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Making History

by Brian Friel

Drama / 4m, 2f / This brilliant work by Ireland's pre eminent playwright plunges into the world of Hugh O'Neill, an Irish hero who led an ill fated uprising in alliance with Spain against the British in 1591, a conflict which culminated in ignominious defeat at the Battle of Kinsale. The play begins shortly after O'Neill's controversial marriage to the sister of the British "Butcher Bagenal" who is famous for slaughtering Irish villagers. The battle occurs between acts and then the myth of O'Neill is created by his biographer, Archbishop Peter Lombard. O'Neill ends up a hapless drunk in Rome while Lombard rewrites history to satisfy the Irish craving for legend.

Making It on Broadway: Actors' Tales of Climbing to the Top

by Jason Alexander Jodie Langel David Wienir

Countering the misperceptions about Broadway performers leading glamorous lives, the words of more than 150 Broadway stars provide unprecedented insight into their struggle for stardom. With an introduction by Jason Alexander and candid interviews with today's most celebrated Broadway stars, this book offers stories to entertain and astonish theater lovers, as well as serve as a sobering reality check for those considering careers on the stage. This book shares firsthand accounts of professional actors' difficult yet fulfilling journeys to Broadway: moving to New York, finding survival jobs, auditioning, landing roles, avoiding pitfalls, forging a family life, and much more.

Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism

by Raymond Knapp

In Making Light Raymond Knapp traces the musical legacy of German Idealism as it led to the declining prestige of composers such as Haydn while influencing the development of American popular music in the nineteenth century. Knapp identifies in Haydn and in early popular American musical cultures such as minstrelsy and operetta a strain of high camp—a mode of engagement that relishes both the superficial and serious aspects of an aesthetic experience—that runs antithetical to German Idealism's musical paradigms. By considering the disservice done to Haydn by German Idealism alongside the emergence of musical camp in American popular music, Knapp outlines a common ground: a humanistically based aesthetic of shared pleasure that points to ways in which camp receptive modes might rejuvenate the original appeal of Haydn's music that has mostly eluded audiences. In so doing, Knapp remaps the historiographical modes and systems of critical evaluation that dominate musicology while troubling the divide between serious and popular music.

Making Make-Believe Real

by Garry Wills

Shakespeare's plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe's Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth. Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity's rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the medieval church-state. The author illuminates the extensive imaginative constructions that went into Elizabeth's reign and the explosion of great Tudor and Stuart drama that provided the imaginative power to support her long and successful rule.

Making Meaning in Puppetry: Materials, Practice, Perception

by Dassia N. Posner

From ice puppets to robots, from intricate marionettes to abstract forms, Making Meaning in Puppetry investigates the elusive and multifaceted how of how puppets make meaning in performance.This engaging collection develops a vocabulary for understanding and articulating how the puppet’s meaning-making systems work across the book’s three distinct parts. Part 1 on Materiality illuminates how materials are chosen and dramaturgy is crafted into a puppet’s design; Part 2 on Practice investigates the interresponsive collaboration between puppet and puppeteer; and Part 3 on Perception considers how spectators understand and read a puppet production. The volume thus traces the full evolution of a puppet, from its raw materials, to its performance possibilities, to the moment it comes to imagined life. The seventeen chapters, authored by experts in the field, build bridges between puppetry and related fields, such as robotics, phenomenology, cognitive science, and queer theory, while using the puppet as their primary anchor of analysis.Making Meaning in Puppetry is ideal for students of theatre and performance studies, theatre artists, scholars, and anyone who is fascinated by this rich performance form and wants to understand it more deeply.

Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England (Published in cooperation with the Folger Shakespeare Library)

by John Kuhn

How early modern theatrical practice helped construct the category of “pagan” as a tool of European self-definition and colonial ambitionIn Making Pagans, John Kuhn argues that drama played a powerful role in the articulation of religious difference in the seventeenth century. Tracing connections between the history of stagecraft and ethnological disciplines such as ethnography, antiquarianism, and early comparative religious writing, Kuhn shows how early modern repertory systems that leaned heavily on thrift and reuse produced an enduring theatrical vocabulary for understanding religious difference through the representation of paganism—a key term in the new taxonomy of world religions emerging at this time, and a frequent subject and motif in English drama of the era.Combining properties such as triumphal chariots, trick altars, and moving statues with music, special effects, and other elements, the spectacular set-pieces that were mostly developed for plays set in antiquity, depicting England’s pre-Christian past, were frequently repurposed in new plays, in representations of Native Americans and Africans in colonial contact zones. Kuhn argues that the recycling of these set-pieces encouraged audiences to process new cultural sites through the lens of old performance tropes, and helped produce fictitious, quasi-ethnographic knowledge for spectators, generating the idea of a homogeneous, trans-historical, trans-geographical “paganism.” Examining the common scenes of pagan ritual that filled England's seventeenth-century stages—magical conjurations, oracular prophecies, barbaric triumphal parades, and group suicides—Kuhn traces these tropes across dozens of plays, from a range of authors including Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, and Philip Massinger.Drawing together theater history, Atlantic studies, and the history of comparative religion, Making Pagans reconceptualizes the material and iterative practices of the theater as central to the construction of radical religious difference in early modernity and of the category of paganism as a tool of European self-definition and colonial ambition.

Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

by Paul Yachnin Bronwen Wilson

The book looks at how people, things, and new forms of knowledge created "publics" in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. The focus is on what the authors call "making publics" — the active creation of new forms of association that allowed people to connect with others in ways not rooted in family, rank or vocation, but rather founded in voluntary groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals. By creating new forms of association, cultural producers and consumers challenged dominant ideas about just who could be a public person, greatly expanded the resources of public life for ordinary people in their own time, and developed ideas and practices that have helped create the political culture of modernity. Coming from a number of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, art history, history of religion, history of science, and musicology, the contributors develop analyses of a range of cases of early modern public-making that together demonstrate the rich inventiveness and formative social power of artistic and intellectual publication in this period.

Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (Accents on Shakespeare)

by Tiffany Stern

Making Shakespeare is a lively introduction to the major issues of the stage and print history, whilst also raising questions about what a Shakespeare play actually is. Tiffany Stern reveals how London, the theatre, the actors and the way in which the plays were written and printed all affect the 'Shakespeare' that we now read. Concentrating on the instability and fluidity of Shakespeare's texts, her book discusses what happened to a manuscript between its first composition, its performance on stage and its printing, and identifies traces of the production system in the plays we read. She argues that the versions of Shakespeare that have come down to us have inevitably been formed by the contexts from which they emerged; being shaped by, for example, the way actors received and responded to their lines, the props and music used in the theatre, or the continual revision of plays by the playhouses and printers. Allowing a fuller understanding of the texts we read and perform, Making Shakespeare is the perfect introduction to issues of stage and page. A refreshingly clear, accessible read, this book will allow even those with no expert knowledge to begin to contextualize Shakespeare's plays for themselves, in ways both old and new.

Making The Scene: A History Of Stage Design And Technology In Europe And The United States

by Oscar G. Brockett Margaret A. Mitchell Linda Hardberger

Theatrical scene design is one of the most beautiful, varied, and lively art forms. Yet there are relatively few books on the subject, and almost none for a general audience that combine expansive scholarship with lavish design. Making the Scene offers an unprecedented survey of the evolving context, theory, and practice of scene design from ancient Greek times to the present, coauthored by the world's best-known authority on the subject and enhanced by three hundred full-color illustrations. Individual chapters of the book focus on Greece, Rome, Medieval Europe (including liturgical drama, street pageants, festival outdoor drama, Spanish religious drama, and royal entries), the Italian Renaissance, eighteenth-century Europe, Classicism to Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism, Modernism, and contemporary scene design. Making the Scene's authors review everything from the effects of social status on theatre design to the sea changes between Classicism, Romanticism, and Naturalism and the influence of perspective-based thought. Particularly intriguing is their rediscovery of lost tricks and techniques, from the classical deus ex machina and special effects in coliseums to medieval roving stage wagons and the floating ships of the Renaissance to the computerized practices of today's theatres. Such ingenious techniques, interwoven with the sweeping beauty of scene design through the ages, combine with the keen scholarship of Oscar Brockett and Margaret Mitchell to create a book as involving as the art it showcases.

Making a Killing

by John Nassivera

Full length, thriller / 2m, 2f / Interior / A Broadway playwright, his conniving producer and his actress wife hatch a plot to guarantee their new play will be a success; they fake the suicide of the playwright on opening night! They then high tail it up to Vermont where the playwright hopes to disappear, as he hates the public spotlight anyway. However, after a few weeks the playwright decides he no longer wants to participate in the scheme. Maybe his wife and his producer who are having an affair will have to kill him for real! Also on the scene is the playwright's feisty agent, who uncovers the plot and then helps her client deal with his most difficult artistic challenge: foiling his producer and wife!

Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices

by Katie Normington Helen Nicholson Emma Govan

Making a Performance traces innovations in devised performance from early theatrical experiments in the twentieth-century to the radical performances of the twenty-first century. This introduction to the theory, history and practice of devised performance explores how performance-makers have built on the experimental aesthetic traditions of the past. It looks to companies as diverse as Australia's Legs on the Wall, Britain's Forced Entertainment and the USA-based Goat Island to show how contemporary practitioners challenge orthodoxies to develop new theatrical languages. Designed to be accessible to both scholars and practitioners, this study offers clear, practical examples of concepts and ideas that have shaped some of the most vibrant and experimental practices in contemporary performance.

Making an Entrance: Theory and Practice for Disabled and Non-Disabled Dancers

by Adam Benjamin

Making an Entrance is the first ever practical introduction to teaching dance with disabled and non disabled students. This clearly written, thought provoking and hugely enjoyable manual is essential reading whether you're just starting out or are already active in the field.Taking improvisation as his focus and as the starting point of choreographic exploration, Adam Benjamin asks what it has to offer as an art form and how it can be better used to meet the changing needs of dance education.In the theoretical section Benjamin explores the history of a disintegrated dance practice, placing it within the wider context of cultural and political movements. He questions what is meant today when we talk about 'inclusive' or 'integrated dance' and what we might expect of it.The book includes over 50 exercises and improvisations designed to stimulate and challenge students at all levels of dance. Benjamin also includes useful hints on the practicalities of setting up workshops covering issues as diverse a class size, the safety aspects of wheelchairs and the accessibility of dance spaces.

Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

by Simone Chess

This volume examines and theorizes the oft-ignored phenomenon of male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing in early modern drama, prose, and poetry, inviting MTF crossdressing episodes to take a fuller place alongside instances of female-to-male crossdressing and boy actors’ crossdressing, which have long held the spotlight in early modern gender studies. The author argues that MTF crossdressing episodes are especially rich sources for socially-oriented readings of queer gender—that crossdressers’ genders are constructed and represented in relation to romantic partners, communities, and broader social structures like marriage, economy, and sexuality. Further, she argues that these relational representations show that the crossdresser and his/her allies often benefit financially, socially, and erotically from his/her queer gender presentation, a corrective to the dominant idea that queer gender has always been associated with shame, containment, and correction. By attending to these relational and beneficial representations of MTF crossdressers in early modern literature, the volume helps to make a larger space for queer, genderqueer, male-bodied and queer-feminine representations in our conversations about early modern gender and sexuality.

Malicious Deceivers: Thinking Machines and Performative Objects (Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media)

by Ioana B. Jucan

In Malicious Deceivers, Ioana B. Jucan traces a genealogy of post-truth intimately tied to globalizing modernity and connects the production of repeatable fakeness with capitalism and Cartesian metaphysics. Through case studies that cross times and geographies, the book unpacks the notion of fakeness through the related logics of dissimulation (deception) and simulation (performativity) as seen with software/AI, television, plastics, and the internet. Specifically, Jucan shows how these (dis)simulation machines and performative objects construct impoverished pictures of the world, ensuring a repeatable sameness through processes of hollowing out embodied histories and lived experience. Through both its methodology and its subjects-objects of study, the book further seeks ways to counter the abstracting mode of thinking and the processes of voiding performed by the twinning of Cartesian metaphysics and global capitalism. Enacting a model of creative scholarship rooted in the tradition of writing as performance, Jucan, a multimedia performance-maker and theater director, uses the embodied "I" as a framing and situating device for the book and its sites of investigation. In this way, she aims to counter the Cartesian voiding of the thinking "I" and to enact a different kind of relationship between self and world from the one posited by Descartes and replayed in much Western philosophical and — more broadly — academic writing: a relationship of separation that situates the "I" on a pedestal of abstraction that voids it of its embodied histories and fails to account for its positionality within a socio-historical context and the operations of power that define it.

Malo para mí

by Divino B'Atista

La suerte parece incluir un favor de Mateo tan pronto como consigue un trabajo en el restaurante donde trabaja Andrew, el chico de sus sueños. Siendo el romántico incurable que es, Mateo cree fielmente que puede convertir la amistad en un romance largamente esperado, el problema es que la vida está llena de sorpresas, y una de ellas va a sacudir completamente el corazón del chico, haciéndole entender que el amor no siempre es tan simple y color de rosa como imaginamos. Malo para mí es una historia ligera, con una trama atractiva y humorística, que hará reír y emocionar al lector hasta la última página. LEA TAMBIÉN, ESA MALDITA SONRISA.

Mama

by Adam Cass

In August 2017, Melbourne's La Mama Theatre celebrates 50 years since the premiere of its first production, Jack Hibberd's 'Three Old Friends'. La Mama commemorates the rich life story of the theatre so far, tracking the history and chronology of the work that has been made and the many careers that have been born, raised and cherished there. Complemented by hundreds of wonderful photographs, the book is woven together through a series of rowdy yarns spun by the La Mama community, capturing a sense of the magic that has been inspiring audiences for fifty years.

Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's Avant-Garde Theatre (Studies in Modern Drama)

by Sarah Bay-Cheng

Mama Dada is the first book to examine Gertrude Stein's drama within the history of the theatrical and cinematic avant-gardes. Since the publication of Stein's major writings by the Library of America in 1998, interest in her dramatic writing has escalated, particularly in American avant-garde theaters. This book addresses the growing interest in Stein's theater by offering the first detailed analyses of her major plays, and by considering them within a larger history of avant-garde performance. In addition to comparing Stein's plays and theories to those generated by Dadaists, Surrealists, and Futurists, this study further explores the uniqueness of Stein via these theatrical movements, including discussions of her interest in American life and drama, which argues that a significant and heretofore unrecognized relationship exists among the histories of avant-garde drama, cinema, and homosexuality. By examining and explaining the relationship among these three histories, the dramatic writings of Stein can best be understood, not only as examples of literary modernism, but also as influential dramatic works that have had a lasting effect on the American theatrical avant-

Mama and Jack Carew

by Hal Corley

Dramatic Comedy / 2m, 1f / Unit Set In the summer of 1969, Beau Stanley's last hurrah before heading off to study architecture in college, doting Mama Lillian vows to help him finally lose his baby fat. Armed with a supply of diet pills and a food-free regimen that includes tearing down a family room wall, 3 a.m. trips to Dulles Airport and blazing, amphetamine-fueled days on the beach, mother and son spend a memorable vacation together. But Beau's weight loss isn't restless Lillian's only project, and in an unguarded moment, she reveals her just-begun affair with a travelling defense contractor, Jack Carew. Once Lillian introduces son and lover, Beau's caught in the oedipal crossfire of a covert and explosive new alliance, forced to cover his Mama's many absences from home. Over the next decade, Jack's repeated pledge to end his own loveless marriage and sweep Lillian away proves a hollow promise. As increasingly beleaguered Beau sacrifices his own independence to help his mother confront her disillusionment and finally, betrayal, parent-child roles are turned upside down. Mama and Jack Carew is a harrowing, oftentimes black-comedic portrait of an unlikely triangle.

Mambo Italiano

by Steve Galluccio

Mambo Italiano achieves its overwhelming power through a perfect balance of fast-paced comedy and poignant drama. Angelo, at the prompting of his equally repressed sister Anna, has told his very traditionally Italian immigrant parents, Maria and Gino, that he is gay. Hurt, betrayed and mortified by Angelo's coming out, his lover Nino is not unprepared for his widowed Italian mother Lina's reaction--a full-on operatic barrage of melodrama and hysterical excess so profound it gives even Angelo's shocked parents pause for second thoughts and prompts a hilarious and touching re-examination of their own outraged response to their son. Seeing their relationship shattered by their families' reactions of grotesquely overplayed comedy and pathos, Angelo emerges from the drama with his new-found pride intact, while Nino retreats even further into the darkness of his bisexual closet. While the press has often called the film version of Mambo Italiano "a gay My Big Fat Greek Wedding," there is far more at work in the play than the zealous mining of Italian immigrant family and gay culture stereotypes. Translated by Michel Tremblay, its huge fan, into a wildly successful Francophone theatrical phenomenon, Mambo Italiano is far more about the dynamics of family, about the vast spaces between the old world and the new, about grasping the resonant codes embedded in what is said and what is meant in ordinary speech, than it is "about" gay culture. In perhaps the play's most defining scene, the parish priest has been bribed with a bottle of wine and a carton of cigarettes to vacate his confessional so it can be occupied by the members of Angelo's family to ritually unburden themselves of their hilarious sins of personal hypocrisy, willful misapprehension and thoughtless transgression. Cast of 4 women and 3 men.

Man From The USSR & Other Plays: And Other Plays

by Vladimir Nabokov

Four plays and two essays on drama, written during Nabokov's émigré years before his writings in English earned him worldwide fame. Translated and with Introductions by Dmitri Nabokov.

Man and Superman

by George Bernard Shaw

One of Shaw's finest and most devilish comedies, Man and Superman portrays Don Juan as the quarry instead of the huntsman. John Tanner, upon discovering that his beautiful ward plans to marry him, flees to the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where he is captured by a group of rebels. Tanner falls asleep, and dreams the famous "Don Juan in Hell" sequence, which features a sparkling Shavian debate among Don Juan, the Devil, and a talkative statue. With its fairy-tale ending and a cast literally from hell, Man and Superman is a hilarious cocktail of farce, Nietzschean philosophy, and Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Man of La Mancha

by Dale Wasserman

Winner of the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Musical, 1966"To me the most interesting aspect of the success of Man of La Mancha is the fact that it plows squarely upstream against the prevailing current of philosophy in the theater. That current is best identified by its catch-labels--Theater of the Absurd, Black Comedy, the Theater of Cruelty--which is to say the theater of alienation, of moral anarchy and despair. To the practitioners of those philosophies Man of La Mancha must seem hopelessly naive in its espousal of illusion as man's strongest spiritual need, the most meaningful function of his imagination. But I've no unhappiness about that. "Facts are the enemy of truth," says Cervantes-Don Quixote. And that is precisely what I felt and meant."--Dale Wasserman, from the Preface.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Man of La Mancha: A Musical Play

by Dale Wasserman

This is a powerful story of a man, disillusioned with everyday life, who decides to become a Knight Errant and go out forth into the world righting all wrongs.

Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare

by Coppelia H. Kahn

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

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