Mikhail Aleksandrovich "Michael" Chekhov was a Russian-American actor, director, author and theatre practitioner. He was a nephew of the playwright Anton Che…
Bill Bryson is a bestselling American-British author known for his witty and accessible nonfiction books spanning travel, science, and language. He rose to prominence with Notes from a Small Island (1…
Sir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights,…
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and one of the world's pre-eminent dramatists. Often called England…
George Bernard Shaw stands as one of the most prolific and influential intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a man whose literary output was matched only by his fervent c…
David Alan Mamet is an American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. His works are known for their clever, terse, sometimes vulgar dialogue and arcane stylized phrasing, as we…
Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He mo…
The Prince, book of Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian political theorist, in 1513 describes an indifferent ruler to moral considerations with determination to achieve and to maintain power.
Sarah Kane was an English playwright. Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensit…
Peter Brook is a world-renowned theater director, staging innovative productions of the works of famous playwrights. A native of London, he has been based in France since the 1970s.
People consider that Russian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (Николай Васильевич Гоголь) founded realism in Russian literature. His works include The Overcoat (1842) and Dead Souls (1842).
Lee Strasberg was an Academy Award nominated Austro-Hungarian-American director, actor, producer, and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre…
Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's …
Henrik Johan Ibsen was a major Norwegian playwright largely responsible for the rise of modern realistic drama. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama." Ibsen is held to be the greates…
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of h…
