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Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture
by Jennifer Higginbotham Mark Albert JohnstonThis volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.
Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender-Bending
by Meredith HellerTheatrical gender-bending, also called drag, is a popular form of entertainment and a subject of scholarly study. However, most drag studies do not question the standard words and ideas used to convey this performance genre. Drawing on a rich body of archival and ethnographic research, Meredith Heller illuminates diverse examples of theatrical gender-bending: male impersonation in variety and vaudeville (1860–1920); the "sexless" gender-bending of El Teatro Campesino (1960–1980); queer butch acts performed by black nightclub singers, such as Stormé DeLarverie, instigator of the Stonewall riots (1910–1970); and the range of acts that compose contemporary drag king shows. Heller highlights how, in each case, standard drag discourses do not sufficiently capture the complexity of performers' intents and methods, nor do they provide a strong enough foundation for holistically evaluating the impact of this work. Queering Drag offers redefinition of the genre centralized in the performer's construction and presentation of a "queer" version of hegemonic identity, and it models a new set of tools for analyzing drag as a process of intents and methods enacted to effect specific goals. This new drag discourse not only allows for more complete and accurate descriptions of drag acts, but it also facilitates more ethical discussions about the bodies, identities, and products of drag performers.
Queering Polishness in Polish Theatre Since 2005: Dissenting Bodies
by Jonas VanderschuerenTheatre has long been an art form at the centre of public life in Poland. Whether it is the self-professed poet-prophets of the Romantic era, or the dissident theatre makers working under the strictures of state socialism, the art form has played a vital role in the development of Polish culture and politics in the context of shifting foreign occupations. This book explores the relationship between contemporary Polish theatre makers and contemporary notions of Polishness and argues that queer theory, and specifically a Polish appropriation of queer theory, can be a crucial element to better understand the politicality of the contemporary Polish theatre field. It does this by focusing on critical theatre productions which are produced at the margins of the Polish theatre field, a choice which has been made as the field is dominated by traditional drama theatres which reproduce a Polish variation on the Western canon. This makes smaller, atypical, and independent theatre productions all the more significant, as they signify a refusal to continue the traditional role of the Polish theatre field in reproducing the canon of Polish Romanticism. As such, the book argues that contemporary Polish theatre has been marked by a struggle between those building performances and state authorities that see those creations as a threat to their authority.
Queering the Stage: Inclusive Approaches to Performing Gender and Sexuality
by Adi CabralQueering the Stage: Inclusive Approaches to Performing Gender and Sexuality addresses a history of stereotyping and provides inclusive approaches to navigating gender and sexuality in a way that does not reduce the broad spectrum of LGBTQ+ communities into a single monolith.Butch it up! Be more manly! Add a little swish! Queen out! These instructions make performers feel minimized, erased, and forced to fit in a binary that encourages underdeveloped portrayals of queer identities. This book will guide the reader in performance techniques for confidently embodying the masculine/ feminine, gay/ straight binaries – as concepts of chosen choreography rather than reductive prescriptions – while also providing non- binary exercises to explore and expand the use of the body, voice, heart, and mind to bring life to characters of sexual orientations and gender identities that do and do not align with the actors’ lived experiences. The reader will be presented with multiple tools for analyzing, developing, and embodying a diverse array of characters, empowering them to make their own choices when it comes to performance. While there is no “right” way to teach performance, this book will present tools rooted in trauma- informed practices that aim to prevent and undo harm in a group setting with a facilitator, or individually.This book is written for instructors of theatre performance and acting wishing to expand their curriculum to include queer concepts in their classroom, and actors working in the industry who want to improve their ability performing characters of diverse genders and sexualities.A companion website, available at www.adicabral.com/queering-the-stage, provides additional materials to support exercises given throughout the book.
Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
by Zsuzsanna BalázsQueering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights challenges the general resistance in scholarship and queer studies to approach Yeats and D’Annunzio through a queer lens because of their controversial affiliations with fascism and elitism, their heterosexuality and their venerated canonical status. This book provides the first fully theorised queer and comparative reading of Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama. It offers the novel contention that due to their increasing involvement in queer and feminist subcultures, their plays feature feelings that are associated with queer historiography and generate ideas that began to be theorised by queer studies more than half a century after the composition of the plays. Moreover, it uncovers an alert, subversive and often coded social commentary in eight key dramatic texts by each playwright and at the same time highlights the thus far neglected commonalities between the plays and the queer historical as well as cultural contexts of these two prominent modernists.
The Quest for Shakespeare
by Jeffrey KahanThis book traces the formation and impact of the New Shakspeare Society, created in 1873, which dedicated itself to solving the mysteries of Shakespeare's authorship by way of science. This promise, however, was undermined not only by the antics of its director, Frederick J. Furnivall, but also by the inexactitudes of the tests. Jeffrey Kahan puzzles out how a society geared towards science quickly devolved into a series of grudge matches. Nonetheless, the New Shakspere Society set the bibliographical and biographical agenda for the next century--an unusual legacy for an organization that was rife with intrigue, enmity, and incompetence; lives were ruined, lawyers consulted, and scholarship (mostly bad) produced and published.
A Question of Mercy: A Play Based on the Essay by Richard Selzer (Books That Changed the World)
by David RabeThe Tony Award–winning playwright of Hurlyburly &“confronts the timely topic of assisted suicide . . . an affirmation of dignity that rings clear and true&” (Variety). David Rabe is one of America&’s finest dramatists. In A Question of Mercy, he explores the controversial and emotional issue of euthanasia, delving deep into the ties that bind friends and lovers. Thomas and Anthony are lovers struggling with Anthony&’s final, exhausting battle with AIDS. Joined by their friend Susanah and a retired doctor, whose help Thomas has requested, they fashion a heartbreaking friendship as they work through the stages of a plan to relieve Anthony of his illness and his life. Rabe creates a passionate depiction of four people confronted with the reality of a loved one&’s fight with death and a compelling dramatic event that poses the question: &“What would you do?&” &“A moving and enlightening experience.&” —Backstage &“Completely gripping. This life and death tale questions the moral implications involved with assisted suicide, and the honor behind the action. A serious and provocative night at the theatre.&” —Theasy Praise for David Rabe &“Few contemporary dramatists have dealt with violence, physical and psychological, more impressively than Rabe.&” —Kirkus Reviews &“A remarkable storyteller.&” —Chicago Tribune &“Rabe&’s mastery of dialogue is the equal of Pinter and Mamet put together . . . full of a measured Mafia formality played against Jacobean terrors, blood lust, horror and revenge raised to an unlikely poetry dazed by equally unlikely insights.&” —The Boston Globe
Questions of Honor
by Kate WelshA stern, rock-hard man stood before Abaigeal Sullivan. No sign of the boy whose playful teases had once turned to stolen kisses and something much, much more. Why, in all the years Joshua Wheaton had been away, had he never made contact, acknowledged her astounding news-that she carried his child? Abby no longer trusted any man, but could she believe Joshua when he claimed he only ever meant to act honorably toward her? There was no doubt he wanted to get closer to her and the son that they had created together.
Quick Bright Things
by Christopher Cook“Everyone hears voices. I’m treated like I’m broken for admitting it.” Can a weekend trip to visit family ever be smooth? Nick was hoping for a quick dinner at his brother Reid’s house when he stopped by with his seventeen-year-old adopted son, Gerome, on their way to meet Gerome’s birth mother. Gerome was recently diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he wants to know more about his family history. Though Reid and his family wreak havoc with their well-meaning but misguided ideas about Gerome’s diagnosis, they manage to convince Nick and his son to stay the night, even after they find Gerome on the roof ready to demonstrate backflips. The dinner pit stop becomes a tense weekend-long event full of claims and questions as the family attempts to “un-crazy” Gerome, leading them all to a dangerous breaking point. With truth, humour, and pathos, Quick Bright Things explores a family’s struggle with understanding mental health, their ways of expressing love, and what it ultimately means to be “okay.”
Quills and Other Plays
by Doug WrightSelected early works from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.Throughout his work, Doug Wright has often combined the personal, the social, and the political, in the process unearthing fundamental truths about life and art while casting an unblinking eye on the dark--and darkly funny--side of human nature. Gathered here are three of Wright's early plays, including Interrogating the Nude, a tongue-in-cheek reimagining of the uproar surrounding the debut of Marcel Duchamp's work in America; Watbanaland, a satiric dissection of yuppie desire and a haunting look at family and faith; and the Obie Award-winning Quills, which explores the boundaries of artistic expression and the dangers of censorship as they played out in the Marquis de Sade's final days at Charenton Asylum.
Quint and Miss Jessel at Bly
by Don NigroDramaCharacters: 2 male, 1 female. Unit Set. Peter Quint is sent by his lifelong employer, the Master of Bly, to be the servant in charge of a remote English country house where Miss Jessel has just arrived to be governess to the orphaned children of the master's brother. The ultimately deadly love triangle that results forms a darkly funny and erotic Gothic love story. These are the lovers who haunt Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Quint is brilliant, sardonic and angry, a man of great abilities trapped by birth into a subservient role he hates. Miss Jessel is beautiful, headstrong, troubled, and deeply infatuated with the master. As Quint and Miss Jessel's affair develops, the rivalry between servant and master builds to a frightening and haunting climax.
The Quintessential Zerka: Writings by Zerka Toeman Moreno on Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy
by Zerka T MorenoThe Quintessential Zerka documents the origins and development of the theory and practice of psychodrama, sociometry and group psychotherapy through the work and innovation of its co-creator, Zerka Toeman Moreno. This comprehensive handbook brings together history, philosophy, methodology and application. It shows the pioneering role that Zerka, along with her husband J. L. Moreno, played in the development, not only of the methods of psychodrama and sociometry, but of the entire group psychotherapy movement worldwide. It demonstrates the extent to which Zerka's intuitive and intellectual grasp of the work, combined with her superb ability to organize and synthesize, continue to exert an influence on the field. Toni Horvatin and Edward Schreiber have selected articles that span a career of some sixty years, from Zerka’s very first publication to recent, previously unpublished, work. Personal anecdotes and poetry from Zerka herself provide a valuable context for each individual article. The selection includes: psychodrama, it's relation to stage, radio and motion pictures psychodramatic rules, techniques and adjunctive methods beyond aristotle, breuer and freud: Moreno’s contribution to the concept of catharsis psychodrama, role theory and the concept of the social atom. This book provides a rich source of insight and inspiration for all those interested in the history, development and practice of psychodrama, sociometry and group psychotherapy, whatever their level of experience. It will be of interest to anyone involved in the fields of psychology, counselling, sociology, social work, education, theatre, or human relations.
A Quintet of Shakespeare Tragedies
by William ShakespeareMurder, Mayhem, and Madness-- Collected here are five of William Shakespeare's greatest tragedies Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. These are the plays that made Shakespeare's reputation. Murder, deceit, treachery, and madness play out on the grand stage. Stories for the ages! Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Quiver
by Anna Chatterton“She doesn’t care about me; she doesn’t even want to see me; she just pretends she does.” Shy, fourteen-year-old Maddie wasn’t expecting to have to worry about taking care of herself just yet. Her sixteen-year-old party-girl sister Bea has scandalously moved in with their mom’s ex-boyfriend, and in turn their brassy mother Sheila has run straight to the comfort of another lover. Maddie is finding that an empty apartment is quiet and lonely, even though her time is normally spent reading comics in her closet. Feeling abandoned and vulnerable, she turns to her favourite superhero, Arrowette. Armed with a backpack filled with a bow and arrows, she embarks on a radical plan to join the army, where she thinks she will find a new family she can count on. Meanwhile, Bea is second-guessing the whole dating an older man thing, and Sheila defends her unorthodox sexual candour, entertaining the ideals of freedom. When Bea and Sheila decide to come home for Maddie’s birthday, they’re faced with the pointed arrow of Maddie’s newfound power and the startling reality of the kind of family they’ve become.
Quotable Shakespeare (Quotable Ser.)
by Max MorrisThis entertaining collection gathers together William Shakespeare's wisest and wittiest quotations. Quotable Shakespeare proves that brevity is the soul of wit and is sure to delight all lovers of the Bard's uniquely perceptive and influential works.
Quotable Shakespeare (Quotable Ser.)
by Max MorrisThis entertaining collection gathers together William Shakespeare's wisest and wittiest quotations. Quotable Shakespeare proves that brevity is the soul of wit and is sure to delight all lovers of the Bard's uniquely perceptive and influential works.
R.U.R.
by Karel CapekBased on a pair of comic dramas from ancient Rome, The Comedy of Errors presents a spectacle of pure farce in the spirit of utmost fun and -- as the title suggests -- hilarious confusion. Two sets of identical twins provide the basis for ongoing incidents of mistaken identity, within a lively plot of quarrels, arrests, and a grand courtroom denouement. One of Shakespeare's earliest dramatic efforts, the play abounds in his trademark conceits, puns, and other forms of fanciful wordplay. It also foreshadows his later and greater comedies, offering students and scholars a valuable key to the playwright's development.
R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life
by Karel CapekA new translation of Karel Čapek&’s play R.U.R.—which famously coined the term &“robot&”—and a collection of essays reflecting on the play&’s legacy from scientists and scholars who work in artificial life and robotics.Karel Čapek's &“R.U.R.&” and the Vision of Artificial Life offers a new, highly faithful translation by Štěpán Šimek of Czech novelist, playwright, and critic Karel Čapek&’s play R.U.R.: Rossum&’s Universal Robots, as well as twenty essays from contemporary writers on the 1920 play. R.U.R. is perhaps best known for first coining the term &“robot&” (in Czech, robota means serfdom or arduous drudgery). The twenty essays in this new English edition, beautifully edited by Jitka Čejková, are selected from Robot 100, an edited collection in Czech with perspectives from 100 contemporary voices that was published in 2020 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the play.Čapek&’s robots were autonomous beings, but biological, not mechanical, made of chemically synthesized soft matter resembling living tissue, like the synthetic humans in Blade Runner, Westworld, or Ex Machina. The contributors to the collection—scientists and other scholars—explore the legacy of the play and its connections to the current state of research in artificial life, or ALife. Throughout the book, it is impossible to ignore Čapek&’s prescience, as his century-old science fiction play raises contemporary questions with respect to robotics, synthetic biology, technology, artificial life, and artificial intelligence, anticipating many of the formidable challenges we face today.ContributorsJitka Čejková, Miguel Aguilera, Iñigo R. Arandia, Josh Bongard, Julyan Cartwright, Seth Bullock, Dominique Chen, Gusz Eiben, Tom Froese, Carlos Gershenson, Inman Harvey, Jana Horáková, Takashi Ikegami, Sina Khajehabdollahi, George Musser, Geoff Nitschke, Julie Nováková, Antoine Pasquali, Hemma Philamore, Lana Sinapayen, Hiroki Sayama, Nathaniel Virgo, Olaf Witkowski
Rabbit Hole (movie tie-in)
by David Lindsay-AbaireMovie tie-in edition of the film from Lions Gate starring Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart and Dianne Wiest. Life for a happy couple is turned upside down after their young son dies in an accident.
Rabelais's Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais
by E. Bruce HayesIn the first extended investigation of the importance of dramatic farce in Rabelais studies, Bruce Hayes makes an important contribution to the understanding of the theater of farce and its literary possibilities. By tracing the development of farce in late medieval and Renaissance comedic theater in comparison to the evolution of farce in Rabelais's work, Hayes distinguishes Rabelais's use of the device from traditional farce. While traditional farce is primarily conservative in its aims, with an emphasis on maintaining the status quo, Rabelais puts farce to radical new uses, making it subversive in his own work. Bruce Hayes examines the use of farce in Pantagruel, Gargantua, and the Tiers and Quart livres, showing how Rabelais recast farce in a humanist context, making it a vehicle for attacking the status quo and posing alternatives to contemporary legal, educational, and theological systems. Rabelais's Radical Farce illustrates the rich possibilities of a genre often considered simplistic and unsophisticated, disclosing how Rabelais in fact introduced both a radical reformulation of farce, and a new form of humanist satire.
Rabindranath Tagore's Theatre: From Page to Stage
by Abhijit SenThis book analyses Rabindranath Tagore’s contribution to Bengali drama and theatre. Throughout this book, Abhijit Sen locates and studies Rabindranath’s experiments with drama/theatre in the context of the theatre available in nineteenth-century Bengal, and explores the innovative strategies he adopted to promote his ‘brand’ of theatre. This approach finds validation in the fact that Rabindranath combined in himself the roles of author-actor-producer, who always felt that, without performance, his dramatic compositions fell short of the desired completeness. Various facets of his plays as theatre and his own role as a theatre-practitioner are the prime focus of this book. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in Theatre and Performance Studies and most notably, those focusing on Indian Theatre and Postcolonial Theatre.
Race
by David Mamet"Gripping. . . . Deep in its gut, Mamet's new play argues, everything in America-and this play throws in sex, rape, the law, employment and relationships-is still about race."-Chicago Tribune"A dramatist celebrated for introducing expletives to the American theatre now tackles a truly taboo four-letter word. . . . Most concerned with the power and treachery of language, Mamet remains American theatre's most urgent five-letter word."-GuardianDavid Mamet, who took on the subject of sexual harassment with his 1992 drama Oleanna, has once again ignited controversy, hitting the hot-button issue of our so-called post-racial society. When a rich white man is accused of raping a younger African American woman, he looks to a multicultural law firm for his defense. But even as his lawyers-one of them white, another black-begin to strategize, they must confront their own biases and assumptions about race relations in America. Currently playing to acclaim on Broadway in a production directed by Mamet, audience members may be moved to self-scrutiny by his signature gritty yet finely tuned language.David Mamet is a playwright, director, author, essayist, screenwriter, and film director. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, which also received a Tony Award nomination, along with Speed-the-Plow. Other of his plays include American Buffalo, Oleanna, and The Cryptogram.
Race and Performance after Repetition
by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane VogelThe contributors to Race and Performance after Repetition explore how theater and performance studies account for the complex relationship between race and time. Pointing out that repetition has been the primary point of reference for understanding both the complex temporality of theater and the historical persistence of race, they identify and pursue critical alternatives to the conceptualization, organization, measurement, and politics of race in performance. The contributors examine theater, performance art, music, sports, dance, photography, and other forms of performance in topics that range from the movement of boxer Joe Louis to George C. Wolfe's 2016 reimagining of the 1921 all-black musical comedy Shuffle Along to the relationship between dance, mourning, and black adolescence in Flying Lotus's music video “Never Catch Me.” Proposing a spectrum of coexisting racial temporalities that are not tethered to repetition, this collection reconsiders central theories in performance studies in order to find new understandings of race.Contributors. Joshua Chambers-Letson, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Nicholas Fesette, Patricia Herrera, Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Mario LaMothe, Daphne P. Lei, Jisha Menon, Tavia Nyong’o, Tina Post, Elizabeth W. Son, Shane Vogel, Catherine M. Young, Katherine Zien
Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama
by Rena M. HeinrichMixed-race Asian American plays are often overlooked for their failure to fit smoothly into static racial categories, rendering mixed-race drama inconsequential in conversations about race and performance. Since the nineteenth century, however, these plays have long advocated for the social significance of multiracial Asian people. Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Experience in American Drama traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and explores the ways that mixed-race Asian identity transforms our understanding of race. Mixed-Asian playwrights harness theater’s generative power to enact performances of “double liminality” and expose the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.
Racism and Early Blackface Comic Traditions: From the Old World to the New (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)
by Robert HornbackThis book traces blackface types from ancient masks of grinning Africans and phallus-bearing Roman fools through to comedic medieval devils, the pan-European black-masked Titivillus and Harlequin, and racial impersonation via stereotypical 'black speech' explored in the Renaissance by Lope de Vega and Shakespeare. Jim Crow and antebellum minstrelsy recycled Old World blackface stereotypes of irrationality, ignorance, pride, and immorality. Drawing upon biblical interpretations and philosophy, comic types from moral allegory originated supposedly modern racial stereotypes. Early blackface traditions thus spread damning race-belief that black people were less rational, hence less moral and less human. Such notions furthered the global Renaissance’s intertwined Atlantic slave and sugar trades and early nationalist movements. The latter featured overlapping definitions of race and nation, as well as of purity of blood, language, and religion in opposition to 'Strangers'. Ultimately, Old World beliefs still animate supposed 'biological racism' and so-called 'white nationalism' in the age of Trump.