More plays!
First up: the essential two volumes of Paddy Chayefsky’s stuff (and there’s still more out there). The Stage Plays
and The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The Television Plays
. He’s so good for acting classes, both his plays, his screenplays, and his TV scripts. Great scenes throughout, high peaks of emotion, good characters to delve into. Extremely Freudian, but that’s part of the era of writing he hails from.
The Paul Schmidt translation of Chekhov’s plays: The Plays of Anton Chekhov
: I prefer his translation to all the others.
My battered copy of Virginia: A Play
, which I understudied in Chicago. I understudied both female roles – Vita Sackville-West AND Virginia. I actually got to go on multiple times. Truly nerve-wracking (I went into a phone booth near Wrigley Field and called into my answering service, and heard the director calmly telling me I would be going on as Virginia in a week for a week of performances. I literally almost pissed my pants.) It was an unbelievably rewarding experience.
Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays
: I’ve been meaning to re-read the complete works of Marlowe one of these days. Nobody like him. Last year I re-read all of Shakespeare’s stuff in chronological order (my second time doing that: I highly recommend it) and it made me think it would be fun to do the same thing with Marlowe, whose plays I love but don’t know as well.
Arthur Miller’s After the Fall
was my thesis at The Actors Studio, put on at Circle in the Square downtown. A great experience and I’m still proud of my work in that.
And Odets! Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays
Playwright of my heart!! One of my favorite lines in any script ever is from Awake and Sing and it’s pure Odets: “Baby, don’t gimme ice when your heart’s on fire!” You MUST mean this when you say it. You can’t hold back. If you hold back, you may be doing some nice acting … but you are not doing Odets.
