Huerta takes as his starting point 1979, the year Luis Valdez's play, Zoot Suit, was produced on Broadway. Huerta looks at plays by and about Chicanas and Chicanos, as they explore through performance, the community and its identity caught between the United States and Mexico. Through informative biographies of each playwright and analyses of their plays, Huerta offers an accessible introduction to this important aspect of American theater and culture. The book contains photographs from key productions and will be invaluable to students, scholars and general theatergoers.

Theater has often served as a touchstone for critical moments of political change or national definition. Steve Wilmer selects key historical moments in American history to examine the theater's response. The selected events range from the Colonial fight for independence through Native American struggles, the Socialist Worker play and the Civil Rights Movement, to those of the last decade. Wilmer also considers audience reception and critical response.

A concert saloon is an establishment offering various kinds of entertainment, including alcohol, with some also providing gambling and prostitution. Brooks McNamara explores the concert saloon in New York from the Civil War to the early years of the twentieth century. He focuses on the theatrical aspects of the concert saloon and examines the sources of saloon shows, changes in direction during the century, performing spaces and equipment, and employees and patrons.

An account of contemporary theater practice in its most collaborative and dynamic form, this 2006 book was the first book-length study of two of the most important American theater artists at the start of the twenty-first century. For twenty-five years, Mee and Bogart have pursued independent but sympathetic visions of theater rooted in the avant-garde of the 1960s, guided by a view of art and culture as a perpetual process of 'remaking'. Since 1992, the SITI Company has pioneered the unique combination of three training practices as the basis for collective creations that layer language,...

Drawing upon archival resources, official correspondence and personal interviews, this book provides a detailed examination of the U.S. Federal Theatre Project in the decade of the 1930s. It recreates the often chaotic but frequently exhilarating story of "Uncle Sam" as producer. Special attention is given to the controversial Negro unit; the prize-winning production of See How They Run; and the mass spectacles which attempted to incorporate Hallie Flanagan's vision of a truly national project rooted in local culture.

Theater has often served as a touchstone for moments of political change or national definition and as a way of exploring cultural and ethnic identity. Heather Nathans examines its growth and influence in the development of the young American Republic--from the Revolution through the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Unlike many works on early American theater, this book explores the lives and motives of the people working behind the scenes to establish a new national drama.

This new and updated encyclopedic guide, with over 2700 cross-referenced entries, covers all aspects of the American theatre from its earliest history to the present. Entries include people, venues and companies scattered through the USA, plays and musicals, and theatrical phenomena. Additionally, there are some 100 topical entries covering theatre in major US cities and such disparate subjects as Asian American theatre, Chicano theatre, censorship, Filipino American theatre, one-person performances, performance art, and puppetry. Major popular forms are represented in entries such as circus,...

Although often dismissed as a minor offshoot of the better-known German movement, expressionism on the American stage represents a critical phase in the development of American dramatic modernism. Situating expressionism within the context of early twentieth-century American culture, Walker demonstrates how playwrights who wrote in this mode were responding both to new communications technologies and to the perceived threat they posed to the embodied act of meaning. At a time when mute bodies gesticulated on the silver screen, ghostly voices emanated from tin horns, and inked words stamped...

Congressional Theatre is the first book to identify and examine the significant body of plays, films, and teleplays that responded to the actions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the "show business hearings" it held between 1947 and 1960. Among the writers discussed are Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht, Lillian Hellman, Maxwell Anderson, Elia Kazan, Barrie Stavis, Herman Wouk, Eric Bentley, Saul Levitt, Budd Schulberg, Carl Foreman, Abraham Polonsky, and Walter Bernstein.

Theatre Culture in America, 1825-1860 advances the idea that cultures are performances that take place both inside and outside of playhouses. Americans imaginatively expanded conventional ideas of performance as an activity restricted to theaters in order to take up the staging of culture in other venues--in issues of class, race, and gender, in parades and the visits of dignitaries, in rioting and the denomination of prostitutes, and in the views of the town, the city, and the frontier. Joining up-to-date historical research with a firm and clear-headed grasp of contemporary critical theory,...