Three new works from José Rivera, a writer known for his lush language, open heart, and stylistic flirting with the surreal. Boleros for the Disenchanted is the moving story of the playwrights own parents: their sweet courtship in 1950s Puerto Rico, and then forty years later in more difficult times in America. With Brainpeople, Rivera explores the troubled minds of three women in a post-apocalyptic setting who feast on a freshly slaughtered tiger. In School of the Americas, he imagines Che Guev...
A short, clear, critical study of David Hare's work for theatre, film and television, concentrating on questions of staging, performance and narrative and dramatic form.
All roads lead to London - and to the West End theatre. This book presents a new history of the beginnings of the modern world of London entertainment. Putting female-centred, gender-challenging managements and styles at the centre, it redraws the map of performance history in the Victorian capital of the world. Bratton argues for the importance in Victorian culture of venues like the little Strand Theatre and the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street in the experience of mid-century London, ...
New Playwriting Strategies has become a canonical text in the study and teaching of playwriting, offering a fresh and dynamic insight into the subject. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition explores and highlights the wide spread of new techniques that form contemporary theatre writing, as well as their influence on other dramatic forms.
Paul Castagno builds on the innovative plays of Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to investigate groundbreaking new ...
Alan Hughes presents a new complete account of production methods in Greek comedy. The book summarises contemporary research and disputes, on such topics as acting techniques, theatre buildings, masks and costumes, music and the chorus. Evidence is re-interpreted and traditional doctrine overthrown. Comedy is presented as the pan-Hellenic, visual art of theatre, not as Athenian literature. Recent discoveries in visual evidence are used to stimulate significant historical revisions. The author ha...
Maria Irene Fornes provides an enlightening introduction to a pivotal figure in both Hispanic-American and experimental theater. From her theatrical origins in 1960s Cuba to her precedent plays for the US stage, this book presents an important guide of work to this politically-charged playwright.
Drama at the Heart of the Secondary School provides a rationale for the curricular centrality of drama together with rich and detailed examples of cross-phase thematic projects which are drama-led, but which promote learning across a wide range of curriculum areas, from the humanities and other arts, to English and literacy, science and PSHE.
Each unit explores relevant and stimulating themes and topics that will engage the students, promote empathy, pose questions, and produce creative respo...
This book examines the intersection of religion and theatrical performance in modernity/postmodernity. Religion, no longer sequestered in the "private sphere," has become an explicitly public force. It stimulates and complicates public actions; it is a crucial component of performance.
The writings here suggest that performance studies and religious studies can inform one another, leading to innovative and deepened understandings within and between the disciplines. Religion must receive its ...
This volume analyzes major French plays of the 1830s, focusing on their theatricality, and on the ways in which they expose the workings of the theatre rather than conceal them. Through an examination of performance within these plays, the study posits that the stage is a privileged site of demonstration, a literal "proving ground" that lends a physical reality to abstract values announced in the text and shared or questioned by the audience. Negotiating between the literary study of drama and p...
While award-winning author Rudolfo Anaya is known primarily as a novelist, his genius is also evident in dramatic works performed regularly in his native New Mexico and throughout the world. Billy the Kid and Other Plays collects seven of these works and offers them together for the first time.
Like his novels, many of Anaya’s plays are built from the folklore of the Southwest. This volume opens with The Season of La Llorona, in which Anaya fuses the Mexican legend of the dreaded “crying wom...
Stage technicians or “teckies” traditionally apprentice for knowledge about their craft. This is a new, unique practical guide for teckies that can be read or used as a reference manual for all aspects of stage lighting, from equipment to lighting a performance space to special effects and design.
Information is easily accessed through tabbed sections and keywords. The information in each chapter is presented at three levels: “A Quick Start,” enough basic information to get started; “More In...
Provides a comparative approach to the internationally wide-spread phenomenon of the contemporary director-auteur in the theatre, urging a historical and theoretical exploration of the visions, methods, and stage idioms in the work of established artists. Sidiropoulou examines prominent examples of both older and more recent director-auteur work, aiming at re-asserting – to its artistic and academic audience – the value of balancing the established emphasis on the diegetic aspects of theatre wit...
In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video "Dangerous." In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of "whiting up," in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial i...
From her early work with such writers as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and John Osborne, to her time with Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre, Jocelyn Herbert (1917–2003) pioneered a simple yet atmospheric set design style that remains influential today. Britain’s leading stage designer brought her innovative approach to the big screen on such films as Lindsay Anderson’s Isadora. Published for the first time, Herbert’s sketchbooks provide an intimate portrait of her life and work. Illustr...
Claire Cochrane maps the experience of theatre across the British Isles during the twentieth century through the social and economic factors which shaped it. Three topographies for 1900, 1950 and 2000 survey the complex plurality of theatre within the nation-state which at the beginning of the century was at the hub of world-wide imperial interests and after one hundred years had seen unprecedented demographic, economic and industrial change. Cochrane analyses the dominance of London theatre, bu...
Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts. Across a century of literary production using the physical space of the theatre and the discursive space of the page, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zo...
This volume offers transdisciplinary approaches to discuss acting in moving-image culture. It assembles international scholars from dance, theatre, film, media and cultural studies, art and philosophy, who scrutinie both the actor’s presence and art in analog and digital film from historical, generic, and particularly theoretical perspectives: phenomenology, Deleue studies, new media theory to cognitive research, along with re-animated classical approaches and case studies. Each perspective inte...
Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. This has led to an astonishing range of performance styles, ways of working and modes of intervention in varied sites of theatrical production. The essays in this collection place this work in context, exploring historical and contemporary examples of documentary and 'verbatim' theatre, and applying a range of critical perspectives tha...
Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists--from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim--have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience’s aspirations and concerns have played out in the shows themselves. Musicals thus became a paradigm which instructed newcomers in how to assimilate while correspondingly envisioning "American Dream" America as democratic and inclusive. Broadway musicals still...
Stephen Sondheim returns with the second volume of his collected lyrics, giving us another remarkable glimpse into his life’s work, and into his life.
As he did in the acclaimed and best-selling Finishing the Hat (one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010), Sondheim richly annotates his lyrics with personal and theater history, discussions of his collaborations, and exacting, charming dissections of his work — both the successes and the failures. Picking up where he left off in Finishi...
This is the first book-length survey of tragic costume to be published for over forty years. The core of the book focuses on tragic costume in its original performance context of fifth-century Athens, but the implications of subsequent uses in Roman and more recent performances are also taken into consideration. Most importantly, the reader is invited to think about how tragic costume worked as a language in ancient performance and was manipulated physically and verbally in order to create meani...
Theater is the room where performance happens. Where people sit and watch other people. The moment to moment event that unfolds hinges on our imperfect-ness. . . . Theatre for Beginners is a manual for the actor based in the belief that the person is interesting before the performing happens, and the essence of good stage work is rooted in a constant state of beginning.
Richard Maxwell, the downtown writer and director with a deadpan aesthetic and an ever-innovative body of work, has written ...
A unique contribution to an emerging field, Composed Theatre explores musical strategies of organization as viable alternative means of organizing theatrical work. In addition to insightful essays by a stellar group of international contributors, this volume also includes interviews with important practitioners, shedding light on historical and theoretical aspects of composed theatre.
As stage and screen artists explore new means to enhance their craft, a new wave of interest in expressive movement and physical improvisation has developed. And in order to bring authenticity and believability to a character, it has become increasingly vital for actors to be aware of movement and physical acting. Stage and screen artists - including dancers, clowns, puppeteers, singers, and other performers who combine acting with their art - must now call upon physical presence, movement on st...
Acting Together II continues where the first volume left off, presenting more inspiring examples of peace-building performances in conflict-ridden regions. Where the first volume emphasizes theater and ritual's potential for resistance and catharsis in the midst of direct violence and in the aftermath of mass violence, the second volume focuses on performance's ability to bridge gaps and create inclusion in the more subtle context of structural violence and social exclusion. Drawing examples fro...
One of Hollywood's most talented and memorable actresses ("The Hustler, Carrie") and three-time Oscar nominee presents an intimate memoir covering her life and career.
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...
This reference work is a show-by-show chronicle of the series, arranged by broadcast season, and showing network affiliation, host, announcer, director, musical director, and adaptation writer. Show listings include title, date first broadcast, cast, cast of the Lux commercials, plot synopsis, and film versions of the story. Also provided are the intermission guests-D.W. Griffith, Theda Bara, King Vidor, Sid Grauman among others-interviewed between acts of the broadcasts.
We easily accept that size matters in other areas of human endeavor, but what about works of the imagination? Why do some dramatic creations extend to five hours or more, and how does their great length help them accomplish extraordinarily ambitious aims? In Great Lengths, theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalbexamines internationally prominent, marathon-length theater productions, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, the Royal Shakespeare Company’...
This masterful biography sheds new light on one of the 20th-century’s most acclaimed literary figures. Arthur Miller’s prize-winning plays, including Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge, and The Crucible brought him an international and enduring following. While the first half of his life was marked by events such as his refusal to provide information to the House Un-American Activities Committee and his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, the second half proved no less fascinating. In 1962, Mon...
Nahuatl drama, one of the most surprising results of the Catholic presence in colonial Mexico, merges medieval European religious theater with the language and performance traditions of the Aztec (Nahua) people of central Mexico. Franciscan missionaries, seeking effective tools for evangelization, fostered this new form of theater after observing the Nahuas’ enthusiasm for elaborate performances. The plays became a controversial component of native Christianity, allowing Nahua performers to pres...
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.
Contemporary Irish drama communicates not only through words but also through the non-verbal use of space – both the geographical places in which plays are set and the ways stage space is used. The work of cultural and physical geographers, brought to bear on plays by Friel, McPherson, Carr, and McGuinness, illuminates the extent to which perceptions of themes and characters are determined by the plays’ uses of space. The plays shape reactions to issues of belonging and not belonging, home and h...
In Exercises for Rebel Artists, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes use their extensive teaching and performance experience with La Pocha Nostra to help students and practitioners to create ‘border art’.
Designed to take readers right into the heart of radical performance, the authors use a series of crucial practical exercises, honed in workshops worldwide, to help create challenging theatre which transcends the boundaries of nation, gender, and racial identity.
The book features:
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After a meteoric ascent on Broadway that began with Ziegfeld's 1910 Follies, Lillian Lorraine went on to become one of the most famous entertainers in America. Her passionately lived life made her a prime target for the tabloid gossip doyens of the day. This biography recounts the early West Coast life of this superstar as well as her coronation on Broadway, her work in silent film, and her sexual liaisons that helped her gain her notoriety. It also covers her eventual disappearance from public ...
This is the indispensable career guide for anyone interested in the theatre: the complete A to Z culled from industry expert Jim Volz's experience and interviews with many voices in the theatre community. This guide is your first port of call from how to get your foot in the door to where, when and how to advance your career. In addition to advice, inspiration and strategies for all working practitioners, not just actors, it also features extensive listings and directories for regional companie...
A revised edition of one of the most influential plays of our time, published with a new forward by the author, and debuting in celebration of Signature Theatre Company’s Tony Kushner season.
Scott Miller once again shares his passion for and knowledge of musical theater in this endlessly entertaining and informative look at how musicals have both reflected and adapted to America's changing mores. Specifically, Miller casts his eye on the triumvirate of postwar social change: sex, drugs, and rock & roll.
Eager to respond to the concerns and tastes of the increasingly influential baby-boomer generation, musical theater in the late Sixties began to embrace formerly taboo subjects. S...
This is the indispensable career guide for anyone interested in the theatre: the complete A to Z culled from industry expert Jim Volz's experience and interviews with many voices in the theatre community. This guide is your first port of call from how to get your foot in the door to where, when and how to advance your career. In addition to advice, inspiration and strategies for all working practitioners, not just actors, it also features extensive listings and directories for regional companie...
Theatre in Pieces: politics, poetics and interdisciplinary collaboration is an innovative compilation of seven highly acclaimed productions by key practitioners of non-playwright-driven theatre. Each playtext is reproduced in full and accompanied by extensive notes from members of the original producing theatre. A substantial introduction by Anna Furse provides an overview of the works and contextualizes their reading by revealing how a script can emerge from or provoke a collaborative devising ...
This book examines laughter in the Shakespearean theater, in the context of a cultural history of early modern laughter. Aimed at an informed readership, as well as graduate students and scholars in the field of Shakespeare studies, it is the first study to focus specifically on laughter, not comedy. It looks at various strands of the early modern discourse on laughter, ranging from medical treatises and courtesy manuals to Puritan tracts and jestbook literature. It argues that few cultural phen...
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...
A design tech portfolio showcases a theatre designer/technician's most prized accomplishments in stage design, lighting, costuming, or makeup. The ability to make a winning portfolio is essential to getting into choice colleges, obtaining scholarships, and getting new jobs in the field. Unfortunately the process can become time consuming and challenging if you don't know where to start. Show Case offers students, teachers, and aspiring professionals the information they need to know to create, m...
Does a particular song take you back to a certain time and place? More than 100 celebrities were asked what songs bring back special memories. * Film star Joan Collins The Way You Look Tonight reminds her of the first dance at her wedding to Percy Gibson. * TV presenter Richard Madeley remembers playing guitar at the local folk club when he hears American Pie by Don McLean. * Pavarotti's rendition of Nessun Dorma sets off memories of the 1990 World Cup for Gary Lineker * Joanna Lumley thinks of ...
It’s been said (actually, it’s been sung), that when a Broadway baby says goodnight, it’s early in the morning. But what about those Broadway nights? The thrill of being on stage, the adulation, the applause, the stage door fanatics… Stephen Sherrin has no such life. Sure, he dallies on the Great White Way, but when he does have a job it’s beneath the stage, subbing in the orchestra pit. Other parts of his life are the pits, too—including his love life. Why does he always date men who already ha...
"These are memoirs of a kid born in New York City in 1925. His dad, George Senior, was a pianist, composer, and orchestra leader at Proctor's Vaudeville Theatre, and his mother, Helen, played in a classic dance troupe. Hanky-panky ensued. They married, and I soon was the result... I write like I talk. A long time ago I tried making 'talking and telling the truth' one and the same. That isn't just difficult; it means painfully reviewing things you've been led to believe since you were a child. Th...
The vanished world of India’s late-colonial theatre provides the backdrop for the autobiographies in this book. The life-stories of a quartet of early Indian actors and poet-playwrights are here translated into English for the first time. These men were schooled not in the classroom but in large theatrical companies run by Parsi entrepreneurs. Their memoirs, replete with anecdote and humor, are as significant to the understanding of the nationalist era as the lives of political leaders or social...
