ABSTRACT
Sidney Homan defines a pivotal line as “a moment in the script that serves as a pathway into the larger play … a magnet to which the rest of the play, scenes before and after, adheres.” He offers his personal choices of such lines in five plays by Shakespeare and works by Beckett, Brecht, Pinter, Shepard, and Stoppard. Drawing on his own experience in the theatre as actor and director and on campus as a teacher and scholar, he pairs a Shakespearean play with one by a modern playwright as mirrors for each other. One reviewer calls his approach “ground-breaking.” Another observes that his “experience with the particular plays he has chosen is invaluable” since it allows us to find “a wedge into such iconic texts.” Academics and students alike will find this volume particularly useful in aiding their own discovery of a pivotal line or moment in the experience of reading about, watching, or performing in a play.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |12 pages
Introduction
part I|44 pages
The Theatre's Other Side
chapter 2|21 pages
Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
part II|36 pages
Pivotal Moments
chapter 3|18 pages
The Taming of the Shrew
part III|38 pages
Expanding the World Onstage
chapter 6|16 pages
Shepard, True West
part IV|40 pages
Theatrical Presence
chapter 7|18 pages
The Comedy of Errors
chapter 8|20 pages
Beckett, Waiting for Godot
part V|41 pages
Playing Offstage