808 books match the query 'Drama' and 10 start with j

cover of JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and other plays

JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and other plays

Caridad Svich

Intellect Books, 2016

“JARMAN (all this maddening beauty”) and Other Plays is a collection of three radically poetic works for live performance by OBIE Award–winning playwright Caridad Svich. The playtexts includes a lyrical meditation on the legacy of iconic queer artist Derek Jarman, a meditation on displacement and human suffering (Carthage/Cartagena), and an intimately operatic reflection on Penelope and Odysseus (The Orphan Sea). Accompanied by scholarly essays placing the plays in context, this book showcases the beautiful strangeness and profound resistance in Svich’s work.

“Svich is one of the finest poet/playwrights of this generation. . . . She is a playwright whose plays perform like dramatic poems that are wondrous to the ear and moving to the heart.”—Seth Gordon, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis
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cover of Jagadamba: The Kasturba Story

Jagadamba

The Kasturba Story

Ramdas Bhatkal

Seagull Books, 2016

While Mahatma Gandhi is hailed across the world as a champion of humanity and nonviolent struggle, the struggles of the woman who accompanied him closely all his life, his wife Kasturba Gandhi, remain untold. This playtext, Jagadamba, rights that wrong with a long monologue in which Kasturba speaks from her heart about the different facets of her life—an often difficult marriage, the great man’s selfless immersion in politics and its consequences for their family, their troubled sons, and, most importantly, her own desires and hopes.

Originally conceived in the Marathi language for actress Rohini Hattangadi, who received an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of Kasturba in Richard Attenborough’s classic biopic Gandhi, this play charts the journey of a simple girl who went on to become “Jagadamba,” or the “Universal Mother,” as the wife of the Mahatma.

As Shanta Ghokale writes in her introduction: “Wives of great men have hard lives, often lived in negation of values they hold most dear. Jagadamba is the personal feelings of a devoted wife who had held her own in a life made mentally, physically, and morally turbulent by her husband’s ideas and political work.”
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cover of Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji

Japanese Counterculture

The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji

Steven C. Ridgely

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Terayama Shuji (1935-1983) was an avant-garde Japanese poet, dramatist, film director, and photographer known for his highly provocative work. In this inventive and revealing work, Steven Ridgely examines Terayama's life and art to show that a conventional notion of him does not do full justice to the meaning and importance of his wide-ranging, often playful body of work.

Ridgely places Terayama at the center of Japanese and global counterculture and finds in his work a larger story about the history of postwar Japanese art and culture. He sees Terayama as reflecting the most significant events of his day: young poets seizing control of haiku and tanka in the 1950s, radio drama experimenting with form and content after the cultural shift to television around 1960, young assistant directors given free rein in the New Wave as cinema combated television, underground theatre in the politicized late 1960s, and experimental short film through the 1970s after both the studio system and art house cinema had collapsed.

Featuring close readings of Terayama's art, Ridgely demonstrates how across his oeuvre there are patterns that sidestep existing power structures, never offering direct opposition but nevertheless making the opposition plain. And, he claims, there is always in Terayama's work a broad call for seeking out or creating pockets of fiction-where we are made aware that things are not what they seem-and to use otherness in those spaces to take a clearer view of reality.
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cover of Jean-Claude Grumberg: Three Plays

Jean-Claude Grumberg

Three Plays

By Jean-Claude Grumberg and Seth Wolitz

University of Texas Press, 2014

Winner of seven Molières, the Pulitzer Prize of France, Jean-Claude Grumberg is one of France’s leading dramatists and a distinguished voice of modern European Jewry after the Shoah. His success in portraying contemporary Parisian Jews on the stage represents a new development in European theater and a new aesthetic expression of European Jewish experience and sensibility of the Holocaust and its aftermath, a perspective quite different from either the American or the Israeli one. Grumberg’s Jews are French to their fingertips, yet they have been made more consciously Jewish by the war and the difficulties of reintegrating into a society in which too many neighbors denounced them or ignored their pleas to save their children. Affirming the new status of Jewish culture, Grumberg’s plays insist on the recognition of Jewish identity and uniqueness within the majority societies of Europe.

This volume offers the first English translation of three of Grumberg’s prize-winning plays: The Workplace (L’Atelier, 1979), On the Way to the Promised Land (Vers toi Terre promise, 2006) and Mama’s Coming Back, Poor Orphan (Maman revient, pauvre orphelin, 1994). Presented in the order of the history they record and steeped in Grumberg’s personal experience and insights into contemporary Parisian life, these plays serve as documentary witnesses that begin with the immediate postwar reality and continue up to the end of the twentieth century. Seth Wolitz provides notes on the plays’ themes, structures, characters, and settings, along with an introduction that discusses Grumberg’s place within the emergence of French-Jewish drama and a translation of an interview with the playwright himself.

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cover of Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater

Joint Enterprises

Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater

Heather Anne Hirschfeld

University of Massachusetts Press, 2004

Over half of the plays of the English Renaissance were written collaboratively—by multiple dramatists working together. Joint Enterprises examines this kind of dramatic production, charting its social and professional significance as a historically embedded but personally inflected creative phenomenon. By situating individual joint works such as Eastward Hoe, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Changeling in specific institutional contexts, Heather Hirschfeld explores the diverse motivations driving dramatic collaborations, traces the distinct writerly relationships that developed from such energies, and analyzes their rhetorical effects in individual plays.

Drawing on a range of documentary and literary sources as well as recent methodological advances in theater history, the book presents a sequence of case studies designed to accommodate both the larger cultural setting of the early modern theater and the localized, idiosyncratic factors influencing discrete literary productions. Each chapter chronicles the professional setting of a particular joint work and then investigates its rhetorical or linguistic traces in the resultant text. This approach allows Hirschfeld to locate specific links between modes of collaborative production and forms of dramatic representation and then explicate the literary and political implications of these connections.

Hirschfeld's case studies provide a fresh account of the institutionalization—the steady growth, organization, and incorporation—of the professional drama in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English cultural life. By attending to the changing shapes and stakes of joint enterprises, she shows that dramatists did not unconsciously absorb the practice of collaborative writing from general social discourses, but rather were aware of the material and symbolic significances of their work, meanings structured by the traditions of the developing professional theater and by the cultural pressures and anxieties attendant upon a new and often fragile institution.
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cover of Jonson's Moral Comedy

Jonson's Moral Comedy

Alan C. Dessen

Northwestern University Press, 1971

Alan C. Dessen's Johnson's Moral Comedy asks the question about the character of Ben Jonson’s comedies: were they sentimental or were they didactic and moralistic comedies? Dessen’s groundbreaking text remains significant for its contribution to early conversations about Jonsonian comedy, as well as its contribution to the practice of ethical criticism of literature. In his close readings of Jonson’s plays, he offers a model of engaging in such critical practice.
 
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cover of Journey to the West: A Play

Journey to the West

A Play

Mary Zimmerman

Northwestern University Press, 2011

This adaptation of a late sixteenth-century classic Chinese comic novel, Journey to the West, based on Anthony C. Yu’s translation, takes as its point of departure the true story of a seventh-century monk and his fabled pilgrimage from China to India in search of sacred texts. Mixing whimsy with spiritual weight, Zimmerman’s script combines comedy, adventure, and satire in a moving allegory of human perseverance.
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cover of Journey: The Gateway Theatre Building and Company, 1884-1965

Journey

The Gateway Theatre Building and Company, 1884-1965

Ian Brown

Intellect Books, 2013

The Gateway Theatre Company between 1953 and 1965 was a major force in developing modern Scottish theatre, moving in 1965 to become the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company. The Gateway Theatre and its company were therefore highly influential in the development of theatre in Scotland. They encouraged new writing and young performers to establish a vibrant contemporary tradition of Scottish theatre in a manner complementary to, and at times more important than, that of its sister theatre, the Citizens in Glasgow. Both theatre building and company are regarded with enormous affection and respect. This book provides authoritative brief histories of the building and the company incorporating much original research, an essay on the links between the theatre and the Church of Scotland (its landlord post second world war), and appreciations of two leading figures in the operation of the theatre and the company. These are Sadie Aitken, 'the Caledonian Lilian Bayliss' (a theatrical legend), and Robert Kemp (playwright and a key figure in post war theatre).
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cover of Juarez

Juarez

Edited, with an introduction by Paul J. Vanderwood; Tino T. Balio, Series Editor

University of Wisconsin Press, 1983

Juárez was Warner Brothers' cinematic attempt to answer the major international question of the 1930s: would democracy or dictatorship prevail? Eager to further the foreign policy objectives of its friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt and equally willing to add to its prestigious and profitable biography series, the stuido set a record high budget and assembled special film stock, extensive scholarly research, a loose time schedule, a renowned director, and a stellar cast that included Paul Muni, Brian Aherne, and Bette Davis. The film was meant to be an ideologically clear-cut statement against fascism. The ways in which this artistic propaganda backfired make Juárez a significant historical document for students of film, Latin American history, and U.S. foreign relations.

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cover of Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar

William Shakespeare

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2022

A fresh, contemporary translation of one of Shakespeare’s most dramatic and popular plays.

Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s famous Roman tragedy, chronicles the chaos leading up to the fateful murder of Caesar and the ensuing political fallout upon his death. Shishir Kurup’s translation updates Shakespeare’s language to allow more of the playwright’s ideas to come through; it opens the wonders and blazing relevance of the play’s rhetorical brilliance to the twenty-first century.
 
This translation of Julius Caesar was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.
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