Theater History Books

Updated in its 6th edition, Working in Groups provides readers with practical strategies, built on theory and research, for communicating and working successfully in groups. The authors use the guiding principle of balance while looking at both how groups work and how to work in groups. This accessible and user-friendly text gives readers the tools to apply group communication theories, methods, and skills—helping them become more effective and ethical group members.

What is it about musical theatre that audiences find entertaining? What are the features that lead to its ability to stimulate emotional attachment, to move and to give pleasure? Beginning from the passion musical theatre performances arouse and their ubiquity in London's West End and on Broadway, this book explores the ways in which musical theatre reaches out to and involves its audiences. It investigates how pleasure is stimulated by vocal, musical and spectacular performances. Early discussi...

Elephants, lions, tigers and leopards evoke fascination and awe, fear and excitement.This bookanalyzes trained acts in twentieth-century live circus and cinema,reveals how humans anthropomorphize animals with their emotions, and interrogates the notion thatanimals embody a phenomenology of emotions and feelings in culture.

Why did Queen Elizabeth I compare herself with her disastrous ancestor Richard II? Why would Ben Jonson transform Queen Anne and her ladies into Amazons as entertainment for the pacifist King James? How do the concepts of costume as high fashion and as self-fashioning, as disguise and as the very essence of theater, relate to one another? How do portraits of poets help make the author readers want, and why should books, the embodiment of the word, be illustrated at all? What conventions connect...

Re-Visioning Myth is the first in-depth assessment of "re-vision" as a phenomenon in women’s drama, examining the diverse ways in which classical myth narratives have been reworked by women playwrights for the European stage. This study explores the ideological and aesthetic potential of such practice and silmultaneously exposes the tensions inherent in attempts to challenge narratives that have fundamentally shaped Western thought. From tracing the persistence of classical myths in contemp...

Violence against women in plays by women has earned little mention. This revolutionary collection fills that gap, focusing on plays by American women dramatists, written in the last thirty years, which deal with different forms of gender violence. Each author discusses specific manifestations of violence in carefully selected plays: psychological violence, violence within the family, violence suffered by women at the hands of the medical profession, violence caused by situations of war and soci...

This is the first book-length study, in any language, of the influence of Mei Lanfang - the internationally known Chinese actor who specialized in female roles - on the twentieth-century international stage. Focusing on Mei Lanfang's tours of Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union, Min Tian investigates - in the twentieth-century transnational political, ideological, cultural as well as theatrical contexts - the presence and placement of Mei Lanfang and the Chinese theatre on the intern...

In studying performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama, Clum highlights the fact that - paradoxically - at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays about marriage were written by homosexual men. Beginning with Oscar Wilde and focusing on some of the most successful British and American playwrights of the past century, including Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, Terence Ra...

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1915. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... PROPERTIES AND HOW TO MAKE THEM Use care in the selection of your properties. Study your text. Avoid anachronisms. Do not use muskets and pipes in a scene that is laid before muskets were invented and tobacco discovered. Do not use modern lamps to light a mediaeval scene. Do not use mod...

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1880. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XI. FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. THAT our drama is extinct as literature, and our stage is in a deplorable condition of decline, no one ventures to dispute; but there are two opinions as to whether a revival is possible, or even probable; and various opinions as to the avenues ...

Updated in this 11th edition, Brockett and Hildy’s History of Theatre, is the most comprehensive and widely used survey of theatre history in the market. This eleventh edition retains all of the traditional features that have made History of the Theatre the most successful text of its kind including worldwide coverage, extensive illustrations – many now in color! --useful maps, and the expertise of Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, two of the most widely respected theatre historians in t...

Indian Popular Theatres foregrounds an aspect of contemporary performance that has for some time warranted but not received serious study. It explores the living traditions of Indian Theatre in terms of its audience and the specific circumstances that surround them, focusing on four key forms: Bengali Jatra epics The Pandavani and storytellers of Central India The progressive New Marathi Theatre of Pune Safdar Hashmi’s JANAM street theatre Each of these styles of ...

The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation’s past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, of...

Stanislavski: The Basics is an engaging introduction to the life, thought and impact of Konstantin Stanislavski. Regarded by many as a great innovator of twentieth century theatre, this book examines Stanislavski's: life and the context of his writings major works in English translation ideas in practical contexts impact on modern theatre With further reading throughout, a glossary of terms and a comprehensive chronology, this text makes the ideas and theories of Stanislavski available to an und...

This bookranges from refugee camps in Palestine to halting sites of the Irish Travellers and elsewhere in search of a new politics practiced through performance. Written through the intersection of performance and philosophy, the book refutes neoliberalism's depoliticizing and strategic uses of humanitarianism, human rights, and development.

J. C. Gottsched, who reformed early Enlightenment German theater, claimed for comedy the ability to transform morality. The new literary comedies of the 1740s, among the other moral goals that they pursued, propagated a new sentimental discourse promoting marriage based on love while devaluing its traditional socioeconomic foundations. Yet in comedies by well-known dramatists of the period such as Gottsched, Gellert, J. E. Schlegel, Lessing, and Quistorp, alternative gender roles and sexual beh...

One of the most comprehensive handbooks available on Kabuki theatre provides readers with all the information they need to understand and appreciate this exciting amalgam of dramatic and musical arts. A clear and thoughtfully written text describes the theater’s development in the context of Japanese history, with detailed analyses of actors’ techniques, music and dance, plays and playwrights, the playhouse’s design evolution, and six representative Kabuki plays. Includes glossary of Japanese t...

Since its opening in 1911, Liverpool’s Playhouse has been inextricably linked to the history of the city in which it was built. The impetus to create it, Ros Merkin reveals in this chronicle of the oldest surviving repertory theater in Britain, grew out of the city’s new sense of civic pride and largesse in the early twentieth century. Her book asks both how the city has shaped the theater and what the theater has brought to the city, and along the way she dispels the myth that the Playhouse is...

Leading theatre historians and practitioners map a theatrical history that moves from the religious tropes of Medieval Iberia to the postmodern practices of twenty-first-century Spain. Considering work across the different languages of Spain, from vernacular Latin to Catalan, Galician and Basque, this history engages with the work of actors and directors, designers and publishers, agents and impresarios, and architects and ensembles, in indicating the ways in which theatre has both commented on ...

A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance three volume setcontains detailed listings of all major English-language productions of Shakespeare plays on stage and screen from 1970 to the early twenty-first century in the UK, Canada and the USA.

* Casts new light on how Chekhovís plays can be interpreted and enacted * The author explores all the prime components of Chekhov's theatrical technique: text construction, themes and ideas, scenes, dialogue, plot, and interaction between verbal and nonverbal elements * A rigorous and comprehensive treatment of the many aspects of Chekhov's artistic universe * All the major works explored. One century after the death of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), his plays are celebrated throughout the world as...

Mr. Broadway was completed just one month before Gerald Schoenfeld's death in 2008 at the age of 84. Bringing the reader backstage, the long-term chairman of the Shubert Organization shares his triumphs and failures, sings praise, and settles scores. He recounts nightmarish tales of the Shuberts, themselves - the meanness of Lee, the madness of JJ, the turmoil surrounding John's personal life, and the drunken ineptitude of Lawrence Shubert Lawrence, Jr., the man who succeeded them and nearly br...

Stage Turns documents the development and innovations of disability theatre in Canada, the aesthetic choices and challenges of the movement, and the multiple spatial scales at which disability theatre operates, from the local to the increasingly global. Kirsty Johnston provides histories of Canada's leading disability theatre companies, emphasizing the early importance of local efforts in the absence of national coordination. Close readings of individual productions demonstrate how aesthetic ch...

This collection documents and examines political and protest theatre produced between the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and Obama’s election in 2008 by British and American artists responding to their own governments’ actions and policies during this time. The plays take up topics such as the ongoing wars on terror, Blair’s support of U.S. policies, the flawed intelligence that led to the Iraq war, and illegal detentions and torture at Abu Ghraib. The authors argue that engaged artists faced a radically...

Greek drama has been subject to ongoing textual and historical interpretation, but surprisingly little scholarship has examined the people who composed the theater audiences in Athens. Typically, scholars have presupposed an audience of Athenian male citizens viewing dramas created exclusively for themselves--a model that reduces theater to little more than a medium for propaganda. Women's theater attendance remains controversial, and little attention has been paid to the social class and ethnic...

The Cell Block Theatre was the hub of Australian avant-garde theater, music, and dance in the 1960s and 1970s, but it was built fora very different purpose. This is the fascinating story of how a derelict wing of Darlinghurst Gaol—the home of Sydney’s most notorious female criminals—not only became a place of creative freedom and ingenuity, but also housed early performances from artists such as John Bell, Nick Cave, Yvonne Kenny, David Malouf, Peter Sculthorpe, and Jim Sharman. Richly illustrat...

This book is the broad application of queer theories to the original plays of the contemporary Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness, the only author in Ireland to consistently utilize gay and lesbian themes in his writing. McGuinness continually represents sexual difference in his character development in a way that previous Irish authors have not. In particular McGuinness portrays homosexual protagonists in his dramas, allowing the queer the narrative prerogative, not merely a secondary role in the...

Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an unprecedented study tracing the history of ‘The Other’ through the ages in British theatre. The diverse and often contradictory aspects of this history are expertly drawn together to provide a detailed background to the work of African, Asian, and Caribbean diasporic companies and practitioners. Colin Chambers examines early forms of blackface and other representations in the sixteenth century, through to the emergence of black and Asian actors, compan...

This book invites you to look at theatre translationas a process, a living and ever-changing system thatprofoundly depends on the target audience. The authorinvestigates the interrelation between the translatedtheatre text, the final production, as well as theTranslator and the Actor, who become the maincharacters of this book. Along with theatretranslation, it touches upon the genres of musical,cabaret and Travestie. Based on differentinterpretations of the musical “Cabaret” in America,Germany ...

In 2005 literary and film critic Edward Turk immersed himself in New York City’s ACT FRENCH festival, a bold effort to enhance American contact with the contemporary French stage. This dizzying crash course on numerous aspects of current French theatre paved the way for six months of theatregoing in Paris and a month’s sojourn at the 2006 Avignon Festival. In French Theatre Today he turns his yearlong involvement with this rich topic into an accessible, intelligent, and comprehensive overview o...

Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian director and actor and co-founder, in 1898, of the Moscow Art Theatre, was the originator of the most influential system of acting in the history of western theatre. Many of Stanislavsky's concepts are widespread in popular thought on acting; this 2008 book offers a evaluation of the basis of his ideas, discussing whether the system has survived because Stanislavsky made discoveries about acting that are and always have been scientifically verifiable, or whet...

'I love acting - it is so much more real than life,' Oscar Wilde famously wrote. Acting Wilde demonstrates that Wilde's plays, fiction, and critical theory are organised by the idea that all so-called 'reality' is a mode of performance, and that the 'meanings' of life are really the scripted elements of a dramatic spectacle. Wilde's real issue was whether one could become the author of his own script, the creator of the character and role he inhabits. It was a question he struggled to answer fro...

Ranging from France and Russia to America in the throes of world war and revolution, Medieval Roles for Modern Times investigates how critics and creative artists made medieval culture a part of their modern world through theatrical role playing. On both the Left and the Right across Europe, partisans used medieval drama to express the ideological struggles dividing them. Helen Solterer explores the case of the Thophiliens, a Parisian youth group in the 1930s and 1940s whose members included Rol...

On a warm, humid night in June of 1962, four amateur actors sat on stools in the Court House of Niagara-on-the-Lake for their first performance of Don Juan in Hell from George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. It was a "modest" first performance, without the pomp and circumstance of other theatre openings, and many were unsure of the lifespan of such a theatre experience. So began founder Brian Doherty's Shaw Festival, or as it was humbly called in the beginning, A Salute to Shaw. Entering its...

In the first half of the eighteenth century, a new comic plot formula dramatizing the moral reform of a flawed protagonist emerged on the English stage. The comic reform plot was not merely a generic turn towards morality or sentimentality, Aparna Gollapudi argues, but an important social mechanism for controlling and challenging political and economic changes. Gollapudi looks at reform comedies by dramatists such as Colley Cibber, Susanna Centlivre, Richard Steele, Charles Johnson, and Benjamin...

Of enduring historical and contemporary interest, the anatomy theater is where students of the human body learn to isolate structures in decaying remains, scrutinize their parts, and assess their importance. Taking a new look at the history of anatomy, Cynthia Klestinec places public dissections alongside private ones to show how the anatomical theater was both a space of philosophical learning, which contributed to a deeper scientific analysis of the body, and a place where students learned to ...

Recounting the 106-year stage and screen history of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Bruce K. Hanson updates and expands his 1993 volume on "The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up." Hanson traces the origin of Barrie's tale through the first London production in 1904, to various British and American theatrical and film productions up to and including the stage versions of 2010. Included are interviews with actresses Dinah Sheridan, Mary Martin and Sandy Duncan, all of whom portrayed Peter Pan on stage, and Bet...

What is it about Hamlet that has made it such a compelling and vital work? Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages is an account of Shakespeare's great play from its sources in Scandinavian epic lore to the way it was performed and understood in his own day, and then how the play has fared down to the present: performances on stage, television, and in film, critical evaluations, publishing history, spinoffs, spoofs, musical adaptations, the play's growing reputation, its influence on writers a...

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, advancements in communication and travel encouraged widespread international cultural exchange, and Americans increasingly came into contact with Russian culture and theatrical performance. A number of factors, including emigration from Russia, world war, revolutionary activities in both Russia and the United States, and developments in modernism in the American theatre influenced the way those performances were received by American artists and audiences. Examini...

A forgotten yet award-winning playwright, Cal Yeomans was one of the founders of gay theatre whose work was fueled by gay liberation and extinguished by the AIDS epidemic. Exploring both sex and sexuality so candidly, he burst the boundaries of what was considered acceptable. His writings were not only manifestations of the sexual liberation of the times, but were also attempts to overcome what he had been raised to despise. Schanke's examination of Yeomans' life and legacy allows a rare explora...

The 'ballet d'action' was one of the most successful and controversial forms of theatre in the early modern period. A curious hybrid of dance, mime and music, its overall and overriding intention was to create drama. It was danced drama rather than dramatic dance; musical drama rather than dramatic music. Most modern critical studies of the ballet d'action treat it more narrowly as stage dance, and very few view it as part of the history of mime. Little use has previously been made of the most r...

In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class's time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. Th...

Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Natasha Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wive...

Theatre and Prison investigates how theatre makers stage critical questions about the use of prison in society. Using examples from popular culture, dramatic texts and applied theatre, it analyses how theatre and performance reveals economies of punishment, affects penal reform and both challenges and participates in narratives of reformation.

This lively, lucid book undertakes a detailed study of Shakespeare's fascination with clowns, fools, and fooling. Through close reading of plays over the whole course of Shakespeare's theatrical career, Bell highlights the fun, wit, insight, and mystery of some of Shakespeare's most vibrant and often vexing figures.

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other tha...

This book explores automata or early robots as performers on the stage of theatre history. Automata are precursors to our digital culture, demonstrating that our spectacular culture of machine-based entertainments has numerous historical precedents. Automata are surprisingly saturated with intellectual and cultural history. Chapters examine topics like English Reformation Iconoclasm's fear that art might surpass God's nature in Elizabethan moving statues; the influence that hydraulic garden auto...

The theatrical works of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, which have largely been marginalized in discussions of theater history and literary scholarship, offer a hybrid theater that integrates the popular with the formal, the mainstream with the experimental. Fahy examines the integration of and challenges to popular culture found in their works and offers new readings with an eye to American cultural studies and the impact of mass entertainment on modern life.

This is a book for all fans of Chinese theater arts, from Kunqu and Peking Opera to Chinese and Western plays, operas, and stage or variety shows; from the smallest, most intimate neighborhood theaters to China's cutting edge or avante-garde playhouses to its grandest concert halls. Hongfan Zhao examines themes, plots, characters, and all aspects of stagecraft (artistic and technical) in China from the twentieth century to the present. This is the definitive history and appreciation of stage dra...