This beautifully illustrated book deserves attention and admiration. It is meticulously researched, articulately written and totally fascinating -- definitely a volume for the home library.

A serious study of the evolution of theater in the Western world, ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE begins with early tribal and religious rituals and records their development into an art form that has both reflected and affected ancient and modern civilizations.

Harwood is a playwright and novelist. He crafts his story of the development of theatrical art with the eye of an insider and the thoroughness of a scholar. From the Greeks to Shakespeare and from Camus to Coward, Harwood's love of the many aspects of theatrical production, of performers, and of audiences shines through these pages to illuminate the mystery of the stage for the average reader. If you love theater, take time to read and study this one.

It's enhance your enjoyment of the next play you attend and increase your appreciation of the craft of acting and staging, as well.

Sunnye Tiedemann (aka Ruth F. Tiedemann)

Stacy Keach is magnificent. The rocky relationships in this production are so life-like! You can feel what's going on and you can relate to it.

The play TAKING SIDES is so flatly realistic that you feel at first that you are sitting on a wooden chair in the interrogator's office--listening and watching, but somehow unnoticed. Its style is seemingly so commonplace that you do not have the usual sensation of reading literature, but rather the odd sensation of following characters who are speaking what just comes into their heads. In short, Harwood has achieved a transparent realism that removes your critical defenses and leads you where he will.

The time is just after WWII, and the Americans in Berlin are chasing down ex-Nazis, bringing them in for questioning, rummaging through confiscated files. The man under scrutiny in this case is the great conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler, who remained in Germany during the Hitler years to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic and thus draw suspicion upon himself as a favorite of the Nazis, but who simultaneously refused to join the Party and persisted in helping out individual Jews.

Upon this ambiguous record, Harwood constructs a play in which an American interrogator, obtuse and uncultured, lucky by birth, applies hard moral judgements to a man who has lived in a murky and terrifying world. Step by step, the process draws you into a gripping confrontation between two worlds, two mentalities, two fates, even between two worlds, and at times the world seems reversed--the interrogator seems like a Nazi "just following orders" and the presumed Nazi seems like a downtrodden Jew. The author plays no tricks, makes no big statements, yet reveals complexities of social relations and human natures that leave you thinking long after the play. You are moved as though you had just witnessed a historical event and plumbed to the depths of a great man's soul. You feel that you understand a great deal more about the Nazi experience than ever before, and more about the Old World and the New.

Furtwangler, by the way, was not only a great conductor, but also, I believe, a great composer. His Second Symphony, written at the time of his denazification, is filled with rage and determination to endure. He's a monumental figure of the century, and the play brings this home.