Granville Barker on Theatre brings together some of the most important critical theatrical writings of Harley Granville Barker, a major figure of 20th-century British theatre.

Known as a pioneer of the National Theatre and Repertory Movement, and remembered mainly for his Prefaces to Shakespeare, from the 1900s to his death in the 1940s Granville Barker commented enthusiastically in newspaper items, introductions to plays, articles, essays, articles, and published lectures on a range of topics: the nature of theatre as an art form and as a social medium, the need for...

Granville Barker on Theatre brings together some of the most important critical theatrical writings of Harley Granville Barker, a major figure of 20th-century British theatre.

Known as a pioneer of the National Theatre and Repertory Movement, and remembered mainly for his Prefaces to Shakespeare, from the 1900s to his death in the 1940s Granville Barker commented enthusiastically in newspaper items, introductions to plays, articles, essays, articles, and published lectures on a range of topics: the nature of theatre as an art form and as a social medium, the need for...

"A mirror of our frightened, fallible selves at this very fraught moment in American history... WHAT DID YOU EXPECT? is the second work in the second cycle of plays by Mr Nelson that have quietly emerged as a sui generis triumph of civic theater... They] inhabit the here and now with an unobtrusive thoroughness I've never encountered elsewhere in the theater."
Ben Brantley, The New York Times

"By exploring the underwater part of the iceberg whose visible tip is politics, Nelson] is challenging the idea of what political theater can be."
Jesse Green, New York...

Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's LA RONDE, JITTERBUGGING: SCENES OF SEX IN A SOCIETY is set in 1947. A cycle of brief sexual encounters in a seaside New England hotel begins with the seduction of a soldier by a whore and ends with the seduction of that whore by the mayor. The play contrasts the sadness of the manipulative liaisons with the surface optimism of period songs.

THE GABRIELS trilogy chronicles a year in the life of a neighboring family who reunite in real time at three different points across 2016 to celebrate, remember, and wait for the world to change. History and politics, art and culture, love and hate are all on the table as the Gabriels gather in the kitchen of the house they grew up in -- ultimately revealing the deep, human impact of one of the most extraordinary years in American history. Part Three, WOMEN OF A CERTAIN AGE: It is election night as the Gabriels economic woes worsen. They have worked hard and played by the rules, and yet...

"I am normally wary of any new play that could be called Chekhovian' it implies something fragile and wispily atmospheric. But Richard Nelson's extraordinary play about the pioneering playwright-director Harley Granville Barker combines a command of realistic detail with a sense of suffering and loss that genuinely evokes the Russian master.
As in many of his previous plays, such as Some Americans Abroad, Nelson deals with cultural collision. In this instance, Granville Barker finds himself in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1916, surrounded by a group of English refugees....