Thinking Like a Director

"More engaging than a textbook, Thinking Like a Director is a concise and highly practical guide to the craft. It's a required reading for young stage and film directors, students, and anyone who wants to know what a skillful professional director does." --Gilbert Gates, Producing Director of the Geffen Playhouse and Producer of the Academy Awards Show

"It's rare for a 'how-to' book to be at the same time so practical and so literate." --Robert Brustein, Artistic Director, American Repertory Theatre

"Thinking Like a Director helps fill the void of practical handbooks that are available to theater directors. It is smart and lucidly written and should prove to be an invaluable guidebook for students and emerging directors." --Donald Margulies

"Bloom's deeply instructional and encouraging primer takes the mystery out of the art of directing without taking out the joy. I've never seen anything quite like it." --Mariette Hartley

"A lucid, concise, and admirably undogmatic manual for aspirant directors, from which writers, actors, and ordinary theatergoers will also learn much about the complex business of putting on plays." --David Lodge

"With a relaxed, informal style, Thinking Like a Director captures the experience of stage directing as well as any book I can think of. Its section on working with living playwrights is a welcome addition to the literature, useful to playwrights as much as directors, and Bloom's writing on language will be highly informative for actors, too." --Arthur Kopit

"I very much enjoyed Michael Bloom's Thinking Like a Director. A taste for directing is like a taste for pickled herring--those that like it seem to like it a lot. For those who've tried it and liked it, I think this book has some pretty good ideas." --David Mamet