This is the first collection of critical essays to appear about the Wooster Group. Since the 1970s this groundbreaking, New York-based performance company has led the way in crystallizing the conditions of contemporary stage practice at the intersection of several cultural and artistic traditions. As demonstrated by the assembled critics, each of them an authority in the field, these traditions extend into the past as well as into the future, through the Wooster Group's impact on the latest generation of performance artists. The company's consequent institutionalization is posited and challenged in the essays constituting Part I of the collection. Part II tackles the work-in-progress, mapping its idiomatic stage vocabulary and providing case studies, ranging from Frank Dell's The Temptation of St. Antony to To You, The Birdie! (Phedre). Part III presents productions by kindred artists such as Elevator Repair Service, the Builders Association, Cannon Company, and Richard Maxwell. Lavishly illustrated with photographs, this collection should prove invaluable to anyone with an interest in the current theatrical scene and its place in the wider institutional, artistic, and historical contexts.

This close study of selected plays by four of the greatest early moderm playwrights, namely Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and O'Neill, examines how these plays challenge long-standing traditions and assumptions of nineteenth-century theatre and reas

Theater has always been the site of visionary hopes for a reformed national future and a space for propagating ideas, both cultural and political, and such a conceptualization of the histrionic art is all the more valuable in the post-9/11 era. The essays in this volume address the concept of � Americanness and the perceptions of the � alien -- as ethnic, class or gendered minorities -- as dealt with in the work of American playwrights from Anna Cora Mowatt, through Rachel Crothers or Susan Glaspell, and on to Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Nilo Cruz or Wallace Shawn. The authors of the essays come from a multi-national university background that includes the United States, the United Arab Emirates and various countries of the European Community. In recognition of the multiple components of drama, the essays for the volume were selected in order to exemplify different aspects and theories of theater studies: the playwright, the play, the audience and the actor are all examined as part of the theatrical experience that serves to formulate American national identity.

In recent decades, there has been a marked tendency to look at war literature from a perspective that reaches beyond the experiences of particular nations. Characteristically, though poetry and prose from Poland, Hungary and fomer Czechoslovakia are included in multiantional anthologies, the war literatures of Eastern Europe seem to have been ignored in critical studies. The Myth of War in British and Polish Poetry. 1939-1945 aims to fill in this critical vacuum. This study concentrates on the processes through which British and Polish poetry contributed to the shaping of myths of war, each offering creative interpretations of historical facts and developments. Both poetic traditions are analysed in the context of their national literary heritage and historical background in order to explain the discrepancies characterising these imaginative versions of war. Yet, the ultimate objective is to discover spheres of convergence within a network of differences. This comparative analysis of British and Polish war poetry paves the way for discussions about the relationships between national and individual experiences of history, inviting consideration of how seemingly unsurpassable borders can be crossed. Contents: Survey of the developments in British and Polish poetry of the First World War--The creation of national myths of war and their impact on post-1918 literature--British and Polish poetry of the Second World War--The myth of war and the myth of the wartime generation--The impact of the British and Polish myths of war on post-1945 poetry.

This book brings together essays on the Stratford Festival, on Shakespeare in Quebec, and on Canadian dramatic adaptations of Hamlet and Othello by Ric Knowles, one of Canada's leading drama and theatre scholars. The essays discuss such major figures as Robert Lepage, Ann Marie MacDonald, Djanet Sears, Michael O'Brien, Ken Gass, Robin Phillips, Marco Micone, and Martine Beaulne. Taken together they explore both the role that Canada has played in contemporary understandings of Shakespeare, and the role that Shakespeare has played in the constitution of postcolonial Canadian subjectivity and nationhood.