Drama

Mastering the Shakespeare Audition is a handbook for actors of all ages and experience, whether auditioning for a professional role or a place in drama school. Many actors have no idea where to start in preparing a Shakespeare audition speech. Yet many auditions – professional or drama school – require a well-delivered classical monologue. Mastering the Shakespeare Audition shows performers how to focus rehearsal time and spend it well. Starting with how to choose a piece that plays to each actor's particular strength, casting director Donna Soto-Morettini provides a series of timed exercises and rehearsal techniques that will allow any actor to feel confident and truly prepared for performance – in sessions totalling just 35 hours. Offering progressive and clearly marked exercises detailing the time necessary both to read and complete the work, Mastering the Shakespeare Audition also features extended exercises for those with more time to spare, allowing a deeper understanding of the ideas and skills involved.

'For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.' Willy Loman has been a salesman for 34 years. At 60, he is cast aside, his usefulness now exhausted. With no future to dream about he must face the crushing disappointments of his past. He takes one final brave action, but is he heroic at last?, or a self-deluding fool?

"I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history," Arthur Miller wrote of his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events, Miller's drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town's most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminates the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence. Written in 1953, The Crucible is a mirror Miller uses to reflect the anti-communist hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy's "witch-hunts" in the United States. Within the text itself, Miller contemplates the parallels, writing, "Political opposition... is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence." WIth an introduction by Christopher Bigsby. (back cover)