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Theater Posters of James McMullan
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The Theater Posters of James McMullan

McMullan, James; Gersten, Bernard; Guare, John
ISBN-10: 0670876836
ISBN-13: 9780670876839

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3 used from $9.31
On buses, billboards, and train platforms, in newspapers and magazines, a poster's swift promise in glorious color or powerful dark tones offers a vivid impression of what awaits a theatergoer, and provides the lasting mental image of a play long after its closing night. No one creates such images with more invention, honesty, and beauty--sometimes disturbingly, but always memorably--than James McMullan.
The Theater Posters of James McMullan is an illuminating collection of thirty-six posters from 1976 to the present (from Arcadia and Carousel to Six Degrees of Separation), almost all of them for New York's Lincoln Center Theater, by this artist for whom "the body itself becomes a quickly understood gesture like the movement of a mime or a dance." The ragman hanging off the lamppost with his flaming match in Road, the French-postcard wink of the Anything Goes woman, Eros aiming his arrow in Four Baboons Admiring the Sun . . . full-page reproductions of McMullan's posters accompany his stories of their geneses. Reference photographs, sketches, and alternate versions illustrate his search for the perfect visual metaphor. Most of all, the personalities and dramas of the theater people who surrounded each poster's birth--from Wole Soyinka and John Guare to Liv Ullmann, Patti LuPone, and Mike Nichols--fill this gift book of choice for all theater and art lovers.
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Play Memory, 1978p. 6
The House of Blue Leaves, February 28, 1986p. 8
The Front Page, October 31, 1986p. 10
Death and the King's Horseman, February 13, 1987p. 14
Anything Goes, September 11, 1987p. 18
Road, July 14, 1988p. 24
Waiting for Godot, October 11, 1988p. 28
Measure for Measure, February 3, 1989p. 32
The Tenth Man, November 10, 1989p. 34
Six Degrees of Separation, May 19, 1990p. 36
Mule Bone, January 20, 1991p. 44
Two Shakespearean Actors, December 17, 1991p. 46
The Most Happy Fella, January 24, 1992p. 50
Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, February 22, 1992p. 52
The Sisters Rosensweig, September 25, 1992p. 56
Playboy of the West Indies, April 14, 1993p. 58
In the Summer House, July 8, 1993p. 62
Abe Lincoln in Illinois, November 5, 1993p. 64
Hello Again, December 30, 1993p. 68
Johnny on a Spot, February 1994p. 70
Carousel, February 18, 1994p. 72
The Heiress, February 9, 1995p. 78
Grande Etole, 1995p. 80
Arcadia, March 2, 1995p. 82
Twelve Dreams, May 11, 1995p. 88
Racing Demon, November 1, 1995p. 90
A Fair Country, February 1, 1996p. 98
A Delicate Balance, March 28, 1996p. 102
It's a Slippery Slope, November 2, 1996p. 106
God's Heart, March 6, 1997p. 108
An American Daughter, March 20, 1997p. 112
The Little Foxes, April 3, 1997p. 118
Pride's Crossing, December 7, 1997p. 120
Ah, Wilderness!, March 18, 1998p. 124
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.
Illustrator James McMullan was born in June 1934. He studied at Seattle's Cornish School of Allied Arts and Pratt Institute. McMullan's illustrations have appeared on book jackets and in magazines including Esquire and Sports Illustrated, and he has designed dozens of theatrical posters.
Born of Irish Catholic parents in New York City, Guare was an only child. His parents led intense but somewhat separate lives and young Guare found himself increasingly alone as he grew up. He spent his childhood reading, listening to albums of Broadway musicals, and writing plays. His first play was presented in a neighbor's garage when he was eleven. Guare first came to public attention with his one-act play Muzeeka (1968), a biting social satire about an ambitious man who works for a canned-music company that inflicts its banal arrangements on the entire country. The hero, Jack Argue, is a modern guilt-ridden "Everyman" who has sold himself out to the system. The play was first performed at Connecticut's Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre, then at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. On April 28, 1968, it opened off-Broadway at the Provincetown Playhouse on a double bill with Sam Shepard's Red Cross. Muzeeka ran for 65 performances and earned its author an Obie Award that year. The House of Blue Leaves (1971), Guare's first full-length play, is set in a Queens apartment on the day the Pope is making his first visit to New York City. A savage farce, The House of Blue Leaves presents an unrelenting attack on lower middle-class values. It shows the emptiness of the characters' inner lives and the horror of their senseless acts of violence. The play won both an Obie and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1971. In 1986 it enjoyed a highly successful revival at New York's Lincoln Center, which further established Guare as a unique and critically acclaimed American playwright. His more recent plays, such as Six Degrees of Separation (1990), show the playwright turning toward a more tragic outlook. Critics have been almost universal in their praise of Guare's screenplay for Louis Malle's film, Atlantic City (1981). Although not published in book form, the Canadian-French film has been distributed by Paramount in the United States. It is a bittersweet, Runyonesque tale about a small-time numbers runner, played by Burt Lancaster, and a small-town waitress, played by Susan Sarandon. Atlantic City received a number of honors, including best-screenplay awards by the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Society, and the New York Film Critics Circle.

List price: $35.95
Edition: 1998
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Binding: Trade Cloth
Pages: 160
Size: 10.36" wide x 13.84" long x 0.82" tall
Weight: 3.41 lbs.
Language: English

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