A unique play anthology featuring five gripping docudramas originally commissioned by L.A. Theatre Works that each explore pivotal moments in 20th century U.S history. With ensemble casts and innovative staging potential these plays are perfect for theatre companies, schools and educational groups looking to stage familiar historical stories in new and original ways. Each play is accompanied by dramaturgical notes that help contextualize and analyze both the events themselves and the dramatic form in which they are presented. The scripts included are: The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial by Peter Goodchild The Real Dr. Strangelove by Peter Goodchild RFK: The Journey to Justice by Murray Horwitz and Jonathan Estrin The Chicago Conspiracy Trial by Peter Goodchild Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers by Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons (Winner of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Best Live Entertainment Award, 1992) As well as five scripts this anthology includes a foreword by Professor Michael Hackett, professor of directing and theatre history at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.

In the middle years of the sixteenth century, English drama witnessed the emergence of the 'tyrant by entrie' or the usurper, who supplanted earlier 'tyrant by the administration' as the main antihero of political drama. This usurper or, in Machiavellian terms principe nuove, was the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own 'virtu' and through an act of 'lawmaking' violence. Early Tudor morality plays were exclusively concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant; in the political drama of the first half of the sixteenth century, we do not encounter a single instance of usurpation among the texts that are still available to us. In contrast, the historical and tragic plays of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods teem with illegitimate monarchs. Almost all of Shakespeare's history plays, at least four of his ten tragedies, and even a few of his comedies feature usurpation or potential usurpation of sovereign power as a crucial plot device. Why and how does usurpation emerge as a preoccupation in English theatre? What are the political, historical, legal, and dramaturgical transformations that influence and are influenced by this moment of emergence? As the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the study of usurpation and tyranny in sixteenth-century drama and politics, Tyranny and Usurpation: The New Prince and Lawmaking Violence will challenge existing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these critical questions.

This book is the first to examine age across the modern and contemporary dramatic canon, from Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams to Paula Vogel and Doug Wright. All ages across the life course are interpreted as performance and performative both on page and on stage, including professional productions and senior-theatre groups. The common admonition "act your age" provides the springboard for this study, which rests on the premise that age is performative in nature, and that issues of age and performance crystallize in the theatre. Dramatic conventions include characters who change ages from one moment to the next, overtly demonstrating on stage the reiterated actions that create a performative illusion of stable age. Moreover, directors regularly cast actors in these plays against their chronological ages. Lipscomb contends that while the plays reflect varying attitudes toward performing age, as a whole they reveal a longing for an ageless self, a desire to present a consistent, unified identity. The works mirror prevailing social perceptions of the aging process as well as the tension between chronological age, physiological age, and cultural constructions of age.

Prefiguring Postblackness explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American freedom struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural context in which they were produced, Carol Bunch Davis shows how these representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining the civil rights movement's advances. These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity, and their staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that very era. In their use of a ""postblack ethos"" to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle. The plays under discussion range from the canonical (Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman) to celebrated, yet understudied works (Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness, Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope, and Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody). Finally, Davis discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation.

This book is the first comprehensive examination of commercial drama as a reading genre in early modern England. Taking as its focus pre-Restoration printed drama's most common format, the single-play quarto playbook, it interrogates what the form and content of these playbooks can tell us about who their earliest readers were, why they might have wanted to read contemporary commercial drama, and how they responded to the printed versions of plays that had initially been performed in the playhouses of early modern London. Focusing on professional plays printed in quarto between 1584 and 1660, the book juxtaposes the implications of material and paratextual evidence with analysis of historical traces of playreading in extant playbooks and manuscript commonplace books. In doing so, it presents more detailed and nuanced conclusions than have previously been enabled by studies focused on works by one author or on a single type of evidence.

This book is a landmark study of Shakespeare's politics as revealed in his later History Plays. It offers the first ever survey of anti-monarchism in Western literature, history and philosophy, tracked from Hesiod and Homer through to contemporaries of Shakespeare such as George Buchanan and the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates, thus demonstrating that anxiety over monarchic power, and contemptuous demolitions of kingship as a disastrously irrational institution, formed an important and irremovable body of reflection in prestigious Western writing. Overturning the widespread assumption that "Elizabethans believed in divine right monarchy", it exposits the anti-monarchic critique built into Shakespeare's Histories and Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, in five chapters of close literary critical readings, paying innovative attention to performance values. Part Two focuses Queen Elizabeth's principal challenger for national rule: the Earl of Essex, England's most popular man. It demonstrates from detailed readings that, far from being an admirer of the war-crazed, unstable, bi-polar Essex, as is regularly asserted, Shakespeare launched in Richard II and Henry IV a campaign to puncture the reputation of the great earl, exposing him as a Machiavel seeking Elizabeth's throne. Shakespeare emerges as a humane and clear-sighted critic of the follies intrinsic to dynastic monarchy: yet hostile, likewise, to the rash militarist, Essex, who would fling England into permanent war against Spain. Founded on an unprecedented and wide-ranging study of anti-monarchist thought, this book presents a significant contribution to Shakespeare and Marlowe criticism, studies of Tudor England, and the history of ideas.

The first volume to collect these 3 political plays in one volume. Intro and commentary discusses these texts in the context of Greek history and politics, but also political science and theory as regards more recent eras, including our own, allowing students to relate to the material and work comparitively. The 3 plays selected are the world's first detailed portrayal of demagogy, making them very topical to contemporary readers.

Callan Davies presents "strangeness" as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama-one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as "Shakespeare's late plays," "tragicomedy," or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.

Staging Favorites explores theatrical representations of royal favorites in Spanish, French, and English dramatic production during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this time, the courts of Spain, France, and England were dominated by all-powerful ministers who enjoyed royal favor. The politics of royal favoritism gave rise to a significant group of plays which constitutes the subject of this book. While scholars have studied this group partially and separately in national context, Staging Favorites approaches these "dramas about favorites" from a wider European point of view, and performs comparative analyses of a number of plays - including La paciencia en la fortuna; Le Favori, ou la Coquette; and Sejanus His Fall - and adds new detail and differentiation to the early modern perception and representation of the royal favorite. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in early modern literature, history of theater, and cultural history.

Situated on the intersection of comparative literary criticism, political history and theory, and cultural analysis, Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia offers an in-depth reading of early Russian tragedy as a political genre. Imported to Russia by Aleksandr Sumarokov around 1750, tragedy reenacted and shaped the symbolic economy and the often disturbing historical experience of "absolutist" autocracy. Addressing half-forgotten texts and events, this study engages with literary and cultural theory from Walter Benjamin to Foucault and "new historicism" in order to contribute to a broader discussion of early modern "poetics of culture."

Playwright and television writer Kermit Frazier began life as a precocious Negro boy growing up in southeast Washington, D.C., during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. As a student at an all-Black elementary school, Kermit was selected for a newly formed honors track at a predominantly white secondary school. Traveling a complex path, Kermit tore down segregation barriers, balanced on an academic pedestal, and battled an internal war of denial against his same-sex attractions. This memoir is not a story about a young man rising from "the hood" but rather a young Black man struggling with stereotypes, identity, and mild dyslexia while straddling two middle-class worlds, Black and white, and striving not to be everyone's "other.

Gender and cultural studies readings of Tennessee Williams's work have provided diverse perspectives on his complex representations of sexuality, whether of himself as an openly gay man, or of his characters, many of whom narrate or dramatize sexual attitudes or behavior that cross heteronormative boundaries of the mid-century period. Several of these studies have positioned Williams and his work amid the public tensions in American life over roughly four decades, from 1940-1980, as notions of equality and freedom of choice challenged prejudice and repression in law and in society. To date, however, neither Williams's homosexuality nor his persistent representations of sexual transgressions have been examined as legal matters that challenged the rule of law. Directed by legal history and informed by multiple strands of Williams's studies criticism, textual, and cultural, this book explores the interplay of select topics defined and debated in law's texts with those same topics in Williams's personal and imaginative texts. By tracing the obscure and the transparent representations of homosexuality, specifically, and diverse sexualities more generally, through selected stories and plays, the book charts the intersections between Williams's literature and the laws that governed the period. His imaginative works, backlit by his personal documents and historical and legal records from the period, underscore his preoccupation with depictions of diverse sexualities throughout his career. His use of legal language and its varied effects on his texts demonstrate his work's multiple and complex intersection with major twentieth-century concerns, including significant legal and cultural dialogues about identity formation, intimacy, privacy, and difference.

Exam Board: AQA, Edexcel, Eduqas & CCEA Level: AS/A-level Subject: Modern Languages First Teaching: September 2016 First Exam: June 2017 Literature analysis made easy. Build your students' confidence in their language abilities and help them develop the skills needed to critique their chosen work: putting it into context, understanding the themes and narrative technique, as well as specialist terminology. Breaking down each scene, character and theme in Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit), this accessible guide will enable your students to understand the historical and social context of the play and give them the critical and language skills needed to write a successful essay. - Strengthen language skills with relevant grammar, vocab and writing exercises throughout - Aim for top marks by building a bank of textual examples and quotes to enhance exam response - Build confidence with knowledge-check questions at the end of every chapter - Revise effectively with pages of essential vocabulary and key mind maps throughout - Feel prepared for exams with advice on how to write an essay, plus sample essay questions, two levels of model answers and examiner commentary

Convention and Contravention in Ben Jonson's Three Comedies: Volpone, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair is a book about Jonson's convention of comedy that is a disguise for the realities of life. The book aims to show the importance of the truths that are generally away from the human eye in Jonson's time through scrutiny of Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. Selected plays are in a dialogue with Shakespeare's As You Like It, Measure for Measure, and Twelfth Night, and close analysis of the texts of the plays offers the reader a detailed study of the upside down world of the comedic, carnivalesque period that enables characters free themselves of their responsibilities. The plays end in harmony, taking all scattered parts of the disarray of the carnival time back to its normal. Madness, lack of morality, deceitfulness, confusion, misunderstandings, and disguise are common elements in all the plays discussed in the book. Ben Jonson takes the opportunity and presents a critical viewpoint about the Elizabethan and Jacobean laxity and leniency, making the carnivalesque spirit central to his criticism. This book intends to immerse into ways in which characters create chaos within themselves in the selected plays. Shakespeare's selected plays are supplementary texts that richly add layers, branches, and offices to the reading of Jonson's society rather than just enriching the comedic impact of the performances.

Two-volume collection providing the first opportunity to consider Bale's surviving dramatic work as a whole in the original language. His plays explore the theological and political implications of the English Reformation and offers a Protestant counterblast to the English mystery cycles.

George Lillo's domestic tragedies provided the impetus for the development of new forms of serious drama during and after the eighteenth century, on the Continent as well as in the English-speaking theatre. This edition makes available for the first time all of the plays known or thought to have been written by the playwright, in reliable old-spelling texts following modern bibliographical principles. Some have not been reprinted since 1810. Even the much-studied London Merchant has not previously been published in an edition that recognizes the errors contained in the first edition and the authorial revisions introduced in early reprints. The introduction to each play treats its sources, histories of publication and reception in the theatre, and textual problems. The apparatus criticus and historical collations provide full bibliographical detail. Commentary notes discuss the author's use or adaptation of sources and furnish information about links among his own plays, topical background, and literary allusions. Steffensen edition makes possible an informed awareness of Lillo's lesser-known plays in a variety of genres, as an enlightening context for further study of these influential domestic dramas.

FIRST CITIZEN. Before we proceed any further, hear me speak. ALL. Speak, speak. FIRST CITIZEN. YOU are all resolv'd rather to die than to famish? ALL. Resolv'd, resolv'd. FIRST CITIZEN. First, you know Caius Marcius is chief enemy to the people. ALL. We know't, we know't. FIRST CITIZEN. Let us kill him, and we'll have corn at our own price. Is't a verdict?

This book offers a new, accurate and actable translation of one of Euripides' most popular plays, together with a commentary which provides insight into the challenges it sets for production and suggestions for how to solve them. The introduction discusses the social and cultural context of the play and its likely impact on the original audience, the way in which it was originally performed, the challenges which the lead roles present today and Medea's implications for the modern audience. The text of the translation is followed by the 'Theatrical Commentary' section on the issues involved in staging each scene and chorus today, embodying insights gained from a professional production. Notes on the translation, a glossary of names, suggestions for further reading and a chronology of Euripides' life and times round out the volume. The book is intended for use by theatre practitioners who wish to stage or workshop Medea and by students both of drama, theatre and performance and of classical studies.

This book explores how the pregnant body is portrayed, perceived and enacted in Shakespeare's and his contemporaries' drama by means of a phenomenological analysis and a recourse to early modern popular medical discourse on reproduction. Phenomenology of pregnancy is a fairly new and radical body of philosophy that questions the post-Cartesian chasm of an almost autonomous reason and an enclosed and self-sufficient (male) body as foundations of identity. Early modern drama, as is argued, was written and staged at the backdrop of revolutionary changes in medicine and science where old and new theories on the embodied self-clashed. In this world where more and more men were expected to steadily grow isolated from their bodies, the pregnant body constituted an embattled contradiction. Indebted to the theories of embodiment this book offers a meticulous and detailed investigation of a plethora of pregnant characters and their "pregnant embodiment" in the pre-modern works by Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Ford. The analysis in each chapter argues for an indivisible link between an intensely embodied experience of pregnancy as enacted in space and identity-shaping processes resulting in a more acute sense of selfhood and agency. Despite seemingly disparate experiences of the selected heroines and the repeated attempts at containment of their "unruly" bodies, the ever transforming and "spatial" pregnant identities remain loci of embodied selfhood and agency. This book provocatively argues that fictional characters' experience reflects tangible realities of early modern women, while often deflecting the scientific consensus on reproduction in the period.

The first volume to collect these 3 political plays in one volume. Intro and commentary discusses these texts in the context of Greek history and politics, but also political science and theory as regards more recent eras, including our own, allowing students to relate to the material and work comparitively. The 3 plays selected are the world's first detailed portrayal of demagogy, making them very topical to contemporary readers.

Blasted has been labelled as one of the landmark plays of post-war British theatre, achieving its iconic status and, indeed, its notoriety, very quickly. Sarah Kane's suicide in 1999 consolidated a process of singling-out that had begun four years earlier with the 'national outrage' initiated by the media's scandalised response to the premiere of Blasted. The brutal content of the play resulted in much-quoted hostility from the critics. Academic attention to the play has begun a process of re-evaluation, debating the production and reception of the play and key issues including its status as a classic example of 'in-yer-face' drama. This guide provides a comprehensive critical introduction to Blasted, giving students an overview of the play's significance, a brief biography of Sarah Kane and a guide to socio-political background; a detailed analysis of the play's structure, style and characters; an analysis of key production issues and choices; an overview of key productions from the 1995 Royal Court premiere to today; and a chapter exploring possibilities and exercises for practical work on the play. An annotated guide to further reading highlights key secondary material including useful websites.

Taking as its common thread the overtly theatrical nature of early modern society and its cultural and political manifestations this book studies dramatic texts, dedications, autobiographies, adaptations and performative practices, to prove that the boundaries between on and off stage performances of gender are blurred. Thus, the limits that separate theatre and life are highly permeable and the relations between both are bidirectional: the performativity of gender and identity is an idea that the theatre takes from and transfers to society. This concept is applied to a wide timeframe creating a dialogue between different historical times and cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, the authors explore sexualities as written and performed by both men and women, offering a wider scope to determine whether and to what extent normative gender roles are being questioned, contested or reinforced.

Through a close re-examination of Eugene O'Neill's oeuvre, from minor plays to his Pulitzer-winning works, this study proposes that O'Neill's vision of tragedy privileges a particular emotional response over a more "rational" one among his audience members. In addition to offering a new paradigm through which to interpret O'Neill's work, this book argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is a robust account of the value of difficult theatre as a whole, with more explanatory scope and power than its cognitivist counterparts. This paradigm reshapes our understanding of live theatrical tragedy's impact and significance for our lives. The book enters the discussion of tragic value by way of the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and through this study, Killian makes the case that O'Neill has refused to allow Plato to define the terms of tragedy's merit, as the cognitivists have. He argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is non-cognitive and locates the value of a play in its ability to trigger certain emotional responses from the audience. This would be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, literature and philosophy.

In a desperate attempt to bring some spark back to their all-too-cosy married life, professional millennials Michael and Phil switch a sherry on the couch for a night on the town. Their goal: to get in with Generation Z by trying to get off with one. Enter fit, sexy, confident Quasim. But the 'just for one night' adventure brings shocking revelations as Michael and Phil discover more about the 20-year-old boy in their bed than they ever wanted to know, and their suburban dream is shaken to its core. Following the sold out runs of critical hits Undetectable (nominated for 3 Off West End Awards) and My Dad's Gap Year (nominated for 4 Off West End Awards), Tom Wright's darkly comedic and wildly sexy new play is his most provocative show to date.

Shakespeare and Emotional Expression offers an exciting new way of considering emotional transactions in Shakespearean drama. The book is significant in its scope and originality as it uses the innovative medium of colour terms and references to interrogate the early modern emotional register. By examining contextual and cultural influences, this work explores the impact these influences have on the relationship between colour and emotion and argues for the importance of considering chromatic references as a means to uncover emotional significances. Using a broad range of documents, it offers a wider understanding of affective expression in the early modern period through a detailed examination of several dramatic works. Although colour meanings fluctuate, by paying particular attention to contextual clues and the historically specific cultural situations of Shakespeare's plays, this book uncovers emotional significances that are not always apparent to modern audiences and readers. Through its examination of the nexus between the history of emotions and the social and cultural uses of colour in early modern drama, Shakespeare and Emotional Expression adds to our understanding of the expressive and affective possibilities in Shakespearean drama.