A collection of one-act plays from American playwrights, which cover such themes as love, fantasy, politics, grief, marriage, crime, and deceit.

(Best American Short Plays). Best Monologues from Best American Short Plays, Volume One is a must for actors of all ages beginners as well as seasoned veterans and belongs in the libraries of all theater teachers looking for new and exciting material for their students. The monologues in this volume are excerpted from the outstanding series Best American Short Plays, an archive of works from many of the best playwrights active today, presenting taut, engaging single-character pieces that range from zany comedy to poignant tales of love and loss. Each monologue includes a short introduction and a reference identifying where to locate the entire play, should anyone choose to pursue production beyond the monologue. Long or short, serious or not, this collection is must-have material for anyone interested in acting. The monologues also succeed as excellent companions for the casual reader.

This second volume of the best monologues from the Best American Short Plays series features a diverse selection drawn from the outstanding works from many of today's best American playwrights. In these monologues, the playwrights capture much of the flavors, feelings, and thoughts of American culture over the past several decades. The result is a collection of taught, engaging monologues offering fascinating perspectives. They are written with an eye toward the stage that makes them excellent source material for actors young and old alike. And they offer a freshness and directness that make them excellent companions for readers attracted to good, often quirky, and always engaging contemporary literature.

(Best American Short Plays). Applause is proud to continue the series that for over 60 years has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. Our editor Barbara Parisi has selected the following 16 plays: DEBOOM: WHO GIVES THIS WOMAN? , by Mark Medoff; And Then , by Amelia Arenas; The Cleaning , by Zilvinas Jonusas; Breakfast and Bed , by Amy Fox; The News from St. Petersburg , by Rich Orloff; Double Murder , by Scott Klavan; Running in Circles Screaming , by Jeni Mahoney; Witness , by Peter Maloney; Asteroid Belt , by Lauren Feldman; Glass Knives , by Liliana Almendarez; Hearts and Minds , by Adam Kraar; In Conclusive Woman , by Julie (Pratt) Mollenkamp; Mixed MeSSages , by Mike Pasternack; Amoureque and Arabesque , by Victor Gluck; and The Birth of Theater , by Jules Tasca.

Applause is proud to continue the series that for over 70 years has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. As previous series editor Ramon Delgado wrote in his introduction to The Best American Short Plays of 1989, the choice of entries for each edition has been based on the same goal: “to include a balance among three categories of playwrights: 1) established playwrights who continue to practice the art and craft of the short play, 2) emerging playwrights whose record of productions indicate both initial achievement and continuing artistic productivity, and 3) talented new playwrights whose work may not have had much exposure but evidences promise for the future.” From its inception, The Best American Short Plays has identified new, cutting-edge playwrights who have gone on to establish award-winning careers, including Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Wendy Wasserstein, David Mamet, and Horton Foote. This volume, Bill Demastes' first edition as series editor, illustrates how well the short story play can grapple with the many dimensions of love. The selected plays present unique perspectives on the wide range of love's impact on our lives, each giving a thoroughly modern twist to the idea that life would be so much easier (but also much less interesting) if we could only avoid love's mercurial influence.

Multiple award-winning producer and leading teacher of acting Robert Benedetti offers a no-nonsense, detailed, and clearly structured approach to the fundamentals of acting for the camera. Benedetti uses the same approach he has employed in writing and teaching for over fifty years — defining underlying principles, presenting them in a logically sequential program of development, and providing experiential exercises to help future, as well as experienced, actors shine in film and television.

A comprehensive study of an award-winning playwright known for unconventional blending of genres John Guare, one of the most innovative and influential contemporary American playwrights of the last sixty years, is best known for such works as House of Blue Leaves, winner of an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, and four Tony Awards, and Six Degrees of Separation, recipient of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play and the Olivier Best Play Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. In Understanding John Guare, William W. Demastes provides a concise biography and analyzes the playwright's career from his earliest works produced off-off Broadway in the 1960s to his most recent Broadway play, A Free Man of Color, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Often compared to his contemporaries Sam Shepard and David Mamet, who have distinctive voices tied to their mastery of realistic, idiomatic American English, Guare has a style that is perhaps more varied, Demastes speculates, the result of his formal training in theater. After earning a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, Guare earned an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. He then polished his theater craft in New York City during the exciting and turbulent 1960s, breaking from realist conventions and creating an unlikely blend of comedy, burlesque, stand-up comedy, and absurdly incongruous plotlines. The result has been a theater of surprise that is rich in stage action and experimentally invigorating. Demastes examines Guare's tools and techniques such as mixing serious with comic, creating characters who break into song and dance, inserting stand-up comedy routines, and drawing from the most absurd incongruities of everyday life. In doing so, Guare has created plays about the best and worst of humanity, about lost souls, and about delusional ideals.

(Applause Books). For over 70 years, The Best American Short Plays has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. From its inception, it has identified cutting-edge playwrights who have gone on to establish award-winning careers, including Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and more. In this volume, the plays capture the struggle between "hot tempers and cold decrees." Humans love to think of themselves as rational beings well in control of their lives and surroundings from sunup to sundown, sundown to sunrise. We learn to follow rules of proper behavior and more than happily issue out advice to our friends who just can't get a handle on themselves. Restraint and order, after all, are the cornerstones of human society and civilization. The problem is that human nature bucks and bridles at every attempt to socialize and civilize. Shakespeare got it right when he penned the observation, "The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree." In those few words he has managed to capture precisely why it is so difficult to be human; if it were okay simply to let our hot tempers prevail, life would be so much easier. But cold decrees are what prevent us from self-destruction, and so we endure the struggle.

(Best American Short Plays). For more than 70 years, The Best American Short Plays has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. From its inception, it has identified cutting-edge playwrights Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and others who have gone on to establish award-winning careers. The Best American Short Plays 2013-2014 takes a look at our changing times. "Uncertain" seems to be the watchword of today's world, full of surprises, shocks, and even a few delights. Uncertainty brings with it fear and insecurity, as well as nostalgic longing for the good old days, but for some, uncertainty means opportunity and along with it the prospect of change for the better. This volume explores various experiences of uncertainty and includes a series of nine plays gathered by Daniel Gallant, entitled Nine Signs of the Times , as well as short plays by Neil LaBute, John Guare, Laura Shaine Cunningham, Daniel F. Levin, Quincy Long, Halley Feiffer, Caridad Svich, and Clay McLeod Chapman. This collection will be complemented by a range of plays from around the country by playwrights likewise observing and digesting the signs of the times. Together the plays of this volume work as a time capsule, capturing the fears and longings of a world on the verge and in the midst of big changes, hopefully for the better but quite possibly for the worse.

From the 1960s to the present day, John Guare’s plays have ranged from one-act to cyclic, realistic to surrealistic, naturalistic to experimental, and tragic to comic dramas. This study’s approach to the cornucopia the playwright himself provided when in an interview he gave a fundamental aesthetic principle of his craft. Like a person—and Guare’s plays develop the personal as well as the artistic self—a play must be grounded in reality; only then can it soar. The ground is traditional theatre with characters, no matter how larger than life they can be, and plot, no matter how illogical it can be. The soaring is in interrupting the action with monological narratives and musical interludes, bringing characters back from the dead, and having the action take hairpin turns into a mixture of genres and styles, modes and tones. In verbal and visual images, the flight invokes works by authors as varied as Aeschylus and Whitman, Dante and Feydeau, Verdi and Romberg. Soaring from ground to new ground, the theatre creates the transmission of the American heritage in Lake Hollywood, an idealism corrupted by a fraudulent American Dream in Lydie Breeze, and the recovery of the past in A Few Stout Individuals. As Guare said about his plays: they “interconnect.”