In this brief but staggering two-act, playwright Norris demonstrates his skill at drawing out the dark truth that lurks beneath the surface of the “perfect” family. His crackling satire takes dead aim at the self-satisfied, left-leaning American upper-middle class and its many self-delusions.
On a winter afternoon, Kelly and Clay—an attractive, prosperous, seemingly happy couple with a four-year-old daughter and a newborn baby—must explain to a visitor the events of the previous Thanksgiving, on which, so it seems, someone or something had been gnawing at the avocados on their kitchen table. In the course of this holiday gathering—attended by Clay’s mother, a well-meaning but clueless first-grade teacher who spouts pointless liberal bromides; his brother, a plastic surgeon with a nihilistic streak and a taste for martinis; and his brother's girlfriend, a sexy Balkan immigrant with a love for all things American (racism included)—the recent past is unearthed along with revelations of failed marriages, fraternal hatred, infidelity and venereal disease, in the form of their daughter’s nasty genital infection. And it’s a comedy. As the story is gradually unfolded to their visitor, a Muslim cab driver, his relationship to the events becomes increasingly clear, as does the emptiness of the family’s supposed benevolence and sensitivity.
With its crashing emotion and cutting humor, this vicious dissection of the comfortable progressive life lays bare the lies that people use to feel righteous even as they veer off a genuinely ethical path.
The Panza Monologues is an original solo performance piece based on women's stories about their panzas—tú sabes—that roll of belly we all try to hide. Written, compiled, and collected by Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga and fashioned into a tour-de-force solo performance, The Panza Monologues features the words of Chicanas speaking with humor and candor. Their stories boldly place the panza front and center as a symbol that reveals the lurking truths about women's thoughts, lives, loves, abuses, and living conditions.
This second edition of The Panza Monologues presents the performance script in its entirety, as well as a rich supporting cast of dramaturgical and pedagogical materials. These include a narrative history of the play’s development by the playwrights; critical materials that enhance and expand upon the script’s themes and ideas (a short introduction to San Antonio, where the play was developed; playwright autogeographies; and a manifesto on women of color making theater); and a selection of pedagogical and creative ideas, including guidelines and advice for staging a production of the play and for teaching it in the classroom, community-making activities (screenings, hosting “Panza Parties,” community/group discussions), and creative writing activities connected to the play.
Recently in the field of theatre studies there has been an increasing amount of debate and dissonance regarding the borders of its territory, its methodologies, subject matter, and scholarly perspectives. The nature of this debate could be termed "political" and, in fact, concerns "the performance of power"—the struggle over power relations embedded in texts, methodologies, and the academy itself.
This striking new collection of nineteen divergent essays represents this performance of power and the way in which the recent convergence of new critical theories with historical studies has politicized the study of the theatre. Neither play text, performance, nor scholarship and teaching can safely reside any longer in the "free," politically neutral, self-signifying realm of the aesthetic. Politicizing theatrical discourse means that both the hermeneutics and the histories of theatre reveal the role of ideology and power dynamics.
New strategies and concepts—and a vital new phase of awareness—appear in these illuminating essays. A variety of historical periods, from the Renaissance through the Victorian and up to the most contemporary work of the Wooster group, illustrate the ways in which contemporary strategies do not require contemporary texts and performances but can combine with historical methods and subjects to produce new theatrical discourse.
In Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and Writing, author Jodi Kanter explores opportunities for creativity and growth within our collective responses to grief. Performing Loss provides teachers, students, and others interested in performance with strategies for reading, writing, and performing loss as communities—in the classroom, the theater, and the wider public sphere.
From an adaptation of Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness to a reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, from Kanter’s own experience creating theater with terminally ill patients and federal prisoners to a visual artist’s response to September 11th, Kanter shows in practical, replicable detail how performing loss with community members can transform experiences of isolation and paralysis into experiences of solidarity and action.
Drawing on academic work in performance, cultural studies, literature, sociology, and anthropology, Kanter considers a range of responses to grief in historical context and goes on to imagine newer, more collaborative, and more civically engaged responses. Performing Loss describes Kanter’s pedagogical and artistic processes in lively and vivid detail, enabling the reader to use her projects as models or to adapt the techniques to new communities, venues, and purposes. Kanter demonstrates through each example the ways in which writing and performing can create new possibilities for mourning and living together.
Four unconnected but unforgettable plays from ancient Athens’ first great tragedian.
Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BC), the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms, witnessed the establishment of democracy at Athens, fought against the Persians at Marathon and probably also at Salamis, and had one of his productions sponsored by the young Pericles. He was twice invited to visit Sicily, and it was there that he died. At Athens he competed for the tragic prize at the City Dionysia about nineteen times between circa 499 and 458, and won it on thirteen occasions; in his later years he was probably victorious almost every time he put on a production, though Sophocles beat him at least once.
Of his total of about eighty plays, seven survive complete. The first volume of this new Loeb Classical Library edition contains fresh texts and translations by Alan H. Sommerstein of Persians (472), on the recent war, the only surviving Greek historical drama; Seven against Thebes (467), the third play of a trilogy, on the conflict between Oedipus’ sons which ends when they kill each other; Suppliants, the first or second play of a trilogy, on the successful appeal by the daughters of Danaus to the king and people of Argos for protection against a forced marriage to their cousins (whom they will later murder, all but one); and Prometheus Bound (of disputed authenticity), on the terrible punishment of Prometheus for giving fire to humans in defiance of Zeus (with whom he will later be reconciled after preventing his overthrow). The second volume contains the complete Oresteia trilogy (458), comprising Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, and Eumenides, presenting the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, the revenge taken by their son Orestes, the pursuit of Orestes by his mother’s avenging Furies, his trial and acquittal at Athens, Athena’s pacification of the Furies, and the blessings they both invoke upon the Athenian people.
This edition’s third volume offers all the major fragments of lost Aeschylean plays, with brief headnotes explaining what is known, or can be plausibly inferred, about their content, and bibliographies of recent studies.
The Roman comic playwright “whose every word delights.”
Terence brought to the Roman stage a bright comic voice and a refined sense of style. His six comedies—first produced in the half dozen years before his premature death in 159 BC—imaginatively reformulated in Latin plays that were originally written by Greek playwrights, especially Menander. For this new Loeb Classical Library edition of Terence, John Barsby gives us a faithful and lively translation with full explanatory notes, facing a freshly edited Latin text.
Volume I contains a substantial introduction and three plays: The Woman of Andros, a romantic comedy; The Self-Tormentor, which looks at contrasting father-son relationships; and The Eunuch, whose characters include the most sympathetically drawn courtesan in Roman comedy. The other three plays are in Volume II: Phormio, a comedy of intrigue with an engaging trickster; The Mother-in-Law, unique among Terence’s plays in that the female characters are the admirable ones; and The Brothers, which explores contrasting approaches to parental education of sons.
The Romans highly praised Terence—“whose speech can charm, whose every word delights,” in Cicero’s words. This new edition of his plays, which replaces the now outdated Loeb translation by John Sargeaunt (first published in 1912), succeeds in capturing his polished style and appeal.
“How has the art of theater managed to survive at all into the era of modernism and the era of what is currently, however ineptly, called postmodernism?” asks preeminent theater scholar Eric Bentley. “Through the work of [Luigi] Pirandello, I should think, more than any other single individual.”
Bentley’s English versions of four of Pirandello’s most celebrated plays—collected here for the first time—capture the playwright’s voice with remarkable perception. He has provided texts that are the standard for American productions, sensitive both to what is uniquely “Sicilian” in Pirandello’s language and to the rigors of the American stage.
Along with Pirandello’s better-known works, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Emperor Henry, and Right You Are, this edition includes the widely performed The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, unavailable in any other collection.
Contributors. André Bazin, Robert Brustein, Bert Cardullo, Anthony DeCurtis, Don DeLillo, Jesse Ward Engdhal, Richard Gilman, Jim Hosney, Mame Hunt, Jonathan Kalb, Stanley Kauffmann, Jody McAuliffe, Mary Ann Frese Witt, Jacquelyn Wollman, David Wyatt
Recovering the stage work of one of America's finest black female writers
This volume collects twelve of Georgia Douglas Johnson's one-act plays, including two never-before-published scripts found in the Library of Congress. As an integral part of Washington, D.C.'s, thriving turn-of-the-century literary scene, Johnson hosted regular meetings with Harlem Renaissance writers and other artists, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, May Miller, and Jean Toomer, and was herself considered among the finest writers of the time. Johnson also worked for U.S. government agencies and actively supported women's and minorities' rights.
As a leading authority on Johnson, Judith L. Stephens provides a brief overview of Johnson's career and significance as a playwright; sections on the creative environment in which she worked; her S Street Salon; "The Saturday Nighters," and its significance to the New Negro Theatre; selected photographs; and a discussion of Johnson's genres, themes, and artistic techniques.
Playwrights for Tomorrow was first published in 1973. 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 volume presents four plays by writers who have worked under the program of the Office for Advanced Drama Research (O.A.D.R.) at the University of Minnesota, an experimental project which provides promising playwrights with the opportunity of working with cooperating theatres in the production of their plays. Arthur H. Ballet, the editor, is director of the
O.A.D.R.
The plays in this volume and the theatres which cooperated in their production are Boxes by Susan Yankowitz, Magic Theatre, Berkeley, California; Canvas by David Roszkowski, Scorpio Rising Theatre, Los Angeles; Bierce Takes on the Railroad! by Philip A. Bosakowski, Theatre III, College of Marin, Kentfield, California; and Chamber Piece by John O'Keefe, Magic Theatre, Berkeley, California.
In an introduction Professor Ballet discussed the program and accomplishments of the O. A.D.R., which was established with the aid of a Rockefeller Foundation grant. He writes: "It seemed obvious that no artist worked in more lonely isolation and needed more direct contact with the theatre than the playwright. Despite loud pronouncements . . . that theatres outside of New York were searching for new plays and writers, the evidence indicates that very few theatres really wanted to work with unknown but living playwrights. The O.A.D.R., in its small way, has tried to open a highway . . . between new, often untried writers and willing, even brave theatres.
As Speech and Drama (England) pointed out in a review of earlier volumes of the Playwrights for Tomorrow series: "Schemes like this one at Minnesota deserve the highest praise. On the evidence of these volumes, the executive committee which operates this venture is not attempting to impose any single imprint on its authors—a further example of the generosity of the patronage."
Playwrights for Tomorrow was first published in 1967. 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 fourth in a series of volumes which offer collections of plays by dramatists who have participated in an experimental program conducted at the University of Minnesota under the auspices of the Office of Advanced Drama Research (O.A.D.R.). Dr. Arthur H. Ballet, editor of the series, is the director of the O.A.D.R.
This volume contains three full-length plays and one short play. They are The World Tipped Over, and Laying on Its Side (one act) by Mary Feldhaus-Weber, Visions of Sugar Plums by Barry Pritchard, The Strangler by Arnold Powell, and The Long War by Kevin O' Morrison. Mary Feldhaus-Weber is a St. Paul poet who has chosen to work in the theatre. Mr. Pritchard, a former playwright in residence at Theatre St. Paul, now writes for television and films in Hollywood. Mr. Powell is a teacher and theatre director at Birmingham-Southern College in Atlanta, and Mr. O'Morrison pursues an acting career in the Broadway theatre.
As Dr. Ballet explains in his introduction, the program of the O.A.D.R. is designed to give promising playwrights a testing ground for their ideas, skills, and talents by providing them with a chance to have their plays actually produced and, whenever possible, the opportunity of working with the producing groups. He points out that a number of the writers associated with the O.A.D.R. have subsequently moved into the mainstream of contemporary American theatre. Publication of the plays will, it is hoped, bring them to the attention of larger audiences and stimulate further critical appraisal.
Most critics agree that Euripidean tragedy addresses a wealth of political questions, and that it successfully incorporates and engages with a variety of ancient Greek poetic traditions. Nevertheless, these topics and questions have generally been treated separately. In this book, Jonah Radding contends that the political issues addressed in Euripides’ tragedies are inextricably related to his employment of choral lyric genres such as paean and epinician, and to his engagement with canonical poetic texts such as the Iliad and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.
We see that Euripides consistently recasts traditional poetic genres and texts in order to dramatize and illuminate political questions that are central to his tragedies. At the same time, Radding suggests that the dramatic politicization of the poetic tradition also serves to question the manner in which ancient Athenians understood and utilized these various poetic forms in their own polis. Ultimately, we see that the relationship between poetry and politics in Euripidean tragedy is truly reciprocal, for both aspects illuminate—and are illuminated by—the other, each becoming a more powerful force in the process.
Among the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is perhaps best remembered for the innovative use of jazz rhythms in his writing. While his poetry and essays received much public acclaim and scholarly attention, Hughes’ dramas are relatively unknown. Only five of the sixty-three plays Hughes scripted alone or collaboratively have been published (in 1963).
Published here, for the first time, are four of Hughes’ most poignant, poetic, and political dramas, Scottsboro Limited, Harvest (also known as Blood on the Fields), Angelo Herndon Jones, and De Organizer. Each play reflects Hughes’ remarkable professionalism as a playwright as well as his desire to dramatize the social history of the African American experience, especially in the context of the labor movements of the 1930s and their attempts to attract African American workers. Hughes himself counted prominent members of these leftist groups among his close friends and patrons; he formed a theater group with Whittaker Chambers, prompting an FBI investigation of Hughes and his writing in the 1930s. These plays, while easily read as idealistic propaganda pieces for the left, are nonetheless reflective of Hughes’ other more influential and studied works.
The first scholar to offer a systematic study of Hughes’ plays, Susan Duffy provides an informed introduction as well as a detailed analysis of each of the four plays. Duffy also establishes that De Organizer, a collaboration with noted jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson (who also wrote its score) was indeed performed by the Labor Stage.
By making these forgotten texts available, and by presenting them within a scholarly discussion of 1930s leftist political movements, Duffy seeks to spark a renewed interest in Langston Hughes as an American playwright and political figure.
This anthology of work by three Asian American women playwrights—Wakako Yamauchi, Genny Lim, and Velina Hasu Houston—features pioneering contemporary writers who have made their mark in regional and ethnic theatres throughout the United States. In her introduction, Houston observes that the Asian American woman playwright is compelled "to mine her soul" and express the angst, fear, and rage that oppression has wrought while maintaining her relationship with America as a good citizen.
The plays are rich with cultural and political substance and have a feminist concern about women's spirit, intellect, and lives. They portray Asian and Asian American women who challenge the cultural and sexual stereotypes of the Asian female. Yamauchi's two plays deal with how easily a country can dishonor its citizens. In "12-1-A," a Japanese American family is incarcerated during World War II in an Arizona camp where Yamauchi herself was interned. "The Chairman's Wife" dramatizes the life of Madame Mao Tse Tung through the lens of events at Tien An Men Square in 1989. Lim's "Bitter Cane" is about the exploitation of Chinese laborers who were recruited to work the Hawaiian sugar cane plantations. In "Asa Ga Kimashita" ("Morning Has Broken"), Houston explores a Japanese woman's interracial romance in postwar Japan and the influence of traditional patriarchy on the lives of Japanese women.
These plays will entertain and enlighten, enrage and profoundly move audiences. With honesty, imagination and courage, each grapples with the politics of life.
In the series Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ.
A comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page illuminates for a general audience how and why the plays work so well.
Noting in detail the practical and physical limitations the Bard faced as he worked out the logistics of his plays, Colin Butler demonstrates how Shakespeare incorporated those limitations and turned them to his advantage: his management of entrances and exits; his characterization techniques; his handling of scenes off-stage; his control of audience responses; his organization of major scenes; and his use of prologues and choruses. A different aspect of the plays is covered in each chapter.
Butler draws most of his examples from mainstream plays, such as Macbeth, Othello, and Much Ado about Nothing. He brings special focus to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is treated as one of Shakespeare’s most important plays. Butler supports his major points with quotations, so readers can understand an issue even if they are unfamiliar with the particular play being discussed. The author also cross-references the use of dramatic devices in the plays, increasing the reader’s enjoyment and understanding of Shakespeare’s achievements.
Clear, jargon-free, easy-to-use, and comprehensive, The Practical Shakespeare looks at stagecraft and playwriting as conduits for students, teachers, and general audiences to engage with, understand, and appreciate the genius of Shakespeare.
When Tony Tanner died in 1998, the world lost a critic who was as sensitive a reader of Jane Austen as he was of Thomas Pynchon, and who wrote with a warmth and clarity that belied his fluency in literary theory.
In the final ten years of his life Tanner tackled the largest project any critic in English can take on—writing a preface to each of Shakespeare’s plays. This collection serves as a comprehensive introduction for the general reader, the greatest and perhaps the last in the line of great introductions to Shakespeare written by such luminaries as Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tanner brings Shakespeare to life, explicating everything from big-picture issues such as the implications of shifts in Elizabethan culture to close readings of Shakespeare’s deployment of complex words in his plays.
Although these prefaces are written for a general audience, there is much value for the scholar as well. Tanner introduces some of the most significant recent and historical scholarship on Shakespeare to show the reader how certain critics frame large issues in a useful way. This scholarly generosity permits Johnson, Hazlitt, Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin, Pater, and many others to enter into conversation. The Independent said of the project, “All of Tanner’s life and education had prepared him for this task and the results are magnificent—both accessible and erudite.”
Process: An Improviser's Journey is an invaluable resource for mastering improv. Author, teacher, and improviser Michael Gellman was given a mission by famed improv coach Del Close: “[T]o create improvised one-act plays of literary quality from scratch.” Already steeped in the world of improvisation, he took it upon himself to do this, in the form of a class for other improvisers in which they would build the skills necessary to execute such a seemingly tall order. Scruggs and Gellman’s book, modeled after Stanislavski’s timeless An Actor Prepares, follows a fictional young actor taking Gellman’s real-life class.
Scruggs and Gellman introduce readers to Geoff, who has just moved to Chicago to pursue acting. He undergoes the standard trials of audition and rejection before he takes the advice of a fellow actor and turns to improv classes at Second City. At first, Geoff thinks improvisation is about laughs and loosening up, but he soon learns that it is a powerful tool as well as an end in itself. Through Geoff’s eyes, the book introduces readers to key tenets of improvisation: concentration, visualization, focus, object work, being in the moment, and the crucial “yes, and.” His experiences with the basics of improvisation do serve to get him a few roles, but his real breakthrough comes when he signs up for an improvised one-act class with Michael Gellman. He and his classmates arrive unprepared for the challenge, but with Gellman’s prompts and advice, they slowly move through process to performance over the course of three seasons in Chicago. The class culminates with their final project: a completely improvised one-act play performed in front of a live audience.
Avenging Chicagoans form a league for justice in Ike Holter’s superhero-inspired play, Prowess. In this heartfelt yet fantastical homage to Chicago, award-winning playwright Ike Holter introduces us to a quartet of “average” citizens who have been the victims of violence and felt powerless because of it.
In the face of the city’s seemingly intractable ills, the play’s characters join forces to rescue Chicago—and themselves. But how? With heart, wit, and wisdom, Holter explores how one responds to violence. Does a person focus on self-defense and personal survival? Or fight back—with more violence? Pulsating and physical, Prowess is about vulnerability, vigilantism, heroism, and self-knowledge.
Prowess is one of seven plays in Holter’s Rightlynd Saga, all to be published by Northwestern University Press. The other plays in the cycle are Rightlynd, Exit Strategy, Sender, The Wolf at the End of the Block, Red Rex, and Lottery Day.
Symbol and psyche are twin concepts in contemporary symbological studies, where the symbol is considered to be a "statement" by the psyche. The psyche is a manifold of conscious and unconscious contents, and the symbol is their mediator. Because Lorca's dramatic characters are psychic entities made up of both conscious and unconscious elements, they unfold, grow, and meet their fate in a dense realm of shifting symbols.
In Psyche and Symbol in the Theater of Federico García Lorca, Rupert Allen analyzes symbologically three dramatic works of Lorca. He has found Perlimplín to be a good deal more complex in both psyche and symbol than it has been admitted to be. Yerma involves psychological complications that have not been considered in the light of modern critical analysis, and the symbolic reaches ofBlood Wedding have until this book remained largely unexplored.
Lorca was no stranger to the "agony of creation," and this struggle sometimes appears symbolically in the form of his dramatic characters. Both Yerma and Blood Wedding reflect specific problems underlying the creative act, for they are "translations" into the realm of sexuality of the creative turmoil experienced by Lorca the poet. Perlimplín portrays the paradoxical suicide as a self-murder born out of the futile attempt to create not a poem, but a self.
Previous criticism of these three plays has been dominated by critical assumptions that are transcended by Lorca's own twentieth-century mentality. Allen's analysis provides a new view of Lorca as a dramatist and presents new material to students of symbology.
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