"The Theatre of Sabina Berman: " The Agony of Ecstasy" and Other Plays" introduces and makes accessible to an English-speaking audience the work of the contemporary Mexican playwright Sabina Berman. The book contains translations of the four plays that established Berman s career: "The Agony of Ecstasy, Yankee, Puzzle, "and "Heresy. "An introduction by Adam Versenyi provides a critical assessment of each play, a discussion of the specific problems of translation involved, and placement of Berman s work in the larger Mexican and Latin American context.It is evident that Sabina Berman s...
"The Theatre of Sabina Berman: " The Agony of Ecstasy" and Other Plays" introduces and makes accessible to an English-speaking audience the work of th...
Edited by Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer, Teaching Performance Studies is the first organized treatment of performance studies theory, practice, and pedagogy. This collection of eighteen essays by leading scholars and educators reflects the emergent and contested nature of performance studies, a field that looks at the broad range of human performance from everyday conversation to formal theatre and cultural ritual. The cross-disciplinary freedom enacted by the writers suggests a new vision of performance studiesa deliberate commerce between field and classroom. "
Edited by Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer, Teaching Performance Studies is the first organized treatment of performance studies theory, practi...
In this first modern book-length biography of native Englander William E. Burton, theatre historian David L. Rinear explores Burton s diary, letters, published reviews, and various reminiscences to reveal the tumultuous personal and professional lives of the mid-nineteenth-century actor/manager and his role in American literary history." Stage, Page, Scandals, and Vandals: William E. Burton and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre "also provides insight into the cultural and artistic climate of an early period in American history when the country was still forming a national identity.Burton...
In this first modern book-length biography of native Englander William E. Burton, theatre historian David L. Rinear explores Burton s diary, letters, ...
In this first book-length biography of Mercedes de Acosta, theatre historian Robert A. Schanke adroitly mines lost archival materials and mixes in his own interviews with de Acosta s intimates to correct established myths and at last construct an accurate, detailed, and vibrant portrait of the flamboyantly uninhibited early-twentieth-century author, poet, and playwright.Born to wealthy Spanish immigrants, Mercedes de Acosta (18931968) lived in opulence and traveled in the same social circles as the Astors and Vanderbilts. Introduced to the New York theater scene at an early age, her...
In this first book-length biography of Mercedes de Acosta, theatre historian Robert A. Schanke adroitly mines lost archival materials and mixes in his...
Our Land Is Made of Courage and Glory: Nationalist Performance of Nicaragua and Guatemala adds to a growing and timely body of work on nationalist drama. Examining important twentieth-century plays that few people have written about in English, E. J. Westlake analyzes the phenomenon of nation as performance by focusing on the definition of a people, national metaphors, and the uses of national history.
Westlake discerns the common characteristics that constitute nationalist plays, a genre that seeks to legitimate the nature of a nation by defining its boundaries, race,...
Our Land Is Made of Courage and Glory: Nationalist Performance of Nicaragua and Guatemala adds to a growing and timely body of work on natio...
When movies replaced theatre as popular entertainment in the years 191020, the world of live drama was wide open for reform. American advocates and practitioners founded theatres in a spirit of anticommercialism, seeking to develop an American audience for serious theatre, mounting plays in what would today be called alternative spaces, and uniting for the cause an eclectic group of professors, social workers, members of women s clubs, bohemians, artists, students, and immigrants. This rebellion, called the Little Theatre Movement, also prompted and promoted the college theatre major, the...
When movies replaced theatre as popular entertainment in the years 191020, the world of live drama was wide open for reform. American advocates and pr...
In this fresh approach to musical theatre history, Bruce Kirle challenges the commonly understood trajectory of the genre. Drawing on the notion that the world of the author stays fixed while the world of the audience is ever-changing, Kirle suggests that musicals are open, fluid products of the particular cultural moment in which they are performed. Incomplete as printed texts and scores, musicals take on unpredictable lives of their own in the complex transformation from page to stage.
Using lenses borrowed from performance studies, cultural studies, queer studies, and ethnoracial...
In this fresh approach to musical theatre history, Bruce Kirle challenges the commonly understood trajectory of the genre. Drawing on the notion th...
This collection of plays, fiction, and journalistic essays by Sophie Treadwell provides an engaging portrait of one of America s most innovative yet neglected feminists. "Broadway s Bravest Woman: Selected Writings of Sophie Treadwell" is the first critical compilation of her prose and drama and highlights the most significant and formerly unavailable pieces of her work. Editors Jerry Dickey and Miriam Lopez-Rodriguez place Treadwell within the context of the early twentieth century and outline four themes that infused her feminist ideology: the social positioning of women, ethnic identity...
This collection of plays, fiction, and journalistic essays by Sophie Treadwell provides an engaging portrait of one of America s most innovative ye...
Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 19231937 is a critical and political biography and a cultural and social history that focuses on Lawson s career in the theatre. Using a materialist methodology, Jonathan L. Chambers emphasizes the evolution and interplay of the playwright s artistic vision and political ideology, considering his art as both a documentation of this evolution and a product of the socio-political and cultural matrix in which he was immersed.
Spanning the playwright s career, the volume details Lawson s early...
Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 19231937 is a critical and political biography and a cult...
"Angels in the American Theater: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy "examines the significant roles that theater patrons have played in shaping and developing theater in the United States. Because box office income rarely covers the cost of production, other sources are vital. Angelsfinancial investors and backershave a tremendous impact on what happens on stage, often determining with the power and influence of their money what is conceived, produced, and performed. But in spite of their influence, very little has been written about these philanthropists. Composed of sixteen essays and...
"Angels in the American Theater: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy "examines the significant roles that theater patrons have played in shaping and ...