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Robert Cardullo's 'On a Dramatic Note: Short Essays on Multiple Plays, from Sophocles to Shakespeare and Moliére to Mamet' consists of analysis and criticism of such well known plays as Oedipus Tyrannos, Hamlet, King Lear, Tartuffe, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, Major Barbara, Of Mice and Men, Our Town, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Riders to the Sea, The Homecoming, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Loot, Dutchman, Plenty, Saved, Glengarry Glen Ross, Buried Child, and A Soldier's Play - among a number of other important works. From the short essays included in this book, one will quickly discover that the author's preoccupations as a critic are not theoretical. He is, rather, a ''close reader'' committed to a detailed yet relatively objective examination of the structure, style, imagery, and language of a play. As someone who once regularly worked in the theater as a dramaturg, moreover, he is concerned chiefly with dramatic analysis that can be of benefit to directors, designers, and even actors - that is, with analysis of character, action, dialogue, and setting that can be translated into concepts for theatrical production, or that can at least provide the kind of understanding of a play with which a theater practitioner could fruitfully quarrel. Many of the plays considered are regularly produced, especially by university theaters, and these explicatory essays and notes may in some small way make a contribution to future stagings. A number of these dramas are also routinely treated in high school and college courses on dramatic literature, so the short pieces contained in 'On a Dramatic Note' may also serve students as models for the writing of play analyses.--
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