Full Description

Restoration comedies of manners are at once bitingly true-to-life and deceptively artificial. Their style, elegance, grace, and wit provide the kind of challenge actors continue to love. Now Suzanne Ramczyk offers both directors and actors the tools they need to perform these popular plays.

Drawing on her directing experience and her years of leading workshops on Restoration theatre, Ramczyk provides:

• an historic overview of the period and the literature
• analysis of the major literary devices and features
• methods to approach vocal interpretation of often highly artificial text
• a solid grounding in period manners and movement
• specific exercises to get actors quickly and easily into the Restoration style
• detailed artwork of period costumes
• illustrations of such period necessities as bows, curtsies, the "language" of the fan, and snuff taking.

Read Ramczyk and explore the possibilities of Restoration comedy from first reading to final, polished performance.

Additional Resource Information

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Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1.	Overview: A Brief History of Restoration England
	The Court and World of Charles II
	Plays and Playwrights
	The Theatre, Its Actors, and Audiences
	Summary
2	Some Basic Acting Concerns
	Introduction
	Character Types
	Achieving Objectives Through Externals Flaunting As an Objective
	Masking Emotion
	Interaction As a Game to Be Won Scenes for Practice
	Scene Analysis
3	The Language in Restoration Comedies: Background, Types, Styles, and Modes of Speech
	Introduction
	Purveyors and Annihilators of Wit
	Conventions of Public and Private Discourse
	Devices and Components of Wit
	Summary
	Exercises
	Scene Analysis
4	Using the Voice
	Introduction
	Understanding Operative Words
	Working Imagistically: Utilizing Laban’s Components of Movement for the Voice
	The Vocal Variables of Pitch, Rhythm, and Tempo
	Putting It All Together: Experimenting with Pitch, Tempo, and Rhythm
	Playing the Sounds
	Scene Analysis
5	The Physical Lives of Characters: Movement, Fashion, and the Details of Deportment
	Introduction
	The Mask of Fashion
	A Consideration of Rehearsal Costumes
	Fashion and Movement: A Brief Consideration of Space General Physical and Movement Concerns
	A Laban Approach
	Postures Delineated
	Integrating Movement with Text and Voice
	Bows and Curtsies
	Gestures With and Without Props
	Exercises for Integrating Gesture with Movement and Text Scene Analysis
	Acting, Text, Voice, and Movement: A Synthesis
	Character Analysis/Worksheet
Appendix A: A Vocal Warm-Up
Appendix B: A Partial List of Writings on the Art of Deportment in the Restoration Era
Appendix C: A Partial List of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedies
Bibliography