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What makes a film "work," so that audiences come away from the viewing experience refreshed and even transformed in the way they understand themselves and the world around them? In The Death and Life of Drama, veteran screenwriter and screenwriting teacher Lance Lee tackles this question in a series of personal essays that thoroughly analyze drama's role in our society, as well as the elements that structure all drama, from the plays of ancient Athens to today's most popular movies.

Using examples from well-known classical era and recent films, Lee investigates how writers handle dramatic elements such as time, emotion, morality, and character growth to demonstrate why some films work while others do not. He seeks to define precisely what "action" is and how the writer and the viewer understand dramatic reality. He looks at various kinds of time in drama, explores dramatic context from Athens to the present, and examines the concept of comedy. Lee also proposes a novel "five act" structure for drama that takes account of the characters' past and future outside the "beginning, middle, and end" of the story. Deftly balancing philosophical issues and practical concerns, The Death and Life of Drama offers a rich understanding of the principles of successful dramatic writing for screenwriters and indeed everyone who enjoys movies and wants to know why some films have such enduring appeal for so many people.

Opera offers a rich space in which to think about problems of mimesis—how artworks imitate ideal forms, how humans imitate the things around us, and how words attempt to represent reality.

In this book, musicologist and cultural historian Sarah Collins shows how the strange, exhilarating, and uniquely self-conscious art form of opera opens itself to such contemporary, theoretical questions. The Deathly Pleasures of Form is especially concerned with the links between linguistic and bodily signification in opera through the genre’s use of figures of partial agency—disembodied voices, enchanted objects, puppets, mechanical devices. The book is structured around four emblematic figures (Faust, Don Juan, Papageno, and Hoffmann) who are paired with four objects of variable animacy (puppet, stone, silhouette, and mirror, respectively). Across these chapters, Collins develops an expanded notion of mimesis that illuminates opera’s material and mechanical investments, its filmic and other adaptations, its explicit negotiation between vocal utterance and bodily gesture, and the epistemological significance of opera’s excesses. Ultimately, Collins claims that opera performs a type of compromised agency that can offer new critical insight into the self-limiting nature of both freedom and representation.

Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.

Emilio Carballido was one of the most innovative and accomplished of Mexico's playwrights and one of the outstanding creators in the new Latin American theater. By his mid-forties he had already produced an impressive body of works in two very different veins. On the one hand, he mastered the techniques of the "well-made play." On the other, he developed a richly rewarding vein of fantasy, sometimes poetic, sometimes comic, sometimes macabre—and sometimes all three.

The plays in this volume are in the latter vein, ranging from surrealist farce in "The Intermediate Zone" to the grotesqueries of "The Time and the Place," from tragicomedy in "Theseus" to the dreamlike permutations of "The Golden Thread." But even at his most fantastic, Carballido never loses his remarkable gift for characterization: his peevish Minotaur, his raffish Nahual (were-jaguar) are wholly believable monsters.

The most authoritative, accessible, and poetic translations of the Greek Tragedies ever produced, now in one volume!
 
Drawn from the authoritative third editions of David Grene and Richmond Lattimore’s collections of the complete Greek tragedies, expertly updated by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most, this collection brings together seventeen of the greatest surviving plays of ancient Greece. Combining accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation, the masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have been rendered so compellingly in English that they remain the definitive translations. Each text has been carefully updated to bring it even closer to the ancient Greek original while retaining the vibrancy for which Chicago’s versions are famous.
 
Alongside the plays, this edition includes an introduction to the life and work of each tragedian; an introduction to each play offering essential information about its first production, plot, and reception through the centuries; and notes addressing textual uncertainties. Featuring lively translations by eminent classicists and authors including Anne Carson, Robert Fitzgerald, David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Oliver Taplin, Emily Townsend Vermeule, and Elizabeth Wyckoff, this is an indispensable anthology for any reader of the foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.
 

A play that explores the influence of pioneer drag artist Bert Savoy.

The Half of It is inspired by the life and work of Bert Savoy, a Vaudeville drag artist who was active in the 1910s and early 1920s. Savoy was at the height of his career when he was tragically killed by lightning in 1923. The play highlights the groundbreaking and inspirational work of this important, yet largely forgotten, pioneer. Characters include some of Savoy’s famous friends, such as Klondike Kate and Mae West (who many believe borrowed her sassy stage persona from Savoy’s drag act). The play explores themes of gender identity, gender expression, celebrity in the modern era, the LGBTQ community of the early twentieth century, and the origins of contemporary drag performance.

The first English-language translation of the 1968 activist play about inequality and access to education

In The Inheritor, surrealist imagery and experimental forms convey the radically different experience of two students, the Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor, as they prepare for a high-stakes exam. Revealing a world of privilege where “there is no such thing as luck,” the play features a beheaded knight, a talking record player, and a boisterous chorus of professors depicted as a flock of squawking birds.

Based on sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture, the play was collectively created by Théâtre de l’Aquarium, a company then composed entirely of students. It proved a powerful success when it premiered in May 1968 amid student and worker protests in Paris, and it continues to speak forcefully to education inequity on campuses across anglophone countries today.

In The Jacksonian, Beth Henley returns to the Southern Gothic storytelling that made her reputation with both critics and audiences. Set in a seedy motel in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, the play centers around Rosy, a troubled teenager, and Bill, her dentist father who has been living at the motel for several months as his wife, Susan, considers the disgrace of divorce. Fred, the motel bartender, and Eva, a waitress, are locked in a gruesome pact: he’ll marry her if she agrees to help him evade punishment for a hideous crime. But Bill, turning to nitrous oxide to ease the pain of his life collapsing around him, is a convenient target for Eva’s desperate desire for companionship. At the height of the violence associated with the civil rights movement, these characters gradually reveal the shameful secrets and psychological turmoil just beneath the surface of their insistent Southern gentility.

A play from the inimitable Kate Hamill, based on the true story of the groundbreaking Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi

During the seventeenth century, Italian artists strove to reshape the very image of humanity. Artemisia Gentileschi—the daughter of a painter—dreams of making her mark at a time when a woman is not thought capable of being an artist, let alone one of the greats. Just as her career begins to gain unexpected momentum, a series of devastating betrayals crack the foundation of her work—and her life. In electrifying verse and gorgeous artwork, The Light and The Dark depicts the deeply moving true story of a young woman who changed the very image of women in society . . . weaving a magnetic and empowering tapestry of ambition, rage, and resilience across the ages.

"What matters about a play is not the extent to which it is like any other play, but the way in which it is different," writes Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. "This is, I suggest, how the ancient audiences received the performances.... My purpose, then, in writing these essays is twofold: ... to devote enough space to the discussion of each play to allow its special tone and texture to emerge without hindrance and at leisure ... and to include in one collection analyses of plays so different from one another that the accent will come to rest on the variety of the tragic experience rather than on any one narrowly defined norm."

Greek tragedy is a vehicle for many different ideas and many different intentions. From the wealth of material that has come down to us the author has chosen six plays for analysis. He reminds us that the plays were written to be seen and heard, and only secondarily to be studied. The listeners expected each play to have a specific objective, and to exhibit its own mood. These the author attempts to recover for us, by listening to what each play, in its own right, has to say. His principal concern is with the tragic diction and the tragic ideas, designed to release certain massive responses in the large theater-going group of ancient Athens. In exploring the characters and the situations of the plays he has chosen, the author transports his reader to the world of fifth-century B.C. Greece, and establishes the relevance of that world to our own experience.

The essays are not introductory in nature. No space is given, for instance, to basic information about the playwrights, the history of Greek drama, or the special features of the Attic stage. Yet the book addresses itself to classicists and nonclassicists alike. The outgrowth of a series of lectures to nonspecialists, its particular appeal is to students of literature and the history of Western thought. Parallels are drawn between the writings of the philosophers and the tragedies, and attention is paid to certain popular Greek beliefs that colored the tragic formulations. Ultimately, however, the approach is not historical but critical; it is the author's intention to demonstrate the beauty and the craftsmanship of the plays under discussion.

William Goddard is here to help. He taught Shakespeare for decades as much-loved professor at Swarthmore College, and here he distills that experience into an accessible, engaging companion to the plays. Across two volumes, Goddard covers all of Shakespeare's plays and brings fresh insight to familiar characters, scenes, and verses. Goddard writes, "The greatest poetry has always depicted the world as a little citadel of nobility threatened by an immense barbarism, a flickering candle surrounded by infinite night" Shakespeare's candle still burns, and with Goddard's help we can all see it brighter than ever.

When the lines between reality and fantasy blur, what counts as ethical? Who decides?

The Nether, a daring examination of moral responsibility in virtual worlds, opens with a familiar interrogation scene given a technological twist. As Detective Morris, an online investigator, questions Mr. Sims about his activities in a role-playing realm so realistic it could be life, she finds herself on slippery ethical ground. Sims argues for the freedom to explore even the most deviant corners of our imagination. Morris holds that we cannot flesh out our malign fantasies without consequence. Their clash of wills leads to a consequence neither could have imagined. Suspenseful, ingeniously constructed, and fiercely intelligent, Haley’s play forces us to confront deeply disturbing questions about the boundaries of reality.

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

Marcie Frank’s study traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel’s narrative form and to the modern organization of literature. Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage.

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

With her trademark irreverent and witty twist on classic works, Zimmerman brings to life the story of Odysseus's ten-year journey

This dramatic adaptation of Homer's myth begins with a modern young woman who is struggling to understand Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey. A classical muse appears, and the young woman becomes the goddess Athena--a tireless advocate for Odysseus in his struggle to get home. Zimmerman's adaptation depicts his encounters with characters such as Circe, the Cyclops, Poseidon, Calypso, the Sirens, and others in new and exciting ways.