Amnon Kabatchnik Releases 'Courtroom Dramas On The Stage, Volume II'

Legendary drama professor, esteemed historian, celebrated director, and award-winning writer Amnon Kabatchnik has penned a new volume in his critically-acclaimed award-winning reference series. Kabatchnik's latest, Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Volume II (BearManor Media) is now available wherever fine books are sold in hardcover (ISBN: 979-8887711362, 506 pages, $45.00), trade paper (ISBN: 979-8887711355, 506 pages, $35.00), and eBook ($9.95) editions.

The follow up to Kabatchnik's critically-acclaimed Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Volume II concentrates on trial plays mounted in the 20th Century. Resplendent with fascinating facts, Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Volume II contains over 90 entries, each of which features a plot synopsis, production data, critical analyses, and biographical sketches of playwrights and key actors-directors.

Presented chronologically, Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Volume II examines notable dramas from the first decade, including Leo Tolstoy's The Living Corpse (Russia, 1900), Alexander Bisson's Madame X (France, 1908), and John Galsworthy's Justice (England, 1910). Subsequent entries examine mainstream authors-such as Elmer Rice, Ayn Rand, Ernst Toller, W. Somerset Maugham, Richard Wright, Maxwell Anderson, Arthur Miller, and Herman Wouk, as well as Jean Genet, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, William Saroyan, James Baldwin, Terence Rattigan, Jeffrey Archer, Ariel Dorfman, David Henry Hwang, Aaron Sorkin, others-who penned plays populated with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, jurors, witnesses, and the accused, often charged with murder in the first degree.

Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Volume II also examines the arrival of courtroom melodramas by veteran mystery writers, including Gaston Leroux (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1912), A.E.W Mason (No Other Tiger, 1928), Agatha Christie (Witness for the Prosecution, 1953), and Henry Cecil (Settled Out of Court, 1960). Moreover, Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Volume II includes plays inspired by real-life events, including Caponsacchi (1926), based on a poem by Robert Browning, which depicts a double murder among the clergy in Rome of 1698; Sophie Treadwell's expressionist drama Machinal (1928), which focuses on a sensational 1927 murder case in Queens, New York, in which an ordinary stenographer kills her much older husband when she feels stifled at home; and A Pin to See the Peepshow (1951), by F. Tennyson Jesse and H.M. Harwood, which introduces a twenty-eight-year-old London millinery who, with the aid of her younger lover, plans to eliminate a bossy husband.

Created, compiled, and organized by eminently and uniquely qualified expert Amnon Kabatchnik, Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Volume 2 is a meticulously researched, comprehensive, and invaluable resource.

Kabatchnik has earned high critical acclaim for his previous works, including his celebrated Blood on the Stage volumes, which won honors in the Benjamin Franklin Awards, the ForeWord Book of the Year Awards, and the Independent Book Publishers Award.

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