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Theatre Symposium, Vol. 31
Theatre and the Popular
Edited by Chase Bringardner
University of Alabama Press, 2024
A new issue of the longstanding theatre journal, documenting conversations that traverse disciplinary boundaries

The essays in the thirty-first volume of Theatre Symposium traverse disciplinary boundaries to explore what constitutes the “popular” in theater and performance in an increasingly frenetic and mediated landscape. Amid the current resurgence of populist discourse and the enduring impact of popular culture, this volume explores what is considered popular, how that determination gets made, and who makes it. The answers to these questions shape the structures and systems of performance in an interaction that is reciprocal, intricate, and multifaceted. Productions often succeed or fail based on their ability to align with what is popular—sometimes productively, sometimes clumsily, sometimes brazenly, and sometimes tragically.

In our current moment, what constitutes the popular profoundly affects the real world politically, economically, and socially. Controversies about the electoral college system hinge on the primacy of the “popular” vote. Streaming services daily update lists of their most popular content and base future decisions on opaque measures of popularity. Social media platforms broadcast popular content across the globe, triggering new products, social activism, and political revolutions.

The contributors to this volume engage with a range of contemporary and historical examples and argue with clarity and acuity the interplay of performance and the popular. Theatre and performance deeply engage with the popular at every level—from audience response to box office revenue. The variety of methodologies and sites of inquiry showcased in this volume demonstrates the breadth and depth of the popular and the importance of such work to understanding our present moment onstage and off.

CONTRIBUTORS
Mysia Anderson / Chase Bringardner / Elizabeth M. Cizmar / Chelsea Curto / Janet M. Davis / Tom Fish / Kyla Kazuschyk / Sarah McCarroll / Eleanor Owicki / Sunny Stalter-Pace / Chelsea Taylor / Chris Woodworth

 
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Theatre Symposium, Vol. 32
Material Performance and Performing Objects
Keith Byron Kirk
University of Alabama Press, 2025

A new volume of the longstanding theatre journal, documenting conversations that traverse disciplinary boundaries

Theater Symposium, Volume 32 delves into the collaborative dynamics and ritualistic exchanges within performance during the collective resurgence into a hopeful post-COVID world. This volume’s contributors embark on a journey through the vibrant realm of material performance, with puppetry at the forefront, guiding readers into an expansive landscape of object performance styles and structures. As they navigate this terrain, they pose critical questions that unravel the complexities of object performance analysis and its impact on audiences. Bringing together perspectives from designers, creators, and performers, this volume explores how object performances serve as a medium to engage with the world, fostering synchrony and positive outcomes across a diverse array of artistic practices. Theater Symposium, Volume 32 invites readers to expand their understanding of collaborative practices and the object world, whether it be through the lens of labor or entertainment.

Contributors
Ashley Bellet / Francesca Marie Chilcote / Elisabeth Hostetter / Rebecca Johnson / Kyla Kazuschyk / Keith Byron Kirk / Jesse Njus / Claudia Orenstein / Paulette Richards / Dory Sibley / Echo Sunyata Sibley / Skye Strauss

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Theatre Symposium, Vol. 7
Theatre and Violence
John W. Frick
University of Alabama Press, 1999

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Theatre Theory Reader
Prague School Writings
Edited by David Drozd
Karolinum Press, 2017
The Theatre Theory Reader provides the first comprehensive and critical anthology of texts reflecting on the development of the theater theory of the Prague School—or Prague Linguistic Circle—beginning with early twentieth-century composer and aesthetician Otakar Zich. The majority of the thirty-eight texts date from the 1930s and early 1940s, the period when the Prague Linguistic Circle was most active as both a theoretical laboratory and a focal point for scholars, artists, and intellectuals. A substantial afterword places these writings in context, describing the emergence of the Prague School in an effort to promote a deeper understanding of its texts. Organized thematically and structurally rather than chronologically, the Theatre Theory Reader explores issues and themes in the study of the theater as an art form and as artistic practice. Just as the Prague School theorists viewed theory as a toolbox of approaches to theater analysis, this anthology should be considered a toolbox of analytic possibilities.
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Theatre, Time and Temporality
Melting Clocks and Snapped Elastics
David Ian Rabey
Intellect Books, 2016
Theatre, Time and Temporality is the first book-length exploration of the subject of temporality within theater and performance. David Ian Rabey brings in sources ranging from medieval and Renaissance theater to contemporary performances—in addition to recent writings from physics, philosophy, and psychology—to analyze ways that time can be presented, communicated, and transformed in the theater. How do we experience time in theater, and how can that experience be altered or manipulated? Rabey’s analysis and exploration will spark discussion among students and scholars of drama, as well as among practicing performers and dramatic writers.
 
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Theatres of Independence
Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947
Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker
University of Iowa Press, 2005
Theatres of Independence is the first comprehensive study of drama, theatre, and urban performance in post-independence India. Combining theatre history with theoretical analysis and literary interpretation, Aparna Dharwadker examines the unprecedented conditions for writing and performance that the experience of new nationhood created in a dozen major Indian languages and offers detailed discussions of the major plays, playwrights, directors, dramatic genres, and theories of drama that have made the contemporary Indian stage a vital part of postcolonial and world theatre.

The first part of Dharwadker’s study deals with the new dramatic canon that emerged after 1950 and the variety of ways in which plays are written, produced, translated, circulated, and received in a multilingual national culture. The second part traces the formation of significant postcolonial dramatic genres from their origins in myth, history, folk narrative, sociopolitical experience, and the intertextual connections between Indian, European, British, and American drama. The book’s ten appendixes collect extensive documentation of the work of leading playwrights and directors, as well as a record of the contemporary multilingual performance histories of major Indian, Western, and non-Western plays from all periods and genres. Treating drama and theatre as strategically interrelated activities, the study makes post-independence Indian theatre visible as a multifaceted critical subject to scholars of modern drama, comparative theatre, theatre history, and the new national and postcolonial literatures.
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Theatres of the Body
Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia
Lynn Matluck Brooks
Temple University Press, 2025
Theatres of the Body is Lynn Matluck Brooks’ critical examination of danced stage productions in antebellum Philadelphia. Starting in the 1820s, Brooks explores visual art and social and theatrical dancing across different classes, focusing on the work of E. W. Clay. Continuing through the 1830s, she looks at pantomime ballets and blackface minstrelsy through a political lens, asking questions regarding citizenship, slavery, and freedom. At the time, the city boasted the largest number of native-born ballet dancers in the young nation. Philadelphia also became a creative home to blackface star T. D. Rice, who helped popularize that performance genre.

Reviewing print culture in the 1840s, Brooks shows how newspapers, magazines, and popular fiction provided documentation of dancing in Philadelphia as well as the responses of dance commentators, practitioners, and moralists. Theatres of the Body also considers the interplay of science with dance in the 1850s, which impacted both dance practices and reception.

Providing an expansive historiography of these significant contributions to dance in the United States, Brooks deepens our understanding of antebellum culture and history.
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Theatrical Consciousness
The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism
Alisa Ballard Lin
Northwestern University Press, 2025

Investigating late imperial Russian and early Soviet modernism’s reinvention of the actor

In this wide-ranging study, Alisa Ballard Lin argues that Russian theatrical theory and practice contributed to a broad pre- and postrevolutionary discourse about the mind, profoundly reshaping concepts of consciousness, perception, identity, and the constitution of the subject. Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism examines efforts in Russian theater—from around the turn of the century through the mid-1930s—to stimulate, train, imagine, and ultimately understand the actor’s, as well as the spectator’s, mind. Discussing key figures of the period, including Nikolai Evreinov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Alexander Tairov, Lin identifies an underappreciated dimension of humanism within Russian modernism: a humanism that resisted the pressures of an increasingly technologized, industrialized, and politicized modernity that challenged the place of the human within it.

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The Theatrical Event
Dynamics of Performance and Perception
Willmar Sauter
University of Iowa Press, 2000
The Theatrical Event discusses the objectives of theatre studies by focusing on the communicative encounter between performer and spectator—the theatrical event. A theatrical event includes the presentation of a performance and the attention of an audience; in this sense, every performance—on stage or in the street, historical or contemporary—that is watched by an audience is a theatrical event. The concept underlines the “eventness” of all encounters between performers and spectators.
In the first part of the book, Willmar Sauter presents various models for the analysis of theatrical events, examining the relationship between performance and perception and the interaction between the performative event and its context. Using examples from ancient and recent theatre history and discussing traditional and nontraditional approaches to theatre theory, he builds a paradigmatic change in the concept of theatre. Constructs such as playing culture (as opposed to written culture), theatrical communication, theatricality, and theatre as a model of cultural event are brought into focus and their methodological advantages explored.
The second part of the book uses the theoretical groundwork of the first part to enhance a variety of topics, including such legends as Sarah Bernhardt and other historical phenomena such as a Swedish Renaissance play, Strindberg's ideas on acting, the question of ethnicity in the political theatre of the 1930s, and critical writings on contemporary performances. Sauter examines how Robert Lepage's staging of A Dream Play is viewed by critics and scholars and analyzes Dario Fo's intercultural transfer to outdoor performances in Stockholm and the unusual sensationalism of Strindberg's Miss Julie.
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Theatrical Gamut
Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage
Enoch Brater, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1995
This collection of original essays in honor of American drama critic Ruby Cohn captures the rich mixture of discourses on the act of theater. The variety of approaches -- from formalist to feminist -- pays tribute to the centrality of Beckett in any evaluation of just what constitutes the "modern" in modern, contemporary, postmodern, and experimental drama. The essays devote attention to playwrights like Sam Shepard, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Jane Bowles, Arthur Miller, and Suzan-Lori Parks and urge us as well to reconsider Shakespeare, Strindberg, and such visionary theater practitioners as Antonin Artaud and Joseph Chaikin. They also investigate the dynamics of actor, character, and audience, and offer insights into contemporary German theater, Noh drama, and Balinese theatrical practices. Whatever their subject, these suggestive and original pieces always bring us back to Beckett in fresh and surprising ways.The contributors are H. Porter Abbott, Linda Ben-Zvi, Herbert Blau, John Russell Brown, Sue-Ellen Case, William Coco, Elin Diamond, Bernard Dort, James Eigo, Martin Esslin, Carla Locatelli, John Orr, Janelle Reinelt, Antonia Rodriguez-Gago, Yasunari Takahashi, and Hersh Zeifman."Any enthusiastic student of drama--whether professor or undergraduate, theater historian or theater critic, member of acting company or member of an audience--will find The Theatrical Gamut both enlightening and provocative."--Jill Levenson, University of Toronto
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Theatrical Reality
Space, Embodiment and Empathy in Performance
Campbell Edinborough
Intellect Books, 2016
Performance, dramaturgy, and scenography are often explored in isolation, but in Theatrical Reality, Campbell Edinborough describes their connectedness in order to investigate how the experience of reality is constructed and understood during performance. Drawing on sociological theory, cognitive psychology, and embodiment studies, Edinborough analyzes our seemingly paradoxical understanding of theatrical reality, guided by the contexts shaping relationships between performer, spectator, and performance space. Through a range of examples from theatre, dance, circus, and film, Theatrical Reality examines how the liminal spaces of performance foster specific ways of conceptualizing time, place, and reality.
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Theatrical Scene Painting
A Lesson Guide
William H. Pinnell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Theatrical Scene Painting: A Lesson Guide, second edition, is a practical guide to scene painting for students and novices, as well as a reference for intermediate scene painters who wish to refresh or supplement their basic skills. Drawing on his extensive teaching and scene-painting experience, William H. Pinnell clarifies and expands on the lessons of the first edition, providing a detailed overview of the fundamentals of traditional scene painting.

The guide not only covers the basic tools of the trade and various methods of creating texture on scenery but also includes more advanced techniques for scene making, beginning with stonework, woodwork, and wallpaper before moving on to the more intricate techniques of moldings, paneling, drapery, foliage, shiny metal, perspective illusions, scale transfers, scenic drops, and scrims. Pinnell also includes refinements and embellishments that can lead to the development of personal style without sacrificing the goal of realism and more advanced work. Alternative methods to achieve different effects are also featured.

Theatrical Scene Painting: A Lesson Guide was the first book of its kind to provide clear step-by-step instructions in how to paint a wide variety of basic and advanced effects commonly needed for the theater. This new edition clarifies the origins of painting techniques and is supplemented with clearer step-by-step descriptions, new instructional photographs, and drawings that illustrate each major step. This edition also includes additional painting projects and their possible variations, a gallery of nineteen examples of professional scenic works, and an expanded glossary to eliminate confusion in terms.

Useful to both self-taught artists and students, each lesson in the guide can be a stand-alone topic or can form the foundation for a student to build skills for increasingly complex techniques.

The second edition of Theatrical Scene Painting provides many new essential scene painting projects in a clearer format, broadens the scope of the painting examples, and includes updated methods as well as new lessons. This clear and easily accessible guide gives students the ability to put together recognizable illusions.

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Theatrical Scene Painting
A Lesson Guide
William H. Pinnell
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987

This handbook explains the techniques of traditional scene painting. A “how to” book for the novice, it shows the methods used in creating the illusion of three dimensions where only two exist. It provides a step-by-step explanation of each aspect of scene painting, using both color and black-and-white photographs for illustration.

Among the many illusions made possible through the magic of paint are stonework, wallpaper, woodwork, as well as mouldings, draperies, and foliage. To teach the beginner how to re-create reality through painted illusion, Pinnell emphasizes traditional scene painting, including basic tools, primary painting techniques, and methods for creating texture on scenery. He also illustrates refinements and embellishments that lead to more advanced work.

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The Theatricalists
Making Politics Appear
Theron Schmidt
Northwestern University Press, 2024

Examines how the politics of the theater can illuminate the theatricality of politics

Theatricality is often dismissed as a distraction from “real” politics, as when cynical political gestures are derided as “pure theater” or “only theater.” But the artists and theater companies discussed in this book, including Back to Back Theatre, Tim Crouch, Rabih Mroué, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Christoph Schlingensief, take a different approach. Theron Schmidt argues that they represent a “theatricalist turn” that explores and tests the conditions of the theater itself. Across diverse contexts of political engagement, ranging from disability rights to representations of violence, these theatrical conditions are interconnected with political struggles, such as those over who is seen and heard, how labor is valued, and what counts as “political” in the first place. In a so-called post-political era, The Theatricalists argues that an examination of theater’s internal politics can expand our understanding of the theatricality of politics more broadly.

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The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy
Playing Space and Chorus
Graham Ley
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Ancient Greek tragedy has been an inspiration to Western culture, but the way it was first performed has long remained in question. In The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy, Graham Ley provides an illuminating discussion of key issues relating to the use of the playing space and the nature of the chorus, offering a distinctive impression of the performance of Greek tragedy in the fifth century BCE. 

Drawing on evidence from the surviving texts of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Ley explains how scenes with actors were played in the open ground of the orchestra, often considered as exclusively the dancing place of the chorus. In reviewing what is known of the music and dance of Greek antiquity, Ley goes on to show that in the original productions the experience of the chorus—expressed in song and dance and in interaction with the characters—remained a vital characteristic in the performance of tragedy.
Combining detailed analysis with broader reflections about the nature of ancient Greek tragedy as an art form, this volume—supplemented with a series of illustrative drawings and diagrams—will be a necessary addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in literature, theater, or classical studies.

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Theatricality of the Closet
Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan
Michelle Liu Carriger
Northwestern University Press, 2023
A richly illustrated exploration of fashion and its capacity for generating controversy and constructing social and individual identities

Clothing matters. This basic axiom is both common sense and, in another way, radical. It is from this starting point that Michelle Liu Carriger elucidates the interconnected ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race are created by the everyday act of getting dressed. Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan examines fashion and clothing controversies of the nineteenth century, drawing on performance theory to reveal how the apparently superficial or frivolous deeply affects the creation of identity.

By interrogating a set of seemingly disparate examples from the same period but widely distant settings—Victorian Britain and Meiji-era Japan—Carriger disentangles how small, local, ordinary practices became enmeshed in a global fabric of cultural and material surfaces following the opening of trade between these nations in 1850. This richly illustrated book presents an array of media, from conservative newspapers and tabloids to ukiyo-e and early photography, that locate dress as a site where the individual and the social are interwoven, whether in the 1860s and 1870s or the twenty-first century.

 

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Theory and Craft of the Scenographic Model, Revised Edition
Darwin Reid Payne
Southern Illinois University Press, 1985

Through diagrams, sketches, and mod­els, along with explications of the essen­tial tools and materials required, Payne defines and delineates the precise step-by-step procedures of scenographic mod­elmaking: the basic preparations of con­struction, the process of making the model, and the experimental aspects of modelmaking. This new edition with 50 additional illustrations and other new information offers teachers, students, and beginning professionals alike a com­plete and comprehensive approach to creating and constructing the sceno­graphic model.

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Thieving Three-Fingered Jack
Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015
Botkin, Frances R.
Rutgers University Press, 2018

The fugitive slave known as “Three-Fingered Jack” terrorized colonial Jamaica from 1780 until vanquished by Maroons, self-emancipated Afro-Jamaicans bound by treaty to police the island for runaways and rebels.  A thief and a killer, Jack was also a freedom fighter who sabotaged the colonial machine until his grisly death at its behest. Narratives about his exploits shed light on the problems of black rebellion and solutions administered by the colonial state, creating an occasion to consider counter-narratives about its methods of divide and conquer. For more than two centuries, writers, performers, and storytellers in England, Jamaica, and the United States have “thieved" Three Fingered Jack's riveting tale, defining black agency through and against representations of his resistance.

Frances R. Botkin offers a literary and cultural history that explores the persistence of stories about this black rebel, his contributions to constructions of black masculinity in the Atlantic world, and his legacies in Jamaican and United States popular culture.

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Thinking about the Playwright
Comments from Four Decades
Eric Bentley
Northwestern University Press, 1987
Essays discuss Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill, Brecht, Shaw, acting styles, theater controversies, translation, regional drama, and the nature of theater.  
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Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama
Reception and Afterlives
Amy Garnai
Bucknell University Press, 2023
A key figure in British literary circles following the French Revolution, novelist and playwright Thomas Holcroft promoted ideas of reform and equality informed by the philosophy of his close friend William Godwin. Arrested for treason in 1794 and released without trial, Holcroft was notorious in his own time, but today appears mainly as a supporting character in studies of 1790s literary activism. Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama authoritatively reintroduces and reestablishes this central figure of the revolutionary decade by examining his life, plays, memoirs, and personal correspondence. In engaging with theatrical censorship, apostacy, and the response of audiences and critics to radical drama, this thoughtful study also demonstrates how theater functions in times of political repression. Despite his struggles, Holcroft also had major successes: this book examines his surprisingly robust afterlife, as his plays, especially The Road to Ruin, were repeatedly revived worldwide in the nineteenth century.
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Thunder on the Stage
The Dramatic Vision of Richard Wright
Bruce Allen Dick
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Richard Wright’s dramatic imagination guided the creation of his masterpieces Native Son and Black Boy and helped shape Wright’s long-overlooked writing for theater and other performative mediums.

Drawing on decades of research and interviews with Wright’s family and Wright scholars, Bruce Allen Dick uncovers the theatrical influence on Wright’s oeuvre--from his 1930s boxing journalism to his unpublished one-acts on returning Black GIs in WWII to his unproduced pageant honoring Vladimir Lenin. Wright maintained rewarding associations with playwrights, writers, and actors such as Langston Hughes, Theodore Ward, Paul Robeson, and Lillian Hellman, and took particular inspiration from French literary figures like Jean-Paul Sartre. Dick’s analysis also illuminates Wright’s direct involvement with theater and film, including the performative aspects of his travel writings; the Orson Welles-directed Native Son on Broadway; his acting debut in Native Son’s first film version; and his play “Daddy Goodness,” a satire of religious charlatans like Father Divine, in the 1930s.

Bold and original, Thunder on the Stage offers a groundbreaking reinterpretation of a major American writer.

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Time Slips
Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History
Jaclyn I. Pryor
Northwestern University Press, 2017
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.
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Tormented Minds
Christine Roberts
Intellect Books, 1995
This anthology contains three plays (Ceremonial Kisses, Shading the Crime, and The Maternal Cloister) that feature a protagonist who is compelled to confront his or her particular oppressors. The critique of this oppression through theatre falls on particular social institutions and differs for each character. The main institutions under scrutiny are religion and the state.

The plays are very different in style and include the use of physical theatre, naturalistic explorations of human rights abuses, and symbolic structures, puppets and poetry. The plays are supported by an analysis of their processes and themes. All have reached production and the text is supplemented by photographs of these performances.
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Touched Bodies
The Performative Turn in Latin American Art
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Shortlisted for the 2020 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize​
Winner of the 2019 Art Journal Prize from the College Art Association

What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy. Based on original documents and innovative readings, her book brings politics and ethics to the discussion of artistic developments during the “long 1980s”. She describes the rise of performance art in the context of feminism, HIV-activism, and human right movements, taking a close look at the work of Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita from Chile, León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentágono from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performative turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, recast the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways in which we perceive art and understand its role in society.
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Toward a Feminist Theater
Selected Plays
Kate Hamill and Kristin Leahey
Northwestern University Press, 2025
The first-ever anthology from celebrated playwright Kate Hamill
 
Bringing together seven critically acclaimed feminist adaptations of literary classics and one delightfully original new work, this collection demonstrates why Kate Hamill is one of the most electrifying and widely produced playwrights working today. Whether probing the power of toxic leaders (The Piper), revitalizing Jane Austen for the stage (Sense and SensibilityPride and PrejudiceEmma), “cheerfully desecrating” Arthur Conan Doyle through a post-pandemic lens (Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson—Apt. 2B), reexamining an American classic’s gender roles (Little Women), or dramatizing the nineteenth-century classic of puritanical New England through the lens of an ostracized mother and daughter (The Scarlet Letter), Hamill’s work has transformed the theatrical landscape over the past decade.
 
An introduction from editor Kristin Leahey and an interview with Hamill frame this landmark anthology, with reflections on the current state of American drama, Hamill’s unique dramaturgical practice, and how the art form may move further and faster toward a feminist theater.
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Toward a Theater of the Oppressed
The Dramaturgy of John Arden
Javed Malick
University of Michigan Press, 1995
Toward a Theater of the Oppressed is an engaging study of the dramaturgy of contemporary British playwright John Arden and the political implications of his work. Arden made his debut on the London stage in the wake of a powerful new wave of young, "angry" drama in England during the late 1950s. Javed Malick argues that in contrast to contemporaries like John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Arnold Wesker, Arden offered a radically different approach to drama and theater, employing a long-neglected writing style that derived from pre-bourgeois popular traditions.
Malick situates Arden's dramaturgy in the wider context of the radical alternative tradition in Western drama, drawing connections to Brecht, Piscator, the radical playwrights of the 1960s. He then explores the formal structure, ideological implications, and historical significance of Arden's work, treating his stage plays as one dramaturgically coherent opus- from the early Waters of Babylon to his and Margaretta D'Arcy's ambitious trilogy, The Island of the Mighty. Finally, he discusses the last phase of Arden and D'Arcy's political and artistic development, which led them to turn their backs on the professional theater circuit. He argues that Arden's rejection of the institutional stage was the logical outcome of his persistent search for alternative forms of political theater.
Toward a Theater of the Oppressed will be invaluable reading for those interested in modern drama, political theater, and popular performance, as well as students of contemporary British drama.
Javed Malick is Reader in English, Khalsa College, University of Delhi, India.
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Tragic Muse
Rachel of the Comédie-Française
Rachel M. Brownstein
Duke University Press, 1995
The great nineteenth-century tragedienne known simply as Rachel was the first dramatic actress to achieve international fame. Composing her own persona with the same brilliance and passion she demonstrated on stage, she virtually invented the role of "star." Rumors of her extravagant life offstage delighted the audiences who flocked to theaters in Boston and Paris, London and Moscow, to see her perform in the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. In Tragic Muse, Rachel M. Brownstein reveals the life of la grande Rachel and explores—at the boundary of biography, fiction, and cultural history—the connections between this self-dramatizing woman and her image.
Born to itinerant Jewish peddlers in 1821, Rachel arrived on the Paris stage at the age of fifteen. She became both a symbol of her culture’s highest art and a clue to its values and obsessions. Fascinated with all things Napoleonic, she was the mother of Napoleon’s grandson and the lover of many men connected to the emperor. Her story—the rise from humble beginnings to queen of the French state theater—echoes and parodies Napoleon’s own. She decisively controlled her career, her time, and finances despite the actions and claims of managers, suitors, and lovers. A woman of exceptional charisma, Rachel embodied contradiction and paradox. She captured the attention of her time and was memorialized in the works of Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Henry James.
Richly illustrated with portraits, photographs, and caricatures, Tragic Muse combines brilliant literary analysis and exceptional historical research. With great skill and acuity, Rachel M. Brownstein presents Rachel—her brief intense life and the image that was both self-fashioned and, outliving her, fashioned by others. First published by Knopf (1993), this book will attract a broad audience interested in matters as wide ranging as the construction of character, the cult of celebrity, women’s lives, and Jewish history. It will also be of enduring interest to readers concerned with nineteenth-century French culture, history, literature, theater, and Romanticism. Tragic Muse won the 1993 George Freedley Award presented by the Theater Library Association.
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Transforming Tradition
The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s
Siyuan Liu
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the PRC launched a reform campaign that targeted traditional song and dance theater encompassing more than a hundred genres, collectively known as xiqu. Reformers censored or revised xiqu plays and techniques; reorganized star-based private troupes; reassigned the power to create plays from star actors to the newly created functions of playwright, director, and composer; and eliminated market-oriented functionaries such as agents. While the repertoire censorship ended in the 1980s, major reform elements have remained: many traditional scripts (or parts of them) are no longer in performance; actors whose physical memory of repertoire and acting techniques had been the center of play creation, have been superseded by directors, playwrights, and composers. The net result is significantly diminished repertoires and performance techniques, and the absence of star actors capable of creating their own performance styles through new signature plays that had traditionally been one of the hallmarks of a performance school. Transforming Tradition offers a systematic study of the effects of the comprehensive reform of traditional theater conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, and is based on a decade’s worth of exhaustive research of official archival documents, wide-ranging interviews, and contemporaneous publications, most of which have never previously been referenced in scholarly research.

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Transgenerational Remembrance
Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan
Jessica Nakamura
Northwestern University Press, 2020

In Transgenerational Remembrance, Jessica Nakamura investigates the role of artistic production in the commemoration and memorialization of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) in Japan since 1989. During this time, survivors of Japanese aggression and imperialism, previously silent about their experiences, have sparked contentious public debates about the form and content of war memories.

The book opens with an analysis of the performance of space at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine, which continues to promote an anachronistic veneration of the war. After identifying the centrality of performance in long-standing dominant narratives, Transgenerational Remembrance offers close readings of artistic performances that tackle subject matter largely obscured before 1989: the kamikaze pilot, Japanese imperialism, comfort women, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japanese American internment. These case studies range from Hirata Oriza’s play series about Japanese colonial settlers in Korea and Shimada Yoshiko’s durational performance about comfort women to Kondo Aisuke’s videos and gallery installations about Japanese American internment.

Working from theoretical frameworks of haunting and ethics, Nakamura develops an analytical lens based on the Noh theater ghost. Noh emphasizes the agency of the ghost and the dialogue between the dead and the living. Integrating her Noh-inflected analysis into ethical and transnational feminist queries, Nakamura shows that performances move remembrance beyond current evidentiary and historiographical debates.

 
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Translocas
The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Translocas focuses on drag and transgender performance and activism in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Arguing for its political potential, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes explores the social and cultural disruptions caused by Latin American and Latinx “locas” (effeminate men, drag queens, transgender performers, and unruly women) and the various forms of violence to which queer individuals in Puerto Rico and the U.S. are subjected. This interdisciplinary, auto-ethnographic, queer-of-color performance studies book explores the lives and work of contemporary performers and activists including Sylvia Rivera, Nina Flowers, Freddie Mercado, Javier Cardona, Jorge Merced, Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, Monica Beverly Hillz, Lady Catiria, and Barbra Herr; television programs such as RuPaul’s Drag Race; films such as Paris Is BurningThe Salt Mines, and Mala Mala; and literary works by authors such as Mayra Santos-Febres and Manuel Ramos Otero. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a drag performer himself, demonstrates how each destabilizes (and sometimes reifies) dominant notions of gender and sexuality through drag and their embodied transgender expression. These performances provide a means to explore and critique issues of race, class, poverty, national identity, and migratory displacement while they posit a relationship between audiences and performers that has a ritual-like, communal dimension. The book also analyzes the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret in Puerto Rico, and invites readers to challenge, question, and expand their knowledge about queer life, drag, trans performance, and Puerto Rican identity in the Caribbean and the diaspora. The author also pays careful attention to transgender experience, highlighting how trans activists and performers mold their bodies, promote social change, and create community in a context that oscillates between glamour and abjection.

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Transoceanic Animals as Spectacle in Early Modern Spain
John Beusterien
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Animal spectacles are vital to a holistic appreciation of Spanish culture. In Transoceanic Animals as Spectacle in Early Modern Spain, Beusterien christens five previously unnamed animals, each of which was a protagonist in a spectacle: Abada, the rhinoceros; Hawa’i, the elephant; Fuleco, the armadillo; Jarama, the bull; and Maghreb, the lion. In presenting and analyzing their stories, Beusterien enriches our understanding of the role of animals in the development of commercial theater in Spain and in the modern bullfight. He also contributes to growing scholarly conversations on the importance of Spain in the history of science by examining how animal spectacles had profound repercussions on the emergence of the modern zoo and natural history museum. Combining scholarly content analysis and pedagogical sagacity, the book has a broad appeal for scholars of the early modern Spanish Empire, animal studies scholars, and secondary and postsecondary instructors looking for engaging exercises and information for their Spanish language, culture, and history students.
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Transoceanic Blackface
Empire, Race, Performance
Kellen Hoxworth
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A sweeping history of racialized performance across the Anglophone imperial world from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century

A material history of racialized performance throughout the Anglophone imperial world, Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance revises prevailing understandings of blackface and minstrelsy as distinctively US American cultural practices. Tracing intertwined histories of racialized performance from the mid-eighteenth through the early twentieth century across the United States and the British Empire, this study maps the circulations of blackface repertoires in theatrical spectacles, popular songs, visual materials, comic operas, closet dramas, dance forms, and Shakespearean burlesques.

Kellen Hoxworth focuses on overlooked performance histories, such as the early blackface minstrelsy of T. D. Rice’s “Jump Jim Crow” and the widely staged blackface burlesque versions of Othello, as traces of the racial and sexual anxieties of empire. From the nascent theatrical cultures of Australia, Britain, Canada, India, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United States, Transoceanic Blackface offers critical insight into the ways racialized performance animated the imperial “common sense” of white supremacy on a global scale. 
 
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TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault
An Unreasonable Body of Work
Edited by Judith Rudakoff
Intellect Books, 2012
Transgendered playwright, performer, columnist, and sex worker Nina Arsenault has undergone more than sixty plastic surgeries in pursuit of a feminine beauty ideal. In TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault, Judith Rudakoff brings together a diverse group of contributors, including artists, scholars, and Arsenault herself to offer an exploration of beauty, image, and the notion of queerness through the lens of Arsenault’s highly personal brand of performance art.
Illustrated throughout with photographs of the artist’s transformation over the years and demonstrating her diversity of personae, this volume contributes to a deepening of our understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be beautiful. Also included in this volume is the full script of Arsenault’s critically acclaimed stage play, The Silicone Diaries.
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Traveler, There Is No Road
Theatre, the Spanish Civil War, and the Decolonial Imagination in the Americas
Lisa Jackson-Schebetta
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Traveler, There Is No Road offers a compelling and complex vision of the decolonial imagination in the United States from 1931 to 1943 and beyond. By examining the ways in which the war of interpretation that accompanied the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) circulated through Spanish and English language theatre and performance in the United States, Lisa Jackson-Schebetta demonstrates that these works offered alternative histories that challenged the racial, gender, and national orthodoxies of modernity and coloniality. Jackson-Schebetta shows how performance in the US used histories of American empires, Islamic legacies, and African and Atlantic trades to fight against not only fascism and imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s, but modernity and coloniality itself.

This book offers a unique perspective on 1930s theatre and performance, encompassing the theatrical work of the Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Spanish diasporas in the United States, as well as the better-known Anglophone communities. Jackson-Schebetta situates well-known figures, such as Langston Hughes and Clifford Odets, alongside lesser-known ones, such as Erasmo Vando, Franca de Armiño, and Manuel Aparicio. The milicianas, female soldiers of the Spanish Republic, stride on stage alongside the male fighters of the Lincoln Brigade. They and many others used the multiple visions of Spain forged during the civil war to foment decolonial practices across the pasts, presents, and futures of the Americas. Traveler conclusively demonstrates that theatre and performance scholars must position US performances within the Americas writ broadly, and in doing so they must recognize the centrality of the hemisphere’s longest-lived colonial power, Spain. 
 
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Travesty Actors
Self and Theater in Stalinist Culture
Boris Wolfson, edited by Simon Morrison
Northwestern University Press, 2026
Examining theatrical performance under Stalinist cultural mandates
 
Talk of Joseph Stalin’s “show trials,” the public prosecutions in Moscow’s Hall of Columns in the late 1930s, is so familiar as to obscure the relationship between actual shows—in the Soviet Union’s major theaters—and politics. Travesty Actors: Self and Theater in Stalinist Culture examines theatrical performance within the context of the Soviet cultural establishment’s fashioning of a “genuine Soviet person.” Boris Wolfson focuses on prominent and controversial plays by artists including Aleksandr Afinogenov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha, and Natalia Sats and the efforts of theater companies, like the Moscow Arts Theater, the Meyerhold Theater, and the Central Children’s Theater, to adhere to this cultural mandate while grappling with repression, censorship, and conflicting interpretations of its aims. Drawing on archival materials, diaries and memoirs and eyewitness accounts, Wolfson greatly illuminates the achievements of Soviet theater during this harsh period and the cultural significance of artistic theories and practices for articulating and enacting ideological programs.
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Trial by Farce
A Dozen Medieval French Comedies in English for the Modern Stage
Edited and Translated by Jody Enders
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Was there more to comedy than Chaucer, the Second Shepherds’ Play, or Shakespeare? Of course! But, for a real taste of medieval and Renaissance humor and in-your-face slapstick, one must cross the Channel to France, where over two hundred extant farces regularly dazzled crowds with blistering satires. Dwarfing all other contemporaneous theatrical repertoires, the boisterous French corpus is populated by lawyers, lawyers everywhere. No surprise there. The lion’s share of mostly anonymous farces was written by barristers, law students, and legal apprentices. Famous for skewering unjust judges and irreligious ecclesiastics, they belonged to a 10,000-member legal society known as the Basoche, which flourished between 1450 and 1550. What is more, their dramatic send-ups of real and fictional court cases were still going strong on the eve of Molière, resilient against those who sought to censor and repress them. The suspenseful wait to see justice done has always made for high drama or, in this case, low drama. But, for centuries, the scripts for these outrageous shows were available only in French editions gathered from scattered print and manuscript sources.

In Trial by Farce, prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest legal farces to English-speaking audiences in a refreshingly uncensored but philologically faithful vernacular. Newly conceived as much for scholars as for students and theater practitioners, this repertoire and its familiar stock characters come vividly to life as they struggle to negotiate the limits of power, politics, class, gender, and, above all, justice. Through the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce, we gain a new understanding of comedy itself as form of political correction. In ways presciently modern and even postmodern, farce paints a different cultural picture of the notoriously authoritarian Middle Ages with its own vision of liberty and justice for all. Theater eternally offers ways for new generations to raise their voices and act.
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A Triptych from the Russian Theatre
An Artistic Biography of the Komissarzhevsky Family
Victor Borovsky
University of Iowa Press, 2001
This is a collective biography of three generations of the Komissarzhevsky family whose artistic activities had an enormous impact on Russian and world theater.
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Trumpets in the Mountains
Theater and the Politics of National Culture in Cuba
Laurie A. Frederik
Duke University Press, 2012
Trumpets in the Mountains is a compelling ethnography about Cuban culture, artistic performance, and the shift in national identity after 1990, when the loss of Soviet subsidies plunged Cuba into a severe economic crisis. The state's response involved opening the economy to foreign capital and tourism, and promoting previously deprecated cultural practices as quintessentially Cuban. Such contradictions of Cuba's revolutionary ideals elicited an official preoccupation with how twenty-first-century cubanía, or Cubanness, was to be understood by its citizens and creatively interpreted by its artists. The rural campesino was re-envisioned as a key symbol of the future; the embodiment of socialist humility, cultural pureness, and educated refinement; potentially the Hombre Novísimo (even newer man) to replace the Hombre Nuevo (new man) of Cuban communist philosophy.

Campesinos inhabit some of the island's most isolated areas, including the mountainous regions in central and eastern Cuba where Laurie A. Frederik conducted research among rural communities and professional theater groups. Analyzing the ongoing dialogue of cultural officials, urban and rural artists, and campesinos, Frederik provides an on-the-ground account of how visions of the nation are developed, manipulated, dramatized, and maintained in public consciousness. She shows that cubanía is defined, and redefined, in the interactive movement between intellectual, political, and everyday worlds.

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The Trustus Plays
The Hammerstone, Drift, and Holy Ghost
Jon Tuttle
Intellect Books, 2009

The Trustus Plays collects three full-length, award-winning performance texts by American playwright Jon Tuttle. Each play was a winner of the national Trustus Playwrights Festival contest and was then produced by the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina. The Hammerstone is a comedy about two professors aging gracelessly, Drift is a dark comedy about marriage and divorce, and Holy Ghost is the story of German POWs held in the camps in the American south. Jon Tuttle provides an introduction to the plays, and Trustus founder and artistic director, Jim Thigpen, offers a preface describing Tuttle’s work within the context of the Trustus theatre’s dedication to experimental, edgy social drama.

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