Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Drama

This book tells the story of producer, actor, and author Oscar Asche, one of the most commercially successful actor/managers in the first half of the 20th century. Though virtually written out of theatre history because of his triumph on the musical comedy stage, he is most frequently remembered today as having had a successful career as an actor and producer of Shakespeare. Asche was an innovator in stage lighting and one of the first to use it as a language of the stage rather than as mere illumination. During World War I, he captured the public imagination and provided audiences with...

With a thirty-year run of award-winning, critically acclaimed, and commercially successful plays, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) to The Invention of Love (1997), Tom Stoppard is arguably the preeminent playwright in Britain today. His popularity also extends to the United States, where his plays have won three Tony awards and his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

John Fleming offers the first book-length assessment of Stoppard's work in nearly a decade. He takes an...

Alexander Pushkin's four compact plays, later known as The Little Tragedies, were written at the height of the author's creative powers, and their influence on many Russian and Western writers cannot be overestimated. Yet Western readers are far more familiar with Pushkin's lyrics, narrative poems, and prose than with his drama. The Little Tragedies have received few translations or scholarly examinations. Setting out to redress this and to reclaim a cornerstone of Pushkin's work, Evodokimova and her distinguished contributors offer the first thorough critical study of these plays....

This highly acclaimed critical exploration of modern drama begins with Buchner and Ibsen and then discusses the major playwrights who have shaped modern theater--Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Handke. A new introduction by the author assesses developments of recent years.

Reviews of the earlier editions:

"The best single study of the astonishing transformations dramatic art has undergone in the last century or so."--Thomas R. Edwards, New York Times Book Review

"In its field this is one of the choice books of...

The life and career of the Nobel Prize winning dramatist Luigi Pirandello is the subject of this important new reference companion. Designed to improve the general understanding of this major literary figure, the book focuses not only on Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello's most famous work, but also on other plays, novels, short stories, and even translations of his poems. In addition to essays by some of the best-known Pirandello experts and drama scholars, the volume contains background information on Pirandello and a complete bibliography of his works and books...

Although children's theatre has been a part of American culture from early times, historians have not always included it in the documentation of our theatrical heritage. Sometimes more the product of the educator and the social worker than the producer or the theatre artist, theatre with and for young people has been neglected in traditional theatre history studies; yet as early as 1792 Charles Stearns began creating his plays and dialogues for school children. The traditions and success of eighteenth-century school drama inspired social workers to explore similar activities in their...

In this unique study of the dramatic form, Oscar Lee Brownstein presents a personal analysis of the way in which experience is created by drama. A variety of plays are discussed and examined as perceptual objects, structures whose designs are entirely determined by the fact that they are meant to be perceived. Brownstein focuses on the distinct aspects of the dramatic art form and on its special powers to orchestrate the imagination and produce a personal encounter in the lives of spectators. In so doing, he provides a practical critical theory of drama that is sophisticated yet...

"Gabriel" (1839) is a romantic and adventurous play about a woman's struggle for freedom and love. Raised as a Renaissance prince, Gabriel gives up her entitlement and assumes a feminine identity to satisfy the demands of her male lover. A prescient protofeminist dramatic treatment of gender, the play makes a passionate plea for female equality in education and opportunity. Available for the first time in an English translation, the script is supplemented by an introductory essay that examines questions posed by the play with regard to conventional gender representations and how the...

Margaret Webster presided over many firsts in the American theater. She was the first woman to direct Shakespearean plays on Broadway, she was one of the founders of the American Repertory Theatre, she was active in the beginning of the Off-Broadway movement, and she wrote an assortment of articles, speeches, memoirs, and autobiographies. This reference provides an overview of her life and a detailed record of her many accomplishments in 20th-century American theater. The volume begins with a biographical essay that discusses her life and career. A chronology then highlights the most...

The Golden Age of Spanish drama extends from the close of the 15th century to the death of Calderon in 1681. During that time, the humanists, as dramatists, followed Italy's artistic awakening direction, and imitated Classical drama. With originality and dreams of greatness, they subverted the nature of tragedy; modified the approach of Comedy and invented the New Play, the "Comedia Nueva." In it the poet-dramatists introduced important modificaitons of realism, included imagined reality, Christian symbolism and theatricality, as artistic truth. They elaborate all kinds of syntheses. For...

Presenting roughly sixty year's worth of Miller scholarship, Centola and Cirulli offer a wide range of interpretations and critical responses to the playwright's work. Incorporating insights from several disciplines including, but not limited to, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, this work also contains discussions of his work in light of new understandings discovered through considerations of cultural contexts, performance issues, feminist concerns, as well as deconstructionist and postmodernist redefinitions of the textuality of Miller's writing.

Presenting roughly sixty year's...

When "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" opened in 1984, August Wilson was unknown in theatre. By 1988 he was described as the foremost dramatist of the American black experience and was the most acclaimed playwright of his time by 1990. He is one of only seven American playwrights to win two Pulitzer prizes and one of only three black playwrights to receive that award. Remarkably, Wilson has been able to explore and communicate the American black experience, while also achieving a universality that attracts the white audiences needed for commercial success. Based on extensive research that...

This first book dedicated to US-Cuban playwright/director Maria Irene Fornes is a lucid theoretical, historical, and production-oriented study of Fornes' published works and their critical legacy. Kent argues that most critics, including a range of theatre feminists, have yet to fully explicate the incisive social critique presented in Fornes' work. Examining the complex relationships between Fornes' aesthetic innovations and her unconventional social politics, Kent presents a comprehensive, contextualized study of Fornes work and the critics' response.

Widely acclaimed as one of America's most distinguished female playwrights, Lillian Hellman made an entrance into a largely male-dominated field in 1934 with The Children's Hour, a drama that rocked the literary establishment with its frank treatment of lesbianism while calling attention to her writing talents. Written between 1934 and 1963, Hellman's dramatic canon includes eight original plays and four adaptations. Two of these, Watch on the Rhine (1941) and Toys in the Attic (1960), received Drama Critics' Circle Awards. In addition to her dramatic activities, she...