Author Description

This Director's Playbook contains the play itself, and many resources that a high school or college director or drama coach, or even a commercial director, would find useful. There's a skeleton outline for entrances and exits of all actors, a section for audition candidates, tips on organizing a team, stage manager responsibilities, list of scenes, how to create a program, sell advertising, duties of a producer, sample budget. Scenes are broken up into dramatic dialogues, with fifty square inches of space for drawings, notes, sketches of how to present a scene. No details on costuming or set design, as each director will expand on his/her own vision for the play. That's the point of this playbook. Even the script can be (has been) cut by directors. How to maximize the impact of this play for a modern audience, that's up to the ingenuity of the director. The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, with juicy roles even for the bit players, but outstanding roles for Portia and Shylock. This play is a lot of fun, a bit sexy, it's got a moral lesson, and it may reflect on our own times, depending on how the director interprets it.