front cover of The Theater of Narration
The Theater of Narration
From the Peripheries of History to the Main Stages of Italy
Juliet Guzzetta
Northwestern University Press, 2021
Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies

This book examines the theater of narration, an Italian performance genre and aesthetic that revisits historical events of national importance from local perspectives, drawing on the rich relationship between personal experiences and historical accounts. Incorporating original research from the private archives of leading narrators—artists who write and perform their work—Juliet Guzzetta argues that the practice teaches audiences how ordinary people aren’t simply witnesses to history but participants in its creation.
 
The theater of narration emerged in Italy during the labor and student protests, domestic terrorism, and social progress of the 1970s. Developing Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s style of political theater, influenced by Jerzy Grotowski and Bertolt Brecht, and following in the freewheeling actor‑author traditions of the commedia dell’arte, narrators created a new form of popular theater that grew in prominence in the 1990s and continues to gain recognition. Guzzetta traces the history of the theater of narration, contextualizing its origins—both political and intellectual—and centers the contributions of Teatro Settimo, a performance group overlooked in previous studies. She also examines the genre’s experiments in television and media.
 
The first full-length book in English on the subject, The Theater of Narration leverages close readings and a wealth of primary sources to examine the techniques used by narrators to remake history—a process that reveals the ways in which history itself is a theater of narration.
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front cover of Theatre History Studies 2018, Vol. 37
Theatre History Studies 2018, Vol. 37
Sara Freeman
University of Alabama Press, 2018
Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference
 
THEATRE HISTORY STUDIES, VOLUME 37
 
STEFAN AQUILINA
Meyerhold and The Revolution: A Reading through Henri Lefebvre’s Theories on “Everyday Life”
 
VIVIAN APPLER
“Shuffled Together under the Name of a Farce”: Finding Nature in Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon
 
KRISTI GOOD
Kate Soffel’s Life of Crime: A Gendered Journey from Warden’s Wife to Criminal Actress
 
PETER A. CAMPBELL
Staging Ajax’s Suicide: A Historiography
 
BRIAN E. G. COOK
Rousing Experiences: Theatre, Politics, and Change
 
MEGAN LEWIS
Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes: Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B and the Consequences of Staging the Colonial Gaze
 
PATRICIA GABORIK
Taking the Theatre to the People: Performance Sponsorship and Regulation in Mussolini’s Italy
 
ILINCA TODORUT AND ANTHONY SORGE
To Image and to Imagine: Walid Raad, Rabih Mouré, and the Arab Spring
 
SHULAMITH LEV-ALADGEM
Where Has the Political Theatre in Israel Gone? Rethinking the Concept of Political Theatre Today
 
CHRISTINE WOODWORTH
“Equal Rights By All Means!”: Beatrice Forbes-Robertson’s 1910 Suffrage Matinee and the Onstage Junction of the US And UK Franchise Movements
 
LURANA DONNELS O’MALLEY
“Why I Wrote the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant-Play”: Mary Church Terrell’s Bicentennial Activism
 
JULIET GUZZETTA
The Lasting Theatre of Dario Fo and Franca Rame
 
ASHLEY E. LUCAS
Chavez Ravine: Culture Clash and the Political Project of Rewriting History
 
NOE MONTEZ
The Heavy Lifting: Resisting the Obama Presidency’s Neoliberalist Conceptions of the American Dream in Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity
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