ~ Luis Valdez
True West ~ Sam Shepard
Top Girls ~ Caryl Churchill
Cloud Nine ~ Caryl Churchill
"Master Harold" and the boys ~ Athol Fugard
Glengarry Glen Ross ~ David Mamet
Fences ~ August Wilson
The Other Shore ~ Gao Xingjian
The Piano Lesson ~ August Wilson
M. Butterfly ~ David Henry Hwang
Fires in the Mirror ~ Anna Deavere Smith
Angels in America, Part One ~ Tony Kushner
Information for Foreigners ~ Griselda Gambaro
Oleanna ~ David Mamet
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead ~ Tom Stoppard
Blasted ~ Sarah Kane
'Art' ~ Yasmina Reza
How I Learned to Drive ~ Paula Vogel
Topdog/Underdog ~ Suzan-Lori Parks
Doubt: A Parable ~ John Patrick Shanley
Dead Man's Cell Phone ~ Sarah Ruhl
Water ~ the Spoonful ~ Quiara Alegría Hudes
Sweat ~ Lynn Nottage
Vietgone ~ Qui Nguyen