This innovative study examines the role of memory in the history of theatre and drama. Favorini analyzes issues of memory in self-construction, collective memory, the clash of memory and history and even explores what the work of cognitive scientists can teach us about brain function and our response to drama.

This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.

Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture s fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period s most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the...

Danjuro ' s Girls is a fascinating history of Japan's female kabuki troupes, offering a penetrating investigation into three generations of kabuki actresses associated with the renowned Ichikawa Danjuro acting dynasty. Contextually grounding early female precedents in kabuki, the book focuses on the Ichikawa Girls' Kabuki Troupe, a unique and trailblazing company founded after Japan's defeat in World War II. The troupe became a national sensation in the 1950s, briefly becoming part of the otherwise impenetrable all-male kabuki establishment. Drawing on numerous interviews, as well as written...

Theatre and Religion on Krishna s Stage examines the history and form of India's ras lila folk theatre, and discusses how this theatre functions as a mechanism of worship and spirituality among Krishna devotees in India. From analyses of performances and conversations with performers, audience, and local scholars, Mason argues that ras lila actors and audience alike actively assume roles that locate them together in the spiritual reality that the play represents. Correlating Krishna devotion and theories of religious experience, this book suggests that the emotional experience of theatrical...

Mendel's Theatre offers a new way of thinking about early twentieth-century American drama by uncovering the rich convergence of heredity theory, the American eugenics movement, and innovative modern drama from the 1890s to 1930.

This book is the first study of popular theatre in France from left to right, exploring how theatre shapes political acts, ideals, and communities in the modern world.

This book examines the relationship between wartime conflict and theatre practices. Bringing together a diverse collection of essays in one volume, it offers both a geographically and historically wide view of the subject, taking examples from Britain, Australia and America to the Middle East, Korea and China, and spanning the fifth century BCE to the present day. It explores the ways in which theatre practices have been manipulated for use in political and military propaganda, such as the employment of scenographers to work on camouflage and the application of acting methods in espionage...

This book recounts the personal and professional life of Thomas Souness Hamblin (1800-1853), Shakespearean actor and Bowery Theatre manager.

W. C. Fields was a virtuoso comedian, often called a comic genius, legendary iconoclast, and "Great Man," who brought so much laughter to millions while enduring so much anguish. This book explores his little-known, long stage career from 1898 to 1930, which had a major influence on his comedy and screen presence.