History & Criticism

Staging Consciousness argues that theater is a living invalidation of the Western dualism of mind and body, activating human consciousness through its embodiment of thought in performance. While consciousness theory has begun to find ways to bridge...

Suzan Lori-Parks is one of America's most distinctive playwrights. In 2007 her creation ""365 Plays/365 Days"" was produced in more than 700 theaters around the world. She has been named one of ""Time"" magazine's ""100 Innovators for the Next New Wave""...

The theater of early modern England was a disastrous affair. The scant record of its performance demonstrates as much, for what we tend to remember today of the Shakespearean stage and its history are landmark moments of its dissolution: the burning down...

Over fifty years ago, it became unfashionable - even forbidden - for students of literature to talk about an author's intentions for a given work. In "Murder by Accident", Jody Enders boldly resurrects the long-disgraced concept of intentionality,...

Set against the backdrop of transforming theatre conventions in the early 1900s and US entry into World War I in 1917, this book relates the stories of the actors, stage artists, critics and many others - black and white - involved in the groundbreaking...

Imagine a stage full of black cats emitting electrical sparks, a man catching bullets with his teeth, or an evangelist jumping on a transformer to shoot bolts of lightning through his fingertips. These and other wild schemes were part of the repertoire...

The development of the documentary trial play in late-twentieth-century American theatre. From the Chicago Conspiracy Trial and the O. J. Simpson trial to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill congressional hearings, legal and legislative proceedings in the...

The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage demonstrates how theatrical production in Spain since the early 1990s has reflected national anxieties about immigration and race. Jeffrey K. Coleman argues that Spain has...

The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage demonstrates how theatrical production in Spain since the early 1990s has reflected national anxieties about immigration and race. Jeffrey K. Coleman argues that Spain has...

Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela is an innovative examination of how supporters of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez engaged in performance practice to build and negotiate the terms of populism. In Angela Marino's...

Aesthetic Citizenship is an ethnographic study of the role of theatrical performance in questions regarding immigration, citizenship, and the formation of national identity. Focusing on Paris in the twenty-first century, Emine Fisek analyzes the use of...

Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers' sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth...

Revealing the careers and backstage lives of child performers and their place in antebellum America From 1855 until 1863, the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Comedians, a professional acting company of approximately thirty children, entertained audiences with...

Steven Adler examines the dynamic life and workings of the theatre company responsible for some of the world's most compelling performances and influential productions of the last 40 years, including ""Marat/Sade"", ""A...

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe has for the past forty years provided a space for multicultural artistic expression and a platform for the articulation of Puerto Rican and black cultural politics. The Cafe's performances-poetry, music, hip hop, comedy, and...

Acts of Conspicuous Compassion investigates the relationship between performance culture and the cultivation of charitable sentiment in America, exploring the distinctive practices that have evolved to make the plea for charity legible and compelling...

Acts of Gaiety explores the mirthful modes of political performance by LGBT artists, activists, and collectives that have inspired and sustained deadly serious struggles for revolutionary change. The book explores antics such as camp, kitsch, drag,...

Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right challenges assumptions regarding "radical" and "experimental" performance that have long dominated thinking about the avant-garde. The essays bring to light vanguard performances rarely...

This fascinating anthology reveals the rich performance history of Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present.""Stages of Conflict"" brings together a vast array of dramatic texts, ambitiously tracing the intersection of...

Despite its importance to literary and cultural texts of resistance, theater has been largely overlooked as a field of analysis in colonial and postcolonial studies. Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance seeks to address that absence, as it uniquely views...

Suzan Lori-Parks is one of America's most distinctive playwrights. In 2007, her creation ""365 Plays/365 Days"" was produced in more than 700 theaters around the world. She has been named one of ""Time"" magazine's...

The women's experimental theater space called the WOW Cafe (Women's One World) has been a vital part of New York's downtown theater scene since 1980. Since that time, WOW has provided a place for feminist and particularly lesbian theater artists to...

In the dark of the blackout before the curtain rises, the theater holds its many worlds suspended on the verge of appearance. How can a performance sustain this sense of potentiality that grounds all live production? Or if a stage-world does begin, what...

The Avant-Garde and the Popular in China examines avant-garde performance as an important political force shaping popular culture in modern China, focusing on artist and activist Tian Han. This is the first book to analyze Han's art and activism and to...

At an ecopark in Mexico, tourists pretend to be illegal migrants, braving inhospitable terrain and the U.S. Border Patrol as they attempt to cross the border. At a living history museum in Indiana, daytime visitors return after dark to play fugitive...

This collection by leading theater performers, practitioners, critics, and passionate spectators offers a backstage pass to the personal and creative lives of some of the most important and influential theater artists of the past fifty years: Edward...

Stages of Conflict brings together a vast array of dramatic texts, ambitiously tracing the intersection of theater and social and political life in the Americas over the past five centuries. Including eighteen works faithfully translated into English,...

Arthur Miller's America collects new writing by leading international critics and scholars on the theater of the late icon, activist and playwright Arthur Miller, and the ways his dramatic work reflects the changing moral equations of his time. The...

Carolyn Grattan Eichin's From San Francisco Eastward explores the presence and influence of theater in the West during the Victorian era. San Francisco, Eichin argues, served as the center of the western theatrical world, having attained prominence...

More than a chronicle, America in the Round is a critical history that reveals how far Washington D.C.'s Arena Stage could go with its budget and racially liberal politics, and how Arena both disputed and duplicated systems of power. With an innovative...

Jonathan Shandell provides the first in-depth study of the historic American Negro Theatre (ANT) and its lasting influence on American popular culture. Founded in 1940 in Harlem, the ANT successfully balanced expressions of African American consciousness...

Existing scholarly discussions of theatrical realism have been predominantly limited to 19th-century European and Russian theater, with little attention paid to wider explorations and alternative definitions of the practice. Examining theater forms and...

Theatermakers in the United States have long been drawn to madness as a source of dramatic spectacle. During the Broadway musical’s “golden age,” creative teams used the currently in-vogue psychoanalytic ideas about mental life to construct troubled...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780472108756Author George M. PaulFormat HardbackPage Count 216Imprint The University of Michigan PressPublisher The University of Michigan...

The essays in this collection offer a radical reappraisal of the avant-garde by placing it within a much broader global context. The book questions the very assumptions that underlie the generally accepted chronology and theory of the avant-garde, and...

Playwright, actor and director Charles Ludlam (1943–1987) helped to galvanize the Ridiculous style of theater in New York City starting in the 1960s.  Decades after his death, his place in the chronicle of American theater has remained constant, but his...

The work of director, playwright, essayist, and poet Antonin Artaud has had a lasting influence, particularly among theater scholars, who consider his 1938 book Le Théâtre et son double (The Theater and Its Double) a classic text of the avant-garde. Both...

Questions about how theater history should be taught have in recent years provoked passionate discussions. Some scholars have argued that the emerging discipline of performance studies should replace theater history altogether. On the other side of the...

Stage properties are an often-ignored aspect of theatrical productions, in part because their usage is meant to be seamlessly integrated into the performance instead of a focal point for the audience. However, a skillfully used prop can augment the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780472111398Author Erik GundersonFormat HardbackPage Count 288Imprint The University of Michigan PressPublisher The University of Michigan...