Broadway Books Database

Most readers nowadays encounter the plays of Aristophanes in the classroom, not the theater. Yet the “father of comedy” wrote his plays for the stage, not as literary texts. Many English translations of the plays were written decades ago, and in their outdated language they fail to capture the dramatic liveliness of the original comedies. Here Michael Ewans offers new and lively translations of three of Aristophanes’ earliest surviving plays: Acharnians, Knights, and Peace. While remaining fa...

The seven plays that comprise Chiori Miyagawa’s Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays explore themes of memory and identity.Her plays combine poetic language with harsh reality, and time and space are fluid in the worlds she creates—they converge and separate while the characters inhabit many dimensions at once with ease. In one way or another, the heroes and heroines of these plays are outsiders—emotionally (as in Awakening), physically (as in Comet Hunter) or socially (as in Broken Morning), ...

Scene Design: Rendering and Media is intended to help students or practitioners improve their skills at making finished renderings of scene designs for theater. The book demonstrates the process of creating the renderings through real world methods and techniques. Chapters are dedicated to a detailed discussion of various tools including drawing, light and shadow, color mixing, painting, figures, and other media, and the book is rife with colorful and inspirational examples.

Performance in the Time of Terror is an important investigation of the ways in which performance has given shape and form to "wars of terror," past and present, and as a strategy and tactic of violence. Focusing on an array of performances that caused a stir during the "war on terror" of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Hughes also explores the use of performance by counterinsurgents during the "war on terrorism" in Northern Ireland (1969-1998). Offering original discussions of the...

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.

The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezín, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death; but in the midst of this was a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children’s drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners’ theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavors, deserves serious attention as well. Performing Captivity collects ele...

"A brilliant and daring book on how art reveals life, how it illuminates childhood beyond what the sciences of development can tell us." ---Jerome Bruner, University Professor, New York University "Combining the surgical precision of a psychoanalytically informed critic with the oracular eloquence of a brilliant close reader, Ellen Handler Spitz reads our cultural fortunes about childhood and parenting through works of art. Moving us (in both senses of the term) from the serene plenitude of...

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...

The work of an outstanding Georgian theatre director and teacher Mikhail Tumanishvili (1921-1996) was first published in Georgia in 1976 and is now made available for the first time in an English translation. Before the Rehearsal Begins is a precise and demanding exploration of the director's creative process. The book is richly illustrated with diagrams and drawings sketched by the author and is inspiring in its simplicity and imaginative freedom. Tumanishvili is acknowledged worldwide as a...

Critical Essays on British South Asian Theatre marks a major contribution to the understanding of one of the most remarkable examples of diasporic artistic activity in recent history. The second volume on British South Asian theater compiled by Graham Ley and Sarah Dadswell, this volume provides detailed critical analyses of theater practice and performance from the last thirty years.

The Study of Drama by Harley Granville-Barker was published as part of the Cambridge Miscellany series in 1934. It contains the text of a lecture delivered by the author in Cambridge in 1934 on the study of 'drama as drama, considered in relation to the theatre'. The lecture is printed together with extensive notes, which were added subsequently.

The Art of Clowning is the first book on clowning technique and offers a step-by-step process for actors and other theatrical enthusiasts to discover their "inner clown." This fun and accessible guide expands on theories and exercises to help students and beginners develop solo and group performances. Using twenty years of teaching experience, Simon reveals a complete system of clowning that is a must-have for amateurs and experts alike. Now with even MORE ways to find your inner clown!

Mae West, Sarah Bernhardt, Ethel Barrymore and Helen Keller are perhaps among the best known women to appear on vaudeville stages. Each came to vaudeville by a different path and with a different offering: Mae West entered vaudeville with a song and dance routine when she was 13 years old. Ethel Barrymore dropped in on the Palace Theater to present one-act plays. Sarah Bernhardt was being celebrated by the British for her fifty years on the dramatic stage when she agreed to appear in the U.S. H...

British South Asian theater has been one of the most significant features of diasporic artistic activity throughout the world in the last thirty years, yet its remarkable achievements have been largely ignored by mainstream media and scholars. With British South Asian Theatres, Graham Ley and Sarah Dadswell aim to reverse such neglect. Drawing on unpublished archives and an extensive series of interviews on the history of British theater, these essays document the presence of South Asians on th...

The Brecht Yearbook is a venue for discussion about aspects of theater and literature that were of particular interest to Bertolt Brecht, especially the politics of literature and the politics of theater in a global context. The Volume Brecht in / and Asia contains twenty-six essays based on presentations given at “Brecht in/and Asia,” the thirteenth Symposium of the International Brecht Society (IBS), which was held at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa in 2010. Themes covered include Bre...

In 1979, Scarecrow Press published J. P. Wearing’s American and British Theatrical Biography: A Directory, which enabled users to quickly locate biographical information about figures—both major and minor—who are or were connected with British and American theatre. In American and British Theatrical Biographies: An Index, Wearing has revised and extensively expanded the previous work. This edition draws upon more than 130 sources and 500 volumes that have been surveyed and indexed, prov...

How does class get 'cast' and made performative? What modes are there for people to wrestle-back their forms of representation? And how should we understand this intense manipulation of feeling? This bookexamines why class politics matter against much political and academic rhetoric which refract inequality through other means.

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...

From Komisarjevsky in the 1920s, to Cheek by Jowl’s Russian ‘sister company’ almost a century later, Russian actor training has had a unique influence on modern British theatre. Russians in Britain, edited by Jonathan Pitches, is the first work of its type to identify a relationship between both countries’ theatrical traditions as continuous as it is complex. Unravelling new strands of transmission and translation linking the great Russian émigré practitioners to the second and third generat...

Artful Stories tells the story of four arts practitioners from Trinidad and Tobago—a lighting designer, a dancer, a jazz musician and a choreographer—who have made a name for themselves internationally. The work also centers on their role as educators in their fields. Their unique and individual journeys exemplify the classic role artists have (always) played as teachers. Artful Stories is a timely and profound work that captures the teacher-student dynamic. It fills a void in terms of recogniz...

The Wild West was popular with American audiences long before the appearance of the Hollywood western. From 1829 to 1881, playgoers throughout the nation applauded frontier dramas that celebrated conventional American values like rugged individualism and the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Yet, as Pioneer Performances shows, a more subversive cultural agenda often worked within the orthodox framework of this popular drama. Drawing on a range of plays and public entertainments, Matthew Rebhorn unc...

Get professional techniques usually known only by Hollywood makeup artists in this full-color, comprehensive book from accomplished makeup pros Gretchen Davis and Mindy Hall. The two come to you with impressive backgrounds in film and television industries--their projects have included Pearl Harbor, Rent, Stuart Little, and The Nanny Diaries, and Mindy Hall is fresh off her Academy Award win for her work on 2009's Star Trek. This new edition of The Makeup Artist Handbook offers even more illustr...

In Rehearsal is a clear and accessible how-to approach to the rehearsal process. Author Gary Sloan brings more than thirty years' worth of acting experience to bear on the question of how to rehearse both as an individual actor and as part of the team of professionals that underpins any successful production. Interviews with acclaimed actors, directors, playwrights, and designers share a wealth of knowledge on dynamic collaboration. The book is divided in to three main stages, helping the re...

Wonder is a highly ambivalent word and idea which can denote woe, horror, or terror on one hand and delight, jubilation, or ecstasy on the other. In the first part of this book, Adam Max Cohen embraces the many meanings of wonder in order to challenge the generic divides between comedy, tragedy, history, and romance to suggest that Shakespeare's primary goal in crafting each of his play worlds was the evocation of one or more varieties of wonder. In the second part of this book, seven esteemed ...

Exploring the relationship between dramatic language and its theatrical aspects, Reading Modern Drama provides an accessible entry point for general readers and academics into the world of contemporary theatre scholarship. This collection promotes the use of diverse perspectives and critical methods to explore the common theme of language as well as the continued relevance of modern drama in our lives. Reading Modern Drama offers provocative close readings of both canonical and lesser-known ...

MasterClass in Drama Education explores drama teaching, drawing directly on international research and practice, presenting effective and engaging approaches for drama learning and focussing on the skills, knowledge and understanding for researchers teachers and M level students. Michael Anderson explores the history, practice and research in drama education to create a foundation for effective learning and teaching. Examples of international practice and research support an evidence-based disc...

With Stage Directing: A Director's Itinerary, the student of theatrical directing now has a step-by-step guide to directing a production, from choosing a play to opening night. Unlike other directing textbooks, this practical guidebook provides instruction on how to organize the work of the director through the practical challenges of the directorial process (e.g., organizing a budget spreadsheet, writing casting notices, setting up an audition space, etc.). In Stage Directing, the process of d...

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...

In The Avant-Garde, Mike Sell rejects the common idea that the avant-garde is only about art and insists that it is much more than a European phenomenon. In doing so, he redefines the historical, geographical, ideological, disciplinary, and theoretical boundaries of avant-garde studies and raises a number of difficult questions about the avant-garde— How have avant-gardes been shaped by racism and contributed to racist power and imperialism? How have the claims made by avant-garde political and...

Droznin is remarkable and valuable for his ability to combine serious and historically contextualised reflection on the body, psychology and human behaviour with an incorporated and systematic exploration of these ideas in practice.' Paul Allain Andrei Droznin’s Physical Actor Training presents a unique introduction to the master teacher behind a programme of stage movement training that is taught all over the world. Droznin’s influence on the way biomechanical principals and the relationshi...

Although Jane Hading (1859–1940), Lily Elsie (1886–1962), and Billie Burke (1884–1970) gained fame as stage actresses, their popular appeal also rested on their ability to cultivate a glamorous appearance. Their careers illustrate the early transformation of actresses into marketable commodities whose celebrity status depended on the consumption of their images. This celebrity, in turn, was used to market an array of beauty and fashion goods to women striving to emulate them. The three women ...

This book is the second part of an important experimental trilogy in text archaeology of all the various ideas about the 1664 and later versions. Tartuffe ou L'Imposteur, (Tartuffe or the Hypocrite), is Molière’s most famous play and was first performed at Versailles in 1664. It attacked religious hypocrisy and as a result caused much scandal and was then banned. Tartuffe means "hypocrite" especially one who shows affected religious piety and exaggeratedly feigns virtue. Revised versions of Tar...

The Lettre sur la Comédie de l'Imposteur is the only work of any length which does full justice to comedy in the seventeenth century as a serious dramatic form. It is an important document in its own right and because it is inseparable from the historical context of Molière's Le Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur and the circumstances which influenced its development.

Words for Lori Laitman’s opera, The Scarlet Letter Based on the story by Nathaniel Hawthorne Award-winning poet and librettist David Mason, author of Ludlow and other books, has given new life in verse to Hawthorne’s classic novel. By distilling the book’s narrative line and adding a charged lyricism of his own, Mason has created another magnificent work in his ongoing poetic portrait of America. In old Boston, a young woman, Hester Prynne, has been charged with adultery and forced to ...

The piano music of Maurice Ravel is among the most thrilling, the most colorful, and, for pianists, the most challenging of the repertoire. This book is about how performers and listeners can discover it and relate to it - how it sounds and feels under the fingers and within the receptive imagination. But to write about those experiences, to explore the background, influences, and impulses behind Ravel's music, is to be engaged in a form of biography. Discovering the delicate melancholy of the ...

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 ...

In early modern Europe medicine and theatre were often regarded as part of the same popular culture. Itinerant medical 'quacks' and troupes of actors were both integral parts of everyday life, each drawing upon theatricality to attract customers and promote their services. In this study, the writings of three renowned physicians - the Swiss Platter brothers and their Austrian colleague Guarinonius - are used to explore the often neglected interfaces between healing and performance. Their descrip...