Reddit reviews Towards a Poor Theatre (Theatre Arts (Routledge Paperback))

Jerzy Grotowski - Towards a Poor Theatre

Antonin Artaud - The Theatre and Its Double

Bertolt Brecht - Brecht on Theatre

Jacques Ranciere - The Emancipated Spectator

Guy Debord - The Society of the Spectacle

Del Close + Charna Halpern - Truth in Comedy

Extreme Exposure - An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the 20th Century

New Downtown Now - An Anthology of New Theatre from Downtown New York

Those books should give you a good introduction to directing in the theatre outside of traditional American realism. Where were you hoping to go to school?

It's like nobody realizes that theatre exists when trying to compare gaming to other media. It was nice seeing a shoutout to commedia, but there's much much more to it than centuries old touring improv acts. Modern day theatre isn't just fourth wall proscenium shit, it's been doing interactive and emergent storytelling and breaking the actor-audience barrier for fifty years at least. Children's theatre in particular has so many tools to use to tell stories and not limit the audience to a traditional authoritarian relationship.

Read the fucking manual and know who Augusto Boal, Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, Andre Gregory, and Jerzy Grotowski are. There's so much here to learn from. At the very least, watch My Dinner with Andre.

Here's my two cents:

If I had one book, it would be
A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer

This book is a great jumping off point for whatever you want to study. It codifies and connects different types of styles, e.g. it takes a topic like "balance" and says this is an example from mime, from balinese dance, from noh, etc.

In addition to Brecht, I'd recommend picking up Towards a Poor Theater (Grotowski). Grotowski's work is deeply, deeply physical.

Another book, a good primer on the major movements of the last 120 years or so is Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook, which has a little bit of everyone, in their own words, from Stanislavski and Meyerhold through To Barba. It's not as actor-centric perhaps, but it will give you a good overview, that you can get more specific with.

Lastly, The Practical Handbook for the Actor and The Invisible Actor, two books that help me immensely with how i approach a role.