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.

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.

Rachel Watson longs for a different life. Her only escape is the perfect couple she watches through the train window every day, happy and in love. Or so it appears. When Rachel learns that the woman she's been secretly watching has suddenly disappeared, she finds herself as a witness and even a suspect in a thrilling mystery which she will face bigger revelations than she could ever have anticipated.

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.

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.

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.

'Performing Contagious Bodies' explores live/body art and installation practices through theories of ritual and magic. Featuring discussion of a wide range of contemporary international practice, the book explores the intersections of performance studies, art history, anthropology and contemporary visual art practices.

The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio chronicles four years in the life of an extraordinary Italian theatre company whose work is widely recognized as some of the most exciting theatre currently being made in Europe. In the first English-language book to document their work, company founders, Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci and Chiara Guidi, discuss their approach to theatre making with Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout. At the centre of the book is a detailed exploration of the company's eleven episode cycle of tragic theatre, Tragedia Endogonida (2002-2004,) including: production notes and extensive correspondence giving insights into the creative process essays by and conversations with company members alongside critical responses by their two co-authors seventy-two photographs of the company's work. This is a significant collection of theoretical and practical reflections on the subject of theatre in the twenty-first century, and an indispensible written and visual document of the company's work.

The games and exercises in this book are designed to be used as warm-ups at the beginning of a theatre class. They have been used successfully with middle school students and they can easily be adapted for use with younger children, older teens and adults in various settings. The games are divided into thirteen sections for easy reference: 1. Clowning, 2. Cooperation and Teamwork, 3. Focus and Concentration, 4. Getting Ready, 5. Improvisation, 6. Listening, 7. Name Games, 8. Observation, 10. Pantomime, 11. Stretching and Relaxation, 12. Stage Movement, 13. Voice. The games have been adapted from many books, workshops and standard group activities. This is a comprehensive collection of tested games and exercises. A must book for every theatre library.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

This generously illustrated selection of fifty reviews and essays, written between 1914 and 1962 by thirty American critics, draws together some of the best, most influential, and most interesting writing on Montemezzi, revealing for the first time the full depth of his impact in the United States, the country to which he moved in 1939.

Our modern narratives of science and technology can only go so far in teaching us about the death that we must all finally face. Can an act of the imagination, in the form of opera, take us the rest of the way? Might opera, an art form steeped in death, teach us how to die, as this provocative work suggests? In "Opera: The Art of Dying" a physician and a literary theorist bring together scientific and humanistic perspectives on the lessons on living and dying that this extravagant and seemingly artificial art imparts.

Contrasting the experience of mortality in opera to that in tragedy, the Hutcheons find a more apt analogy in the medieval custom of "contemplatio mortis"--a dramatized exercise in imagining one's own death that prepared one for the inevitable end and helped one enjoy the life that remained. From the perspective of a contemporary audience, they explore concepts of mortality embodied in both the common and the more obscure operatic repertoire: the terror of death (in Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites"); the longing for death (in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"); preparation for the good death (in Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung"); and suicide (in Puccini's "Madama Butterfly"). In works by Janacek, Ullmann, Berg, and Britten, among others, the Hutcheons examine how death is made to feel logical and even right morally, psychologically, and artistically--how, in the art of opera, we rehearse death in order to give life meaning.

Modern international studies of world theatre and drama have begun to acknowledge the Arab world only after the contributions of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Within the Arab world, the contributions of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco to modern drama and to post-colonial expression remain especially neglected, a problem that this book addresses.

"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.

"A forgotten yet award-winning playwright, Cal Yeomans was one of the founders of gay theatre whose work was fueled by gay liberation and extinguished by the AIDS epidemic. Exploring both sex and sexuality so candidly, he burst the boundaries of what was considered acceptable. His writings were not only manifestations of the sexual liberation of the times, but were also attempts to overcome what he had been raised to despise. Schanke's examination of Yeomans' life and legacy allows a rare exploration into the pivotal moment of gay American history between the Stonewall riots and the AIDS epidemic"--

This book illustrates how local awareness of Western cultural hegemonic entities such as Broadway and Shakespeare have been implemented within South Korean theatre in the global era. With a focus on performances that targeted global audiences, Lee explores the ways in which Korea's nationalistic desires for global visibility are projected on stage.

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.

This book explores the intersection between apophaticism - negative theology - and performance. While apophaticism in literature and critical theory may have had its heyday in the heady debates about negative theology and deconstruction in the 1990s, negative ways of knowing and speaking have continued to structure conversations in theatre and performance studies around issues of embodiment, the non- and post-human, objects, archives, the ethics of otherness in intercultural research, and the unreadable and inaccessible in the work of minority artists. A great part of the history of apophaticism lies in mystic literature. With the rise of the New Age movement, which claimed historical mysticism as part of its genealogy, apophaticism has often been sidelined as spirituality rather than serious study. This book argues that the apophatic continues to exert a strong influence on the discourse and culture of Western literature and especially performance, and that by reassessing this ancient form of negative epistemology, artists, scholars, students, and teachers alike can more deeply engage forms of unknowing through what cannot be said and cannot be represented in language, on the stage, and in every aspect of social life.

In January of 1972 the Golden Age of Opera series of the Edward J. Smith Recordings was succeeded by the Unique Opera Records Corporation (UORC) and released two-hundred and eighty numbered releases between 1972 and December, 1977. Smith's final private label, the A.N.N.A. Record Company (ANNA) released seventy-three numbered issues between 1978 and 1982. Interspersed between UORC and ANNA, and spanning the years 1954 to 1981, numerous "special label" issues were released under fugitive names. As a companion to the first volume, EJS: Discography of the Edward J. Smith Recordings "The Golden Age of Opera," 1956-1971, this volume continues where the first left off. The three labels are catalogued in separate sections. Researchers will appreciate the ten indexes provided and the selectively quoted material from Smith's personal correspondence that supplements the text.

This collection of essays is impressive in its breadth, ranging over English (Shakespeare, Stoppard, Churchill, Ravenhill, Penhall), Irish (MacNamara, Johnston), American (O Neill, Stein, Kushner, Lynn), and Continental (Beckett, Weiss, Jelinek) dramatists; furthermore, many of the plays given extended treatment King Lear, The Emperor Jones, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Investigation, Top Girls, and Angels in America are frequently anthologized and/or taught. And because each of these essays was written by a different author, the range of theorists and critics drawn upon (Lyotard, Jameson, McHale, Hutcheon, Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, Levinas, Hassan, etc.) is so extensive as to provide a veritable overview of postmodern theory as it might usefully be applied to the theatre.

The book offers an introduction to adaptations between stage and screen, examining stage and screen works as texts but also as performances and cultural events. Case studies of distinct periods in British film and theatre history are used to illustrate the principle that adaptations can't be divorced from the historical and cultural moment in which they are produced and to look at issues around theatrical naturalism and cinematic realism. Written in a refreshingly accessible style, it offers an original analysis with emphasis on performance and event. It opens up new avenues of exploration to include non-literary issues such as the treatment of space and place, mise en scene, acting styles and star personas. The recent growth of digital theatre is examined to foreground the 'events' of theatre and cinema, with phenomena such as NT Live analysed for the different ways that 'liveness' is adapted. Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen explores how cultural values can be articulated in the act of translating between mediums. The book takes as its subject the interaction between film and theatre and argues that, rather than emphasising differences between the two mediums, the emphasis should be placed on elements that they share, in particular the emphasis on performance and the participation in an event. It uses a number of case studies to show how this relationship is affected by changes in technology - the coming of film sound, the invention of live-casting - and in the nature of the event being offered to particular audiences. These examples, ranging from the well-known to the obscure, are all treated with relevant and knowledgeable analysis and a strong and appropriate sense of context. The book offers a welcome overview of previous work in this area and demonstrates the importance of basing analysis on historical context, as well as giving new insights into some familiar examples. Discussion ranges from Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock to Robert Lepage and Ivo van Hove. There are detailed analyses of Alfie, Gone Too Far and Festen as well as authoritative analyses of NT Live performances and British New Wave cinema. The book will be of primary interest to academics, researchers, teachers and students working in adaptation studies, film studies and theatre studies. Written in an accessible style it will appeal to teachers and students on A-level, undergraduate and postgraduate film, theatre, media and cultural studies courses. The chapter on digital theatres will add to the growing body of literature in this area and appeal to students and academics working on digital cultures and new media. Live screenings of theatre events are becoming more widely available and increasingly popular, including some of the productions discussed. There is potential interest for a general audience interested in British films, theatre and actors.