Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers

Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers, Sixth Edition teaches the skills of script analysis using a formalist approach that examines the written part of a play to evaluate its potentials for performance and production.

This new edition offers a more streamlined experience for the reader and features new and revised content, such as a fully updated chapter on postmodern drama, new sections on Associative Thinking and Ambiguous Terms in the Introduction, and revised appendices featuring The Score of a Role and expanded treatments of Functional Analysis for Designers and Further Questions for Script Analysis. Explorations of both classic and unconventional plays are combined with clear examples, end-of-chapter summaries, and stimulating questions that will allow actors, directors, and designers to immediately incorporate the concepts and processes into their theatre production work.

An excellent resource for students of Acting, Script Analysis, Directing, and Playwriting courses, this book provides the tools to effectively bring a script to life on stage.

James Thomas is Professor and Director in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Wayne State University, Detroit. His publications include The Seagull: An Insiders' Account of the Ground-breaking Moscow Production, A Director's Guide to Stanislavsky's Active Analysis, The Art of the Actor Manager: Wilson Barrett and the Victorian Theatre, and translations of The Joy of Rehearsal, The Craft of Rehearsal, and Beyond Rehearsal by Russian director Anatoly Efros. He was a contributor to Russian Theatre in Practice and his research has been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Scene. He is also founding director of Wayne State University's Summer Study Abroad Intensive with the Moscow Art Theatre School.