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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.

An updated edition of a key reference text by “the high priestess of improvisational theater”

A major force in the development of American theater, Viola Spolin devised pedagogical techniques that have influenced and inspired legions of actors, improvisers, and directors. Theater Games for Rehearsal: A Director's Handbook, first published in 1985, is a practical application of Spolin's famous method that guides directors and their companies step-by-step through all phases of the rehearsal period. 

In Theater Games for Rehearsal, Spolin shows in easy-to-follow detail how her techniques can be used for a variety of theater needs, from selecting performance material, casting, and building a harmonious company to warming up actors, creating stage space, and overcoming opening-night jitters. This new edition, edited by Carol Bleackley Sills, incorporates Spolin's wished-for updates: four important exercises have been added, and instructions presenting her improvisational approach have been clarified throughout. Sidecoaching instructions and game evaluations are boxed and highlighted for on-the-spot reading by the director during rehearsal. 

With these additions and improvements, Theater Games for Rehearsal: A Director's Handbook brings Spolin's ideas to a new generation with greater accessibility and excitement. Featuring a new foreword by renowned film director Rob Reiner, the updated edition is mandatory for any theater bookshelf. 

In this ground-breaking work, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics turns to the major figure in English literature, William Shakespeare, and proposes a dramatic new reading of nearly all his plays and poems. The key to A Theater of Envy is Girard's novel reinterpretation of "mimesis." For Girard, people desire objects not for their intrinsic value, but because they are desired by someone else - we mime or imitate their desires. This envy - or "mimetic desire" - he sees as one of the foundations of the human condition.

Bringing such proocative and iconoclastic insights to bear on Shakespeare, Girard reveals the previously overlooked coherence of problem plays like Troilus and Cressida, and makes a convincing argument for elevating A Midsummer Night's Dream from the status of a chaotic comedy to a masterpiece. The book abounds with novel and provocative interpretations: Shakespeare becomes "a prophet of modern advertising," and the threat of nuclear disaster is read in the light of Hamlet. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is a brief, but brilliant aside in which an entirely new perspective is brought to the chapter on Joyce's Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus gives a lecture on Shakespeare. In Girard's view only Joyce, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century novelists, comes close to understanding the greatest of Renaissance playwrights.

Throughout this impressively sustained reading of Shakespeare, Girard's prose is sophisticated, but contemporary, and accessible to the general reader.

Explores the profound influence of multilingual dictionaries, dialogues, and grammars on English Renaissance playwrights

In Theaters of Translation, Andrew S. Keener offers a fascinating account of the ways that plays by Thomas Kyd, Mary Sidney Herbert, Ben Jonson, and their fellow English contemporaries were shaped by and part of a multilingual Europe where dictionaries, grammars, and language-learning materials circulated widely. He proposes a fresh, multilingual approach to English Renaissance drama that challenges the histories of early modern European languages as sites of national and linguistic cohesion.

Covering the period between 1570 and 1640, when England’s drama and the English language itself were evolving, Keener uses the term “cosmopolitan vernaculars” to examine how nonclassical European languages modeled transnational forms of belonging for playgoers, readers, and authors in Renaissance England. Combining recent contributions to cosmopolitan theory and transnational studies of early modern literature and culture, Keener highlights both the ways in which cosmopolitanism manifests through Europe’s vernacular languages—in print and performance—and the ways languages themselves can exhibit cosmopolitanism for those who encounter them on the page or on the stage.

Theaters of Translation opens up new transnational interpretations of English Renaissance plays and casts fresh light on historical anecdotes, such as Jonson inscribing a copy of Pietro Aretino’s scandalous Italian dialogues or Shakespeare’s First Folio being advertised for sale in Germany before its London publication. It offers much of interest to readers and scholars of Renaissance Europe, early modern drama, and the development of national European languages.

Exploring the dynamic intersections of performance and place.

At a time when so many options exist for access to theatrical entertainments, it is no surprise that theatre practitioners and scholars are often preoccupied with the role of the audience. While space undoubtedly impacts the rehearsal and production processes, its greater significance seems to rest in the impact a specific location has on the audience.
 
This volume provides diverse viewpoints on theatre and space, as well as its relationship to the audience. Sebastian Trainor and Samuel T. Shanks offer contemporary perspectives on two ancient theatre spaces, while Lisa Marie Bowler describes the Globe Theatre, a replica of the original, as embodying a kind of absence despite its rich link to the past. Focusing on distinctly different periods and settings, both Andrew Gibb and Christine Woodworth describe a politics of space in which specific players gain prestige and power. Chase Bringardner identifies the audience as playing an important role in creating a space for parody in a historic Nashville venue, while Arnab Banerji describes an exhausting process for members of the Bengali group theatre who must continually move from space to space. Finally, Alicia Corts discusses virtual performance spaces and the degree to which participants are able to control their online identities within virtual performances. Bookending these eight essays are Marvin Carlson’s keynote presentation “Whose Space Is It Anyway?” and his closing remarks for the symposium, both of which allude to, and richly explicate, the ultimate arbiters of theatrical space: the audience.
 

Illustrates how theatre’s engagement with politics changes over time

For the thirtieth volume of Theatre Symposium, the editors return to a topic first proposed over twenty years ago in volume 9 (theatre and politics in the twentieth century), reimaged for a broader, more comprehensive time frame. In this volume on theater and politics, scholars explore what constitutes the political, how the political is performed, and how theatre engages with politics over time, drawing on the following framing questions: What is the historical and ongoing role of theatre in framing our ideas and conversations about politics? How do politics and theatre engage one another in an increasingly mediated landscape? From theatrical analysis of the political arena to political analysis of the theatrical stage, discussions of theatre and politics can challenge ethical, theoretical, and artistic considerations of our world.

The current moment presents a compelling opportunity to revisit, revise, and reengage. Certainly, in the twenty-one volumes since volume 9, the political landscape both nationally and internationally has shifted dramatically. The past two years specifically have seen an increase in the already prevalent presence of the political in our daily discourse. The COVID-19 global pandemic and ongoing racial reckonings have further unmoored many systems and structures, requiring action and change. Rather than a moment of pause or passivity, pandemic times have seen an increase in political activity and political discourse on the local, national, and global levels. Within the theatre and performance communities, these calls to action have resulted in movements like #weseeyouWAT and other calls to break down old systems and create new ones, to privilege access for those of the global majority, and to explicitly demand advocacy and activism. Organizations like the Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) itself crafted new ethos statements and engaged in the necessary work of boldly foregrounding equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility at the center of all its efforts.

The editors and contributors to this volume respond to the immediacy of this moment and the clarion call for change. From Shakespeare to new productions like Alabama Love Stories, presented at Auburn University, contributors grapple with a range of examples, contemporary and historical, and argue with renewed urgency for the importance of intentionally interrogating the interplay of performance and politics. The essays in this volume demonstrate that theatre and performance cannot rise to this moment or even begin to address it without doing that substantial work to clean its own house and create accessible new spaces.

Contributors
Chase Bringardner / Tessa Carr / Lily Climenhaga / Abena Foreman-Trice / Emma Givens / TK Manwill / Boomie Pederson / Royal Shirée / Teresa Simone / Tony Tambasco / Jonathon W. Taylor / Justice von Maur / Patricia Ybarra

 

A new volume of the longstanding theatre journal, documenting conversations that traverse disciplinary boundaries

Theater Symposium, Volume 32 delves into the collaborative dynamics and ritualistic exchanges within performance during the collective resurgence into a hopeful post-COVID world. This volume’s contributors embark on a journey through the vibrant realm of material performance, with puppetry at the forefront, guiding readers into an expansive landscape of object performance styles and structures. As they navigate this terrain, they pose critical questions that unravel the complexities of object performance analysis and its impact on audiences. Bringing together perspectives from designers, creators, and performers, this volume explores how object performances serve as a medium to engage with the world, fostering synchrony and positive outcomes across a diverse array of artistic practices. Theater Symposium, Volume 32 invites readers to expand their understanding of collaborative practices and the object world, whether it be through the lens of labor or entertainment.

Contributors
Ashley Bellet / Francesca Marie Chilcote / Elisabeth Hostetter / Rebecca Johnson / Kyla Kazuschyk / Keith Byron Kirk / Jesse Njus / Claudia Orenstein / Paulette Richards / Dory Sibley / Echo Sunyata Sibley / Skye Strauss

When Theatre for Youth: Twelve Plays with Mature Themes was published in 1986, it met a need for plays that could help young people deal with some of the more difficult realities of life. Responding to the sweeping changes in society over the succeeding thirty years, Coleman A. Jennings and Gretta Berghammer have assembled a new collection of plays that reflects not only on themes such as aging, death and dying, friendship, courage, conformity, maturation, sexuality, and struggles with moral judgment but also on gender identity, poverty, diversity, and discrimination.

Theatre for Youth II: More Plays with Mature Themes presents twelve plays, nine of them new to this anthology, that offer a rich variety of original stories (The Tomato Plant Girl, The Arkansaw Bear, Super Cowgirl and Mighty Miracle), compelling adaptations (The Afternoon of the Elves, Broken Hearts, Courage!), historical drama (Mother Hicks, Johnny Tremain), diverse themes (La Ofrenda, The Transition of Doodle Pequeño), friendship (The Selfish Giant), and future societies (With Two Wings). As these plays explore some of the most challenging themes for today’s youth, including the difficulties of single parenthood, divorce, race relations, sexuality, and gender discrimination, they share messages fundamental to us all: open your imagination and dare to dream; embrace life; honor your personal passion, beliefs, and creativity; take a risk; and love with all your heart.

Since the beginning of the theatre-for-youth movement in the United States, the majority of plays written for children have been fairy tales. By the 1960s, however, encouraged by changes in social attitudes toward children, playwrights began to respond to a growing tendency on the parts of both parents and teachers to have children face, rather than avoid, the more difficult truths of existence. Thus children's dramatic literature was opened to new subjects, themes and characters previously considered unsuitable for the young audience.

Theatre for Youth seeks to identify and illustrate this trend by examining twelve plays that deal with mature themes: aging, death and dying, conformity, sexuality, divorce, moral culpability. The plays have been chosen not only for their mature content, but also for their professional integrity, the delicacy with which they handle their subject matter, and their respect for their intended audience.

A foreword by Jed H. Davis, an introduction and summary paragraphs for each play by Jennings and Berghammer, and a lengthy annotated list of suggested plays for further reading or viewing make this volume extremely useful both for directors of children's theatre and for teachers.

Investigating late imperial Russian and early Soviet modernism’s reinvention of the actor

In this wide-ranging study, Alisa Ballard Lin argues that Russian theatrical theory and practice contributed to a broad pre- and postrevolutionary discourse about the mind, profoundly reshaping concepts of consciousness, perception, identity, and the constitution of the subject. Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism examines efforts in Russian theater—from around the turn of the century through the mid-1930s—to stimulate, train, imagine, and ultimately understand the actor’s, as well as the spectator’s, mind. Discussing key figures of the period, including Nikolai Evreinov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Alexander Tairov, Lin identifies an underappreciated dimension of humanism within Russian modernism: a humanism that resisted the pressures of an increasingly technologized, industrialized, and politicized modernity that challenged the place of the human within it.

Examines the discourses around the role of bloodlines and kinship in the social hierarchies of early modern Europe

“Blood is thicker than water,” goes the old proverb. But do common bloodlines in fact demand special duties or prescribe affections? Thicker than Water examines the roots of this belief by studying the omnipresent discourse of bloodlines and kindred relations in the literature of early modern Europe.

Early modern discourses concerning kinship promoted the idea that similar bloodlines dictated greater love or affinity, stabilizing the boundaries of families and social classes, as well as the categories of ethnicity and race. Literary representations of romantic relationships were instrumental in such conceptions, and Lauren Weindling examines how drama from England, France, and Italy tests these assumptions about blood and love, exposing their underlying political function. Among the key texts that Weindling studies are Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet¸ Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, Giambattista della Porta’s La Sorella and its English analog, Thomas Middleton’s No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s, John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and Machiavelli’s La Mandragola.

Each of these plays offers an extreme limit case for early modern notions of belonging and exclusion, through plots of love, courtship, and marriage, including blood feuds and incest. Moreover, they feature the voices of marginalized groups, unprivileged by these metrics and ideologies, and thus offer significant counterpoints to this bloody worldview.
While most critical studies of blood onstage pertain to matters of guilt or violence, Thicker Than Water examines the work that blood does unseen in arbitrating social and emotional connections between persons, and thus underwriting our deepest forms of social organization.
 

Drawing on decades of research and interviews with Wright’s family and Wright scholars, Bruce Allen Dick uncovers the theatrical influence on Wright’s oeuvre--from his 1930s boxing journalism to his unpublished one-acts on returning Black GIs in WWII to his unproduced pageant honoring Vladimir Lenin. Wright maintained rewarding associations with playwrights, writers, and actors such as Langston Hughes, Theodore Ward, Paul Robeson, and Lillian Hellman, and took particular inspiration from French literary figures like Jean-Paul Sartre. Dick’s analysis also illuminates Wright’s direct involvement with theater and film, including the performative aspects of his travel writings; the Orson Welles-directed Native Son on Broadway; his acting debut in Native Son’s first film version; and his play “Daddy Goodness,” a satire of religious charlatans like Father Divine, in the 1930s.

Bold and original, Thunder on the Stage offers a groundbreaking reinterpretation of a major American writer.

Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape?, Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light, by esteemed Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, is a monologue delivered by the “she” in Beckett’s play. This unnamed female similarly recalls other significant women protagonists in Handke’s own work such as The Left-handed Woman. Handke prefaces the monologue in Till Day You Do PartOr a Question of Light with a description of two stone figures. While the male figure remains “as dead and gone as anyone can,” the female bursts into life, and her monologue gradually focuses on Krapp’s use of pauses and language to dominate the other characters in the Beckett play. Ultimately, however, her complaints and critique of Krapp become a declaration of her love for Krapp or at least an affirmation of their attachment, as the two of them are ultimately bound together, perhaps even inseparable. 

Till Day You Do Part Or a Question of Light  is Handke at his best, evidencing the great skill, psychological acumen, and vision for which his work has been celebrated.