As Karen Malpede points out in her introduction to Acts of War, tragedy "arose as a complement to, perhaps also as an antidote to, war." The greatest of the early playwrights wrote from experience—Aeschylus and Sophocles were generals in the Athenian army, and Euripides was a combat veteran. Electronic media reports war instantly, but the stage provides an unrivaled venue for facing the horror of armed conflict on a human scale.This timely anthology of plays by American and British writers bears witness to the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for combatants and civilians alike and asks what it means to be a citizen in a democracy at war. From violence on the battlefield and in the cells of Guantanamo to the toll exacted on the homefront, the seven plays collected by Malpede, Messina, and Shuman explore in depth the costs of war. Sometimes with humor or erotic charge, always with compassion and surprising insight, these contemporary plays return to the theater a necessary social edge.Karen Malpede’s introduction sets the plays in the broader contexts of theater’s roots and recent history, while award-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges provides a foreword.

Within the relatively recent development of a tradition of African American playwriting, the Theodore Ward Prize has, over its twenty-year history, offered a rich reflection of the accomplishments of emerging and established black playwrights and their growing importance in shaping contemporary theater. This volume showcases three winners of the Theodore Ward Prize--plays that in their quality and subject matter aptly represent what is being written and produced by African American playwrights and theaters today.

Carefully selected by a director and educator who has been affiliated with the contest for eighteen of its twenty years, these three works have themes that range from the sordid shenanigans of a Depression-era "South Side Burial Society" (Leslie Lee's Sundown Names and Night-Gone Things) to a single mother's heartbreaking battle to save her children's souls (Mark Clayton Southers' Ma Noah) to a poignant and achingly funny reunion of three sisters after their parents' death (Kim Euell's The Diva Daughters DuPree). Their publication answers a growing demand for the work of African American playwrights even as it affords deep and varied insights into African American culture in our era.

"James F. Wilson uncovers fascinating new material on the Harlem Renaissance, shedding light on the oft-forgotten gay and lesbian contributions to the era's creativity and Civil Rights. Extremely well researched, compellingly written, and highly informative."
---David Krasner, author of A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927

Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies shines the spotlight on historically neglected plays and performances that challenged early twentieth-century notions of the stratification of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. On Broadway stages, in Harlem nightclubs and dance halls, and within private homes sponsoring rent parties, African American performers of the 1920s and early 1930s teased the limits of white middle-class morality. Blues-singing lesbians, popularly known as "bulldaggers," performed bawdy songs; cross-dressing men vied for the top prizes in lavish drag balls; and black and white women flaunted their sexuality in scandalous melodramas and musical revues. Race leaders, preachers, and theater critics spoke out against these performances that threatened to undermine social and political progress, but to no avail: mainstream audiences could not get enough of the riotous entertainment.

Many of the plays and performances explored here, central to the cultural debates of their time, had been previously overlooked by theater historians. Among the performances discussed are David Belasco's controversial production of Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur's Lulu Belle (1926), with its raucous, libidinous view of Harlem. The title character, as performed by a white woman in blackface, became a symbol of defiance for the gay subculture and was simultaneously held up as a symbol of supposedly immoral black women. African Americans Florence Mills and Ethel Waters, two of the most famous performers of the 1920s, countered the Lulu Belle stereotype in written statements and through parody, thereby reflecting the powerful effect this fictional character had on the popular imagination.

Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies is based on historical archival research including readings of eyewitness accounts, newspaper reports, songs, and playscripts. Employing a cultural studies framework that incorporates queer and critical race theory, it argues against the widely held belief that the stereotypical forms of black, lesbian, and gay show business of the 1920s prohibited the emergence of distinctive new voices. Specialists in American studies, performance studies, African American studies, and gay and lesbian studies will find the book appealing, as will general readers interested in the vivid personalities and performances of the singers and actors introduced in the book.

James F. Wilson is Professor of English and Theatre at LaGuardia Community College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

In Contemporary Mormon Pageantry, theater scholar Megan Sanborn Jones looks at Mormon pageants, outdoor theatrical productions that celebrate church theology, reenact church history, and bring to life stories from the Book of Mormon. She examines four annual pageants in the United States-the Hill Cumorah Pageant in upstate New York, the Manti Pageant in Utah, the Nauvoo Pageant in Illinois, and the Mesa Easter Pageant in Arizona. The nature and extravagance of the pageants vary by location, with some live orchestras, dancing, and hundreds of costumed performers, mostly local church members. Based on deep historical research and enhanced by the author's interviews with pageant producers and cast members as well as the author's own experiences as a participant-observer, the book reveals the strategies by which these pageants resurrect the Mormon past on stage. Jones analyzes the place of the productions within the American theatrical landscape and draws connections between the Latter-day Saints theology of the redemption of the dead and Mormon pageantry in the three related sites of sacred space, participation, and spectatorship. Using a combination of religious and performance theory, Jones demonstrates that Mormon pageantry is a rich and complex site of engagement between theater, theology, and praxis that explores the saving power of performance.

Dreaming America: Popular Front Ideals and Aesthetics in Children’s Plays of the Federal Theatre Project by Leslie Elaine Frost traces how the tumultuous politics of the late 1930s shaped the stories and staging of federally funded plays for children. Indeed, children’s theater was central to the Federal Theatre Project’s vision of building a national theater. Frost argues that representations of the child and childhood in the FTP children’s plays stage the hopes and anxieties of a nation destabilized by both economic collapse and technological advances. A declining economy and the first stagnant birthrate in three centuries yoked the national economy to the individual family. Profound disagreements over appropriate models of education and parenting, as well as over issues of ethnicity and class, constituted fundamental arguments over democratic values and social norms.

 

Frost locates these plays within the immediate context of the production materials in the FTP archives, as well as within the broader culture of the Great Depression, drawing on disparate primary materials—from parenting magazines to strike literature to political journals—and referencing a range of popular events—from the Joe Louis/Max Schmeling fights to Hollywood movies.

 

As the focus of Depression-era adult anxieties and hopes and as the embodiment of vigor, dynamism, and growth, children carried symbolic value both as the future of America and as the America of the future. Frost examines representative plays’ connections to other media, culture, and politics to situate their singular trajectories in the social history of the Federal Theatre Project and Popular Front culture.

This anthology has its origins in the Encuentro theater festival, which was produced by the Latino Theater Company in association with the Latinx Theatre Commons in Los Angeles in 2014. Encuentro means “an encounter,” and meetings form a core theme in these six groundbreaking plays, each prefaced by a critical introduction from a leading Latinx theater scholar.

Playwrights Ruben C. Gonzalez, José Torres-Tama, Rickerby Hinds, Mariana Carreño King, Javier Antonio González, and Evelina Fernández exhibit a wide range of aesthetic approaches, dramatic structures, and themes, ranging from marriage, gentrification, racial and gendered violence, migration, and the ever-present politics of the U.S.–Mexico border. There is power in the communal experience of creating, witnessing, and participating in theater festivals. This anthology is a testament to that power and seeks to document the historic festival as well as to make these works available to a wider audience.

Encuentro: Latinx Performance for the New American Theater addresses interests of general audiences committed to the performing arts; scholars and students of Latinx, gender, and ethnic studies; university, college, and high school theater programs; and regional theaters looking to diversify their programming.

 

In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of American theatres and theatre artists fostered interracial collaboration and socialization on stage, behind the scenes, and among audiences. In an era marked by entrenched racial segregation and inequality, these artists used performance to bridge America’s persistent racial divide and to bring African American, Latino/Latina, Asian American, Native American, and Jewish American communities and traditions into the nation’s broader cultural conversation.
 
In Experiments in Democracy, edited by Cheryl Black and Jonathan Shandell, theatre historians examine a wide range of performances—from Broadway, folk plays and dance productions to scripted political rallies and radio dramas. Contributors look at such diverse groups as the Theatre Union, La Unión Martí-Maceo, and the American Negro Theatre, as well as individual playwrights and their works, including Theodore Browne’s folk opera Natural Man, Josefina Niggli’s Soldadera, and playwright Lynn Riggs’s Cherokee Night and Green Grow the Lilacs (the basis for the musical Oklahoma!). Exploring the ways progressive artists sought to connect isolated racial and cultural groups in pursuit of a more just and democratic society, contributors take into account the blind spots, compromised methods, and unacknowledged biases at play in their practices and strategies. Essays demonstrate how the gap between the ideal of American democracy and its practice—mired in entrenched systems of white privilege, economic inequality, and social prejudice—complicated the work of these artists.
 
Focusing on questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on the stage in the decades preceding the Civil Rights era, Experiments in Democracy fills an important gap in our understanding of the history of the American stage—and sheds light on these still-relevant questions in contemporary American society. 

Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism provides a number of useful approaches for analyzing works for the stage from a feminist perspective. Each chapter outlines key feminist theories in a specific field, covering literary criticisms, anthropology, psychology, and film, and then applies these theories in a detailed criticism of one or two plays. Plays by Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Jane Bowles, Sam Shepard, and Alice Childress—all produced after World War II—are reexamined through the lenses of feminist theorist Judith Fetterley, Gayle Rubin, Nancy Chodorow, and Laura Mulvey, each a key figure in her respective field.

The introduction provides a framework for the discussion of feminist dramatic criticism by presenting the multiple political perspectives within feminism. The contributions of black and lesbian feminists to the question of theory are explored, as are the evolutionary stages of feminist criticism as they have been occurring in other fields. Theater has been slower than most fields to move through these stages, and its trajectory thus far is briefly traced. For the sake of clarity, each of the central chapters treats theories from a particular discipline, but the conclusion reminds us that in practice the theories are most often combined.

The book will appeal to theater scholars and practitioners interested in finding their way into feminist theory for the first time, or in expanding their knowledge of its insights for use in teaching, research, and production. Those in women's studies and other fields will find it shows ways to include plays among the texts they analyze.

The Black Arts Movement (1965–76) consisted of artists across the United States deeply concerned with the relationship between politics and the black aesthetic. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers examines the ways in which black women playwrights in the movement advanced feminist and womanist perspectives from within black nationalist discourses. La Donna L. Forsgren recuperates the careers, artistic theories, and dramatic contributions of four leading playwrights: Martie Evans-Charles, J.e. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer. Using original interviews, production recordings, playbills, and unpublished manuscripts, she investigates how these women, despite operating within a context that equated the collective well-being of black people with black male agency, created works that validated black women's aspirations for autonomy and explored women's roles in the struggle for black liberation.

In Search of Our Warrior Mothers demonstrates the powerful contributions of women to the creation, interpretation, and dissemination of black aesthetic theory, thus opening an interdisciplinary conversation at the intersections of theater, performance, feminist, and African American studies and identifying and critiquing the gaps and silences within these fields.

In an effort to define what constitutes a feminist reading of literary works, Ann C. Hall offers an analytic technique that is both a feminist and a psychoanalytic approach, applying this technique to her study of women characters in the modern dramatic texts of Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard.

This is the first study to treat these three writers in tandem, and while Hall uses the work of Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and other psychoanalytic feminist critics in her close readings of specific dramatic texts, she also brings in commentaries by critics, directors, performers, and historians. Her technique thereby provides us with a new and significant method for addressing female characters as written by male playwrights, a task that she argues is not only a valid and necessary part of feminist dramatic criticism but a part of theatrical production as well.

From Pinter’s play A Kind of Alaska, Hall extracts a metaphor for the patriarchal oppression of women, contextualizing such oppression through an examination of O’Neill’s madonnas, Pinter’s whores, and Shepard’s female saviors as they are represented in O’Neill’s Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for theMisbegotten; Pinter’s Homecoming, No Man’s Land, Betrayal, and A Kind of Alaska; and Shepard’s Buried Child, True West, and A LieoftheMind.

Since the works of O’Neill, Pinter, and Shepard continue to be performed to popular acclaim, Hall hopes that a better understanding of the female characters in these plays will influence the performances themselves.

Lives in Play explores the centrality of life narratives to women’s drama and performance from the 1970s to the present moment. In the early days of second-wave feminism, the slogan was “The personal is the political.” These autobiographical and biographical “true stories” have the political impact of the real and have also helped a range of feminists tease out the more complicated aspects of gender, sex, and sexuality in a Western culture that now imagines itself as “postfeminist.”

The book’s scope is broad, from performance artists like Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and Bobby Baker to playwrights like Suzan-Lori Parks, Maria Irene Fornes, and Sarah Kane. The book links the narrative tactics and theatrical approaches of biography
and autobiography and shows how theater artists use life writing strategies to advance women’s rights and remake women’s representations. Lives in Play will appeal to scholars in performance studies, women’s studies, and literature, including those in the growing field of auto/biography studies.

“ A fresh perspective and wide-ranging analysis of changes in feminist theater for the past thirty years . . . a most welcome addition to the literature on theater, in particular scholarship on feminist practices.”

—Choice 

“Helps sustain an important history by reviving works of feminist theater and performance and giving them a new and refreshing context and theorical underpinning . . . considering 1970s performance art alongside more conventional play production.” 

—Lesley Ferris, The Ohio State University

We have all had experiences with sickness, care giving, physicians, medical emergencies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices. Health concerns are not solely the domain of medical students, physicians, or nurses—we all deal with our personal well-being and the health of our loved ones on a daily basis. Sometimes these health problems cause us to consider larger social and ethical issues. How do we respond and relate to such matters? In order to help both lay people and medical professionals consider various health care issues, East Carolina University's Brody School of Medicine developed a medical readers' theater program. Compiled for the first time in a single text, Medical Readers’ Theater: A Guide and Scripts provides a vehicle for those who wish to engage in discussions among citizens and professionals about important, topical issues in contemporary medicine.

Consisting of fourteen readers’ theater scripts, a step-by-step guide to performing readers’ theater, and questions for post-performance discussions, this volume utilizes stories by William Carlos Williams, Susan Onthank Mates, Arthur Conan Doyle, Pearl Buck, and many more. Physician/patient relationships, organ donation, chronic illness, race and ethnicity, death and dying, and aging are just a few of the topics covered in this valuable text.

Medical Readers’ Theater can be used in classrooms, hospitals, libraries, or other community settings where citizens can consider views on issues of common concern in the medical world.

The middle years of the nineteenth century were a time of dynamic artistic and social changes in America. Now, Melodramatic Formations is the first study to trace these changes in popular stage melodrama's production, dramatic form, and audience reception. Bruce McConachie shows how the theatrical mutability that characterized the years 1820 to 1870 is inextricably tied to the decline of elite paternalism and republicanism and the rise of bourgeois rationalism and respectability.

Taking a rigorous interdisciplinary approach, McConachie examines several historical regularities of production, genre, and audience. Here theatre (and its drama) has at long last been returned to its general culture, rather than being treated as an isolated phenomenon. Ultimately, he develops a new notion of a theatrical formation—a construct where groups of spectators and theatre performers produce each other as artists-to-be-experienced and audiences-to-be-entertained.

Throughout Melodramatic Formations McConachie illustrates how theatre both maintains and produces various ideologies; he convincingly shows that theatre is a major player in our social and cultural history. This book will be of interest to all in American studies, theatre history, and American cultural history.

Winner of the 2016 George Jean Nathan Award

Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama provides a new understanding of a crucial chapter in American theater history. Enelow’s consideration of the broader cultural climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically the debates within psychology and psychoanalysis, the period’s racial and sexual politics, and the rise of mass media, gives us a nuanced, complex picture of Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio and contemporaneous works of drama. Combining cultural analysis, dramaturgical criticism, and performance theory, Enelow shows how Method acting’s contradictions reveal powerful tensions inside mid-century notions of individual and collective identity.

Mimetic Disillusion reevaluates the history of modern U.S. drama, showing that at mid-century it turned in the direction of a poststructuralist "disillusionment with mimesis" or mimicry.

This volume focuses on two major writers of the 1930s and 1940s--Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams--one whose writing career was just ending and the other whose career was just beginning. In new readings of their major works from this period, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, The Glass Menagerie, and A Streetcar Named Desire, Fleche develops connections to the writings of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault, among others, and discusses poststructuralism in the light of modern writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and Walter Benjamin. Fleche also extends this discussion to the work of two contemporary playwrights, Adrienne Kennedy and Tony Kushner. The aim of Mimetic Disillusion is not to reject "mimetic" and "realistic" readings but to explore the rich complexities of these two ideas and the fruit of their ongoing relevance to U.S. theatre.
 

The “villainous homosexual” has long stalked America’s cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society’s understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires. Murder Most Queer examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy.

Murder Most Queer works to expose the forces that create the homophobic paradigm that imagines sexual and gender nonconformity as dangerous and destructive and to show how theater artists—and for the most part LGBT theater artists—have rewritten and radically altered the significance of the homicidal homosexual. Jordan Schildcrout argues that these figures, far from being simple reiterations of a homophobic archetype, are complex and challenging characters who enact trenchant fantasies of empowerment, replacing the shame and stigma of the abject with the defiance and freedom of the outlaw, giving voice to rage and resistance.  These bold characters also probe the darker anxieties and fears that can affect queer lives and relationships.  Instead of sentencing them to the prison of negative representations, this book analyzes the meanings in their acts of murder, confronting the real fears and desires condensed in those dramatic acts.

Native performance is a multifaceted and changing art form as well as a swiftly growing field of research. Native American Performance and Representation provides a wider and more comprehensive study of Native performance, not only its past but also its present and future. Contributors use multiple perspectives to look at the varying nature of Native performance strategies. They consider the combination and balance of the traditional and modern techniques of performers in a multicultural world. This collection presents diverse viewpoints from both scholars and performers in this field, both Natives and non-Natives. Important and well-respected researchers and performers such as Bruce McConachie, Jorge Huerta, and Daystar/Rosalie Jones offer much-needed insight into this quickly expanding field of study.

This volume examines Native performance using a variety of lenses, such as feminism, literary and film theory, and postcolonial discourse. Through the many unique voices of the contributors, major themes are explored, such as indigenous self-representations in performance, representations by nonindigenous people, cultural authenticity in performance and representation, and cross-fertilization between cultures. Authors introduce important, though sometimes controversial, issues as they consider the effects of miscegenation on traditional customs, racial discrimination, Native women’s position in a multicultural society, and the relationship between authenticity and hybridity in Native performance.

An important addition to the new and growing field of Native performance, Wilmer’s book cuts across disciplines and areas of study in a way no other book in the field does. It will appeal not only to those interested in Native American studies but also to those concerned with women’s and gender studies, literary and film studies, and cultural studies.

In O'Neill's Shakespeare , Normand Berlin explores the relationship of William Shakespeare and Eugene O'Neill through detailed, often surprising, intertextual readings of the two great playwrights' work. "Of course, it would have been impossible for O'Neill not to have been influenced by Shakespeare," acknowledges Berlin. But this is an influence of an unusual and extraordinary sort, "a family romance" that transcends their obvious differences—a romance that "takes in all O'Neill's life and art."

In the first book-length study of this crucial literary and dramatic relationship, Berlin probes far beyond the usual listing of allusions and references. This is the exploration of an "essential, basic, even natural" connection, in which Shakespeare is shown to have fundamentally shaped O'Neill's creative imagination. Following O'Neill's career chronologically, Berlin divides his study into two parts. The "first career" (culminating in Mourning Becomes Electra) is explored through recurring themes that evoke Shakespeare: the sea, black and white, and the family. O'Neill's "second career" (from Ah! Wilderness until the last plays) is examined through Shakespearean genre classifications: comedy, history, tragedy, and tragicomedy. Though always grounded in close textual readings, Berlin's analysis spirals outward to encompass O'Neill's artistic and psychological development and touches on the questions of tradition, transcendence, and human nature inevitably raised when such literary connections across history are drawn.

O'Neill's Shakespeare is more than a reminder that Shakespeare continues to haunt Western culture; it is a careful and fascinating analysis of a particular legacy in American drama. The book has insights to offer to specialists in Shakespeare and O'Neill, and to any reader interested in the transmission of ideas through Western culture. Berlin's study of the unconscious and conscious uses of Shakespeare by O'Neill provide a valuable new understanding of O'Neill's artistry. It is also an eloquent, thoughtful account that blends the transcendence of Shakespeare's influence with the particular ways in which every era must refashion Shakespeare so that "the past becomes the present."

Performing America provides fresh perspectives on the development of visions of both America and "America"--that is, the actual community and the constructed concept--on a variety of theatrical stages. It explores the role of theater in the construction of American identity, highlighting the tension between the desire to categorize American identity and the realization that such categorical uniformity may neither be desirable nor possible.
The topics covered include the links between politics and the stage during the Federalist period, the appropriation of "Indian" artifacts, an exploration of early gender roles, and the metaphorical connections between the theater and western expansion. Other essays treat vaudeville's artistically colonized cultures; Chautauqua's attempt to homogenize culture and commercialize American ideals; W. E. B. Du Bois's pageant, The Star of Ethiopia, as a strategy for constructing "African-American" as "Other" in an attempt to promote a vision of black nationalism; and how theater was used to help immigrants form a new sense of community while joining the resident culture.
The collection then turns to questions of how various ethnic minorities through their recent theatrical work have struggled to argue their identities, especially in relation to the dominant white culture. Two final essays offer critiques of contrasting aspects of the American male.
Throughout, the collection addresses questions of marginality and community, exclusion and inclusion, colonialism and imperialism, heterogeneity and homogeneity, conflict and negotiation, repression and opportunity, failure and success, and, above all, the relationship of American stages at large. It will appeal to readers of a wide range of disciplines including history, American culture, gender studies, and theater studies.
Jeffrey D. Mason is Professor of Theatre, California State University, Bakersfield. J. Ellen Gainor is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and Women's Studies, Cornell University.

"Scrupulously researched, critically acute, and written with care, Playing Underground will become a classic account of an era of hard-won free expression."
-William Coco

"At last---a book documenting the beginnings of Off-Off Broadway theater. Playing Underground is an insightful, illuminating, and honest appraisal of this important period in American theater."
-Rosalyn Drexler, author of Art Does (Not!) Exist and Occupational Hazard

"An epic movie of an epic movement, Playing Underground is a book the world has waited for without knowing it. How precisely it captures the evolution of our revolution! I am amazed by the book's scope and scale, and I bless its author especially for giving two greats, Paul Foster and H. M. Koutoukas, their proper, polar places, and for memorializing such unjustly forgotten masterpieces as Irene Fornes's Molly's Dream and Jeff Weiss's A Funny Walk Home. Stephen Bottoms's vivid evocation of the grand adventure of Off-Off Broadway has woken and broken my heart. It is difficult to believe that he was not there alongside me to breathe the caffeine-nicotine-alkaloid-steeped air."
-Robert Patrick, author of Kennedy's Children and Temple Slave


Few books address the legendary age of 1960s off-off Broadway theater. Fortunately, Stephen Bottoms fills that gap with Playing Underground---the first comprehensive history of the roots of off-off Broadway.

This is a theater whose legacy is still felt today: it was the launching pad for many leading contemporary theater artists, including Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, and others, and it was a pivotal influence on improv comedy and shows like Saturday Night Live.

Off-off Broadway groups such as the Living Theatre, La Mama, and Caffe Cino captured the spirit of nontraditional theater with their edgy, unscripted, boundary-crossing subjects. Yet, as Bottoms discovers, there is no one set of truths about off-off Broadway to uncover; the entire scene was always more a matter of competing perceptions than a singular, concrete reality.

No other author has managed to illuminate this shifting tableau as Bottoms does. Through interviews with dozens of the era's leading playwrights, performers, directors, and critics, he unearths a countercultural theater movement that was both influential and transforming-yet ephemeral and quintessentially of its moment.

Playing Underground will be a definitive work on the subject, offering a complete picture of an important but little-studied period in American theater.

Playwrights for Tomorrow was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is the seventh volume in the series Playwrights for Tomorrow,which makes available collections of plays by dramatists who have participated in the program of the Office for Advanced Drama Research (O.A.D.R.) at the University of Minnesota. Arthur H. Ballet, the series editor, is the director of the O.A.D.R. Under the program of the O.A.D.R., promising playwrights are awarded grants and given the opportunity of having their plays produced by college, community, or experimental theatre groups.

In his introduction to this volume Professor Ballet comments on the experience and progress of the O.A.D.R. program. He points out that the playwrights included here represent the first full year of O.A.D.R. work with the theatres in various parts of the country. Previously the productions of the plays under the O.A.D.R. program had been limited to theatrical groups in or near Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The plays in this volume are Grace and George and God by Alexander Hierholzer, Assassin! by David Ball, Freddie the Pigeon by Seymour Leichman, Rags by Nancy Walter, The Orientals by Stephen Grecco, and Drive-In by David Kranes. Six delightful sketches by Mr. Leichman illustrate his play. Details about the initial productions of the plays and sidelights about the authors and their work are given by Professor Ballet in his introduction.

The locales for the premieres of these plays included Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Part, where two of the plays were given; the Firehouse Theatre in Minneapolis; Yale University's Drama School; the Theatre in the Round, Minneapolis; and the theatre at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama.

From plays produced on shoestring budgets in the 1970s to today's high-tech performance pieces, Latina theater has emerged as a vibrant art form whose time has come. This anthology showcases this dynamic new genre through the works of established playwrights such as Cherríe Moraga and Dolores Prida as well as talented new playwrights and performers who have emerged in the past decade such as Migdalia Cruz, Elaine Romero, and Monica Palacios.

Puro Teatro, A Latina Anthology includes a variety of theatrical genres: plays, performance pieces, puppet shows, innovative collaborations, and testimonials. It features previously unpublished plays from a broad range of experiences within the Latino/a community, including families and home, friends and community building, coming of age and empowerment, and sexual and ethnic identities. The editors' introduction provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary Latina theater, placing it in its theatrical context and examining its divergent roots. Puro Teatro, A Latina Anthology is the first book of its kind to reflect in print a diversified body of writing that turns the spotlight on some of America's most talented and prolific artists. A subsequent volume will complement this anthology with a theoretical, critical reading of Latina theater and performance.

CONTENTS

Full Length Plays
Botánica by Dolores Prida
Heart of the Earth: A Popul Vuh Story by Cherríe Moraga
The Fat-Free Chicana and the Snow Cap Queen by Elaine Romero

One-act Plays
Las nuevas tamaleras by Alicia Mena
And Where Was Pancho Villa When You Really Needed Him? by Silviana Wood
Fuschia by Janis Astor del Valle

Performance Pieces
Nostalgia Maldita: 1-900-MEXICO : A StairMaster Piece by Yareli Arizmendi
Good Grief, Lolita by Wilma Bonet
A Roomful of Men by Amparo García Crow
Describe Your Work by Monica Palacios

Testimonials
"Battle Worn," by Laura Esparza
"Dancing with the Voice of Truth," by María Mar
"Searching for Sanctuaries: Cruising through Town in a Red Convertible," by Diane Rodríguez
"Home, Desire, Memory: There Are No Borders Here," by Caridad Svich
"Tales of a South-of-the-Border/North-of-the-Stereotype Theatre Director, by Susana Tubert
"Catching the Next Play: The Joys and Perils of Playwriting," by Edit Villarreal

Full-Length Plays, Collaborative Works
Frida: The Story of Frida Kahlo by Migdalia Cruz and Hilary Blecher
Memorias de la revolución by Carmelita Tropicana and Uzi Parnes

In engaging, accessible prose, leading theater critic and cultural commentator David Savran explores the intersections between art and culture, offering smart, compelling interpretations of the economic and social contexts of theatrical texts and practices. Acknowledging theater's marginal status in U.S. culture, A Queer Sort of Materialism takes on "the trouble-makers--the ghost, closeted homosexual, masochist, drag king, Third World laborer, even the white male as victim"--who figure more prominently in theater than in other cultural forms. In impeccably researched and argued essays that range in subject matter from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Paula Vogel, from Suddenly Last Summer to Iron John, Savran uncovers the ways that such troublemakers both challenge and reinforce orthodox social practices.
The selections presented here are by turns entertaining, informative, sophisticated, and polemical, reflecting the author's dual citizenship as rigorous scholar and engaging theater critic. This book also provides a model for a kind of queer historical materialism that will prove useful to a wide range of disciplines, including theater and performance, gender and sexuality, queer/gay/lesbian/transgender studies, American studies, and popular culture.
David Savran is Professor of Theater, the Graduate Center, the City University of New York, and author of Cowboys, Communists, and Queers and Taking It Like a Man.

Any review of 20th-century American theatre invariably leads to the term realism. Yet despite the strong tradition of theatrical realism on the American stage, the term is frequently misidentified, and the practices to which it refers are often attacked as monolithically tyrannical, restricting the potential of the American national theatre.
This book reconsiders realism on the American stage by addressing the great variety and richness of the plays that form the American theatre canon. By reconsidering the form and revisiting many of the plays that contributed to the realist tradition, the authors provide the opportunity to apprise strengths often overlooked by previous critics. The volume traces the development of American dramatic realism from James A. Herne, the "American Ibsen," to currently active contemporaries such as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Marsha Norman. This frank assessment, in sixteen original essays, reopens a critical dialog too long closed.

Essays include:

• 
  
• American Dramatic Realisms, Viable Frames of Thought
• 
  
• The Struggle for the Real--Interpretive Con§ict, Dramatic Method, and the Paradox of Realism
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• The Legacy of James A. Herne: American Realities and Realisms
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• Whose Realism? Rachel Crothers's Power Struggle in the American Theatre
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• The Provincetown Players' Experiments with Realism
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• Servant of Three Masters: Realism, Idealism, and "Hokum" in American High Comedy
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Winner, 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Winner, 2012 Tony Award for Best Play
Winner, 1974 National Book Award for Philosophy and Religion

In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun energized the conversation about how Americans live together across lines of race and difference. In Reimagining “A Raisin in the Sun,” Rebecca Ann Rugg and Harvey Young bring together four contemporary plays—including 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner Clybourne Park—that, in their engagement with Hansberry’s play, illuminate the tensions and anxieties that still surround neighborhood integration.

Although the plays—Robert O’Hara’s Etiquette of Vigilance, Gloria Bond Clunie’s Living Green, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park—are distinct from one another in terms of style and perspective on their predecessor, they commonly feature characters who are forced to closely examine, and sometimes revise or abandon, their ideas concerning race and their notions of social and economic justice. Above all, the plays use the lenses of neighborliness, privacy, and community to engage the large question of America’s common purpose. Each play is accompanied by an interview with the playwright about the influence of Hansberry’s landmark work. The afterword includes an interview with George C. Wolfe, whose play The Colored Museum laid the groundwork for the titles in this collection.

The conversation around A Raisin in the Sun has continued unabated since its premiere fifty years ago. Rugg and Young’s book will serve as a valuable resource to fans, scholars, and students alike.

Awarded annually since 1987, the Theodore Ward Prize recognizes the outstanding individual accomplishments of African American playwrights, as well as their growing importance to the shape and direction of American drama in our time. This collection, edited by a director and educator who has been affiliated with the contest for fifteen of its seventeen years, showcases a selection of the award-winning plays and offers a rich and varied view of the best of two decades of evolving African American drama.

These seven plays, which span the Ward Prize's history, represent a wide range of talents, experience, and perspectives brought to bear on diverse themes, from a unique moment in the history of baseball's Negro League to a working-class couple contending with a neighborhood bully; from a child's memories of negotiating desegregation to coming of age amidst the ravages of racism, child abuse, and AIDS. By turns poetic and moving, brave and rousing, uproarious and unsettling, these works written by established and emerging playwrights allow actors, directors, theatergoers, and readers to sample the multifarious dramatic experience being limned by African American playwrights today.

This timely collection addresses the neglected state of scholarship on southern women dramatists by bringing together the latest criticism on some of the most important playwrights of the 20th century.

Coeditors Robert McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige attribute the neglect of southern women playwrights in scholarly criticism to "deep historical prejudices" against drama itself and against women artists in general, especially in the South. Their call for critical awareness is answered by the 15 essays they include in Southern Women Playwrights, considerations of the creative work of universally acclaimed playwrights such as Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Lillian Hellman (the so-called "Trinity") in addition to that of less-studied playwrights, including Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, Alice Childress, Naomi Wallace, Amparo Garcia, Paula Vogel, and Regina Porter.

This collection springs from a series of associated questions regarding the literary and theatrical heritage of the southern woman playwright, the unique ways in which southern women have approached the conventional modes of comedy and tragedy, and the ways in which the South, its types and stereotypes, its peculiarities, its traditions-both literary and cultural-figure in these women's plays. Especially relevant to these questions are essays on Lillian Hellman, who resisted the label "southern writer," and Carson McCullers, who never attempted to ignore her southernness.

This book begins by recovering little-known or unknown episodes in the history of southern drama and by examining the ways plays assumed importance in the lives of southern women in the early 20th century. It concludes with a look at one of the most vibrant, diverse theatre scenes outside New York today-Atlanta.

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 dualist gaps, Staging Consciousness suggests that theater has anticipated these advances, given the ways in which the physical theater promotes nonphysical thought, connecting the two realms in unique and ingenious ways.
William W. Demastes makes use of the writings of such varied theater practitioners as Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Samuel Beckett, Tony Kushner, Sam Shepard, Spalding Gray, Peter Shaffer, and others, illuminating theater as proof that mind is an extension of body. The living stage incubates and materializes thought in a way that highlights the processes of daily existence outside the theater. This book offers a new way for theater practitioners to look at the unique value of the theater and an invitation for philosophers and scientists to search for new paradigms in theater, the oldest of art forms.
William W. Demastes is Professor of English, Louisiana State University. His previous books include Theatre of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism, into Disorderly Order.

Staging Desire gathers critical and biographical essays on notable stage personalities who made their mark before 1969, when the Stonewall riots accelerated the lesbian and gay rights movement in the United States. How they staged their unconventional sexualities greatly influenced the course of their personal and professional lives, and thus the course of American theater history. The book builds on an earlier collection--the well-received Passing Performances, which focused on actors, directors, producers, and agents--by examining playwrights, lyricists, critics, and designers. Shaping theatrical representations from offstage, these practitioners exploited the special opportunities theater offered as a complex and many-layered medium for expression of transgressive desire.
Essays cover the careers of major figures Clyde Fitch, Rachel Crothers, Mercedes de Acosta, Djuna Barnes, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, George Kelly, William Inge, James "Acorn" Oaks, Adam "Vagabond" Badeau, Eric Bentley, Loie Fuller, Robert Edmond Jones, and Jean Rosenthal. Grounded in research into the history of sexuality, the book engages central problems of terminology and evidence in analyzing sexual practices of the past and the modes of articulation of sexuality in theater, conditioned by American culture's peculiar anxieties about both.
Kim Marra is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Iowa. Robert A. Schanke is Professor of Theatre, Central College, Iowa. They edited Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History, a previous volume in this series.

Esteemed scholar and theater aficionado Marvin Carlson has seen an unsurpassed number of theatrical productions in his long and distinguished career. Ten Thousand Nights is a lively chronicle of a half-century of theatre-going, in which Carlson recalls one memorable production for each year from 1960 to 2010.  These are not conventional reviews, but essays using each theatre experience to provide an insight into the theatre and theatre-going at a particular time.  The range of performances covered is broad, from edgy experimental fare to mainstream musicals, most of them based in New York but with stops at major theatre events in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Milan, and elsewhere. The engagingly written pieces convey a vivid sense not only of each production but also of the particular venue, neighborhood, and cultural context, covering nearly all significant movements, theatre artists, and groups of the late twentieth century. 

Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage reveals a vital but little-recognized current in American theatrical history: the dramatic representation of the quotidian and mundane. Jacob Gallagher-Ross shows how twentieth-century American theater became a space for negotiating the demands of innovative form and democratic availability.

Offering both fresh reappraisals of canonical figures and movements and new examinations of theatrical innovators, Theaters of the Everyday reveals surprising affinities between artists often considered poles apart, such as John Cage and Lee Strasberg, and Thornton Wilder and the New York experimentalist Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Gallagher-Ross persuasively shows how these creators eschew conventional definitions of dramatic action and focus attention on smaller but no less profound dramas of perception, consciousness, and day-to-day life.

Gallagher-Ross traces some of the intellectual roots of the theater of the everyday to American transcendentalism, with its pragmatic process philosophy as well as its sense of ordinary experience as the wellspring of aesthetic awareness.

This bold book investigates how performance can transform the way people perceive trauma and memory, time and history. Jaclyn I. Pryor introduces the concept of "time slips," moments in which past, present, and future coincide, moments that challenge American narratives of racial and sexual citizenship.
 

Framing performance as a site of resistance, Pryor analyzes their own work and that of four other queer artists—Ann Carlson, Mary Ellen Strom, Peggy Shaw, and Lisa Kron—between 2001 and 2016. Pryor illuminates how each artist deploys performance as a tool to render history visible, trauma recognizable, and transformation possible by laying bare the histories and ongoing systems of violence woven deep into our society. Pryor also includes a case study that examines the challenges of teaching queer time and queer performance within the academy in what Pryor calls a post-9/11 “homeland” security state.
 
Masterfully synthesizing a wealth of research and experiences, Time Slips will interest scholars and readers in the fields of theater and performance studies, queer studies, and American studies.

In 2001, Victory Gardens Theater received the Tony Award for Regional Theatre and was hailed by the Wall Street Journal as "one of the country's most important playwrights' theaters." This recognition helped the theater take its rightful place alongside Chicago's world-class local theaters. Nearly 250 plays have been produced at Victory Gardens since it was founded in 1974. More than half of these plays have been world premieres, many of which have gone on to national success. This theater's commitment to producing primarily new plays, most by Chicago authors, makes it a unique and exciting institution.

This collection features seven plays by talented authors from the twelve-member Playwrights Ensemble at Victory Gardens. Their works tackle a wide range of topics from a colorful and imaginative retelling of the Medea legend set in the Carribbean to the desperation and regret that can fill a high-school reunion, from a feisty stroke-survivor claiming her independence to a historical drama about the first free man of color to attend Ohio University. Whether focusing on the drama between the four walls of a home or testing the broader realms of culture, history, and politics, the Victory Gardens Theater has always encouraged diverse perspectives and supported original work. Victory Gardens Theater Presents showcases some of the best examples of the distinctive talent that continues to find a home there.