Script Analysis for Theatre: Tools for Interpretation, Collaboration and Production

by Robert Knopf

Script Analysis for Tools for Interpretation, Collaboration and Production provides theatre students and emerging theatre artists with the tools, skills and a shared language to analyze play scripts, communicate about them, and collaborate with others on stage productions. Based largely on concepts derived from Stanislavski's system of acting and method acting, the book focuses on action - what characters do to each other in specific circumstances, times, and places - as the engine of every play. From this foundation, readers will learn to distinguish the big picture of a script, dissect and 'score' smaller units and moment-to-moment action, and create individualized blueprints from which to collaborate on shaping the action in production from their perspectives as actors, directors, and designers.

Script Analysis for Theatre offers a practical approach to script analysis for theatre production and is grounded in case studies of a range of the most studied plays, including Sophocles' Oedipus the King , Shakespeare's Twelfth Night , Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler , Georg Büchner's Woyzeck , Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest , Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire , and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive , among others. Readers will develop the real-life skills professional theatre artists use to design, rehearse, and produce plays.

202 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2016

Reviews

[Grace Deadmore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for class so I didn’t love it but the blueprints slay

[Ineta Lopez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book for theatre students, very educational, practical, and “technical”, including even blueprints that can be used for script analysis.

[MH · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine introductory text which borrows from William Ball, Uta Hagen, and others to create a system that uses actor's tactics to divide a script into beats (which you, the director, then title individually, after you have notated them a certain way in precise places in your oversized margins - Knopf's finickiness about how to appropriately mark a script is exactly the sort of thing that makes this book perfect for college students, but a bit rigid for anyone else). Despite the promises in the introduction, his system is so entirely actor-centric that I'm not sure how helpful it is to a designer, and although he mentions his system's universality he absolutely ignores non-realistic plays in all of his examples, but in all it provides a reasonable introductory technique for undergrads.

[Lindsay Bryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise and user friendly text to help any student of theatre analyze a script. I’ve gone through numerous textbooks and script analysis and this is by far the most student-friendly (with lots of examples and blueprints to use)

[Grace Dolezal-Ng · Rating 5 out of 5]

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