These seven imaginative short theatre pieces by one of America's most inventive and highly regarded playwrights range widely in content, mood and style. The plays offer a stimulating challenge in terms of selecting, arranging, and mounting the diverse com

This second volume of the best monologues from the Best American Short Plays series features a diverse selection drawn from the outstanding works from many of today's best American playwrights. In these monologues, the playwrights capture much of the flavors, feelings, and thoughts of American culture over the past several decades. The result is a collection of taught, engaging monologues offering fascinating perspectives. They are written with an eye toward the stage that makes them excellent source material for actors young and old alike. And they offer a freshness and directness that make them excellent companions for readers attracted to good, often quirky, and always engaging contemporary literature.

Here's a guide book on how to write 45-minute one-act plays, skits, and monologues for all ages. Step-by-step strategies and sample play, monologue, and animation script offer easy-to-understand solutions for drama workshop leaders, high-school and university drama directors, teachers, students, parents, coaches, playwrights, scriptwriters, novelists, storytellers, camp counselors, actors, lifelong learning instructors, biographers, facilitators, personal historians, and senior center activity directors. Guide young people in an intergenerational experience of interviewing and writing skits, plays, and monologues based on the significant events and experiences from lives of people. Learn to write skits, plays and monologues based on historical events and personalities. What you'll get out of this book and the exercises of writing one-act plays for teenage actors and audiences of all-ages audience, are improved skills in adapting all types of social issues, current events, or life experience to 45-minute one-act plays, skits, or monologues for teenage or older adult drama workshops. How do you write plays and skits from life stories, current events, social issues, or history? Are you looking for the appropriate 45-minute, one-act play for high-school students or other teenagers, for community center drama workshops, or even for home school projects or for events and celebrations? Are you seeking one-act plays for older adults drama workshops? Use personal or biographical experiences as examples when you write your skit or play. If you want a really original play, write, revise, and adapt your own plays, skits, and monologues. Here's how to do it.

(Best American Short Plays). "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Really? Words can break spirits, destroy confidence. They can also build hope and incite great acts of heroism. Playwrights know this, and so do theater audiences. Otherwise, why go? Words matter and carry clout every bit as dangerous as a hammer or crowbar. This, too, playwrights know. The monologues in this volume are full of such blows, striking at our imaginations and our memories, generating responses such as joyful laughter or chilling surprise. Others squeeze us into worlds we've never experienced, or perhaps experienced at the furthest edges of memory and recollection. Still others may help us alter the way we see certain things, people, or beliefs. Best Monologues from The Best American Short Plays, Volume Three is a collection of monologues drawn from the popular Best American Short Plays series, an archive of works from many of the best playwrights active today. Long or short, serious or not, excerpts or entireties, this collection abounds in speech acts that may trigger physical reactions and almost certainly will transform an attitude or two, drawing out lost memories, creating new ones, and definitely entertaining, engaging, amusing us all along the way.

(Best American Short Plays). Best Monologues from Best American Short Plays, Volume One is a must for actors of all ages beginners as well as seasoned veterans and belongs in the libraries of all theater teachers looking for new and exciting material for their students. The monologues in this volume are excerpted from the outstanding series Best American Short Plays, an archive of works from many of the best playwrights active today, presenting taut, engaging single-character pieces that range from zany comedy to poignant tales of love and loss. Each monologue includes a short introduction and a reference identifying where to locate the entire play, should anyone choose to pursue production beyond the monologue. Long or short, serious or not, this collection is must-have material for anyone interested in acting. The monologues also succeed as excellent companions for the casual reader.

Brief plays and sketches deal with the relationship between men and women, the past, communication, country life, and mortality.

Best Monologues from Best American Short Plays, Volume One is a must for actors of all ages – beginners as well as seasoned veterans – and belongs in the libraries of all theater teachers looking for new and exciting material for their students. The monologues in this volume are excerpted from the outstanding series Best American Short Plays, an archive of works from many of the best playwrights active today, presenting taut, engaging single-character pieces that range from zany comedy to poignant tales of love and loss. Each monologue includes a short introduction and a reference identifying where to locate the entire play, should anyone choose to pursue production beyond the monologue. Long or short, serious or not, this collection is must-have material for anyone interested in acting. The monologues also succeed as excellent companions for the casual reader.