The fat female body is a unique construction in American culture that has been understood in various ways during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Analyzing post-WWII stage and screen performances, Mobley argues that the fat actress's body signals myriad cultural assumptions and suggests new ways of reading the body in performance.

By examining four playwrights - George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eugene Ionesco - Politics and Theatre in Twentieth-Century Europe looks at how political theatre has unraveled in the modern era due to the 'art of separation, ' wherein political concerns have been removed from the realm of theatre. When political theorists often discuss theatre, they do so mainly within the confines of ancient Greek playwrights, overlooking the salient and meaningful political discourse within more contemporary literature. Focusing squarely on the political elements of Shaw, Brecht, Sarte, and Ionesco, Morgan reintroduces political discourse into discussions of theatre - linking playwright to political philosopher, and their literature to the greater field of political discourse.

This annual chronicle of American theatre features a collection of essays and articles by noted theatre critics and writers that celebrates the past season, and its ten best plays. In addition, "The Best Plays Theatre Yearbook" also features a stunning array of facts and figures about everything you ever wanted to know about Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off Broadway shows for the year - all accompanied by 100 black and white photographs. This comprehensive volume is a must-have for anyone who loves American theatre - from smash musicals to one-man shows.

Este libro de coleccion que tiene usted en sus manos, es un tesoro. En sus paginas se hallan impresas las vivencias y experiencias de personas que de una manera u otra, estuvieron relacionadas con el Teatro Million Dollar. Este recinto, que fue fundado por el senor Sid Grauman en 1918, nacio como una sala cinematografica y eventos teatrales en idioma ingles. Con motivo del estallamiento de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, este teatro se mantuvo cerrado entre los anos 1941 y 1945. Al termino de aquella conflagracion belica, fue que lo reabrieron y lo convirtieron en sede de eventos latinos o hispanos, ganandose el sobrenombre de La Catedral del Espectaculo Latino en Los Angeles. Asi que este libro guarda en sus paginas, la historia veridica narrada por los protagonistas que vivieron la gloriosa epoca del Million Dollar Theatre. Quienes antes se preguntaron, como fue que este teatro se convirtio en La Catedral del Espectaculo latino en Los Angeles?, aqui encontraran la respuesta dentro de este libro.

The contributors explore diverse contexts of performance to discuss peoples' own reflections on political subjectivities, governance and development. The volume refocuses anthropological engagement with ethics, aesthetics, and politics to examine the transformative potential of political performance, both for individuals and wider collectives.

If the city is the theatre of urban life, how does architecture act in its many performances? This interdisciplinary book reconstructs the spatial experiments of Art et action, a theatre troupe active in 1920s Paris, that defined five distinct types of modern performance, types which mirror social institutions and events. The analysis focuses on Art et Action's designs for theatre buildings to show how the performance spaces interacted with actors and spectators according to their respective type, thus commenting on the characteristic events of urban life. For scholars of theatre, the study demonstrates the interdependence of spatial design and drama at a crucial moment in the history of contemporary performance. For architects, the work offers a model in theatre for how architecture might act in the daily drama of urban life, supporting current efforts to make our cities more vital and thus more sustainable.

Thirty-three leading American and British playwrights, from Robert Anderson to Paul Zindel, discuss their views on their own work and contemporary drama, and offer projections about theater for the 21st century. Proceeding from the premise that recent drama in various ways is a reaction to the modernism of Theater of the Absurd, the interviewer, John DiGaetani, terms the diverse responses postmodernism. This concept, while not universally accepted by the playwrights interviewed, becomes a point of departure for lively dialogue, providing insights into the particular playwrights and on contemporary theater in general. Included among the interviewees are farcists, such as Alan Ayckbourn, Tina Howe, and Michael Frayn; playwrights of ethnic and black theater, such as Amlin Gray, Ed Bullins, and August Wilson; embodiments of Chekhovian theater, such as Simon Gray and A. R. Gurney; Maximalists like David Henry Hwang; feminists like Marsha Norman and Timberlake Wertenbaker; exponents of gay theater like Mart Crowley and William Hoffman; social critics like David Storey and Israel Horovitz; and traditionalists like Horton Foote, Romulus Linney, and Robert Anderson. Despite these broadly applied labels, clearly the output of these playwrights cannot be neatly pigeonholed even individually--let alone collectively--to describe any prevailing mode. Therefore, interviewer DiGaetani has chosen to stay with the appellation postmodernism, a widely accepted critical term in the arts used to signify a reaction to what is now an old-fashioned modernism.

Following the ground-breaking Performance and the City, this new volume explores what it means to create and experience urban performance - as both an aesthetic and a political practice - in the burgeoning world cities built by globalization and neoliberal capital. Featuring work by artists as well as scholars, written from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and including dozens of photographs as well as a photo essay by Nicholas Whybrow, Performance and the Global City will appeal to readers interested in urban studies, theatre and performance, geography, sociology, and globalization studies.

Beckett's bilingual oeuvre has been approached from many angles, most of which stress its autonomy from understandings of Irishness emerging from the Irish Literary Revival. Emilie Morin shows that such autonomy is only apparent, and that Beckett's avant-garde practices remain bound to the exigencies that govern their very development.

From 1880 to 1956, when John Osborne transformed the British theater world with Look Back in Anger, British playwrights made numerous lasting contributions and provided a foundation for the innovations of dramatists during the latter half of the 20th century. This reference profiles the life and work of some 40 British playwrights active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whom are also known for their work as novelists and poets. Included are figures such as W. H. Auden, Max Beerbohm, Noel Coward, T. S. Eliot, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, D. H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. Each entry provides a biographical overview; a list of major plays and summaries of their critical reception; a list of minor plays, adaptations, and productions; an assessment of the playwright's career; and archival and bibliographical information. Included in this reference book are alphabetically arranged entries for some 40 British playwrights active from 1880 through 1956. Entries are written by expert contributors, with each entry providing a biographical overview; a list of major plays, premieres, and significant revivals, along with a summary of the critical reception of these works; a listing of additional plays, adaptations, and productions; an assessment of the playwright's career and contributions, with reference to published evaluations in magazines, journals, dissertations, and books; a listing of locations housing unpublished archival material, if available; a selected bibliography of the dramatist's published plays and of essays and articles by the playwright on aspects of the theater; a selected bibliography of secondary sources; and, when available, a listing of previously published bibliographies on the playwright.

This new study explores the history of cross-cultural performative encounters in the Pacific from the Eighteenth century to the present. It examines Western theatrical representations of Pacific cultures and investigates how Pacific Islanders used their own cultural performances to negotiate the colonial situation.

A major contribution to the history of American theatre, this book records in one volume all available data about theatres built in this country before 1915. The first comprehensive reference work of its kind, the "Directory of Historic American TheatreS" identifies 886 theatres ranging from forgotten second-floor opera houses to elaborate performance centers still in use today. The data collected here is based on exhaustive questionnaire and follow-up mailings to historical societies, libraries, theatres, and individuals involved in historic preservation.

Performing Magic on the Western Stage examines magic as a performing art and meaningful social practice. The essays in this interdisciplinary collection analyze the work of numerous western theatrical conjurers and several non-western magical performances in their historical context. Throughout, the contributors link magic to cultural arenas such as religion, finance, gender, and nationality. All of the contributors are connected to the internationally acclaimed Theory and Art of Magic program at Muhlenberg College, through which artists and scholars study the history, theory, and practice of the magical arts.

This volume is a collection of scholarly articles and interviews with intermedial artists working with the concepts of public sphere at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. It explores the response of socially-engaged artistic practices to the current crisis in politics and media. It also critically examines urgent issues such as rampant nationalism and populism, expanding neoliberalism, the refugee crisis, growing inosculations of corporate and cyber culture, and the ongoing geopolitical changes in the Middle East. Can intermedial performances reflect the present artistic and political dilemmas in Europe and beyond? The collection provides theoretical frameworks that interrogate the role that spectators as citizens can play in our mediatized world while focusing on the functions of immersion, participation, and civic engagement in contemporary performance and society. The collection provides analyses by international scholars from Europe, Asia, and the USA, covering global performance created in the twenty-first century. It also introduces interviews with internationally acclaimed intermedial artists and companies such as BERLIN, Rimini Protokoll, Dries Verhoeven, Akira Takayama, and Kris Verdonck.

This book analyzes the interaction of crimes, punishments, and Bernard Shaw in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores crimes committed by professional criminals, nonprofessional criminals, businessmen, believers in a cause, the police, the Government, and prison officials. It examines punishments decreed by judges, juries, colonial governors, commissars, and administered by the police, prison warders, and prison doctors. It charts Shaw's view of crimes and punishments in dramatic writings, non-dramatic writings, and his actions in real life. This book presents him in the context of his contemporaries and his world, inviting readers to view crimes and punishments in their context, history, and relevance to his ideas in and outside his plays, plus the relevance of his ideas to crimes and punishments in life.

This is the first complete edition of the letters and notebooks of actress Mary Devlin, Edwin Booth's first wife, and is the first reference of its kind in nineteenth-century American theatre scholarship. These documents provide a fascinating perspective on Booth, his life, and the development of his career, and include new materials recently uncovered through the editor's research. The volume is also a valuable guide to biograhical information about Booth's father and brother (John Wilkes Booth), and to studies of Mary Devlin Booth and her influence on her husband. In addition, it identifies sources that reflect certain mid-nineteenth-century attitudes and provides a clearer picture of the conventional role wives had in their husband's careers during that period.

First, do no harm. How do we defend the "truth" when no one agrees what it is and many have reason to undermine it? Very freely adapting Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Icke's gripping moral thriller uses the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, belief, and scientific rationality. After a critically acclaimed run at London's Almeida Theatre, The Doctor transferred to the West End in September 2022. This revised and updated edition was published to coincide with the new production.

Works of theatre that depict grievous histories derive their force from making audible voices of the past. Such performances, theatrical or tourist, require the attentive belief of spectators. This engaging new study explores how theatricality works in each instance and how 'playing the part' of the listener can be understood in ethical terms.

Marilyn Monroe, Vincent van Gogh or the victims of rendition flights -- the number and variety of historical and contemporary figures represented on British stages is amazing. This book develops a new theoretical framework for the representation of real life figures on stage and examines different ways in which they can be included in performances.

"Engaging Audiences" provides an insightful introduction to spectatorship from the perspective of cognitive studies. Using performances of several plays and a wide array of scientific evidence, McConachie examines the dynamics of conscious attention, mental concepts, empathy, emotion, and culture in theatregoing. This ground-breaking study challenges many of the current theories used to understand spectators and is a valuable resource to artists and scholars interested in how and why audiences enjoy performance.

Moscow Theatres for Young People shows how the totalitarian ideology of the Soviet period shaped the practices of Soviet theatre for youth, as exemplified by the two oldest theatres for children and youth in Moscow: the Central Children's Theatre/RAMT and the Moscow Tiuz. Weaving together politics, economics, pedagogy, and aesthetics the author paints a vivid picture of the theatrical developments in Soviet/Russian theatre for young people from its inception in 1917 up to the new millennium, revealing the complex intersections between theatre and its socio-historical conditions.

"Mendel's Theatre "uncovers the rich convergence of scientific theories of heredity, the American eugenics movement, and innovative modern drama from the 1890s to 1930. Obsessions with heredity played out in very different kinds of theatre in the modern period, from fairground exhibits to the plays of prominent European modern dramatists like Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and George Bernard Shaw. The rise of vital American dramatists like Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill took place against this backdrop and alongside the now forgotten but extremely popular eugenics movement in America at the time. "Mendel's Theatre" tells that story.