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At last, for those who adapt literature into scripts, a how-to book that illuminates the process of creating a stageworthy play. Page to Stage describes the essential steps for constructing adaptations for any theatrical venue, from the college classroom to a professionally produced production. Acclaimed director Vincent Murphy offers students in theater, literary studies, and creative writing a clear and easy-to-use guidebook on adaptation. Its step-by-step process will be valuable to professional theater artists as well, and for script writers in any medium. Murphy defines six essential building blocks and strategies for a successful adaptation, including theme, dialogue, character, imagery, storyline, and action. Exercises at the end of each chapter lead readers through the transformation process, from choosing their material to creating their own adaptations. The book provides case studies of successful adaptations, including The Grapes of Wrath (adaptation by Frank Galati) and the author's own adaptations of stories by Samuel Beckett and John Barth. Also included is practical information on building collaborative relationships, acquiring rights, and getting your adaptation produced.

An insight into the struggles of paid domestic workers in Latin America through an exploration of films, texts, and digital media produced since the 1980s in collaboration with them or inspired by their experiences.

Paid domestic work in Latin America is often undervalued, underpaid, and underregulated. Exploring a wave of Latin American cultural texts since the 1980s that draw on the personal experiences of paid domestic work or intimate ties to domestic employees, Paid to Care offers insights into the struggles domestic workers face through an analysis of literary testimonials, documentary and fiction films, and works of digital media.

From domestic workers’ experiences of unionization in the 1980s to calls for their rights to be respected today, the cultural texts analyzed in Paid to Care provide additional insight into public debates about paid domestic work. Rachel Randall examines work made in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. The most recent of these texts respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, which put many domestic workers’ health and livelihoods at risk. Engaging with the legal histories of domestic work in multiple distinct national contexts, Randall demonstrates how the legacy of colonialism and slavery shapes the profession even today. Focusing on personal or coproduced cultural representations of domestic workers, Paid to Care explores complex ethical issues relating to consent, mediation, and appropriation.

Palestinian cinema arose during the political cinema movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet it was unique as an institutionalized, though modest, film effort within the national liberation campaign of a stateless people. Filmmakers working within the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and through other channels filmed the revolution as it unfolded, including the Israeli bombings of Palestinian refugee camps, the Jordanian and Lebanese civil wars, and Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, attempting to create a cinematic language consonant with the revolution and its needs. They experimented with form both to make effective use of limited material and to process violent events and loss as a means of sustaining active engagement in the Palestinian political project.

Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution presents an in-depth study of films made between 1968 and 1982, the filmmakers and their practices, the political and cultural contexts in which the films were created and seen, and their afterlives among Palestinian refugees and young filmmakers in the twenty-first century. Nadia Yaqub discusses how early Palestinian cinema operated within emerging public-sector cinema industries in the Arab world, as well as through coproductions and solidarity networks. Her findings aid in understanding the development of alternative cinema in the Arab world. Yaqub also demonstrates that Palestinian filmmaking, as a cinema movement created and sustained under conditions of extraordinary precarity, offers important lessons on the nature and possibilities of political filmmaking more generally.

Passionate Amateurs tells a new story about modern theater: the story of a romantic attachment to theater’s potential to produce surprising experiences of human community. It begins with one of the first great plays of modern European theater—Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in Moscow—and then crosses the 20th and 21st centuries to look at how its story plays out in Weimar Republic Berlin, in the Paris of the 1960s, and in a spectrum of contemporary performance in Europe and the United States. This is a work of historical materialist theater scholarship, which combines a materialism grounded in a socialist tradition of cultural studies with some of the insights developed in recent years by theorists of affect, and addresses some fundamental questions about the social function and political potential of theater within modern capitalism. Passionate Amateurs argues that theater in modern capitalism can help us think afresh about notions of work, time, and freedom. Its title concept is a theoretical and historical figure, someone whose work in theater is undertaken within capitalism, but motivated by a love that desires something different. In addition to its theoretical originality, it offers a significant new reading of a major Chekhov play, the most sustained scholarly engagement to date with Benjamin’s “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre,” the first major consideration of Godard’s La chinoise as a “theatrical” work, and the first chapter-length discussion of the work of The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, an American company rapidly gaining a profile in the European theater scene.

Passionate Amateurs contributes to the development of theater and performance studies in a way that moves beyond debates over the differences between theater and performance in order to tell a powerful, historically grounded story about what theater and performance are for in the modern world.

An exploration of the surrealist artists, musicians, and performers who forged a unique experimental arts community in Alabama

Pataphysics and Surrealism in Alabama: A Cultural History is the first book to uncover a remarkable chapter in American experimental art, music, dance and writing, tracing the activities of a creative group known as Raudelunas, the music collective Transcendprovisation, and the surrealist association initially called Glass Veal: a series of interrelated artistic and cultural movements that originated in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research and firsthand accounts, including interviews with twenty-six participants in these groups, sound recordings, publications, and other primary sources, Steven Harris traces the history of a vibrant creative community that began when three University of Alabama students started improvising music together and encouraged others to join them.

From these sessions emerged a dynamic network of performers and artists whose work challenged conventional boundaries between disciplines. Inspired by musical improvisation, surrealism, and pataphysics, participants embraced spontaneity and absurdity as they developed a positive expression of creativity that was both uniquely Southern and sharply distinctive from the dominant culture that surrounded them.

Harris situates these movements within broader histories of Alabama, Dada, pataphysics, surrealism, and improvised music and dance while charting their lasting influence on the artists who participated in them. Featuring a timeline of major events, biographies of key members, and an anthology of representative writings, Pataphysics and Surrealism in Alabama is an essential contribution to the history of American experimental culture.
 

Actor and singer Paul Robeson's performances in Othello, Show Boat, and The Emperor Jones made him famous, but his midcentury appearances in support of causes ranging from labor and civil rights to antilynching and American warmongering made him notorious. When Robeson announced at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference that it was "unthinkable" for blacks to go to war against the Soviet Union, the mainstream American press declared him insane. 
 
Notions of Communism, blackness, and insanity were interchangeably deployed during the Cold War to discount activism such as Robeson's, just a part of an array of social and cultural practices that author Tony Perucci calls the Cold War performance complex. Focusing on two key Robeson performances---the concerts in Peekskill, New York, in 1949 and his appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956---Perucci demonstrates how these performances and the government's response to them are central to understanding the history of Cold War culture in the United States. His book provides a transformative new perspective on how the struggle over the politics of performance in the 1950s was also a domestic struggle over freedom and equality. The book closely examines both of these performance events as well as artifacts from Cold War culture---including congressional documents, FBI files, foreign policy papers, the popular literature on mental illness, and government propaganda films---to study the operation of power and activism in American Cold War culture.

Marvin D'Lugo offers a concise, informed, and insightful commentary on a preeminent force in modern cinema. D'Lugo follows Almodóvar's career chronologically, tracing the director's works and their increasing complexity in terms of theme and the Spanish film tradition. Drawing on a wide range of critical sources, D'Lugo explores Almodóvar's use of melodrama and Hollywood genre film, his self-invention as a filmmaker, and his on-screen sexual politics. D'Lugo also discusses what he calls "geocultural positioning," that is, Almodóvar's paradoxical ability to use his marginal positions—in terms of his class, geographical origin, and identity—to develop an expressive language that is emotionally recognizable by audiences worldwide. Two fascinating interviews with the director round out the volume.

An exciting consideration of an arthouse giant, Pedro Almodóvar mixes original interpretations into an analysis sure to reward film students and specialists alike.

The metaphor “beyond the pale” refers to something that’s unacceptable and, as James M. Harding argues in this book, “almost always refers to something—an activity, an action, or an act—that is performed.” In this book, Harding recalls that historically the pale marked contested political boundaries and that what lay beyond the pale was considered to be a dangerous frontier. Siding with seemingly excessive and unreasonable acts and with the artists and activists who produce them, Harding brings together a series of ideas and performances that operate beyond the pale and asks readers to examine them on their own terms.

Drawing on political science, critical theory, and philosophy, Harding investigates instances of self-immolation, life-threatening journeys across deserts and seas, radical political hoaxes, extreme speech acts, and anti-police activism. The book’s five chapters consist of a series of meditations, each with an easily identifiable scholarly logic and clear argument, though the connections between the meditations are left up to the reader. Together these meditations urge readers to understand that “beyond the pale” acts are frequently the product of a sense of urgency that preempts the dictates of accepted reason, conventional logic, and safety.

Performing America provides fresh perspectives on the development of visions of both America and "America"--that is, the actual community and the constructed concept--on a variety of theatrical stages. It explores the role of theater in the construction of American identity, highlighting the tension between the desire to categorize American identity and the realization that such categorical uniformity may neither be desirable nor possible. The topics covered include the links between politics and the stage during the Federalist period, the appropriation of "Indian" artifacts, an exploration of early gender roles, and the metaphorical connections between the theater and western expansion. Other essays treat vaudeville's artistically colonized cultures; Chautauqua's attempt to homogenize culture and commercialize American ideals; W. E. B. Du Bois's pageant, The Star of Ethiopia, as a strategy for constructing "African-American" as "Other" in an attempt to promote a vision of black nationalism; and how theater was used to help immigrants form a new sense of community while joining the resident culture.The collection then turns to questions of how various ethnic minorities through their recent theatrical work have struggled to argue their identities, especially in relation to the dominant white culture. Two final essays offer critiques of contrasting aspects of the American male. Throughout, the collection addresses questions of marginality and community, exclusion and inclusion, colonialism and imperialism, heterogeneity and homogeneity, conflict and negotiation, repression and opportunity, failure and success, and, above all, the relationship of American stages at large. It will appeal to readers of a wide range of disciplines including history, American culture, gender studies, and theater studies.

Offering a nuanced understanding of the performing arts’ relationship to politics

Through careful readings of key political performances in Chile's transition from military dictatorship to neoliberal democracy, Jennifer Joan Thompson examines how the production and aesthetics of theater are intertwined in processes of democratization, enactments of citizenship, and the development of cultural policy. Performing Citizenship in Postdictatorship Chile: Cultural Policy and the Making of Political Dramaturgies reveals how artists performed changing models of democratic citizenship. Thompson traces the ways artists confronted and resisted the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, how they then reimagined the body politic during the early transitional period and challenged official constructions of history and memory as the transition to democracy progressed, how they critiqued Chile’s neoliberal economic model and its violence, and, finally, how they have made claims for feminist and Indigenous citizen subjectivities throughout Chile’s current social crisis. Incorporating archival and ethnographic research alongside readings of theatrical and political performances, this study offers a nuanced understanding of the performing arts’ relationship to politics, one that accounts for the ways artists and the state collaborate in the production of the political imagination.