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 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.

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

The emergence of contemporary Australian and English-Canadian multicultural drama undoubtedly constitutes a fascinating development in the history of international literatures written in English. These postcolonial plays offer ideal vantage points from which to observe the struggle of two comparable Commonwealth countries to accommodate the pluralism of their social fabric. As the prominent theatre scholars of this collection congently argue, the articulation of otherness forms a central concern in the drama of these two countries. The postcolonial playwrights studied in this book interpret marginality as an expression of resistance against the legacy of Empire, often through the weapon of subversive mimicry. The organising spatial metaphor of the book suggests new readings of the « other as an evolving site of contestation. This volume articulates a new form of comparative poetics, in which dramatic texts are used as reflecting mirrors, as privileged tools to explore the similarity and otherness that Australia and Canada share.