The Creative Spirit: An Introduction to Theatre

by Stephanie Arnold

Focusing on the collaborative and creative processes that go into productions, Stephanie Arnold introduces students to the theatre through the plays themselves and people who write them, create them, and act in them. A rich context is provided for each play with a discussion of the playwright’s other works, sources for the play, timelines that provide historical and cultural background, and a section on a particular production of the play to give students a sense of experiencing the theatre industry at close hand. The Creative Spirit includes complete scripts of five August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone , Wakako Yamauchi's And the Soul Shall Dance , Tony Kushner's Angels in America , Milcha Sanchez Scott's Dog Lady , and Sam Shepard's Buried Child .

Genres: Theatre

592 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Hillary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This textbook was required for my "Introduction to Theatre" course. It read like a textbook because it is a textbook, but I still managed to read it all. I don't think I have EVER read a textbook from cover to cover before. As an Advertising major in the J-School, a lot of what we're tested on isn't from a book, so I typically don't even buy the textbooks that are "required" for those classes. The theatre course that I took was a General Education course, but I spent A LOT of time reading this textbook in order to get an A. Though this textbook is kind of tedious and redundant in places, I'm happy to say that I learned a fair amount about modern theatre.