Molière

Walter Kerr

The Miser

A critical study of the developments, styles, techniques, and achievements of the great and lesser masters of silent screen comedy, gives special attention to the talents of Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton, Langdon, and Laurel and Hardy

The Silent Clowns

Ira Peck

Murray Schisgal

Poor Harry Berlin decides to end it all by jumping off the Manhattan Bridge. He is stopped by his old friend Milt who takes Harry home and introduces him to his wife, Ellen, with whom Harry instantly falls in love. Milt and Ellen divorce, then realize they're still in love; to get back together, they have to encourage Harry to jump off the bridge.

Aristophanes

"The Birds" (414 B.C.) was Aristophanes' first Utopian play. In this instance, he has his "comedy team" leave Athens, fed up with frauds and bores of that society, in an effort to found a better society among the birds. To do so, they must first locate Epops, King of the Birds, who was once a man like themselves and who might be expected to know both sides of the problem. How they find him and what they persuade him to do is the body of the play.

A Full-length Play

The Birds

A collection of seventy-four of Walter Kerr's theater reviews and essays, originally published in "The New York Times."

Journey to the Center of the Theater

"Most young playwrights nowadays want to learn 'how to' write a play. This seems to me to be a mistake." Thus begins the first chapter of Walter Kerr's fascinating book on the art of playwriting. Taking an about-face look at the creative process, with chapters such as "How to Spoil a Good Story," Mr. Kerr leads us through the exciting and daring adventure of successfully bringing a play to fulfillment. "There is no point in pretending that this is not going to be an argumentative book or that overemphasis isn't going to crop up pretty frequently in the chapters that follow. The face of our theater is so familiar to us that we shall never see its features without blowing them up a bit, one by one. And it does seem to me that we had better do some arguing - quick." Walter Kerr, drama critic, playwright, teacher, director, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama Criticism, served as drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune and was chief critic for the Sunday New York Times until his retirement. -- from back cover.

Walter Kerr

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