From School Library Journal
Grade 8 Up–Filled with plot descriptions and brief analyses and jam-packed with delightfully obscure plays, this concise collection of 1000 important works of the world stage is a wonderful ready-reference tool. The writing is clear, the summaries are easy to follow, and the information on performance dates, genre, setting, etc., is presented in a lucid manner at the head of each article. The works covered range from ancient Greek dramas (Aeschyluss
Seven Against Thebes, Sophocless
Electra) to worldwide treasures (Leo Tolstoys
The Power of Darkness, Jean-Claude Carrières
Le Mahabharata) to contemporary social commentaries such as Marsha Normans
Night, Mother and Paula Vogels
How I Learned to Drive. The volume includes helpful indexes of characters and playwrights, and a list of plays by country of origin and period. Frank N. Magills
Masterplots II: Drama Series (1990) and Critical Survey of Drama series (both Salem), or the Drama for Students series (Gale), are multivolume sets that offer more in-depth analyses. Pattersons resource offers the advantages of succinct description and easy access in a single volume. However, readers may question why some plays were included and others were omitted. For example, John Guares legendary
House of Blue Leaves and Athol Fugards
Boesman and Lena arent here, but Maria Fornéss
Fefu and Her Friends and John Daly Burks
Bunker-Hill each earn an entry. Still, when readers can find descriptions of works by Dario Fo, Caryl Churchill, and Aeschylus in the same book–well, to paraphrase John Guare, I may not know much about signs…but this looks like a good one.
–Herman Sutter, Saint Agnes Academy, Houston, TX Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
When the play's the thing, this work takes top billing. One thousand of "the most significant plays of world theatre" are presented in compact entries crammed with details including title, alternative title, author, date of writing, date and place of first performance, date of first publication, date of first published English translation, genre, setting and time of action, and composition of cast followed by a brief synopsis and commentary. Here you will find not only the plays of Aeschylus, Brecht, Mol, and Shakespeare but recent hit dramas like David Auburn's
Proof, Margaret Edson's
Wit, and Patrick Marber's
Closer. In addition to the fact-packed entries, a number of special features are included: an index of characters allows the reader to track the use of characters in all the plays indexed; for example, using it we find that the character of Antigone is in 25 plays, while Helen of Troy appears in 16, and Medea in 19. An index of playwrights gathers together references to entries on plays not only by the playwright but also to mentions of the playwright in entries on plays by others. There are also a select bibliography, a family tree of main characters in Shakespeare's history plays, and a list of plays ordered according to country of origin and period.
Coverage of both time and place is broad and inclusive, spanning the centuries from the Greek and Roman classics to Shakespeare and his contemporaries right on through the Romantic period and realism, symbolism, and other isms, ending with post-1944 America and post-1956 Britain. Works from Eastern and Western Europe as well as Africa, India, Japan, and more are represented. Although there are a number of theater handbooks and dictionaries available, most usually include only brief references to actual works of drama. The details provided here and the special features that enhance their presentation make this an exceptional reference work, and its reasonable price makes it affordable for almost any reference collection. Carolyn Mulac
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved