The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveller, writer, and creator of theatre to illuminate how cities offer travellers and residents theatrical visions while also remaining mostly invisible, beyond the limits of attention. The book explores the city as both stage and content in three parts. Firstly, it follows in pattern Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, wherein Marco Polo describes cities to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, to produce a constellation of vignettes recalling individual cities through travel writing and engagement with artworks. Secondly, Gillette traces the Teatro Potlach group and its ongoing immersive, site-specific performance project Invisible Cities, which has staged performances in dozens of cities across Europe and the Americas. The final part of the book offers useful exercises for artists and travellers interested in researching their own invisible cities. Written for practitioners, travellers, students, and thinkers interested in the city as site and source of performance, The Invisible City mixes travelogue with criticism and cleverly combines philosophical meditations with theatrical pedagogy.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) telescopes an audacious stretch of western history and mythology into a family drama, showing how the course of human events operates like theatre itself: constantly mutable, vanishing and beginning again. Kyle Gillette explores Wilder's extraordinary play in three parts. Part I unpacks the play's singular yet deeply interconnected place in theatre history, comparing its metatheatrics to those of Stein, Pirandello and Brecht, and finding its anticipation of American fantasias in the works of Vogel and Kushner. Part II turns to the play's many historic and mythic sources, and examines its concentration of western progress and power into the model of a white, American upper-middle-class nuclear family. Part III takes a longer view, tangling with the play's philosophical stakes. Gillette magnifies the play's ideas and connections, teasing out historical, theoretical and philosophical questions on behalf of readers, scholars and audience members alike.

The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveller, writer, and creator of theatre to illuminate how cities offer travellers and residents theatrical visions while also remaining mostly invisible, beyond the limits of attention. The book explores the city as both stage and content in three parts. Firstly, it follows in pattern Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, wherein Marco Polo describes cities to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, to produce a constellation of vignettes recalling individual cities through travel writing and engagement with artworks. Secondly, Gillette traces the Teatro Potlach group and its ongoing immersive, site-specific performance project Invisible Cities, which has staged performances in dozens of cities across Europe and the Americas. The final part of the book offers useful exercises for artists and travellers interested in researching their own invisible cities. Written for practitioners, travellers, students, and thinkers interested in the city as site and source of performance, The Invisible City mixes travelogue with criticism and cleverly combines philosophical meditations with theatrical pedagogy.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) telescopes an audacious stretch of western history and mythology into a family drama, showing how the course of human events operates like theatre itself: constantly mutable, vanishing and beginning again. Kyle Gillette explores Wilder's extraordinary play in three parts. Part I unpacks the play's singular yet deeply interconnected place in theatre history, comparing its metatheatrics to those of Stein, Pirandello and Brecht, and finding its anticipation of American fantasias in the works of Vogel and Kushner. Part II turns to the play's many historic and mythic sources, and examines its concentration of western progress and power into the model of a white, American upper-middle-class nuclear family. Part III takes a longer view, tangling with the play's philosophical stakes. Gillette magnifies the play's ideas and connections, teasing out historical, theoretical and philosophical questions on behalf of readers, scholars and audience members alike.

This collection draws on cutting-edge work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries to offer new perspectives on the importance of visuality and the imagination in the work of Luigi Pirandello, the great Italian modernist. The volume re-examines traditional critical notions central to the study of Pirandello by focusing on the importance of the visual imagination in his poetics and aesthetics, an area of multimedia investigation which has not yet received ample attention in English-language books. Putting scholarship on Pirandello in conversation with new work on the multimedia dimensions of modernism, the volume examines how Pirandello worked across and was adapted through multiple media. It also brings Pirandello into a cross-disciplinary dialogue with new approaches to Italian cultural studies to show how his work remains relevant to scholarly conversations across the field. The essays in this collection highlight the ways in which Pirandello is engaged not only in literature and theatre but also in the visual arts, film, and music. At the same time, they emphasize the ways in which this multimedia creativity enables Pirandello to pursue complex philosophical thoughts, and how scholars' interpretation of his works can provide new insights into problems facing us today. Crossing from aesthetics and a study of modernist notions of creative imagination into studies of multimedia works and adaptations, the volume argues that Pirandello should be understood as a thinker in images whose legacy can be felt across the arts and into the realm of 21st-century theories of literary cognition.