5 comments about Crimes of the Heart (Plays, Penguin).

1. I loved this play from the day I first saw it in the Manhattan Theatre Club before its inevitable switch to Broadway. And I am to direct it early this year. I found the film interesting - I just watched it last night - but Keaton ()who I have always found wonderful) is sadly miscast. Further there was too much casting the minds back in a sentimental fashion - a big mistake. In fact,the flashbacks did the play no great service at all, and to accompany those scenes with a treacly musical score didn't enhance things at alll. Back to the script. I would have liked some photographed scenes of the Broadway production.The page after page after page of props - many of which were to be in cupboards and drawers that never open - had a mystifying, let's give the actors the right kind of 'feel' effect on me. Actors on Broadway should be better equipped technically than having the need for such specious pieces of 'atmosphere'. As it stands, the script, despite all the useful information at the back, is hardly an actor's handbook, and most would, surreptitiously, turn off copies on larger paper in order that the play can be read more easily, with the left hand pages left blank for the actor to insert his or her notes.



2. I was lucky enough to work with Henley herself on a production of this show while I was in college, which offered a wonderful opportunity to gain some insight into Crimes of the Heart. Being a native Mississippian with two sisters myself, I was struck by how true-to-life this play is. The script captures that elusive "sense of place" that all the critics talk about when discussing the South - crazy relatives, old friends with haunted pasts, the importance of food and other types of sustenance. The plot revolves around wacky personalities, old wounds, and unplanned events, and even though the characters frequently despair, the show ends on a hopeful note.

   As with most plays, it's better to watch Crimes of the Heart than to read it, but I admit that I laughed out loud when I read some of the scenes. Henley won a Pulitzer for her work in Crimes of the Heart, and I think it was well-deserved.




3. CRIMES OF THE HEART tells the story of three sisters reuniting together after the youngest of the trio (Babe) shoots her husband and is on the verge of being sent to prison. The story takes place deep in the south in Hazlehurst, Mississippi.

   The writing in this play is superb. It captures the spirit of each of the young women splendidly. However, moving as the story is, it isn't quite poetical and thereby misses perfection.

   Nevertheless, CRIMES OF THE HEART is an enjoyable piece of theatre displaying the daffy complexity of women seen through the lives of three sisters.




4. I just finished playing Lenny in a college production of this play. It was the most fun I've ever had in any role! I have two sisters myself, and Henley's depiction of that kind of relationship is incredibly real. There are some great scenes and monologues for acting practice, too--one, two, or three women, and a couple for one man and one woman. I recommend it to anyone.



5. Being a native Mississippian and also a native of Hazlehurst-the setting of the play- it amazing how realistic the play is about life in the South. Henley's play captures the essence of family relationships, that "crazy" person in everyone's family, the relationships between sisters as friends, and the narrow-mindedness of people in the South. Where else but in the South would a person commit suicide just because "they were having a bad day."

No comments about Care of the Professional Voice: A Guide to Voice Management for Singers, Actors and Professional Voice Users.

5 comments about My Sister Marilyn: A Memoir of Marilyn Monroe.

1. I am so pleased about my purchase. The service was excellent and the book was in excellent condition. Thank you for this wonderful addition to my collection.



2. This is a great book. I never knew Marilyn wrote a autobiography. I couldn't put it down! Highly recommended.



3. Although I'm not a diehard fan of Marilyn Monroe, My Sister Marilyn has surely convinced me to watch more of her films. Since her death in the 1960's, numerous reports have surfaced on how she died. The book doesn't surround that particular subject; instead, it shows us the relationship between Marilyn and her sister Berniece. Their bond as sisters was nice to read and they continued to keep in contact up to her death. I highly recommend this memoir to any fan of Marilyn's, or just for the curious reader looking for truth on one of Hollywood's greatest beauties.



4. This memoir of Berniece Baker Miracle of her half-sister Marilyn Monroe (they had the same mother) is among the most important works ever written on this great star, if only for the insights and information about the young pre-stardom Norma Jeane Baker. Berniece avoided the press for almost 50 years and finally tells her story here and Marilyn fans around the world owe her a debt of thanks for her inside information on Marilyn's early years. And the early photos of Marilyn are so precious. This is a book I am certain will be turned to again and again by Monroe fans, historians, and scholars for many years.



5. This is a very enjoyable book. I'm so glad Berniece Miracle finally came out with the book with help from daughter Mona. The photos are wonderful, as you watch the transition from Norma Jeane to Marilyn, get to see her wedding photo to Jim Dougherty and hear words of Joe DiMaggio and learn some of the insides of Hollywood as Marilyn shared them with her sister.

   Sadly, the book also describes how Berniece was hounded by the press and had a hard time leading a "normal" life. No privacy. I was hoping the book would give more insight into Marilyn's death, but Berniece and Mona are as much in the dark as anyone. Interesting is the denial of any relationship with President John F. Kennedy or brother Bobby. That seems to be a given in most books about Marilyn. However, if you read between the lines here, Marilyn doesn't deny a relationship, she just smiles when Berniece asks and says "they're just boys." There could be a lot Marilyn doesn't share with her sister!

   But what comes shining through in this book is how loving and lovable Marilyn was, and how much she was loved by her sister. The idea of a mentally ill mother explains a lot of things, like Marilyn's obvious depression. The sisters not even knowing about each other until Marilyn was 12 and Berniece 19 is sad, but at least they had each other through the rest of Marilyn's life.

   This is a lovely book, beautifully written, tragic as it must have been. It shows Marilyn as more of the earthy woman her family knew, which is a refreshing perspective from other Marilyn Monroe biographies!

5 comments about My Lives.

1. The best thing about Roseanne's book, "My Lives" is the picture on the cover!
   
   I have always loved Roseanne because she is/was such a talented and courageous entertainer. Through her groundbreaking sitcom, Roseanne she showed the American family as it really was meant to be seen. But I also think there's a part of her that's really not all there. And, sadly she started to unravel around the time this book came out.
   
   "My Lives" was published 14 years ago, 5 years after Roseanne's first autobiography; the considerably less in-your-face "My Life As A Woman." But in her latest editorial debacle Roseanne lets it all hang out so to speak.
   
   Roseanne is intent on painting a very ugly picture of her life through this book. She was the victim of incest and sexual abuse by both her mother and father. She was forced to become a hooker because her and her first husband were living on skid row. She gave up a child that she had as a teenager. She never learned to trust men. She ate like there was no tomorrow and when gained success she became incredibly inebriated on her own fame.
   
   All of this comes off as so cliche and rather sloppy. It reads like a perverse National Enquirer article. But all of that cannot compare to Roseanne's most "startling revelation." She claims that she is the victim of Disassociate Identity Disorder (in 1994 when this book was published the "disease" was called "multiple identity disorder.") Yes, that's right Roseanne claims to have hundreds of personalities living within her one body.
   
   I can remember an interview that Roseanne once did with Arsenio. He was talking about La Toya and all of her hairball stories and Roseanne defended her saying: "I would rather believe a liar than a molester." Well I suppose anyone would. But that does not give her the right, just because she has a public voice, to go on national TV and trash people, the people who were the closest to her simply because she forgot to take her Prozac. And, when Roseanne finally got her head on straight there was never a big press conference or any media appearances to dispel these malicious lies. It's sad that truth isn't as appealing as dishonesty is.
   
   As you probably do not know (because it was rarely reported in the MSM,) A few years after this book was published, a newly divorced (and re-married again Roseanne) has "regained her sanity." This "new" Roseanne now recants all of those hateful statements in this book. But even to call those statements hateful would be doing an injustice. What would you call someone who makes up false allegations of sexual abuse towards her parents?
   
   Some would call this person a monster.
   
   Some would call this person an a-ni-mal.
   
   Some would call this person a conniving money-hungry crook.
   
   I just think Roseanne has made some very poor decisions as far as her personal life and her professional life are concerned. She laid her life out for the entire world to see and somewhere along the way she forgot who she really was and she forgot what the truth was. I suppose it doesn't help matters that she's always been as crazy as a loon.
   
   Geraldine Barr (Roseanne's sister,) wrote a rebuttal to this effluent, My Sister Roseanne. Unfortunately, through her many contacts and with all of the power and clout that comes with having the number one coast-to-coast television show in the Country, Roseanne was able to get the book collectively blackballed. Critics panned that book as a cry for money. These same critics didn't bat an eye when Roseanne publishes an autobiography only 5 years after her first one.
   
   If you're interested in learning about the real Roseanne, I recommend watching her TV show and some of her movies. I also recommend reading her first autobiography and Geraldine's book, as well as any magazine interviews that Roseanne has done over the last 7 to 8 years (anything between 1991 and 1998 are riddled with statements that Roseanne herself now states are "untrue.") But skip this book, unless you enjoy reading about trainwrecks.
   
   I do feel bad for Roseanne but from what I have read about her now, she is enjoying lucidity and is at peace. But more than that, I feel awful for her poor parents. I cannot think of anything worse than to have a child make up such false statements for the pure purposes of selling a book.
   
   Where is Roseanne today?
   
   Now going by "Roseanne Barr" once again, after marrying Ben Thomas twice and divorcing him twice Roseanne's now living happily single with her teenage son. She is currently performing in Las Vegas at the Sahara and when she's in LA or New York Roseanne enjoys stand-up from time to time. However, she has no plans of going back to series TV nor does she have any plans of writing another book. She just wants to put the past behind her and focus on the future. Roseanne is also a very proud grandmother and is very involved in her childrens' and grandchildrens' lives. In April, Roseanne and the cast from her show were reuinted for a TV Land Award; "Roseanne" was given the pop-culture award. In this latest persona, Roseanne appeared very subdued and even wore a fashionable gray forelock in her hair. Perhaps it's a sign that she really has changed. Or, maybe one of her personalities has an aversion to Lady Revlon?



2. I read Roseanne's first book. It was so awful, it was almost torture. This book is an improvement. Roseanne writes more lucidly the second time around. It is more biography than rambling mess, as the first book was. She covers her personal life as well as tid bits regarding her sit com. The sit com is one area where I do believe her. She had to fight (and it wasn't pretty) for control of her own show.
   
   I can see where many ideas for the show came from after reading her books. The problem is that the show was funny and Roseanne's life anything but funny. Roseanne Barr is nothing like Roseanne Conner. Not surprisingly, Roseanne Barr swears like a trucker. She has no filter and says anything and I mean ANYTHING that comes to mind. (I wish I could do this too, but ya just can't!). She was heavily into drugs, alcohol and even has sex with multiple guys for money. This is all while she was married with three kids. She talks about loving her kids, but was barely there to raise them. What a mess.
   
   She also covers the fact that she had suppressed memories of her parents abusing her, mentally and sexually. She states that this is what made her act out so badly all her life and she dealt with it through multiple personalities. She provides a list of each personality's name at the end of the book.
   
   Because her behavior has been so incredibly bizarre and over the top, it is hard to know what to believe or not. It's hard to see someone's pain as enjoyable. Like lots of people, she needed to write the book, but I'm not sure we need to read it.



3. This is Roseanne's second autobiography, the one in which she alleges childhood sexual abuse by both her mother and father. She also details how her younger sister fled her parents' house due to abuse (and now denies any abuse) and how Roseanne's daughter was also abused by Roseanne's father. Roseanne claims her weight issues stem from childhood sexual abuse. In a bizarre chapter at the end, Roseanne even alludes to having multiple personality disorder, as a means of surviving abuse.
   
   Roseanne also dishes about the formative years of her sitcom and her desperate struggle for creative control, as well as her romance, marriage, and creative partnership with Tom Arnold. She also describes in detail the infamous National Anthem debacle, from what her intentions were through the aftermath.
   
   I don't know if I find Roseanne 100% credible. She's outrageous and unbalanced and I can't help but feel that she skewers the truth to meet her own needs. If you can get past that, this makes for an interesting read.



4. I must say that I didn't exactly know what to think when I saw a book with Tom and Roseanne on the cover. But seeing as "Roseanne" is one of my favorite shows, I had to pick it up. This is Roseanne Barr-Arnold's second book; I have not yet read the first one. The book discusses everything between the start of her stand-up act through her marriage with Tom Arnold. She has lots of fun bashing all of the people she worked with on her hit sitcom and her ex-husband, Bill Pentland, who she was married to for 16 years and had 3 children with. The thing that is ironic about this book is how Roseanne talks about how much she loves Tom Arnold, when she divorced him the same year that this book was released. The book is actually quite interesting, however. We see that Roseanne Barr and Roseanne Arnold are definetely two different people. This Roseanne is sticking with her story about her father molesting her and her sisters. (The Roseanne Barr of 2004 is now getting along with her family.) I think that this book is a little one-sided, though. Roseanne doesn't seem to think about how her children must feel during this divorce. I do recommend it for those of you intrigued by Roseanne Barr-Pentland-Arnold-Thomas's life story.



5. I found this book in one of those factory second tables at the shopping centre, I thought it was a novel Roseanne had written, some cheesy romance thing but because I am such a huge fan I bought it anyway, God I loved it, So brutally honest and self examining, I loved the people she loved and hated those she hated.
   Great bio, the best I ever read.

2 comments about Working Actor's Guide: To Los Angeles (Working Actor's Guide, L a).

1. As a working actor for most of my life, I can attest to the fact that of all the "how to" books on the market this book is truly a must have, especially if you are new to the LA market. Here you will find the best/cheapest/chicest etc place to (fill in the blank) get your nails done, get your photos copied, find a computer etc. It won't make you a better actor but it can help you survive in a tough city so that you can spend your energies improving your craft. I offer this advice as someone who recurred on 11 series including Seinfeld and Home Improvement and what is very nice now is that this book used to cost upwards of 125 new (I never owned a new copy but always one two years out of date! ) and now is just the price of a regular book. Combine this book with Judy Kerr's Acting is Everything and you are ready to begin to ask the eternal question "How do I get an agent"?
   
   Patrick Cronin, AEA, SAG, AFTRA
   Chair Department of Theatre
   East Tennessee State University



2. The Working Actor's Guide is, by far, the most comprehensive guide to acting in Los Angeles ever created. Nothing comes close to this directory. It has useful blurbs, detailed contact information, and various other handy resources that any actor (whether newcomer or well established) could use. As a young acting student myself and having purchased this guide for the past six years, I highly recommend it.

1 comments about Even More Monologues for Women by Women.

1. I bought this, hoping for some good pieces to work with forensics students, since my class is all girls. There are a few good pieces, but I would warn any high school teahers purchasing this that there is a lot of profanity and obscenity. Depending on your community, the recurrent themes of lesbianism and feminism might be a bit more extreme than comfortable. However, I think it is a good choice for adults looking for those hard-to-find female monolgues. Selections are, on average, slightly longer than in the preceding Monologues for Women by Women.

No comments about Ladd, the life, the legend, the legacy of Alan Ladd: A biography.

1 comments about Communication: Views from the Helm for the 21st Century.

1. Judith S. Trent has assembled an outstanding selection of essays reflecting the diversity that the field of communication studies has become at the end of the twentieth century. These essays are the outgrowth of convention presentations by scores of leading researchers-scholars who participated in the 1996 San Diego convention of the National Communication Association.

   This assemblage of essays (59 in all) are divided into seventeen chapters comprising an introductory chapter from the bridge, as it were, of Trent's ship of researchers followed by sixteen discrete chapters which chart the waters of communication studies today. There is little or no looking back to the origins of this professional association of educators which was founded in 1914 as the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking. Rather, this text views where the academic discipline of communication studies is today as a way of charting the directions the field may take into the twenty-first century.

   "Communication: Views from the Helm for the Twenty-First Century" admirably showcases the most recent trends and directions in communication studies including health and relational communication; political, group, and organizational communication; media, performance, gender, and cultural studies; as well as intercultural, rhetorical, and political communication.

   From this reviewer's perspective - which may be a deck or two below the bridge - the view might have been enhanced by a broader inclusivity. For example, the gender chapter needed a more diverse view with a stronger focus on gay, lesbian, and transgender areas of inquiry and the area of environmental communication received no consideraton whatsoever. Also marginalized were such areas as debate and forensics, ethics and religion, and freedom of speech and law. While granting that some of these latter areas such as debate and forensics have their own textual history and other areas may be small and specialized, some researchers in these areas of communication studies may feel left back ot the dock.

   In sum, however, communication studies desperately needed a solid text with a comprehensive view of the discipline to provide to senior level college students as well as to graduate students new to the field. This is such a text. It has been and will continue to be used in my teaching of our introductory course of graduate studies at California State Univesity, Los Angeles. And I most highly recommend it to other instructors who are teaching similar courses.

No comments about Euripides' Hippolytus (Focus Classical Library).

2 comments about The Crafty Art of Playmaking.

1. There are dozens of books out there on playwriting and about half that number on directing. Unfortunately for us, neither Shakespeare, Chekhov nor Ibsen wrote books on how to write a play. As a result, virtually all the authors of books about playwriting are academics who have never written a commercially produced play. One has to question the value of such people's advice when dealing with the practical realities of the professional theatre. Sir Alan Ayckbourn has changed all that. He is the author/director of (at this writing) a whopping 69 plays, a substantial portion of which have been critical and/or commercial successes on London's West End and New York's Broadway as well as being translated into numerous languages and produced throughout the world. The first part of the book is about the craft of playwriting. Ayckbourn gives his advice in a straightforward series of "obvious rules." First he states the "obvious rule" and then illustrates it with an example, usually drawn from his own work. Some of my favorites were, "Obvious Rule No. 2: Never start a play without an idea." "Obvious Rule of No. 16: Never include a character with no real function." "Obvious Rule Number 14: At least 50 percent of your play is going to be visual." "Obvious Rule No. 22: You can never know too much about your characters before you start." Ayckbourn says that he takes about a year of thinking and planning before he actually writes a word of dialogue. I found this section of the book extremely valuable. Any playwright or would-be playwright would profit from reading it.
   
   To my surprise, I found the second part of the book, which deals with direction, even more valuable than the first part. Aside from Harold Clurman's ON DIRECTING, I cannot think of another book about directing that has been written by a successful director. Clurman's book is very good about reading a script and analyzing it and giving an overall view of how rehearsals are conducted. Most books on directing provide this information. But what sets Ayckbourn's book apart is that he talks mostly about dealing with actors. To the best of my knowledge, no one has written about this aspect. He tells how to handle fragile egos, how to deal with rivalries, how to state your criticism and the appropriate times to deal with certain issues. He also gives good advice on conducting auditions and what personality traits to look for when casting. Advice like this has long been needed.
   
   The book provides valuable information, but what makes it truly brilliant is the charming way it is written. I found it delightful from start to finish, not to mention inspirational. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to any theatre professional, not just writers and directors, but actors, designers and technicians as well. Five stars plus.



2. Alan Ayckbourn's book on the art of the theater covers far more than just "playmaking" His years of experience as both author and director are evident as he gives "obvious rules" for writing, directing, establishing characters, and everthing in between.
   Not only does he devote a substantial amount of space to the play writing process, but he also talks about casting, lighting, chosing a costume designer, working with your tech staff, and dealing with your actors during the various stages of the production.

   All this is given, not as a dissertation, but with a genuine sense of love for his craft.

   I found the examples of dialogue-taken from his own plays to illustrate the various points of writing-extremely helpful.

   I will refer to this book again in my own writing endeavors.

   Highly recommended.