Bøker av Sherry Kramer

" Reading and digesting the lessons in this book can be of greater value to an aspiring dramatist than years in an MFA program. Whether you are writing for the stage, screen or audio, this book is an invaluable teacher and guide to have by your side throughout the development and revision process."Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig "This book does what no other playwriting book in my experience has done, it offers a new way of seeing and conceiving how theatre makes meaning and carries emotional impact in performance."Suzan Zeder, Professor Emerita and former Head Of Playwriting at University of Texas at Austin, USA Combining a step-by-step analysis of the technique of writing for stage and screen with how the mystery, poetry, and emotional momentum is achieved for the audience, Sherry Kramer offers an empowering, original guide for emerging and established writers. In this structured look at the way audience members progress through a work in real time, Sherry Kramer uses plain-spoken vocabulary to help you discover how to make work that will mean more to your audiences. By using examples drawn from plays, film, and streaming series, ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire to Fleabag to Pirates of the Caribbean, this study makes its concepts accessible to a wide range of artists who work in timebound art. The book also features multiple exercises, developed with MFA writers in The Iowa Playwrights Workshop and The Michener Center for Writers, where Kramer taught for the past 25 years, which provide entrance points to help you consider and create your work.

WHEN SOMETHING WONDERFUL ENDS explores the loss of one's mother, America's dependence on foreign oil, and Barbie dolls in an ingenious, whimsical, touching, funny, infuriating manner that only playwright Sherry Kramer could achieve. While packing up her parents' home following the death of her mother, Sherry uncovers the treasure trove of Barbies from her baby-boom childhood while embarking on the homework of a lifetime: discovering the roots of Islamic hatred of America and our dependence on the oil in the Middle East. As a Jewish girl growing up in the epicenter of the Bible belt, Sherry knows a thing or two about religious fervor and the passions it engenders."While she putters around putting Barbie paraphernalia into boxes, our hostess neatly ties together the personal and the political, yoking her own history to the mess of current global politics and a loss of faith in the American ideal. Quirky and informative." -Christopher Isherwood, The New York Times"As the actress telling Kramer's story packs up the Barbie artifacts of a Baby Boomer youth, the playwright explores both childhood fantasy and grown-up loss, as well as offering a step-by-step theory of why so many in the Arab world have come to hate the United States … it is, bottom line, a moving and provocative piece." -Christine Dolan, Miami Herald"Recounting her quest for the moment our way of life began unraveling, playwright Sherry Kramer's remarkable monologue moves between 1963 and now, between Tehran and Springfield, MO, between radicalized mullahs and vintage Barbies, to unearth truths about America's pursuit of Middle Eastern oil and her personal history, before arriving at her mother's grave and the intersection of geopolitical interests and individual responsibility. As timely as it was revealing and as witty as wise." -Robert Faires, The Austin Chronicle"In her incisive one-woman, autobiographical play. Playwright Sherry Kramer recalls coming of age, the death of a beloved parent, Judaism, the Middle East crisis and a concise history of the durable Barbie doll … Making Barbie a pivotal character in her narrative, playwright Kramer writes with a fluid hand that balances grief, conflict and the innocence of youth." -Robert Daniels, Variety

When you make glass for a living, your body breaks. Victor, the last in a long line of glassmakers, lies under the knife on the operating table for heart and lung surgery, while his family waits to know if he will live or die. An inside-out surrealist ride on the wishes and fears of a family as they wait in a hospital waiting room, where every thought and terror becomes manifest. It is a play about the end of the American manufacturing era, a postmodern history of glass making, and a tale about the need we have to turn the story of our breakable lives into an unbreakable story. "Sherry Kramer's THINGS THAT BREAK is a terribly difficult, painfully beautiful play in which everything is broken. The storytelling is jagged, taking surreal twists as it shifts back and forth between the worried wife of a man having heart surgery and her grown son and daughter… This is a wildly imaginative piece of work… …listening to Miss Kramer's kaleidoscopic language…is like being under some hallucinogenic anesthetic…" Nelson Pressley, The Washington Times "You may have heard that playwright Sherry Kramer is biting off more than she can chew in THINGS THAT BREAK, her free-form comedy about sibling rivalry, heart surgery, and the American dream. Don't believe it. The lady chews like a champion. Chomps, actually, greedily bobbling up insights that would surely escape lesser writers, just as she did when introducing the metaphysics-obsessed lesbian lovers of DAVID'S REDHAIRED DEATH…" Bob Mondello, CityPaper

The perfect rent-controlled New York City apartment has one fatal flaw - the roommate from hell. The play takes place on the day the newest roommate can't take it anymore. Classic humor of mistaken identity mixed with new-age twists. THE WALL OF WATER is farce with all the sharp edges showing - it is an intractably woven tale that tackles subjects as serious as death and as important as scientific inquiry, and everything in between. A farce about the nature of madness, the way it is infectious, how we treat it and how we decided who is and who isn't. A play with four leading roles for young women about strong women and the men who love and sometimes sedate them. "... THE WALL OF WATER quickly bursts through the dam of conventional theater for two hours of the kind of inspired and breathtaking chaos so rare on America's stages that we may have forgotten the word for it. The word is farce ... Even though Sherry Kramer's play is gleefully packed with all those most cherished elements of classic farce - mistaken identity, miscommunicated messages, misunderstood orders - the exasperations which fuel the play's wacky fires from start to finish are recognizably - and sometimes grimly - contemporary ... What distinguishes Kramer's farce from even her most esteemed European counterparts is four strong female roles at the heart of this eloquent craziness ..." -Margaret Spillane, New Haven Independent

Human spontaneous combustion is not something that most people worry about, but Amalia Parker does, and that's why she won't sleep with Rob. Sex with someone she doesn't care about might not be so dangerous, but with the man she truly loves? A definite possibility. This is the kind of logic that only makes sense in the Parker household, where Mom cooks obsessively, Dad has turned the house into an 18-hole golf course, and ancient maiden Aunt Emily does laundry and practices the family art of selective sight. A sweet, quirky comedy.The critics on Sherry Kramer's plays:DAVID'S REDHAIRED DEATH: "Sherry Kramer's extraordinary play ... is like a puzzle: after slowly and painstakingly connecting a series of dots, one uncovers an integrated image out of what appeared to be chaos." -The Chicago ReaderTHINGS THAT BREAK: "... a terribly difficult, painfully beautiful play ... This is a wildly imaginative piece of work." -Nelson Pressley, The Washington TimesTHE WALL OF WATER: "THE WALL OF WATER quickly bursts through the dam of conventional theater for two hours of the kind of inspired and breathtaking chaos so rare on America's stages that we may have forgotten the word for it. The word is farce." - Margaret Spillane, New Haven IndependentWHAT A MAN WEIGHS: "... its view of sexual politics becomes more and more complex, funny, and biting." -TimeWHEN SOMETHING WONDERFUL ENDS: "As timely as it is revealing, and as witty as wise." -Austin Chronicle

Two women find that they have everything in common until the death of a brother drives them apart. Part stand-up comedy, part stand-up tragedy for two. The redhaired mythology that glorifies and empowers two women leads them into a big love, but can't lead them safely out again. A play about the heaviness of the things we carry."... Sherry Kramer's inventively structured, colorfully written and frequently lyrical play ... The narrative fluidly shifts back and forth between the present and the span of a few days two years earlier, when Jean and Marilyn met and Jean received the fateful phone call from home informing her of David's death ... this thoughtful meditation on loss ..." -Douglas J Keating, The Philadelphia Enquirer"... Kramer is working with some provocative material: Jean and Marilyn, a pair of red-haired temptresses (or so they like to think), meet in an enchanted boudoir setting of bent willow and diaphanous draperies, find that they share a million and one likes and dislikes, old boyfriends, nasty habits and family patterns, and fall in love because of that almost magical twinship ... Kramer does, however, have a way with verbal imagery. Woven through the script are wonderful references to fairy tales - Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel ... The playwright is also adept at monologues chock-full of telling details ..." -Pamela Sommers, The Washington Post"... All the scenes are interspersed with lines from previous scenes and foreshadowings of things to come, so there is a coiled, spiralled tension instead of the suspense of an ordinary linear plot. Except for their monologues about death - and the one opening the second as is a stunner - the actresses are always in duet ... DAVID'S REDHAIRED DEATH is a stirring, annoying and difficult piece of work. But an absorbing one ..." -Elizabeth C Donahoe, The Washington Blade"... Kramer's play is like a puzzle: after slowly and painstakingly connecting a series of dots, one uncovers an integrated image out of what appeared to be chaos ..." -Mary Shen Barnidge, Reader (Chicago)