Last month, Marisa Smith and Eric Kraus of the Hanover-based Smith and Kraus Publishers released a book series with the convenience and accessibility of the modern reader in mind. According to the pair, the series, "Playwrights in an Hour," provides a succinct crash course on the lives of 27 influential dramatists throughout history, from Euripedes to Oscar Wilde to Sam Shepherd.
Each volume in the series, sorted into one of four time periods, focuses on one playwright and contains excerpts from the playwright's major works and a central essay describing the playwright's characteristics. While quite slim, the volumes also include ample background information: a quick chronology of global events that affected the playwright's writing, a complete list of the playwright's work, a list of colleagues active during the playwright's time and a bibliography citing various sources of information used in the text, which provides interested readers the opportunity to find more in-depth information about the playwright.
The series is written in a colloquial and accessible style. Although each author has a vast knowledge of the particular playwright he writes about, the essays themselves are neither dense nor overly scholarly and each can, in fact, be read in less than an hour.
"Our main reason for publishing this series is because we felt that the play is a very personal expression, and the more you know about the mind behind the personal expression, the more profound your experience would be watching the play," Smith, said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
The essay on German playwright and pioneer of modern drama Frank Wedekind, for example, provides a brief biography of his life, his outside influences and the impact his difficult childhood and life had on his writing. The essay also highlights various influential plays authored by Wedekind such as the original script for the modern-day Broadway hit "Spring Awakening," penned in 1891 and discusses Wedekind's intentions for writing each play.
Kraus first had the idea for the "Playwrights in an Hour" series about three years ago, by which time Smith and Kraus Publishers founded in 1990 had already established itself as a respectable brand in the theater community, Smith said. The company's preexisting contacts and reputation gave the duo an advantage when they began work on the Playwrights series.
"We had sort of a board of advisors in a way, just people that we've worked with, because we've been publishing books for so long," Smith explained.
"And other directors and dramaturgs and literary managers that we know, we asked them to weigh in on who they thought were the 27 people we couldn't leave out of series one," Kraus added.
Although the series includes 27 volumes, it was originally planned as a 30-book series, Kraus said.
"There were 30 books programmed to come out, until Barnes and Noble, with whom we'd been having discussions for quite a while about this series, told us they measured wrong and we could only fit nine on a shelf instead of 10," Kraus explained.
The process of publishing 27 books at once was a new and somewhat challenging experience for Smith and Kraus Publishers.
"This is the first time we've gone for the whole series at once," Kraus explained. "It's not easy to publish 27 books at one time. We had a delivery date with Barnes and Noble and no matter what we were going to make that delivery date. There was production involved, late manuscripts, there was printing all these things had to happen on time, and they all did. But it was a sweat, we had never done that before."
In the future, Smith and Kraus said they hope to expand their target audience by producing condensed biographies for novelists.
"Our books will serve a better purpose than a biography because ... more can be gained by reading [about] a novelist in an hour than reading a 600 page biography more will stick," Kraus said.
Smith and Kraus are currently planning another group of "Playwrights in an Hour" releases, which will include 18 volumes and is slated for release in April 2011. In a contest currently featured on the Smith and Kraus website, readers can guess, from a list of 100 playwrights, which 18 playwrights the second series will include.
