***Listed in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION's Weekly Book List, July 11, 2011*** Identifying an apprehension about the nature and constitution of urbanism in North American plays, Urban Drama examines how cities like New York City and Los Angeles became focal points for identity politics and social justice at the end of the twentieth century. In plays as different as Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight Los Angeles, 1992, and David Henry Hwang's FOB, these concerns became spatialized against the urban environment, suggesting a shift of consciousness toward what...

Slum plays represent the different locations, attractions, and challenges of life in the slums such as tenements and tenants' rights, immigrant neighborhoods and nativist prejudices, and red-light districts and prostitution. This genre's rise in prominence

Identifying an apprehension about the nature and constitution of urbanism in North American plays, Westgate examines how cities like New York City and Los Angeles became focal points for identity politics and social justice at the end of the twentieth century, and how urban crises inform the dramaturgy of contemporary playwrights.

Drawing on traditional archival research, reception theory, cultural histories of slumming, and recent work in critical theory on literary representations of poverty, Westgate argues that the productions of slum plays served as enactments of the emergent definitions of the slum and the corresponding ethical obligations involved therein.