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An authoritative guide to modelmaking for theater

This third edition of noted scenographer Darwin Reid Payne’s landmark text builds upon Payne’s theories and exercises to provide a modern exploration of the practice of theatrical modelmaking. With chapters on traditional and contemporary materials, tools, and techniques, the book serves as a foundational guide to understanding the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of scenographic modelmaking, making it essential for the beginner, generalist, and professional design practitioner.

The volume begins with a brief history of the scenographic model and explores how modelmaking has adapted to changes in materials, technology, and commercial influences over time. It details setting up a safe, productive model-building studio before introducing the types and purposes of various scenographic models. It then instructs the reader in constructing common model elements and accessories. Later chapters explore how the models reveal stage space and create mood and atmosphere through tonal shading and lighting; discuss the use of found objects, collage techniques, and projection models in scenic design; and delve into 3D printing and computer routering. The final chapter provides information on various aspects of photography and image sharing related to design and production communication.

This comprehensive text provides information not just from theater but also from other modeling disciplines and sources, including architecture, film, dioramas, dollhouse modeling, and model railroading. A useful resource for high school, community college, university, and community theater enthusiasts, it is an excellent reference book for theater designers throughout the country.

Musicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion. Rogers shows how the musical’s episodes of burlesque and minstrelsy model the kinds of radical relationships that the genre works to create across the different bodies of its performers, spectators, and creators every time the musical bursts into song. These radical relationships—borne of the musical’s obsessions with “bad” performances of gender and race—are the root of the genre’s progressive play with identity, and thus the source of its subcultural power. However, this leads to an ethical dilemma: Are the musical’s progressive politics thus rooted in its embrace of regressive entertainments like burlesque and minstrelsy?

The Song Is You shows how musicals return again and again to this question, and grapple with a guilt that its joyous pleasures are based on exploiting the laboring bodies of its performers. Rogers argues that the discourse of “integration”—which claims that songs should advance the plot—has functioned to deny the radical work that the musical undertakes every time it transitions into song and dance. Looking at musicals from The Black Crook to Hamilton, Rogers confronts the gendered and racial dynamics that have always under-girded the genre, and asks how we move forward.

During the 1960s, the SNCC Freedom Singers, The Living Theatre, the Diggers, the Art Workers Coalition, and the Guerrilla Art Action Group fused art and politics by staging unexpected and uninvited performances in public spaces. Through their activism and the response it provoked, art, theater, and politics began to converge and assume a new visibility in everyday life. While their specific political visions varied, these groups shared the impulse to stage performances and actions publicly—"in the streets"—eschewing museums, theaters, and other conventional halls of culture. Bradford D. Martin offers detailed portraits of each of these groups and examines why they embraced public performance as a vehicle to express and advance their politics. 

At a time when the New Left and the counterculture were on the rise, these artists reflected the decade's political and cultural radicalism and helped to define a new aesthetic. Civil rights activists mobilized singing in the struggle for desegregation, introducing a vibrant musical form into the public space. The Living Theatre culminated an arduous quest to mesh artistic and political goals, leading audiences from theaters into the streets to begin the “beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution.” The Diggers playfully engaged San Francisco's counterculture in politics with their carnivalesque public actions. The Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Action Art Group sought to disrupt the conventional art world, mounting protests in and around New York City museums.

By questioning the values and assumptions that separated art from politics, these groups not only established public performance as a legitimate aesthetic but also provided a new creative vocabulary for future generations of artists. Their continued involvement with the women's liberation movement, rural communes, and political street theater into the 1970s and beyond challenges the popular myth that activists disengaged from politics after the 1960s.

The relationship between actors and spectators has been of perennial interest to playwrights. The Roman playwright Plautus (ca. 200 BCE) was particularly adept at manipulating this relationship. Plautus allowed his actors to acknowledge freely the illusion in which they were taking part, to elicit laughter through humorous asides and monologues, and simultaneously to flatter and tease the spectators.

These metatheatrical techniques are the focus of Timothy J. Moore's innovative study of the comedies of Plautus. The first part of the book examines Plautus' techniques in detail, while the second part explores how he used them in the plays Pseudolus, Amphitruo, Curculio, Truculentus, Casina, and Captivi. Moore shows that Plautus employed these dramatic devices not only to entertain his audience but also to satirize aspects of Roman society, such as shady business practices and extravagant spending on prostitutes, and to challenge his spectators' preconceptions about such issues as marriage and slavery. These findings forge new links between Roman comedy and the social and historical context of its performance.

Examines how the politics of the theater can illuminate the theatricality of politics

Theatricality is often dismissed as a distraction from “real” politics, as when cynical political gestures are derided as “pure theater” or “only theater.” But the artists and theater companies discussed in this book, including Back to Back Theatre, Tim Crouch, Rabih Mroué, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Christoph Schlingensief, take a different approach. Theron Schmidt argues that they represent a “theatricalist turn” that explores and tests the conditions of the theater itself. Across diverse contexts of political engagement, ranging from disability rights to representations of violence, these theatrical conditions are interconnected with political struggles, such as those over who is seen and heard, how labor is valued, and what counts as “political” in the first place. In a so-called post-political era, The Theatricalists argues that an examination of theater’s internal politics can expand our understanding of the theatricality of politics more broadly.

A stand-alone edition of Euripides’s The Trojan Women, taken from Chicago’s renowned translations of the Greek tragedies.

Drawn from the authoritative third edition of the University of Chicago Press’s Complete Greek Tragedies series, this stand-alone edition presents Richmond Lattimore’s celebrated translation of a play with an antiwar message that continues to inspire and resonate with readers today. The Trojan Women takes place following the conquest of Troy and tells the story of its sole survivors—all women—who have been enslaved by the Greeks. Mourning their families and their fate, they grapple with the trauma they have experienced and contemplate a future far from home. 

The aftermath of the Trojan War, while extensively depicted in ancient Greek epic, lyric poetry, and art, is rendered especially powerful through the hands of Euripides. An introduction by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most provides essential contextual information about the play’s first production, plot, and reception in antiquity.

The Visual Life of Romantic Theater examines the dynamism and vibrancy of stage spectacle and its impact in an era of momentous social upheaval and aesthetic change. Situating theatrical production as key to understanding visuality ca. 1780-1830, this book places the stage front and center in Romantic scholarship—a field in a period long defined by its focus on poetry—by reenvisioning traditional approaches to artistic and social production. How, it asks, did dramaturgy and stagecraft influence aesthetic and sociopolitical concerns? How does a focus on visuality expand our understanding of the historical experience of theatergoing? In what ways did stage performance converge with visual culture beyond the theater? How did extra-theatrical genres engage with theatrical sight and spectacle? Finally, how does a focus on dramatic vision change the way we conceive of Romanticism itself? The volume’s essays by emerging and established scholars provide exciting and suggestive answers to these questions, along with a more capacious conception of Romantic theater as a locus of visual culture that reached well beyond playhouse walls.

The Vital Lie: Reality and Illusion in Modern Drama is a sweeping inquiry into the stories people tell themselves in order to endure, survive, and belong. Moving from Ibsen and Strindberg to Beckett, Pinter, and beyond, Anthony S. Abbott traces the uneasy traffic between actuality and self-invention that animates modern theater. Rather than offering a simple survey, he uncovers a recurring dramatic predicament: the cognitive dissonance that afflict people when the beliefs they hold about themselves collide with reality.

Anthony S. Abbott writes with the erudite observation of a critic and the curiosity of a participant. His book explores illusion, meaning, and human resilience, a perspective that lends unusual urgency to its readings of canonical playwrights. Abbott's scholarship is expansive without becoming academic in the pejorative sense; his arguments remain animated by large questions about purpose, dignity, and the imaginative structures that sustain ordinary lives. 

Ideal for theater devotees, literary historians, students of modernism, philosophy-minded readers, directors, dramaturgs, and anyone fascinated by self-deception, mythmaking, and identity. Admirers of intellectual biography, cultural criticism, existential inquiry, and ambitious cross-author interpretation will find this volume especially rewarding. Those who relish fresh angles on familiar classics will discover a study that is probing, elegant, and unexpectedly memorable.

A theorization of the representational juxtapositions, frictions, and connections between Black people and other non-white people in early modern European theatre.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, European drama was an important tool for whiteness to imagine itself at the top of an aspirational structure of power relations. Indeed, that structure could only be aspirational at a time when Europeans were profoundly divided along easily racializable religious and ethnic lines, and when their sovereignty was threatened by the Ottoman empire. It was to strengthen this emerging consciousness of racial whiteness, Noémie Ndiaye argues, that European drama engaged in a form of racial triangulation, fitting Muslim, Jewish, Indigenous, Romani, and Asian characters into a spurious black/white racial binary.

Focusing on English, Spanish, and French drama from 1580 to 1715, The Whiteness Between Us shows how plays became a crucial tool to position not only black people but any non-white community in the new racial architecture that white supremacy sought to build. Ndiaye reveals the stage of this era as a space for wish fulfillment, enabling participants to imagine and work towards a whiter future.

The early modern playbooks of racial triangulation that Ndiaye brings to light can and have been reactivated for white supremacist purposes in our own day and age. Partly in response to the contemporary threat of white nationalism, scholars and students have sought to unearth the early modern roots of racial whiteness and white supremacy. Ndiaye’s book participates in this wave of interest, offering several innovations, including its capacious transnational claims.

This original and insightful study explores the points at which theater and propaganda meet. Defining propaganda as a form of "activated ideology," George H. Szanto discusses the distortion of information that occurs in dramatic literature in its stage, film, and television forms.

Szanto analyzes the nature of "integration propaganda," which is designed to render the audience passive and to encourage the acceptance of the status quo, as opposed to "agitation propaganda," which aims to inspire the audience to action. In Szanto's view, most popular western theater is saturated, though usually not intentionally, with integration propaganda. The overall purpose of Theater and Propaganda is twofold: to analyze the nature of integration propaganda so that it becomes visible to western readers as a tool of the dominant class in society, and to examine the manner by which unself-conscious propagandistic methods have saturated dramatic presentation.

In discussing the importance of propaganda within and between technological states, the author examines the seminal work of Jacques Ellul. In this chapter he analyzes the function of integration propaganda in a relatively stable society. The following chapter defines and analyzes three theaters (in the sense of performance) of propaganda: the theater of agitation propaganda, of integration propaganda, and of dialectical propaganda. In this section he uses examples from a variety of plays, movies, and television commercials. In succeeding chapters Szanto discusses the role of integration propaganda in the medieval Wakefield mystery plays and the plays of Samuel Beckett. The appendix, "Contradiction and Demystification," provides a general model that suggests ways of breaking down and overcoming the propagandistic intentions of an artwork and discusses theater's possible role in this breakdown.