History & Criticism

The theater company Mabou Mines has for the past forty years created pathbreaking new theater by combining the latest concepts in music, visual arts, and technology with traditional forms of creative expression: puppetry, text, movement, theater design...

The promotion of state ideology was pervasive in early modern Spain and its New World colonies. One cultural medium affected, theater--the most popular and viable form of mass entertainment at the time--frequently played a role in the advancement of...

Sold as a multi-volume set - the individual volumes are also available for purchase. This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women's playwriting with forty-two essays written by leading and emerging Irish theatre...

The three directors gathered in this volume all approach theatre-making in part as an act of citizenship. Jesusa Rodriguez, Peter Sellars, and Reza Abdoh differ markedly in many important respects, but they all come to the theatre as an intervention in...

This volume focuses on three artists who embrace media and technology as essential elements of their theatrical expression: Elizabeth LeCompte, Ping Chong, and Robert Lepage. Diverse in their aesthetic interests, they nevertheless share an approach to...

This volume assesses the accomplishments of three mid-20th century, North American stage directors: Harold Clurman, Orson Welles, and Margo Jones. Though their theatre-making endeavours were distinct, each produced work that challenged preconceived...

This volume assesses the contributions of David Belasco, Arthur Hopkins, and Margaret Webster, whose careers shaped the artistic and specialist identity of the Broadway director. Their work spans almost a century and captures the rapidly changing social...

Sampling and Remixing Blackness is a timely and accessible book that examines the social ramifications of cultural borrowing and personal adaptation of Hip-hop culture by non-Black and non-African American Black artists in theater and performance. In a...

From the earliest Puritan displays of piety and rectitude to the present-day epidemic of staged school massacres, the history of America has been characterized by a dual impulse: to cast public event and character as high drama, and to dismiss theater...

Acting concentrated both the aspirations and anxieties of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where theater was a defining element of urban sociability. In Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France, Jeffrey M. Leichman argues for a...

Embodying Difference: Scripting Social Images of the Female Body in Latina Theatre explores contemporary theatrical productions by Latina dramatists in the United States and focuses on the effects that neoliberal politics, global market strategies,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781609386412Author Mary McAvoyFormat PaperbackPage Count 266Imprint University of Iowa PressPublisher University of Iowa PressWeight(grams) 445g

With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan opened its doors to the West and underwent remarkable changes as it sought to become a modern nation. Accompanying the political changes that Western trade ushered in were widespread social and cultural changes...

Richard Wesley was witness to a revolution. As both a celebrated participant and eager student of the Black Theater Movement in the late 1960s, he became part of a seismic force in American culture, breaking down barriers and helping to disrupt the...

Since the Soviet occupation of 1968 censorship has closed the curtain on free expression in Czechoslovakia. But plays continue to be circulated in typescript within the country, are regularly smuggled out for publication abroad, and continue to be...

This volume is the seventeenth in a series dedicated to presenting the latest findings in the fields of comparative drama and performance. Featuring eleven essays from the 2021 Comparative Drama Conference in Orlando, it includes new research on...

Crump discusses social and historical context, stages, stagecraft, and literary art of Yuan drama and presents complete translations of three plays-a bandit adventure, a melodrama, and a murder mystery.About the AuthorJ. I. CRUMP was Professor Emeritus...

Written by both scholars and performers, the nearly two-dozen essays that comprise this volume examine performance events in contemporary contexts to show how performances are involved in the changing sociocultural climate, economy, and politics of...

The turn of the twentieth century in New York City was characterized by radical transformation as the advent of consumer capitalism confronted established social hierarchies, culture, and conceptions of selfhood. The popular stage existed in a symbiotic...

Since the establishment of the Northern Irish state in 1921, theatre has often captured and reflected the political, social, and cultural changes that the North has experienced. From the mid-twentieth century, theatre has played a particularly important...

For more than 150 years, Irish playwrights, beginning with Dion Boucicault, have been celebrated by American audiences. However, Irish theater as represented on the American stage is merely a sampling of the national drama, and the underlying causes of...

A certain idea of the avant-garde posits the possibility of a total rupture with the past. The Unfinished Art of Theater pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the semiperiphery of capitalism to...

Throughout his career, famed critical theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) had a complex and often uneasy relationship with theatre and performance. From his early theatre criticism, through his abrupt and enigmatic silence on theatre, to the theoretical...

Toronto Workshop Productions was Toronto's first 'alternative' theatre, and for thirty years, from 1959 until its closure in 1989, it introduced audiences to a radically new form of theatre. Neil Carson's in-depth history of TWP traces the fortunes of...

Scenes from Bourgeois Life proposes that theatre spectatorship has made a significant contribution to the historical development of a distinctive bourgeois sensibility, as characterized by the cultivation of distance. In author Nicholas Ridout's...

Much of the theater of antiquity is marked by erasures: missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them...

How do we recapture, or hold on to, the live performances we most love, and the talented artists and performers we most revere? Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss tells the story of how 18th-century actors, novelists, and artists, key among them David...

Theatrical playing, Hamlet famously averred, holds a mirror up to nature. But unlike the reflections in the mirror, the theater's images are composed of real objects, most notably bodies, that have an independent existence outside the world of reflection...

The various media genres involving evangelical performance may seem tangential but are in fact significant and influential cultural products employing sophisticated tactics to reach large audiences of firm believers, extreme skeptics, and those in...

"Not only a celebration of Marvin Carlson, but a textbook on the history of theatre studies that suggests how to develop and transform paradigms so that they can be applied productively in the future. One of the enormous strengths of theatre studies is...

Jeffrey D. Mason's Stone Tower sets out to enrich---and challenge---traditional views of playwright Arthur Miller. While Miller has long been acclaimed as a social dramatist, this fresh appraisal clearly establishes him as an essentially political...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.About the AuthorScholar, critic, and theorist Jill Dolan is Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama at the University of Texas, Austin. She is author of The Feminist Spectator as...

Infinity (Stage) is a highly original study and poetic meditation on the themes of death, memory, identity, and representation in theater, film, and literature. Inspired in part by the death of his father, Spencer Golub's scholarly entertainment employs...

"Greek drama demands a story of origins," writes Karen Bassi in Acting Like Men. Abandoning the search for ritual and native origins of Greek drama, Bassi argues for a more secular and less formalist approach to the emergence of theater in ancient Greece...

"Robin Bernstein's Cast Out is my latest must have, an important new mapping of the intersection of gender and performance studies."-Holly HughesCast Out is a collection of memoirs and interviews by twenty-two leading performers, playwrights,...

Performing Democracy explores aspects of a developing form of performance that works to change social conditions for marginalized groups or to preserve the traditions and cohesion of the community. The book combines critical analysis with field reports...

When theater and related forms of live performance explore the borderlands labeled animal and autism, they both reflect and affect their audiences' understanding of what it means to be human. Affect, Animals, and Autists maps connections across...

In the 1970s, Yugoslavia emerged as a dynamic environment for conceptual and performance art. At the same time, it pursued its own form of political economy of socialist self-management. Alienation Effects argues that a deep relationship existed between...

Biblical texts have inspired more than 100 Broadway plays and musicals, ranging from early spectacles like Ben-Hur (1899) to more familiar works such as Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. What happens when a culture's most sacred text enters its most...

We all have an animal story-the pet we loved, the wild animal that captured our childhood imagination, the deer the neighbor hit while driving. While scientific breakthroughs in animal cognition, the effects of global climate change and dwindling animal...