With the globalization of business, American snack maker Boltz Foods is expanding into world markets and a naive American businessman who's never traveled abroad is selected to lead the way. Pursued by a Japanese competitor bent on sabotage, this comic adventure weaves in and out of different time- zones through a Japanese resort, Russian sauna, French restaurant, German barbershop, Westminster Abbey, Spanish bullring and the Tower of Babel. Going Global is a slapstick portrait of a clueless American caught up in a whirlwind of wacky multi-cultural gaffes, who at the end, finds there's no place like home."

Nadezhda Ptushkina's plays reflect her keen interest in constructing multidimensional characters that reflect the myriad ways people are affected by today's turbulent world. Often writing strong female roles, she does not shy away from exploring the sometimes tragic implications that lie behind her comical, almost farcical scenes. Ptushkina questions the nature of love, and explores the boundaries between the spiritual and the base, the constructive and the destructive, that lie within every human being. Conflict between the sexes constitutes the core of Ptushkina's plays, in which she warns the audience against confusing sex and love. Ptushkina rejects any notion that men and women are the same, seeing gender differences rather than personality differences as the main source of tension between men and women. Her plays thus dwell on this 'battle of the sexes' and the resulting lack of respect for women that she sees in today's Russia.In this new translation, western readers have a chance to discover why Ptushkina's work holds such wide appeal in the Russian theatre.

Directing with the Michael Chekhov Technique explores the collaborative process between a play's director and the entire production team, making the journey of a production process cohesive using the Michael Chekhov Technique. No other technique provides the tools for both actor and director to communicate as clearly as does Michael Chekhov. Directing with the Michael Chekhov Technique is the first book to apply the insights of this celebrated technique to the realities of directing a theatrical production. The book chronicles the journey of a play, from conception through production, through the eyes of the director. Drawn from the author's rehearsal journals, logs and notes from each performance, the reader is shown how to arrive at a concept, create a concept statement and manage the realization of the play, utilizing specific techniques from Michael Chekhov to solve problems of acting and design. As with all books in the Theatre Arts Workbook series, Directing with the Michael Chekhov Technique will include online video exercises, "Teaching Tip" boxes which streamline the book for teachers, and a useful Further Reading section. Directing with the Michael Chekhov Technique is the perfect guide to the production process for any director.

This transnational and transcultural study intimately investigates the theatre making practices of Indigenous women playwrights from Australia, Aotearoa, and Turtle Island. It offers a new perspective in Performance Studies employing an Indigenous standpoint, specifically an Indigenous woman's standpoint to privilege the practices and knowledges of Maori, First Nations, and Aboriginal women playwrights. Written in the style of ethnographic narrative the author affords the reader a ringside seat in providing personal insights on the process of negotiating access to rehearsals in each specific cultural context, detailed descriptions of each rehearsal location, and describing the visceral experiences of observing Indigenous theatre makers from inside the rehearsal room. The Indigenous scholar and theatre maker draws on Rehearsal Studies as an approach to documenting the day-to-day working practices of Indigenous theatre makers and considers an Indigenous Standpoint as a valid framework for investigating contemporary Indigenous theatre practices in a colonised context.

Shakespeare in Cuba: Caliban's Books explores how Shakespeare is consumed and appropriated in Cuba. It contributes to the underrepresented field of Latin American Shakespeares by applying the lens of cultural anthropophagy, a theory with Latin American roots, to explore how Cuban artists ingest and transform Shakespeare's plays. By consuming these works and incorporating them into Cuban culture and literature, Cuban writers make the plays their own while also nourishing the source texts and giving Shakespeare a new afterlife.

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a lively Portuguese-language theatre festival circuit, where Brazilian, Portuguese, and Lusophone African artists come together and jointly negotiate the cultural dynamics of an emerging transnational community grounded in a common language and shared colonial histories. Christina S. McMahon trains a sharp ethnographic eye on African performances staged at these festivals, revealing how festival productions and their aftermath can generate new perspectives on race and gender, colonial trauma, and the economics of cultural globalization. Featuring in-depth analysis of performances and artist interviews from Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique - countries with vibrant theatre practices and vexed colonial pasts - the book reveals how international festivals can be valuable platforms for new intercultural dialogues and diplomatic possibilities. Recasting Transnationalism through Performance offers a fresh look at the role of theatre in navigating new postcolonial realities.

This practical handbook is invaluable for anyone performing, teaching, studying or simply wanting a new way to enjoy Shakespeare. It provides an outline of Meisner's work and legacy, a discussion of that legacy in the light of the enduring global popularity of Shakespeare, and a wealth of practical exercises drawn from Meisner's techniques. Shakespeare writes about the truth in human relationships and human hearts. Sanford Meisner's work unlocks truthful acting. They would seem a perfect match. Yet, following Meisner's note to his actors that 'text is your greatest enemy', Shakespeare and Meisner are often considered 'strange bedfellows'. The rhetorical complexity of Shakespeare's text can often be perceived as rules an actor must learn in order to perform Shakespeare 'properly'. Meisner's main rule is that 'you can't say ouch until you've been pinched': in other words, an actor must genuinely feel something in order to react in a performance which is alive to the moment. This book explores how actors can use Meisner's tools of 'acting is reacting' to discover the infinite freedom within the apparent constraints of Shakespeare's text.

Few American phenomena are more evocative of time, place, and culture than the drive-in theater. From its origins in the Great Depression, through its peak in the 1950s and 1960s and ultimately its slow demise in the 1980s, the drive-in holds a unique place in the country's collective past. Michigan's drive-ins were a reflection of this time and place, ranging from tiny rural 200-car "ozoners" to sprawling 2,500-car behemoths that were masterpieces of showmanship, boasting not only movies and food, but playgrounds, pony rides, merry-go-rounds, and even roving window washers.

This book details the Irish socialistic tracks pursued by Bernard Shaw and Sean O'Casey, mostly after 1916, that were arguably impacted by the executed James Connolly. The historical context is carefully unearthed, stretching from its 1894 roots via W. B. Yeats' dream of Shaw as a menacing, yet grinning sewing machine, to Shaw's and O'Casey's 1928 masterworks. In the process, Shaw's War Issues for Irishmen, Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, Saint Joan, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, and O'Casey's The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, and The Silver Tassie are reconsidered, revealing previously undiscovered textures to the masterworks. All of which provides a rethinking, a reconsideration of Ireland's great drama of the 1920s, as well as furthering the knowledge of Shaw, O'Casey, and Connolly.

Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960), poet, novelist, playwright and composer would become one of the literary giants of the twentieth century. The father of magic realism in Italy, he was associated with the futurist avant-garde and then launched his own influential literary movement, Novecento. Editor and creator of various journals, he collaborated with some of the greatest writers of his day, from James Joyce to Luigi Pirandello. Bontempelli was a prominent fascist intellectual and largely for this reason is today a controversial, little studied and seldom translated writer. Patricia Gaborik strikes out at this problem by presenting here an extensive introduction on the thought and legacy of this figure and complete translations of three of his major plays: "Watching the Moon" (1916), "Stormcloud" (1935) and "Cinderella" (1942). Bontempelli's sense of theatricality was unparalleled, his characters are bewitching, and Gaborik's translations privilege both readability and playability, offering these plays the chance for a robust, English-language life not only on page but also on stage. In 1953, Bontempelli was awarded the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award. "Watching the Moon" is a densely layered response to the era's avant-gardism, with traces of symbolism, expressionism and futurism. It presents the story of a woman who travels to the literal ends of the earth in an attempt to rescue her (dead) daughter, whom she believes has been kidnapped by the moon. "Stormcloud," where a nimbus is responsible for misery and destruction, points fingers at individual behaviors and especially at personal egotism in the face of love and death. It is a strange and compelling exemplar of magic realism for the stage. "Cinderella," fearless, radical and subversive, adds to Bontempelli's slate of strong and complex female characters, still sometimes a rare commodity on the stage. First English translation. Introduction, notes, select bibliography, illustrated. 198 pages.

This ambitious collection of essays covers American drama in its entirety-from its inception in colonial America, through its many incarnations in the nineteenth century, to its zenith in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Differentiating itself from other treatments of the genre, the handbook will not only highlight the major works of the twentieth century, but will also attend carefully to earlier works and contexts. The collection's first part will explore the genre's eighteenth-century genesis. William Dunlap's complex, sympathetic portrait of British forces in Andre is counterbalanced by the biting anti-colonial political satire of the nation's first female playwright, Mercy Otis Warren, through an appraisal of her witty, subversive skewering of British loyalists in The Group. The nineteenth century saw the form diversifying with offerings like the antebellum era's reform plays, the melodrama, and the musical-a flowering that was given a new center of action in the growth of Broadway. A full survey of the vexing tradition of minstrelsy and the struggles of Black Americans on the stage provides a transition into the twentieth century. The new approaches to playwriting and performance pioneered by Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and the Provincetown Players gave theater a new cachet early in the century through the possibilities offered by naturalism and expressionism. Overtly political content took the stage in the protest plays of Clifford Odets during the Great Depression though in general a more insular realism proved the dominant style, albeit one interrupted by recurring periods of experimentalism. Key moments and artists who defined the later half of the twentieth-century are illuminated through in-depth essays on the scathing indictments of the American dream put forward by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee; the impact of the countercultural, mixed-race musical Hair; the complex nature of David Mamet's social critique; the energy of experimental, off-Broadway theater; the importance of place and memory in August Wilson's works; and the acute anxiety over the AIDS crisis during the Regan eighties as presented in Angels in America. The volume will conclude with a consideration of what lies ahead for the nation's drama, focusing on the pivotal work of leading lights such as Sarah Ruhl and Suzan Lori-Parks.