The Bedford Introduction To Drama

Offering a broad survey of drama from the ancient Greeks to the present — including many new contemporary prize-winners — The Bedford Introduction to Drama has the plays you want to teach in a collection flexible enough to serve your needs in a variety of courses. Fifty-four chronologically arranged plays are illuminated by insightful commentaries and casebooks that enrich students’ contextual understanding and encourage critical thinking. Concise introductions for each historical period and play emphasize theater design, staging, and acting style, and a wealth of photographs and illustrations help students visualize plays in performance. A fresh new design highlights the rich contextual features and additional help for students including a guide to writing about drama, a glossary, and new cross-references to a robust companion Web site.

Offering a carefully chosen selection of plays from the ancient Greeks to the present — including many new contemporary prize-winners — The Compact Bedford Introduction to Drama has the plays you want to teach and the features students need at a compact size and an affordable price. Twenty-eight chronologically arranged plays are illuminated by insightful commentaries and casebooks that enrich students’ contextual understanding and encourage critical thinking. Concise introductions for each historical period and play emphasize theater design, staging, and acting style, and a wealth of photographs and illustrations help students visualize plays in performance. A fresh new design highlights the contextual features and additional help for students including a guide to writing about drama, a glossary, and new cross-references to a robust companion Web site.

This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It focuses on representative plays and performance texts that experiment with form and content, discussing influential playwrights and performance artists such as Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlum, Anna Deavere Smith, Karen Finley and Will Power, alongside avant-garde theatre groups. Saddik traces the development of contemporary drama since 1945, and discusses the cross-cultural impact of postwar British and European innovations on American theatre from the 1950s to the present day in order to examine the performance of American identity. She argues that contemporary American theatre is primarily a postmodern drama of inclusion and diversity that destabilizes the notion of fixed identity and questions the nature of reality.

Offering a broad survey of drama from the ancient Greeks to the present -- including many new contemporary prize-winners -- The Bedford Introduction to Drama has the plays you want to teach in a collection flexible enough to serve your needs in a variety of courses including introduction to drama or theater, theater appreciation, play analysis, or theater history. Fifty chronologically arranged plays are illuminated by insightful commentaries and casebooks that enrich students' contextual understanding and encourage critical thinking. Concise introductions for each historical period and play emphasize theater design, staging, and acting style, and a wealth of photographs and illustrations help students visualize plays in performance. Students are fully supported in the course with a guide to writing about drama, a glossary, and additional resources for reading and understanding plays in LaunchPad Solo for Literature.

SHAW 21 offers readers an eclectic perspective on Shaw, his works, and his contemporaries. Basil Langton, actor and director, reminisces about his early development as an actor, his meeting with Shaw, and his career as director of many of Shaw's plays. He focuses upon Shaw's stagecraft, augmenting his views with those of Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson, whom he interviewed in 1960. Galen Goodwin Longstreth analyzes the correspondence between Shaw and Ellen Terry and argues that the exchange is itself a literary genre, a dramatic performance that reveals their personal identities. The next two contributors, Stanley Weintraub and Andrea Adolph, examine the Shaw/Virginia Woolf relationship. Weintraub focuses on those occasions when their respective lives touched each other, what their feelings for each other were, and how those occasions were obliquely woven into Shaw's plays, most notably Heartbreak House. Professor Adoph argues that in Woolf's only dramatic text, Freshwater: A Comedy, she was conforming to the traditional theatrical mode of the day, dominated, of course, by Shaw, but that she subverted his traditional literary depiction of paternity as, for example, the paternity dramatized in Major Barbara. Sidney Albert and Bernard Dukore provide unique perspectives on reading Major Barbara. Albert shows how John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress serves as Shaw's source for Barbara's progress toward enlightened understanding. Dukore, focusing on the perspective of the familial relationship within the play, concludes that Shaw's dialectic gives the kids the future and not the dad. It will be the next generation, not Father Undershaft, who will determine where society will go next. Julie Sparks and Martin Bucco approach Shaw from a comparative basis, juxtaposing him with two American writers, contemporaries of Shaw, Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis, respectively. Sparks explores the commonality that exists in Shaw's and Twain's thinking about evolution, namely, their heretical visions of a post-Darwinian Eden. Both viewed conventional Christianity iconoclastically, but both arrived at different conclusions about human origin and destiny, a view Sparks describes as emanating from the deist-pessimist-evolutionary-determinist perspective versus the mystic-optimistic-creative-evolutionist perspective, or the Personal Godhead versus the Impersonal Force. Professor Bucco enumerates the many references Sinclair Lewis makes to Bernard Shaw throughout his writings, both prose and fiction, to underscore the American novelist's admiration for the Irish playwright, both recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The final two contributors to SHAW 21, Rodelle Weintraub and William Doan, provide the readers with distinctive perspectives on John Bull's Other Island and The Doctor's Dilemma, respectively. Weintraub recasts the play into a dream sequence whereby Doyle's dream becomes an artifice for problem solving. Implied within Father Keegan's lines in the play, "Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time," is the resolution of Doyle's problem with Nora, the girl he had left behind, and of the dream of modernizing Roscullen. Doan suggests that in The Doctor's Dilemma Shaw uses the idea of unconsummated adultery to argue for the efficacy of art over science. In the conflict between the artist and the scientist, the latter plans to have the artist's muse. In the end, not only is he deprived of the wife but also of the works of art themselves and the spirit that animates them. SHAW 21 also includes three reviews of recent additions to Shavian scholarship as well as John R. Pfeiffer's "Continuing Checklist of Shaviana."

Style: An Approach to Appreciating Theatre offers brief, readable chapters about the basics of theatre as a starting point for discussion, and provides new adaptations of classic plays that are both accessible to students learning about theatre and fit for production. In this text, style is the word used to describe the various ways in which theatre is done in real space and time by humans in the physical presence of other humans. The book uses style, the "liveness" of theatre that makes it distinct from literature or history, as a lens to see how playwrights, directors, designers, and actors bring scripts to life on stage. Rather than focusing on theatre history or literary script analysis, it emphasizes actual theatrical production through examples and explores playscripts illustrating four theatrical styles: Realism, Theatricalism, Expressionism, and Classicism. Susan Glaspells Realistic play Trifles is presented as written, while The Insect Play by the Brothers apek, The Hairy Ape by Eugene ONeill, and Antigone by Sophocles are original, full-length adaptions. Style: An Approach to Appreciating Theatre is the perfect resource for students of Theatre Appreciation, Introduction to Theatre, Theatrical Design, and Stagecraft courses.

This collection addresses key questions in women's theatre history and retrieves a number of previously "hidden" histories of women performers. The essays range across the past 300 years--topics covered include Susanna Centlivre and the notion of intertheatricality; gender and theatrical space; the repositioning of women performers such as Wagner's Muse, Willhelmina Schröder-Devrient, the Comédie Français' "Mademoiselle Mars," Mme. Arnould-Plessey, and the actresses of the Russian serf theatre.

Text & Presentation is an annual publication devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship. It represents a selection of the best research presented at the international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference. This anthology includes papers from the 32nd annual conference held in Los Angeles, California. Topics covered include masculinity in the plays of Tennessee Williams and Frederico Garcia Lorca; Moliere’s revolutionary dramaturgy; motherhood in Medea; Electronovision and Richard Burton’s Hamlet; and José Carrasquillo’s all-nude production of Macbeth, among many others.

Provides a new way of defining—and understanding—postmodern drama

The book of Revelation perennially provokes outlandish futurist predictions proven patently false over time. Such prophecy failures leave the inquiring mind with a strong sense that the book of Revelation is nothing but a hoax, safely ignored and without contemporary relevance. The inevitable practical result, not only for church members, but for their ministers as well, is a canonical book stripped bare of canonical authority.In this volume, six contributors collectively attempt to provide a path toward recanonizing Revelation, reclaiming its authority and relevance through christological foundations. The result is a book not only useful in the collegiate and seminary classroom, but also for serious small-group Bible studies wanting to glean from Revelation something deeper than a fear of being "left behind."

This book works to 'make change strange' from and for the field of theatre and performance studies. Growing from the idea that change is an under-interrogated category that over-determines theatre and performance as an artistic, social, educational, and material practice, the scholars and practitioners gathered here (including specialists in theatre history and literature, educational theatre, youth arts, arts policy, socially invested theatre, and activist performance) take up the question of change in thirty-five short essays. For anyone who has wondered about the relationships between theatre, performance and change itself, this book is an essential conversation starter.