Bernard Shaw on the American Stage is the first comprehensive study of the production of Bernard Shaw's plays in America. During his lifetime (1856-1950), Shaw was America's most popular living playwright; productions of his plays were outnumbered only by Shakespeare. Forty-four of Shaw's plays were staged in America before his death, eight more posthumously. Eleven of the productions were world premieres. Bernard Shaw on the American Stage tells the story of the fifty-two premieres, which, apart from a few fragments, is his total dramatic oeuvre. The book also includes, again for the first time, production data and concise overviews of dozens of the most notable American revivals of the plays, from the 1890s to the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. Illustrations-production photographs, programmes, theatre buildings, playbills, actors' studio portraits- inform the study throughout.

The second of Shaw's "unpleasant" plays, written in 1893, published in 1898, but not performed until 1905, The Philanderer is subtitled "A Topical Comedy." The eclectic range of topical subjects addressed in the play includes the influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen on British middle-class social mores (the second act of The Philanderer is set in the fictional Ibsen Club), medical follies, the rise of the "New Woman," and, in particular, the destructive impact of Victorian marriage and divorce laws. Just as Shaw's other "unpleasant" plays, Widowers' Houses and Mrs Warren's Profession, call, respectively, for reform of laws that allow corrupt property owners to exploit the poor and for radical change to economic structures that drive women into prostitution, so The Philanderer makes the case for more liberal legislation to allow easier divorce-particularly for women-when marriages become irretrievably broken. Shaw's attack on divorce laws becomes even clearer and stronger in the final act that he wrote for the play but discarded in favour of the version he published. The discarded version is published for the first time in this Broadview edition of the play.

One of Bernard Shaw's early plays of social protest, Mrs Warren's Profession places the protagonist's decision to become a prostitute in the context of the appalling conditions for working class women in Victorian England. Faced with ill health, poverty, and marital servitude on the one hand, and opportunities for financial independence, dignity, and self-worth on the other, Kitty Warren follows her sister into a successful career in prostitution. Shaw's fierce social criticism in this play is driven not by conventional morality, but by anger at the hypocrisy that allows society to condemn prostitution while condoning the discrimination against women that makes prostitution inevitable. This Broadview edition includes a comprehensive historical and critical introduction; extracts from Shaw's prefaces to the play; Shaw's expurgations of the text; early reviews of the play in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain; and contemporary contextual documents on prostitution, incest, censorship, women's education, and the "New Woman."

The editor of this lively, updated assortment of reviews, interviews and other critical deliberations on contemporary Canadian drama has gathered material from books, theatre and scholarly journals; from major daily newspapers in Canada and abroad; from critics, academics, journalists and playwrights. This new expanded and updated edition of Canadian Drama and the Critics now includes commentary on 43 English-language plays written during the last 50 years.
"Canadian Drama and the Critics" is an enjoyable read that offers an intelligent, wide-ranging overview of modern Canadian plays and playwrights. An ideal companion text to Talonbooks' "Modern Canadian Plays" Volumes I and II and other anthologies of Canadian drama, "Canadian Drama and the Critics" also includes detailed production information for the premiere of each play and a comprehensive index.