A colorful, spirited gem for aspiring actors or groups looking to improve teamwork.
A book provides guidelines for learning the art of improvisation.
Debut author Schindler is a founding member of Chicago City Limits, New York City’s longest-running improv comedy show, and Soter (You Should Get a Cat, 2016, etc.) is a producer and performer for Manhattan’s Sunday Night Improv. Together in this how-to manual, the duo seeks to make learning improvisation creative and fun. Beginning with a brief history (improv has Chicago roots), the work quickly jumps into the nuts and bolts of slapstick “comedy of the moment.” Instead of scripts, improv performers are given prompts—from the troupe, a partner, or even the audience—and they must learn to act naturally and off the cuff. Chapters begin with footnoted quotes, mostly from actors—like John Cleese of Monty Python’s Flying Circus—and then key concepts are explained for the novice. While it may seem ironic to have rules for spontaneous acting, the authors’ tenets are meant to help newcomers learn to work in sync with other actors. For example, in the guideline “accept all offers,” if an acting partner presents an imaginary cup of coffee, an improviser should take it and develop that idea instead of asking for tea and stopping the flow of the scene. Exercises and games are also included; for example, in “Silent Partner,” one team member must stay quiet, communicating only with body language and facial expressions. Packed with action photos from the authors’ careers (some contain famous faces, like Robin Williams’), the easy-flowing layout is eye-catching. Memorable analogies are used to explain key concepts; for example, building a scene is compared to constructing a house, brick by brick. Most intriguingly, the buoyant chapters end with examples from the authors’ own seasoned careers, such as the times they achieved “group mind,” which caused them to perform seamlessly with their partners. Quirky and lighthearted (at the end of the introduction, the authors proclaim, “Read on, MacDuff”), this lively romp through the improv world is accessible for both high school and adult readers.
A colorful, spirited gem for aspiring actors or groups looking to improve teamwork.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5115-4453-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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