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Something exciting is happening with the contemporary history play. New writing by playwrights such as Jackie Sibblies Drury, Samuel Adamson, Hannah Khalil, Cordelia Lynn, and Lucy Kirkwood, makes powerful theatrical use of the past, but does not fit into critics'familiar categories of historical drama. In this book, Benjamin Poore provides readers with tools to name and critically analyse these changes.The Contemporary History Play contends that many history plays are becoming more complex and layered in their aesthetic approaches, as playwrights work through the experience of being surrounded by numerous and varied forms of historical representation in the twenty-first century. For theatre scholars, this book offers a means of interpreting how new writing relies on the past and notions of historicity to generate meaning and resonance in the present. For playwrights and students of playwriting, the book is a guide to the history play's recent past, and to the state of the art: what techniques and formulas have been popular, the tropes that are widely used, and how artists have found ways of renewing or overturning established conventions.

Shortlisted for the 2024 TaPRA Edited Collection PrizeThis is a guide to contemporary debates and theatre practices at a time when gender paradigms are both in flux and at the centre of explosive political battlegrounds.The confluence of gender and theatre has long created intense debate about representation, identification, social conditioning, desire, embodiment, and lived experience. As this handbook demonstrates, from the conventions of early modern English, Chinese, Japanese and Hispanic theatres to the subversion of racialized binaries of masculinity and femininity in recent North American, African, Asian, Caribbean and European productions, the matter of gender has consistently taken centre stage. This handbook examines how critical discourses on gender intersect with key debates in the field of theatre studies, as a lens to illuminate the practices of gender and theatre as well as the societies they inform and represent across space and time. Of interest to scholars in the interrelated areas of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, and globalization and diasporic studies, this book demonstrates how researchers are currently addressing theatre about gender issues and gendered theatre practices. While synthesizing and summarizing foundational and evolving debates from a contemporary perspective, this collection offers interpretations and analyses that do not simply look back at existing scholarship, but open up new possibilities and understandings. Featuring essential research tools, including a survey of keywords and an annotated play list, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance.

Hercules Performed explores the reception of the ancient Greek hero Herakles – the Roman Hercules – on the western stage from the sixteenth century to the present day, focusing on live theatre, including tragedy, comedy and musical drama. Each chapter considers a particular work or theme in detail, exploring the interplay between classical models and a wide variety of modern performance contexts. The volume is one of four to be published in the Metaforms series examining the extraordinarily persistent figuring of Herakles-Hercules in western culture, drawing together scholars from a range of disciplines to offer a unique insight into the hero's perennial appeal.

This book is a collection of chapters by playwrights, directors, devisers, scholars, and educators whose praxis involves representing, theorizing, and performing social trauma.Chapters explore how psychic catastrophes and ruptures are often embedded in social systems of oppression and forged in zones of conflict within and across national borders. Through multiple lenses and diverse approaches, the authors examine the connections between collective trauma, social identity, and personal struggle. We look at the generational transmission of trauma, socially induced pathologies, and societal re-inscriptions of trauma, from mass incarceration to war-induced psychoses, from gendered violence through racist practices. Collective trauma may shape, protect, and preserve group identity, promoting a sense of cohesion and meaning, even as it shakes individuals through pain. Engaging with communities under significant stress through artistic practice offers a path towards reconstructing the meaning(s) of social trauma, making sense of the past, understanding the present, and re-visioning the future.The chapters combine theoretical and practical work, exploring the conceptual foundations and the artists'processes as they interrogate the intersections of personal grief and communal mourning, through drama, poetry, and embodied performance.

En la primera parte del libro, Nicolás Núñez plantea las investigaciones sobre el teatro náhuatl, tibetano y occidental que llevaron a diseñar un teatro del ser humano en el cosmos. En la segunda parte se explora cómo evolucionó el trabajo, durante las últimas tres décadas, convirtiéndose en un método de entrenamiento y producción teatral que combina en forma única influencias rituales y contemplativas.

The use of disability as a metaphor is ubiquitous in popular culture – nowhere more so than in the myths, stereotypes and tropes around blindness. To be'blind'has never referred solely to the inability to see. Instead blindness has been used as shorthand for, among other things, a lack of understanding, immorality, closeness to death, special insight or second sight. Although these'meanings'attached to blindness were established as early as antiquity, readers, receivers and spectators into the present have been implicated in the stereotypes, which persist because audiences can be relied on to perpetuate them. This book argues for a new way of seeing – and of understanding classical reception - by offering assemblage-thinking as an alternative to the presumed passivity of classical influence. And the theatre, which has been (incorrectly) assumed to be principally a visual medium, is the ideal space in which to investigate new ways of seeing.

Robert Hatch's critical life spanned five decades. Starting in 1947 and continuing until 1984, he wrote about drama (and film) for The New Republic, The Nation, Theatre Arts, The Reporter, and Horizon. Along with John Simon, Robert Brustein, Richard Gilman, and Stanley Kauffmann, Hatch was one of the most potent, influential authors in the New York school of twentieth-century American arts criticism. With style and erudition Open Hatch discusses plays and productions from the following countries: England, the United States, France, Russia, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Greece, and Australia. Among the many works discussed are The Master Builder, by Henrik Ibsen; The Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams; The Bourgeois Gentleman, by Molière; The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O'Neill; Measure for Measure, by William Shakespeare; The Good Woman of Setzuan, by Bertolt Brecht; Exiles, by James Joyce; Endgame, by Samuel Beckett; The Blacks, by Jean Genet; The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee; Dutchman, by LeRoi Jones; and Leonce and Lena, by Georg Büchner. Also included in Open Hatch are articles on the following subjects: the idea of repertory; the Living Theatre; the Actors'Studio; Broadway and Off-Broadway; melodrama; and scene design. In addition, one may find in this rich collection bio-critical pieces on such figures as Tyrone Guthrie, Orson Welles, and John Arden. The precision, wit, and wisdom of Hatch's writing chime in Open Hatch, as he reveals his sense of cultural mission - and love of all the arts - by applying to theater and drama the same high standards that are applied to fiction, poetry, art, and music.

In this volume, Lee Brewer Jones examines Paula Vogel as both a playwright and renowned teacher, analyzing texts and early reviews of Vogel's major plays-including Indecent, Desdemona, How I Learned to Drive, and The Baltimore Waltz-before turning attention to her influence upon other major American playwrights, including Sarah Ruhl, Lynn Nottage, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Chapters explore Vogel's plays in chronological order, consider her early influences and offer detailed accounts of her work in performance. Enriched by an interview with Lynn Nottage and essays from scholars Ana Fernández-Caparrós and Amy Muse, this is a vibrant exploration of Paula Vogel as a major American playwright.By the time Paula Vogel made her Broadway debut with her 2017 Rebecca Taichman collaboration Indecent, she was already an accomplished playwright, with a Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned to Drive (1998) and two Obie Awards. She had also enjoyed a brilliant career as a professor at Brown and Yale with students such as Sarah Ruhl, a MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner, Pulitzer Prize winners Nilo Cruz, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and the only woman to win two Pulitzers for Drama, Lynn Nottage. Vogel's theatre draws upon Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and uses devices such as “defamiliarization” and “negative empathy” to challenge conventional definitions of protagonists and antagonists.

Dramaturgy: The Basics introduces the art of dramaturgy, explaining how dramaturgy works, what a dramaturg is, and how to appreciate their unique contribution to theatre-making. A wide-ranging account of the role of this vital element of theatre helps students and aspiring performance makers to apply dramaturgy to a full spectrum of theatrical disciplines.This guidebook teaches dramatic theories and script analysis as essential skills for aspiring dramaturgs and illustrates the various methods of reading for specific functions of dramaturgy. Dramaturgy: The Basics offers practical step-by-step instructions on how to practice production dramaturgy, dramaturgy of new work, translation, adaptation, devised theatre, site-specific theatre, literary management, criticism, editing, producing, and dramaturgical innovation, with detailed questions to consider at each stage of the process. This book aims to help students develop a dramaturgical mindset, enabling them to build a critical, inquisitive, and socially conscious perspective that is beneficial in all professions and relationships. Resource lists, further reading guides, and chapter summaries make this an outstanding guidebook.An essential read for anyone hoping to make, understand, or discuss theatre, Dramaturgy: The Basics provides a clear, accessible resource for approaching this integral but often misunderstood facet of theatre-making.

This book is a brief history of the end of the world as seen through the eyes of theatre. Since its inception, theatre has staged the fall of empires, floods, doomsdays, shipwrecks, earthquakes, plagues, environmental degradations, warfare, nuclear annihilation, and the catastrophic effects of climate change. Using a wide range of plays alongside contemporary thinkers, this study helps guide and galvanize the reader in grappling with the climate crisis. Kulick divides this litany of theatrical cataclysms into four distinct historical phases: the Ancients, including Euripides and Bhasa, the legendary Sanskrit dramatist; the Age of Belief, with the anonymous authors of the medieval mystery cycles, Shakespeare, and Pushkin; the Moderns, with Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, and Bond; and, finally, the way the world might end now, encompassing Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, and Anne Washburn. In tandem with the insights gleaned from these playwrights, the book draws upon the work of contemporary scientists, ecologists, and ethicists to further tease out the philosophical implications of such plays and their relevance to our own troubled times. In the end, Kulick shows how each of these ages and their respective authors have something essential to say, not only about humanity's potential end, but, more importantly, about the possibility for our collective continuance.

The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference Theatre History Studies is the official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference, Inc. (MATC). The conference is dedicated to the growth and improvement of all forms of theatre throughout a twelve-state region that includes the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Its purposes are to unite people and organizations within this region and elsewhere who have an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. Published annually since 1981, Theatre History Studies provides critical, analytical, and descriptive essays on all aspects of theatre history and is devoted to disseminating the highest quality peer-review scholarship in the field. CONTRIBUTORS Angela K. Ahlgren / Samer Al-Saber / Kelly I. Aliano / Gordon Alley-Young / Melissa Blanco Borelli / Trevor Boffone / Jay Buchanan / Matthieu Chapman / Joanna Dee Das / Ryan J. Douglas / Victoria Fortuna / Christiana Molldrem Harkulich / Alani Hicks-Bartlett / Jeanmarie Higgins / Lisa Jackson-Schebetta / Erin Rachel Kaplan / Heather Kelley / Patrick Maley / Karin Maresh / Lisa Milner / Courtney Elkin Mohler / Heather S. Nathans / Heidi L. Nees / Sebastian Samur / Michael Schweikardt / Teresa Simone / Dennis Sloan / Guilia Taddeo / Kyle A. Thomas / Alex Vermillion / Bethany Wood

Psychology and theater have often intersected in the most interesting ways to describe characters, situations, and interactions. Neuroscience is in the process of discovering how the brain longs for patterns that we find in theater and other art forms, and practitioners in psychiatry frequently refer to literature and drama to better understand patients. For instance, the Oedipal complex was first illustrated in Sophocles'Oedipus Rex, and Sigmund Freud largely derived his understanding of psychiatric complexes from his familiarity with Greek mythology. Psychiatry on the Stage presents an overview of basic psychiatric principles applied to plays from the Greeks to modern times. Additional features include illustrative vignettes from the author's practice and several detailed indexes comprised of plays, corresponding playwrights, and various psychiatric and neurological disorders. As a board-certified psychiatrist and playwright, Dr. Berman is uniquely qualified to explore the connections between psychiatry and theater. This book is sure to appeal to both practitioners in the field of psychiatry and theater enthusiasts alike.

Ghosts haunt the stages of world theatre, appearing in classical Greek drama through to the plays of 21st-century dramatists. Tracing the phenomenon across time and in different cultures, the chapters collected here examine their representation, dramatic function, and what they may tell us about the belief systems of their original audiences and the conditions of theatrical production. As illusions of illusions, they foreground many dramatic themes common to a wide variety of periods and cultures. Arranged chronologically, this collection examines how ghosts represent political change in Athenian culture in three plays by Aeschylus; their function in traditional Japanese drama; the staging of the supernatural in the dramatic liturgy of the early Middle Ages; ghosts within the dramatic works of Middleton, George Peele, and Christopher Marlowe, and the technologies employed in the 18th and 19th centuries to represent the supernatural on stage. Coverage of the dramatic representation of ghosts in the 20th and 21st centuries includes studies of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, plays by Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Sarah Ruhl, Paddy Chayefsky's The Tenth Man, Suzan-Lori Parks'Topdog/Underdog, and the spectral imprint of Shakespeare's ghosts in the Irish drama of Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, William Butler Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. The volume closes by examining three contemporary American indigenous plays by Anishinaabe author, Alanis King.

This play-analysis textbook contains 50 short essays on geographically diverse, historically significant dramas -- among them Major Barbara, Our Town, Hamlet, A Streetcar Named Desire, Romeo and Juliet, Miss Julie, Electra, Death of a Salesman, The Balcony, The Cherry Orchard, Mother Courage, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Old Times. The essays are supported by a Step-by-Step Approach to Play Analysis, a Glossary of Dramatic Terms, Study Guides, Topics for Writing and Discussion, Bibliographical Resources, and a comprehensive Index. Written for university and advanced high school students, these critical essays provide practical models to aid and promote writing and analytical skills. The author is a close reader committed to a detailed yet objective examination of the structure, style, imagery, and language of a play. He is concerned with dramatic analysis that can be of benefit to directors, designers, and even actors. Analysis of character, action, dialogue, and setting can thus be translated into concepts for theatrical production. The three key benefits of ANALYZING DRAMA are: 1. Most so-called play analysis texts are books about the methods and techniques of play analysis but contain few (if any) actual play analyses. The book describes the methods and techniques of play analysis while at the same time providing numerous examples of such analysis. 2. The Topics for Writing and Discussion and Study Guides provide a wide range of set tasks for students. 3. Readings are not biased by any particular social or political doctrine. Aimed at students, teachers, educated readers, and drama aficionados with an interest in world drama in particular and drama studies in general, as well as at theatregoers with an interest in the practice of play analysis and criticism.

Shortlisted for The TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize 2023As the first full-length study to analyse utopian plays in Western drama from antiquity to the present, Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre offers an illuminating appraisal of the objectives of utopianism as manifested in drama through the ages, and carefully ascertains the added value that live performance brings to the persuasion of utopian thought. Siân Adiseshiah scrutinises the distinctive intervention of utopian drama through its examination alongside the utopian prose tradition – in this way, the book establishes new ways of approaching utopian aesthetics and new ways of interpreting utopian drama. This book provides fresh understandings of the generic features of utopian plays, identifies the gains of establishing a new genre, and ascertains ways in which this genre functions as political theatre. Referring to over 40 plays, of which 18 are examined in detail, Utopian Drama traces the emergence of the utopian play in the Western tradition from ancient Greek Comedy to experimental contemporary work. Works discussed in detail include plays by Aristophanes, Margaret Cavendish, George Bernard Shaw, Howard Brenton, Claire MacDonald, Cesi Davidson, and Mojisola Adebayo. As well as offering extended attention to the work of these playwrights, the book reflects on the development of utopian drama through history, notes the persistent features, tropes, and conventions of utopian plays, and considers the implications of their registration for both theatre studies and utopian studies.

This volume argues against Gérard Genette's theory that there is an “insurmountable opposition” between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.

This book is about some of the ways we remember the dead through performance. It examines the dramaturgical techniques and strategies that enable artists to respond to the imperative: ‘Remember Me'– the command King Hamlet's ghost gives to his son in Shakespeare's famous tragedy, Hamlet. The book develops the concept of hauntological dramaturgy by engaging with a series of performances that commemorate, celebrate, investigate, and sometimes seek justice for the dead.It draws on three interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida's hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to ghosts; Abraham and Torok's psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher's and Simon Reynolds'development of Derrida's ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, suggest strategies for reading and creating performances concerned with questions of commemoration. Case studies focus on a set of known and unknown figures, including Ian Charleson, Spalding Gray and David Bowie.This study will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working within theatre and performance studies as well as philosophy and cultural studies.

Mysticism in the Theater introduces theater makers to the power and possibility of using historical mystical ideas to influence all aspects of a production. Historical mysticism represents ideas developed by recognized spiritual thinkers in all religions and time periods: individuals who stilled their ego, and perceived the unity of all, hidden within the apparent multiplicity of existence.This unique manner of spiritual inlay allows theatrical presentations to find the height of artistic expression: art at the intersection of our historical moment and the eternal. This study introduces theater makers to the history of mystical inspiration within performance work and develops strategies for inserting mystical ideas into their productions. The book ties this model into theatre's history, as mystical ideas and quotes have been inserted into productions from Greek theatre through Shakespeare and into the present day.This book explores how teachings and ideas of specific historical mystical thinkers might influence all aspects of contemporary theatrical productions including writing, directing, acting, stagecraft/set design, lighting design, costume design, sound design, and choreography.

Satire reconsiders the entertainment, political dissent and comic social commentary created by innovative writers and directors since this theatrical form took the stage in ancient Athens. From Aristophanes to the 18th-century plays of John Gay and Henry Fielding, to the creations of Joan Littlewood, Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erika Mann, Brendan Behan and Dario Fo, practitioners of theatrical satire have prompted audiences to laugh at corruption, greed, injustice and abusive authority.In the theatre these artists jested at prominent citizens, scandals and fashions. In retrospect it can be seen that their topical references, allegories and impersonations also promoted intervention in public discourse and events outside the theatre, as satire extended its reach beyond the stage into society.Satire focuses on three exemplary satiric plays: The Knights by Aristophanes, The Beggar's Opera by John Gay and The Hostage by Brendan Behan under Joan Littlewood's direction. Detailed discussion of these three innovative works reveals both changes and continuities in stage satire over the course of its long, hilarious history. The survey concludes with a discussion of stage satire as an endangered art in need of preservation by actors, directors and theatre historians.

This book examines a series of contemporary plays where writers put theatre itself on stage. The texts examined variously dramatize how theatre falls short in response to the demands of violence, expose its implication in structures of violence—including racism and gender-based violence—and illustrate how it might effectively resist violence through reconfiguring representation. Case studies, which include Jackie Sibblies Drury's We Are Proud to Present and Fairview, Ella Hickson's The Writer and Tim Crouch's The Author, provide a range of practice-based perspectives on the question of whether theatre is capable of accounting for and expressing the complexities of structural and interpersonal violence as both lived in the body and borne out in society. The book will appeal to scholars and artists working in the areas of violence, theatre and ethics, witnessing, memory and trauma, spectatorship and contemporary dramaturgy, as well as to those interested inboth the doubts and dreams we have about the role of theatre in the twenty-first century.

This book examines the ways the encounters between modernist theatre makers and Greek tragedy were constitutive in the modernist experiments in performance.

Une idée répandue voudrait qu'il n'y ait pas d'héroïnes noires au répertoire et par conséquent pas vraiment de grands rôles au théâtre pour les comédiennes afro-descendantes. Mais est-ce bien vrai? Occultation, invisibilisation, décoloration... les figures théâtrales à la peau sombre ont disparu du paysage dramatique avec l'histoire coloniale, c'est ce qu'entreprend de montrer cet ouvrage qui part sur les traces de ces héroïnes du répertoire moins blanches qu'on ne croit. De quoi renverser dénis et préjugés et relire autrement le répertoire.

If at its most elemental, the theater is an art form of human bodies in space, what becomes of the theater as suicide capitalism pushes our world into a posthuman age? Waste: Capitalism and the Dissolution of the Human in Twentieth-Century Theater traces the twentieth-century theater's movement from dramaturgies of efficiency to dramaturgies of waste, beginning with the observation that the most salient feature of the human is her ability to be ashamed of herself, to experience herself as excess, the waster and the waste of the world. By examining theatrical representations of capitalism, war, climate change, and the permanent refugee crisis, Waste traces the ways in which these human-driven events signal a tendency toward prodigality that terminates with self-destruction. Defying its promise of abundance for all, capitalism poisons all relationships with competition and fear. The desire to dominate in war is revealed to be the desire to obliterate the self in collective conflagration. The refugee crisis raises the urgent question of our responsibility to the other, but the climate crisis renders the question of anthropocentric obligations moot. Waste proposes that the theater is the form best suited to confronting the human's perverse relationship to its finitude. Everything about the theater is suffused with existential shame, with an acute awareness of its provisionality. Unlike the dominant narrative of the human, which is bound up with a fantasy of infinite growth, the theater is not deluded about its nature, origins, and destiny. At its best, the theater gathers artist and audience in one space to die together for a little while, to consciously waste, and not spend, their time.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from Broadway musicals to educational theatre, from Somali drama to grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. Science in performance is essential reading for researchers, students and practitioners working between science and the arts within fields such as theatre and performance studies, science communication, interdisciplinary arts and health humanities.

MAKING THE STAGE is a collection of essays that examines the role of theatre, drama, and performance in contemporary culture, a culture that is growing increasingly technological and isolated--seemingly at odds with the very nature of theatre, a collaborative and sometimes very primitive art form. Through the course of these essays, it is clear that theatre not only survives some of the challenges of the day but even defines discussions, particularly political ones which are prohibited by an increasingly manipulated media. The essays, from a diverse group of theatre scholars, examine the mechanics of theatre, from space to sound to the use of technology, the role of women in creating theatre, the relationship between theatre and literary art forms, the politics of theatre, science and theatre, and the role of performance art. Through them all, it is clear that theatre, drama, and performance continue to speak in significant ways.

Inspired by American playwright Sarah Ruhl's 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, his book is a series of miniature reflections, meditations, and ruminations on subjects encompassing matters of theatre and poetry, two subjects very close to Garebian's heart. The titles alone speak to the little book's uniqueness: Watching Your Father Die on Stage, Do Actors Love the Audience? Filthy Shakespeare, Great Roles Can Be Cannibalistic, Japanese Death Poems, Poetry and Persian Wrestling, What Story Does Poetry Tell? Armenian Poetry, and Can There Be Poetry After Donald Trump? Perceptive, witty, and intimate, the mini musings bubble with a sense of wonder, excitement, and intimacy. A vibrant, provocative series of mini musings that also affords insight into a particular artistic sensibility as several pieces are really slices of memoir and autobiography.

Aesthetic disgust is a key component of most classic works of drama because it has much more potential than to simply shock the audience. This first extensive study on dramatic disgust places this sensation among pity and fear as one of the core emotions that can achieve katharsis in drama. The book sets out in antiquity and traces the history of dramatic disgust through Kant, Freud, and Kristeva to Sarah Kane's in-yer-face theatre. It establishes a framework to analyze forms and functions of disgust in drama by investigating its different cognates (miasma, abjection, etc.). Providing a concise argument against critics who have discredited aesthetic disgust as juvenile attention-grabbing, Sarah J. Ablett explains how this repulsive emotion allows theatre to dig deeper into what it means to be human.

Focusing on contemporary English theatre, this book asks a series of questions: How has theatre contributed to understandings of the North-South divide? What have theatrical treatments of riots offered to wider debates about their causes and consequences? Has theatre been able to intervene in the social unease around Gypsy and Traveller communities? How has theatre challenged white privilege and the persistent denigration of black citizens? In approaching these questions, this book argues that the nation is blighted by a number of internal rifts that pit people against each other in ways that cast particular groups as threats to the nation, as unruly or demeaned citizens – as ‘social abjects'. It interrogates how those divisions are generated and circulated in public discourse and how theatre offers up counter-hegemonic and resistant practices that question and challenge negative stigmatization, but also how theatre can contribute to the recirculation of problematic cultural imaginaries.

Time, Consciousness and Writing brings together a collection of critical reflections on Peter Malekin's “model of the mind”, which he saw as a crucial yet often neglected aspect of critical theory in relation to theatre, literature and the arts. The volume begins with a selection of Peter Malekin's own writings that lay out his critique of western culture, its overstated claims to universal competence and validity, and lays out an alternative view of consciousness that draws partly on Asian traditions and partly on underground traditions from the west. The essays that follow, commissioned for this volume, critically examine Malekin's ideas, drawing out their implications in a variety of contexts including theatre, liturgical performance, poetry and literature. The book ends with an assessment of future prospects opened by this work.

This important contribution to the Theatre And series explores what the possibilities and limits of'community'contribute to our understanding of theatre, and what theatrical practice and representation reveal about the tensions inherent in community settings. Drawing on case studies from wide-ranging locations, from the Middle East, to Latin America and South Asia, the text underlines the plurality of meanings associated with community, as well as the plurality of ways that theatre has engaged with those meanings.Interdisciplinary in its reach, this is the ideal companion for students of theatre and performance studies with an interest in applied theatre or performance in communities.

O Teatro Epico e uma importante contribuicao de Anatol Rosenfeld para os estudos literarios e teatrais. Tendo em vista a relevancia que a nocao do epico assumiu na critica contemporanea, devido mormente a obra de Brecht, o levantamento aqui efetuado comec

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Deindustrialising communities have called upon street theatre companies to re-animate public space and commemorate industrial heritage. How have these companies converted derelict factories into spaces of theatrical production? How do they connect their work to the industrial work that once occurred there? How do those connections manifest in theatrical events, and how do such events give shape and meaning to ongoing redevelopment projects? This book develops an understanding of the relationship between theatre and redevelopment that goes beyond accusations of gentrification or celebrations of radical resistance. Ultimately, Calder argues that deindustrialisation and redevelopment depend on theatrical events and performative acts to make ongoing change intelligible and navigable. Working memories brings together some of current theatre scholarship's fundamental concerns while demonstrating the significance of those concerns to an interdisciplinary readership.

To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

Postdramatic theatre is an essential category of performance that challenges classical elements of drama, including the centrality of plot and character. Tracking key developments in contemporary European and North American performance, this collection redirects ongoing debates about postdramatic theatre, turning attention to the overlooked issue on which they hinge: form. Contributors draw on literary studies, film studies and critical theory to reimagine the formal aspects of theatre, such as space, media and text. The volume expands how scholars think of theatrical form, insisting that formalist analysis can be useful for studying the ways theatre is produced and consumed, and how theatre makers engage with other forms like dance and visual art. Chapters focus on a range of interdisciplinary artists including Tadeusz Kantor, Ann Liv Young and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, as well as theatre's enmeshment within institutional formations like funding agencies, festivals, real estate and healthcare. A timely investigation of the aesthetic structures and material conditions of contemporary performance, this collection refines what we mean, and what we don't, when we speak of postdramatic theatre.

Das Drama ist eine der relevantesten Strukturen in einer sich globalisierenden und transmedial erweiternden Kultur. In seiner historischen Konstanz wie Wandlungsfähigkeit – vom Dionysostheater bis zur aktuellen Qualitätsserie – bleibt es, trotz performativer Ästhetiken, höchst aktuell.Die Publikation bietet eine umfassende historische wie systematische Darstellung aus literatur- und theaterwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Ein besonderes Augenmerk wird auf die Verbindung zwischen informierendem Überblick und Ausdifferenzierungen wie Transformationen des Dramas gelegt. Berücksichtigt wird die Integration des Dramas in theatrale Institutionen und deren Produktionsprozesse, ebenso ästhetische Distanzierungen bzw. mediale Reflexionen oder Dekonstruktionen. Neben verschiedenen Dramaturgien und Kontexten wie Politik, Wirtschaft, Zensur, Didaktik oder Psychologie werden postdramatische und außereuropäische Formen behandelt, zudem transdisziplinäre Bezüge zu neueren Medien wie Film, TV-Serie, Computerspiel, Musiktheater und Tanz hergestellt.Dem Band gelingt ein kompakter Überblick, der dem Drama in seiner systematischen wie historischen Komplexität gerecht wird.

Diversità sulla scena è una raccolta di undici saggi scritti da critici e studiosi di teatro che affrontano la problematica del rapporto tra teatro e la creazione di una coscienza politica filtrata dalle voci di soggetti subalterni. Il volume è arricchito dai contributi di protagonisti della scena italiana che, nella loro veste di autori, attori e registi, denunciano pregiudizi e conformismo dando voce in tal modo a aree sociali tenute ai margini. In questa panoramica del teatro delle differenze, il volume offre una stimolante chiave di lettura della società contemporanea. Pur marginale nel mondo multimediale, paradossalmente il teatro collocato entro spazi emarginati ridiventa centrale e si riappropria di funzioni vitali, quasi finestra aperta, meglio cuore e polmone nella stessa società. Diversità sulla scena affronta argomenti articolati, dal punto di vista multiculturale e geografico, nella misura in cui collega territori di natura antropologica, culturale e traduttiva, grazie a nuove letture critiche dalla bibliografia altresì aggiornata.

This study of the action of discovery as plot device, visual motif, and thematic trope on the early modern stage considers an important and popular performance convention in its cultural and religious contexts. Through close examination of a number of'discoveries'taken from a wide range of early modern plays, Leslie Thomson traverses several related disciplines, including theatre history, literary analysis, art history, and the history of the religious practices that would have influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Taking as its primary focus the performance of disguise-discoveries and discovery scenes, the analyses include considerations of how this particular device relates to genre, plot structure, language, imagery, themes, and the manipulation of playgoer expectations. With strong reference to the visual arts, and an appendix that addresses the problem of how and where discovery scenes were performed, Thomson offers an innovative perspective on the staging and meaning of early modern drama.

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference THEATRE HISTORY STUDIES, VOLUME 37 STEFAN AQUILINA Meyerhold and The Revolution: A Reading through Henri Lefebvre's Theories on “Everyday Life” VIVIAN APPLER “Shuffled Together under the Name of a Farce”: Finding Nature in Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon KRISTI GOOD Kate Soffel's Life of Crime: A Gendered Journey from Warden's Wife to Criminal Actress PETER A. CAMPBELL Staging Ajax's Suicide: A Historiography BRIAN E. G. COOK Rousing Experiences: Theatre, Politics, and Change MEGAN LEWIS Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes: Brett Bailey's Exhibit B and the Consequences of Staging the Colonial Gaze PATRICIA GABORIK Taking the Theatre to the People: Performance Sponsorship and Regulation in Mussolini's Italy ILINCA TODORUT AND ANTHONY SORGE To Image and to Imagine: Walid Raad, Rabih Mouré, and the Arab Spring SHULAMITH LEV-ALADGEM Where Has the Political Theatre in Israel Gone? Rethinking the Concept of Political Theatre Today CHRISTINE WOODWORTH “Equal Rights By All Means!”: Beatrice Forbes-Robertson's 1910 Suffrage Matinee and the Onstage Junction of the US And UK Franchise Movements LURANA DONNELS O'MALLEY “Why I Wrote the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant-Play”: Mary Church Terrell's Bicentennial Activism JULIET GUZZETTA The Lasting Theatre of Dario Fo and Franca Rame ASHLEY E. LUCAS Chavez Ravine: Culture Clash and the Political Project of Rewriting History NOE MONTEZ The Heavy Lifting: Resisting the Obama Presidency's Neoliberalist Conceptions of the American Dream in Kristoffer Diaz's The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

This volume frames the concept of a national play. By analysing a number of European case studies, it addresses the following question: Which play could be regarded as a country's national play, and how does it represent its national identity? The chapters provide an in-depth look at plays in eight different countries: Germany (Die Räuber, Friedrich Schiller), Switzerland (Wilhelm Tell, Friedrich Schiller), Hungary (Bánk Bán, József Katona), Sweden (Gustav Vasa, August Strindberg), Norway (Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen), the Netherlands (The Good Hope, Herman Heijermans), France (Tartuffe, Molière), and Ireland. This collection is especially relevant at a time of socio-political flux, when national identity and the future of the nation state is being reconsidered.

This collection of theater writings by the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky brings his powerful, wildly imaginative vision of theater to an English-language audience for the first time. The centerpiece is his play That Third Guy (1937), a farce written at the onset of the Stalinist Terror and never performed. Its plot builds on Alexander Pushkin's poem'Cleopatra,'while parodying the themes of Eros and empire in the Cleopatra tales of two writers Krzhizhanovsky adored: Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. In a chilling echo of the Soviet 1930s, Rome here is a police state, and the Third Guy (a very bad poet) finds himself in its dragnet. As he scrambles to escape his fate, the end of the Roman Republic thunders on offstage. The volume also features selections from Krzhizhanovsky's compelling and idiosyncratic essays on Shakespeare, Pushkin, Shaw, and the philosophy of theater. Professionally, he worked with director Alexander Tairov at the Moscow Kamerny Theater, and his original philosophy of the stage bears comparison with the great theater theorists of the twentieth century. In these writings, he reflects on the space and time of the theater, the resonance of language onstage, the experience of the actor, and the relationship between the theater and the everyday. Commentary by Alisa Ballard Lin and Caryl Emerson contextualizes Krzhizhanovsky's writings.

This book analyzes recent physics plays, arguing that their enaction of concepts from the sciences they discuss alters the nature of the decisions made by the characters, changing the ethical judgements that might be cast on them. Recent physics plays regularly alter the shape of space-time itself, drawing together disparate moments, reversing the flow of time, creating apparent contradictions, and iterating scenes for multiple branches of counterfactual history. With these changes both causality and responsibility shift, variously. The roles of iconic scientists, such as Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg, are interrogated for their dramatic value, placing history and dramatic license in tension. Cold War strategies and the limits of espionage highlight the emphatically personal involvement of ordinary individuals. This study is vital reading for those interested in physics plays and the relationship between the sciences and the humanities.

It is time to change the way we talk about writing in theater. This book offers a new argument that reimagines modern theater's critical power and places innovative writing at the heart of the experimental stage. While performance studies, German Theaterwissenschaft, and even text-based drama studies have commonly envisioned theatrical performance as something that must operate beyond the limits of the textual imagination, this book shows how a series of writers have actively shaped new conceptions of theater's radical potential. Engaging with a range of theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Jarcho reveals a modern tradition of'negative theatrics,'whose artists undermine the here and now of performance in order to challenge the value and the power of the existing world. This vision emerges through surprising new readings of modernist classics - by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett - as well as contemporary American works by Suzan-Lori Parks, Elevator Repair Service, and Mac Wellman.

Bringing together some of the best work from the 2016 Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore, this collection of essays presents the latest research in comparative drama, performance and dramatic textual analysis. A variety of approaches and formats--including twelve research papers, five book reviews and one transcript--cover topics ranging from Ancient Greece to 21st century America. A highlight is the keynote conversation featuring the great American playwright Tony Kushner.

This title examines the genre of drama in She Stoops to Conquer, Pygmalion, Inherit the Wind, A Raisin in the Sun, and Mamma Mia! It features four analysis papers that consider drama, each using different critical lenses, writing techniques, or aspects of the genre. Critical thinking questions, sidebars highlighting and explaining each thesis and argument, and other possible approaches for analysis help students understand the mechanics of essay writing. Features include a glossary, references, websites, source notes, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

Tracing the history of tragedy and comedy from their earliest beginnings to the present, this book offers readers an exceptional study of the development of both genres, grounded in analysis of landmark plays and their context. It argues that sacrifice is central to both genres, and demonstrates how it provides a key to understanding the grand sweep of Western drama. For students of literature and drama the volume serves as an accessible companion to over two millennia of drama organised by period, and reveals how sacrifice represents a through-line running from classical drama to today's reality TV and blockbuster movies.Across the chapters devoted to each period, Day explores how the meanings of sacrifice change over time, but never quite disappear. He charts the influences of religion, social change and politics on the status and purposes of theatre in each period, and on the drama itself. But it is through a close study of key plays that he reveals the continuities centred around sacrifice that persist and which illuminate aspects of human psychology and social organisation.Among the many plays and events considered are Aeschylus'trilogy The Oresteia, Aristophanes'Women at the Thesmorphia, Menander's The Bad-Tempered Man, the spectacles of the Roman Games, Seneca's The Trojan Women, Plautus's The Rope, the Cycle plays and Everyman from the Middle Ages, Shakespeare's King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, Thomas Otway's The Orphan, William Wycherley's The Country Wife, Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, Beckett'Waiting for Godot, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, Sarah Kane's Blasted and Charlotte Jones'Humble Boy. A conclusion examines the persistence of ideas of sacrifice in today's reality TV and blockbuster movies.