The Holocaust the systematic attempted destruction of European Jewry and other threats to the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945 has been portrayed in fiction, film, memoirs, and poetry. Gene Plunka's study will add to this chronicle with an examination of the theater of the Holocaust. Including thorough critical analysis of more than thirty plays, this book explores the seminal twentieth-century Holocaust dramas from the United States, Europe, and Israel. Biographical information about the playwrights, production histories of the plays, and pertinent historical information are provided, placing...

After nearly five decades as one of Ireland's most celebrated playwrights, Brian Friel has been the subject of ten books and dozens of articles. This study expands Friel criticism into a sizeable body of material and into a fresher interpretative direction. Along with considering Friel's more recent plays, the book analyzes his interviews and essays to chart the author's ideological evolution throughout a career of more than forty years. Moreover, a chapter is devoted to his often ignored articles for The Irish Press (1962 1963), a series that reveals unsuspected insights into Friel's...

Based on extensive archival research, this is a comprehensive study of theatre in the Third Reich. It explores the contending pressures and ambitions within the regime and the Nazi party, within the German theatre profession itself and the theatre-going public. Together, these shaped theatrical practice in the Nazi years. By tracing the origins of the Nazi stage back to the right-wing theatre reform movement of the late nineteenth century, Strobl suggests that theatre was widely regarded as a central pillar of German national identity. The role played by the stage in the evolving collective...

Working through a generational mix of writers, from Sarah Kane, the iconoclastic "bad girl" of the stage, to the "canonical" Caryl Churchill, Elaine Aston charts the significant political and aesthetic changes in women's playwriting at the end of the twentieth century. Aston also explores "new" writing for the 1990s in theater by Sarah Daniels, Bryony Lavery, Phyllis Nagy, Winsome Pinnock, Rebecca Prichard, Judy Upton and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

Plays by writers such as Tanika Gupta, Winsome Pinnock, and Amrit Wilson, among others, are included in the first monograph to document plays by Black and Asian women in Britain. The volume analyzes concerns such as reverse migration (in the form of tourism), sexploitation, arranged marriages, the racialization of sexuality, and asylum seeking as they emerge in the plays. It argues that Black and Asian women playwrights have become constitutive subjects of British theater.

Working from a multi-cultural perspective, this book explores the value of performance as an agent of social change, and makes its arguments through the close examination of the success--not always complete--of specific projects in their practical and cultural contexts. Practitioners and commentators inquire as to how performance in its broadest context can play a part in community activism by helping communities find their own creative voices.

The Holocaust the systematic attempted destruction of European Jewry and other threats to the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945 has been portrayed in fiction, film, memoirs, and poetry. Gene Plunka's study will add to this chronicle with an examination of the theater of the Holocaust. Including thorough critical analysis of more than thirty plays, this book explores the seminal twentieth-century Holocaust dramas from the United States, Europe, and Israel. Biographical information about the playwrights, production histories of the plays, and pertinent historical information are provided, placing...

The Berliner Ensemble was founded by Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel in 1949. The company soon gained international prominence, and its productions and philosophy influenced the work of theatre-makers around the world. David Barnett's book is the first study of the company in any language. Based on extensive archival research, it uncovers Brecht's working methods and those of the company's most important directors after his death. The book considers the boon and burden of Brecht's legacy and provides new insights into battles waged behind the scenes for the preservation of the...

Irony and theater share intimate kinships, not only regarding dramatic conflict, dialectic, or wittiness, but also scenic structure and the verbal or situational ironies that typically mark theatrical speech and action. Yet irony today, in aesthetic, literary, and philosophical contexts especially, is often regarded with skepticism - as ungraspable, or elusive to the point of confounding. Countering this tendency, Storm advocates a wide-angle view of this master trope, exploring the ironic in major works by playwrights including Chekhov, Pirandello, and Brecht, and in notable relation to...

The first study in any language of the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre company co-founded by Bertolt Brecht.