Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays | 
 enlarge | Author: David Ball
Creator: Michael Langham
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy Used: $7.27
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Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 65898
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 104
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.4
ISBN: 0809311100
Dewey Decimal Number: 808.2
EAN: 9780809311101
ASIN: 0809311100
Publication Date: July 7, 1983
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This guide to playreading for students and practitioners of both theater and literature complements, rather then contradicts or repeats, traditional methods of literary analysis of scripts. Ball developed his method during his work as Literary Director at the Guthrie Theater, building his guide on the crafts playwrights of every period and style use to make their plays stageworthy. The text is full of tools for students and practitioners to use as they investigate plot, character, theme, exposition, imagery, motivation/obstacle/conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play. He includes guides for discovering what the playwright considers the play’s most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details. Using Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for illustrating script-reading techniques as well as examples of the kinds of misinterpretation readers can fall prey to by ignoring the craft of the playwright. Of immense utility to those who want to put plays on the stage (actors, directors, designers, production specialists) Backwards and Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
Excellent and easy to read. July 22, 2008
David D. Smith
I've been acting for ten years and got my first directing assignment. I know a lot about directing from having been directed, but this book was a great guide for script analysis with the big picture in mind, not just one character. The show was a success and the actors still like me.
 Immeasurably Useful on a Basic and Elemental Level March 19, 2008
Z. Kaplan (Chicago, Il)
It seems like reading would require no specific techniques, that they would come naturally to one and go without saying, even when the task is more specified, as in the reading of plays. But Ball breaks down this seemingly natural sense into its component elements and explains them in easily digestible, well-paced segments, and to examine these elements does much in the way of re-learning and thus refining and fine-tuning one's seemingly natural reading skill. This skill can be taken and applied in various ways (as Ball describes in the introduction), some of which are immeasurably improved by the complex understanding that posessing these refined elements provides; the reading a play to produce it, for example, or the writing of one yourself can be tremendously improved if one is constantly aware of what they are doing, why they're doing it, and what about their actions are correct, lacking, unnecessary or obtrusive. Without having a defined sense of the tools contained within this book, these tasks would be much more difficult, complicated, vague and roundabout, thus slowing, weakening or perhaps ruining the final product. Pair this skill set with application to texts such as plays, which are made all the more difficult by the fact that the playwright thinks in terms more of making their production work when produced for an audience and less of making their script read and be easily graspable completely on the page, and this manual becomes immeasurably more useful on a basic and elemental level.
Concise fabulous script analysis text February 29, 2008
L. Dawn Larsen (SC)
This book would serve a Script Analysis class very well. I plan to use it for mine in the fall. It also is reader friendly enough to serve an actor/director/designer wanting a different perspective, perhaps, on a script; or could be a different way of explaining what we were generally taught as undergrads.
Short & Oh So Sweet! December 20, 2007
Weetus Cren (Burbank, CA USA)
I have read a lot of books on the subjects of writing and acting. This book contains almost every important point in the tens of thousands of pages I have read when it comes to structure. If you are a writer you have to own this book! There is no wasted space in it. No actor or director on the planet should live without it either. You can read it in a day, but you'll read it again and again.
excellent analysis tool for actors March 12, 2007
D. Hall (New York)
This book may have been primarily written for directors and writers, but it is a great tool for actors to get to real active meanings in a script.
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