This unique book is a graphic novel and performance poem, a mixed-media musical cartoon, an animated feature film come to life. Lee Breuer’s La Divina Caricatura is in the pataphysical tradition of Alfred Jarry—if Jarry had been a Dante fan. In this play we meet unforgettable characters: Rose the Dog, who thinks she is a woman; her lover John, a junkie filmmaker; Ponzi Porco, PhD, a pig in love with the New York Times; and the Warrior Ant, who, to impress his father, Trotsky the Termite, declares the “perpetual revolution” of the bugs of the fifth world. Each a soul on its own pilgrimage, seldom with a Virgil or a Beatrice to guide them, they often try to guide each other, only to get more lost. A dazzling, comic, potent mix of ideas and character, invention and reality, the plays in La Divina Caricatura reinvigorate the stage for our time.
 

First performed the day after Marie-Antoinette’s beheading, Le Jugement dernier des rois stages the burlesque trial of the remaining kings and queens of Europe—paraded in chains like animals, made to brawl over a barrel of crackers, and finally obliterated by a spectacular volcanic eruption. Such is the shocking context—at once tragic and farcical—of the most infamous play of the French Revolution, familiar to all specialists of the period. Until now, however, no standalone critical edition or English translation of this historic play existed. This bilingual edition revives Maréchal’s play and reveals its centrality to scholarly debates about Revolutionary notions of justice, religion, commemoration, comedy, and propaganda. Provocative, written in accessible prose, and short—perfect for students in a French or history seminar—Le Jugement dernier des rois offers an ideal introduction to the most important and contentious questions of the Revolutionary period.

Joué pour la première fois le lendemain de l’exécution de Marie-Antoinette, Le Jugement dernier des rois met en scène le procès burlesque des autres rois et reines d’Europe : exhibés et enchaînés tels des animaux, contraints de se battre pour un tonneau de biscuits, et finalement anéantis par l’éruption spectaculaire d’un volcan. Tel est le contexte scandaleux—tragédie et farce à la fois—de la pièce la plus célèbre de la Révolution française, bien connue de tous les spécialistes de cette période. Jusqu’à maintenant, pourtant, il n’existait ni édition critique ni traduction anglaise de cet ouvrage historique. Notre édition bilingue fait revivre la pièce de Maréchal et la replace au centre des plus grands débats chez les historiens de la Révolution, traitant de justice, religion, commémoration, comédie, et propagande. Provocateur, facile à lire, et concis—parfaitement adapté aux étudiants d’un cours de français ou d’histoire—Le Jugement dernier des rois propose ainsi une introduction idéale à la période révolutionnaire et à ses principales controverses.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Like their Hollywood counterparts, Latin American film and TV melodramas have always been popular and highly profitable. The first of its kind, this anthology engages in a serious study of the aesthetics and cultural implications of Latin American melodramas. Written by some of the major figures in Latin American film scholarship, the studies range across seventy years of movies and television within a transnational context, focusing specifically on the period known as the "Golden Age" of melodrama, the impact of classic melodrama on later forms, and more contemporary forms of melodrama. An introductory essay examines current critical and theoretical debates on melodrama and places the essays within the context of Latin American film and media scholarship.

Contributors are Luisela Alvaray, Mariana Baltar, Catherine L. Benamou, Marvin D’Lugo, Paula Félix-Didier, Andrés Levinson, Gilberto Perez, Darlene J. Sadlier, Cid Vasconcelos, and Ismail Xavier.

Drawing on the rich field of performance studies, this volume, the most recent contribution to the distinguished Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, offers fresh insights and a provocative mix of multidisciplinary topics and methodologies to explore the theatricality and performativity of law as more than a metaphor.

In considering law through the lens of performance studies, the contributors in this volume emphasize the embodied, affective, and reiterative qualities that move law off the printed page and into the thick world of lived experience. They consider the blurring of lines between performance and the enactment of law, the transformative exchanges between the law and its many and varied stagings, and the impact or resonance of performativity in situations where innocence and guilt may be determined. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Joshua Chambers-Letson, Catherine M. Cole, Ryan Hartigan, Lara D. Nielsen, Julie Stone Peters, Ann Pellegrini, and Karen Shimakawa.

To study an archive or archival materials is to encounter an affective and critical practice involved in the construction of memory. Lexicon for an Affective Archive, edited by Giulia Palladini and Marco Pustianaz, is an international collection of these encounters, offering glimpses into the intimate relations inherent in finding, remembering (or imagining), and creating an archive. Bringing together voices from a variety of fields across the humanities, performance studies, and contemporary art, and engaging in a multidisciplinary analysis, this beautifully designed and fully illustrated volume advances the idea of an “affective archive” as a useful conceptual tool—a tool which contributes to an understanding of an expanded notion of an archive and its central role in contemporary visual and performing arts.
 
A co-publication with NInA and Live Art Development Agency.

A beautiful and haunting tale of love, betrayal, knowledge, and power, Life's a Dream (La vida es sueño, 1636) is the best known and most widely admired play of Catholic Europe's greatest dramatist, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681). Calderón's long life witnessed both the pinnacle and collapse of Spanish political power as well as the great flowering of Spanish classical literature. Michael Kidd's new prose translation renders Calderón's masterpiece into a transparent, modern American idiom that preserves the beauty and complexity of Calderón's Baroque Spanish. The result is a highly readable and adaptable text that is enhanced by a generous selection of supporting materials, including a thorough critical introduction and glossary.

How do audiences experience live performances? What is gained when a national theater is born? These questions and more are the subject of Locating the Audience—the first in-depth study of how people form relationships with a new theater company. Investigating the inaugural season of National Theatre Wales, Kirsty Sedgman explores how different people felt about the way their communities were engaged and their places “performed” by the theater’s productions. Mapping the complex interplay between audience experience and identity, the book presents a significant contribution to our contemporary project of defining cultural value. Rather than understanding value as an end point—“impact”—Sedgman makes the provocative claim that cultural value can better be understood as a process. By talking to audiences and capturing pleasures and disappointments, Locating the Audience shows the meaning-making process in action.

Lothario’s Corpse unearths a performance history, on and off the stage, of Restoration libertine drama in Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While standard theater histories emphasize libertine drama’s gradual disappearance from the nation’s acting repertory following the dispersal of Stuart rule in 1688, Daniel Gustafson traces its persistent appeal for writers and performers wrestling with the powers of the emergent liberal subject and the tensions of that subject with sovereign absolutism. With its radical, absolutist characters and its scenarios of aristocratic license, Restoration libertine drama became a critical force with which to engage in debates about the liberty-loving British subject’s relation to key forms of liberal power and about the troubling allure of lawless sovereign power that lingers at the heart of the liberal imagination. Weaving together readings of a set of literary texts, theater anecdotes, political writings, and performances, Gustafson illustrates how the corpse of the Restoration stage libertine is revived in the period’s debates about liberty, sovereign desire, and the subject’s relation to modern forms of social control. Ultimately, Lothario’s Corpse suggests the “long-running” nature of Restoration theatrical culture, its revived and revised performances vital to what makes post-1688 Britain modern.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

Originally published in 1622, Love in the Mirror tells the unforgettable and path-breaking story of a passionate love affair between two women in early modern Florence. Despite the risk of social sanctions, Florinda and Lidia freely consent to love each other “breast to breast and mouth to mouth,” with some surprising consequences for the institution of marriage.

This bilingual edition of the play introduces the English-speaking reader to one of the most remarkable creative artists of the Baroque age, Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–1654). Actor, playwright, and son of the first great diva of the European stage, Isabella Andreini, Giovan Battista was renowned in his lifetime as an avant-garde theatrical innovator. While drawing on the Italian commedia dell’arte, his comedies go far beyond its limits in order— like Calderón, Corneille and Shakespeare—to subvert traditional views of the relationship between art and life, representation and reality.

Love in the Mirror, which was lost from view for centuries, is here translated for the first time into a highly accessible and fully annotated English version. The volume includes a wideranging introduction to this experimental comic masterpiece, as well as to the life and works of G.B. Andreini.

Early modern English writers often complained that "charity had grown cold," lamenting the dissolution of society's communal bonds. But far from diminishing in scope or influence, charity generated heated debates, animated by social, political, and religious changes that prompted urgent questions about the virtue's powers and functions. Charity was as much a problem as it was a solution, a sure sign of trouble even when invoked on behalf of peace and community.

Love's Quarrels charts charity's complex history from the 1520s to the 1640s and details the ways in which it can be best understood in biblical translations of the early sixteenth century, in Elizabethan polemic and satire, and in the political and religious controversies arriving at the outset of civil war. As key works from Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and John Milton reveal, "reading charity" was fraught with difficulty as early modern England reconsidered its deepest held convictions in the face of mounting social disruption and spiritual pressure.

The nature of the Old and New West is fully reflected through dialects, beliefs, occupations, and actions in this collection of thirteen plays with complete stage directions. Set in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah from the mid-1800s to the present day and focusing on veterans, children, prostitutes, priests, the newborn, and newly dead, these one-acts written by playwrights who know the region give voice to those who created and continue to recreate the West. This collection of contemporary plays, written out of love and concern for the region, examines as never before the western myths rooted in the national psyche. The characters battle limits, deny fate, and seek new beginnings. The plays examine symptoms, pose questions, and seek answers about the past and present West.