The Shadow Teller's Plays

In a volume containing 14 original plays – including three shadow-play adaptions of Gogol, Morton and Runyon classics – the author resurrects a sadly neglected theatre genre – the shadow play combining traditional shadow techniques with normal acting to create ‘full-bodied’ mainstream plays.
These plays do not use shadow puppetry-type techniques that need people contorting themselves, however wonderfully, to form shapes, but rather normal acting prowess together and usual props of mainstream theatre with the new back-lighting technologies.
The result is plays which are realistic and yet overlain with the imaginative fantasies that figure theatre can bring… in a fallow area lying between mime and conventional stage plays… a rediscovered form of a modern staging that crosses between live and shadow effect, whether in workshopping for all ages and group-size or for professional productions.
Shadow plays comprise the theatre landscape for live actors re-skilled to jump from behind-the-screen one-dimensional acting to front-of-the-screen three-dimensional acting at any moment of the play. They allow a new and exciting way of presenting the combination of the real and the surreal in ways that offer broadened audience and student experiences, under the master-of-storytelling of a shadow teller together with the master-of-pacing of a mobile light spotter.
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Bill Reed is an Australian novelist, playwright and short-story writer with national awards in all three categories -- including, for long fiction, the FAW’s ANA award; for drama, Critics Choice and The Alexander Theatre Award; and for short stories, the National Short Story Award. The official playwrighting Australian Script Centre has selected many of his works for sale on its website australianplays.org. He divides his time between Australia and Sri Lanka.