- Table View
- List View
Shakespeare Performance Studies
by W. B. WorthenTaking a 'performance studies' perspective on Shakespearean theatre, W. B. Worthen argues that the theatrical event represents less an inquiry into the presumed meanings of the text than an effort to frame performance as a vehicle of cultural critique. Using contemporary performances as test cases, Worthen explores the interfaces between the origins of Shakespeare's writing as literature and as theatre, the modes of engagement with Shakespeare's plays for readers and spectators, and the function of changing performance technologies on our knowledge of Shakespeare. This book not only provides the material for performance analysis, but places important contemporary Shakespeare productions in dialogue with three influential areas of critical discourse: texts and authorship, the function of character in cognitive theatre studies, and the representation of theatre and performing in the digital humanities. This book will be vital reading for scholars and advanced students of Shakespeare and of Performance Studies.
The Wadsworth Anthology Of Drama
by W. B. WorthenThe boldest and most distinguished introduction to drama available today, W.B. Worthen's pace-setting text continues to provide exciting plays usefully situated within their historical and cultural contexts. Based on the best-selling WADSWORTH ANTHOLOGY OF DRAMA, the Brief Edition provides many of the important elements of that anthology but in a more streamlined form.
Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change (New Dramaturgies)
by Lisa WoynarskiThis book addresses theatre’s contribution to the way we think about ecology, our relationship to the environment, and what it means to be human in the context of climate change. It offers a detailed study of the ways in which contemporary performance has critiqued and re-imagined everyday ecological relationships, in more just and equitable ways. The broad spectrum of ecologically-oriented theatre and performance included here, largely from the UK, US, Canada, Europe, and Mexico, have problematised, reframed, and upended the pervasive and reductive images of climate change that tend to dominate the ecological imagination. Taking an inclusive approach this book foregrounds marginalised perspectives and the multiple social and political forces that shape climate change and related ecological crises, framing understandings of the earth as home. Recent works by Fevered Sleep, Rimini Protokoll, Violeta Luna, Deke Weaver, Metis Arts, Lucy + Jorge Orta, as well as Indigenous activist movements such as NoDAPL and Idle No More, are described in detail.
Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PMR-ART
by Jacob WrenAuthenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART is a compelling hybrid of history, memoir, and performance theory. It tells the story of the interdisciplinary performance group PME-ART and their ongoing endeavour to make a new kind of highly collaborative theatre dedicated to the fragile but essential act of "being yourself in a performance situation."Written, among other things, to celebrate PME-ART's twentieth anniversary, the book begins when Jacob Wren meets Sylvie Lachance and Richard Ducharme, moves from Toronto to Montreal to make just one project, but instead ends up spending the next twenty years creating an eccentric, often bilingual, art. It is a book about being unable to learn French yet nonetheless remaining Co-Artistic Director of a French-speaking performance group, about the Spinal Tap-like adventures of being continuously on tour, about the rewards and difficulties of intensive collaborations, about making performances that break the mold and confronting the repercussions of doing so. A book that aims to change the rules for how interdisciplinary performance can be written about today.When Jacob finished a first draft of the book he sent it to many of those who had co-created or worked on PME-ART projects asking for their comments. Therefore, the book also features contributions from: Caroline Dubois, Richard Ducharme, Claudia Fancello, Marie Claire Forté, Adam Kinner, Sylvie Lachance, Nadia Ross, Yves Sheriff, Kathrin Tiedemann and Ashlea Watkin.
I Am My Own Wife (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)
by Doug WrightWinner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; From the Obie Award-winning author of Quills comes this acclaimed one-man show, which explores the astonishing true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. <p><p>A transvestite and celebrated antiques dealer who successfully navigated the two most oppressive regimes of the past century—the Nazis and the Communists.
The Night of the Iguana
by Doug Wright Tennessee WilliamsNow published for the first time as a trade paperback with a new introduction and the short story on which it was based. Williams wrote: "This is a play about love in its purest terms." It is also Williams's robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women's college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin ("the world's oldest living and practicing poet"), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night. This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana and comes with an Introduction by award-winning playwright Doug Wright, the author's original Foreword, the short story "The Night of the Iguana" which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Kenneth Holditch. "I'm tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent--yeah, that's what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this...this...this angry, petulant old man." --The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana
Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre
by Kailin WrightIn Canada, adaptation is a national mode of survival, but it is also a way to create radical change. Throughout history, Canadians have been inheritors and adaptors: of political systems, stories, and customs from the old world and the new. More than updating popular narratives, adaptation informs understandings of culture, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as individual experiences. In Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre Kailin Wright investigates adaptations that retell popular stories with a political purpose and examines how they acknowledge diverse realities and transform our past. Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre explores adaptations of Canadian history, Shakespeare, Greek mythologies, and Indigenous history by playwrights who identify as English-Canadian, African-Canadian, French-Canadian, French, Kuna Rappahannock, and Delaware from the Six Nations. Along with new considerations of the activist potential of popular Canadian theatre, this book outlines eight strategies that adaptors employ to challenge conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous, Black, queer, or female. Recent cancellations of theatre productions whose creators borrowed elements from minority cultures demonstrate the need for a distinction between political adaptation and cultural appropriation. Wright builds on Linda Hutcheon's definition of adaptation as repetition with difference and applies identification theory to illustrate how political adaptation at once underlines and undermines its canonical source. An exciting intervention in adaptation studies, Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre unsettles the dynamics of popular and political theatre and rethinks the ways performance can contribute to how one country defines itself.
Playwriting In Process: Thinking And Working Theatrically
by Michael WrightPlaywriting in Process: Thinking and Working Theatrically is written to encourage new and experienced playwrights to build techniques for a greater range of creative expression in writing for the stage. The book uses exercises to guide playwrights towards thinking and working theatrically. The exercises help playwrights start or revise their work by providing alternate ways of thinking about their subject and their processes. New to the second edition: new exercises, a general updating such as the use of the internet, a new chapter for teachers and playwriting group leaders on using this book in class, and end-of-chapter "Call Out" exercises. Useful for playwrights at all levels.
Sensory Writing for Stage and Screen: An Etude-Based Process of Exploration
by Michael WrightThrough a series of systematic explorations across a wide range of scenarios, Sensory Writing for Stage and Screen offers script writers exercises for attending to their own sensory experiences as a means to exploring the sensory experiences—and worlds—of the characters they create.
Celia, a Slave
by Nicholas Wright Barbara SeydaThe ninth winner of the Yale Drama Series is a searing and powerful drama of slave litigation, injustice, institutional racism, and the rule of law. The winner of the 2015 Yale Drama Series playwriting competition was selected by Nicholas Wright, former Associate Director of London's Royal Court. Barbara Seyda's stunningly theatrical Celia, a Slave is a vivid tableau of interviews with the dead that interweaves oral histories with official archival records. Powerful, poetic, and stylistically bold, this work foregrounds twenty-three diverse characters to recall the events that led to the hanging of nineteen-year-old Celia, an African American slave convicted in a Missouri court of murdering her master, the prosperous landowner Robert Newsom, in 1855. Excavating actual trial transcripts and court records, Seyda bears witness to racial and sexual violence in U. S. history, illuminating the brutal realities of female slave life in the pre-Civil War South while exploring the intersection of rape, morality, economics, and gender politics that continue to resonate today.
Twilight of Jewish Philosophy
by Wright Dr Tamra WrightFirst Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur
by Siobhán M. WyattOffering a new reading of Malory's famed text, Le Morte Darthur, this book provides the first full-length survey of the alterations Malory made to female characters in his source texts. Through detailed comparisons with both Old French and Middle English material, Siobh#65533;n M. Wyatt discusses how Malory radically altered his French and English source texts to create a gendered pattern in the reliability of speech, depicting female discourse as valuable and truthful. Malory's authorial crafting indicates his preference for a certain "type" of female character: self-governing, opinionated, and strong. Simultaneously, the portrayal of this very readable "type" yields characterization. While late medieval court records indicate an increasingly negative attitude towards female speech and a tendency to punish vociferous women as "scolds," Malory makes the words of chiding damsels constructive. While his contemporary writers suppress the powers of magical women, Malory empowers his enchantress characters; while the authors of his French source texts accentuate Guinevere's flaws, Malory portrays her with sympathy.
The Country Wife: A Comedy, As It Is Acted At The Theatre-royal. Written By Mr. Wycherley
by William WycherleyOriginally performed and published in 1675, this five-act play parodies the vices and hypocrisies of Restoration London. The plot centers on the eponymous country wife, Margery, whose suspicious husband, Mr. Pinchwife, keeps her isolated. On a rare outing to the theater, Margery encounters the aptly named Mr. Horner. A notorious rake who feigns impotence to trick his way into the intimate company of married ladies, Horner soon schools Margery in the art of deception and realizes Pinchwife's worst fears. Bursting with racy dialog and bawdy humor, this comic masterpiece offers an enduring blend of cynicism, satire, and farce. The elegance of the play's construction and the glamour of its setting provide a piquant contrast to its earthy celebration of lust and human folly. The Country Wife has been periodically vilified for its immorality but remains ever popular for its lively characters, witty double entendres, and sophisticated drama.
Four Great Restoration Comedies (Dover Thrift Editions Ser.)
by William WycherleyWhen England's theaters reopened in 1660, 18 years after being closed by an act of Parliament, audiences embraced the witty and satirical dialogue spoken by "plain folks" characters--it was a new era in drama. The four comedy classics featured in this one convenient collection are typical of the works popularized during one of the most exciting and innovative periods in English theater.Brimming with bawdy and satirical comedies and rampant with notorious womanizers, amorous adventure, and marital discord are works by William Wycherley (The Country Wife), Sir George Etherege (The Man of Mode), Aphra Behn (The Rover), and Sir John Vanbrugh (The Relapse).
Towards a Cultural Philology: "Phedre" and the Construction of 'Racine'
by Amy Wygant"Amy Wygant reads Racine's ""Phedre"" (1677) through an analysis of its 17th-century cultural contexts and a consideration of its subsequent reception history. She explores the construction of Racinian language as ""musical"", the poetics of the Racinian gaze, and Racine's labyrinthine eros of memory and forgetting. Reference is made to Lully's operas, the battle between the advocates of colour and the champions of drawing in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and Le Notre's centreless garden labyrinth at Versailles. These close textual and contextual studies relate the detail of the tragedy to the conceptual sweep of 17th-century absolutism. Wygant's interdisciplinary study draws on the music history, as well as on emblematics, the history of the formal garden and the arts of memory. Racine's great threnody, the ""recit de Theramene"", is shown as representative of expressions of loss which lie at the root of early modern literature."
Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage
by Catherine WynneBram Stoker worked in the theatre for most of his adult life, as theatre reviewer in Dublin in the 1870s and as business manager at London's Royal Lyceum Theatre in the final two decades of the 19th century. Despite this, critical attention to the influence of the stage on Stoker's writing has been sparse. Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage addresses this lacuna, examining how Stoker's fictions respond to and engage with Victorian theatre's melodramatic climate and, in particular, to supernatural plays, Gothic melodramas and Shakespearean productions that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry performed at the Lyceum. Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage locates the writer between stage and page. It reconsiders his literary relationships with key actors, and challenges the biographical assumption that Henry Irving provided the model for the figure of Count Dracula.
Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art (New World Choreographies)
by Victoria Wynne-JonesThis book offers new ways of thinking about dance-related artworks that have taken place in galleries, museums and biennales over the past two decades as part of the choreographic turn. It focuses on the concept of intersubjectivity and theorises about what happens when subjects meet within a performance artwork. The resulting relations are crucial to instances of performance art in which embodied subjects engage as spectators, participants and performers in orchestrated art events. Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art deploys a multi-disciplinary approach across dance choreography and evolving manifestations of performance art. An innovative, overarching concept of choreography sustains the idea that intersubjectivity evolves through places, spaces, performance and spectatorship. Drawing upon international examples, the book introduces readers to performance art from the South Pacific and the complexities of de-colonising choreography. Artists Tino Sehgal, Xavier Le Roy, Jordan Wolfson, Alicia Frankovich and Shigeyuki Kihara are discussed.
Peony Pavilion: Mudan Ting
by Tang Xianzu Cyril BirchThe Peony Pavilion is one of literature's most memorable love stories and a masterpiece of Ming drama.
The Peony Pavilion: Mudan Ting
by Tang Xianzu Cyril Birch Catherine Crutchfield Swatek Xianzu TangThe celebrated English translation of this classic work of Chinese literature is now available in an updated paperback edition. Written in 1598 by Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion is one of literature's most memorable love stories and a masterpiece of Ming drama. Cyril Birch has captured all the elegance, lyricism, and subtle, earthy humor of this panoramic tale of romance and Chinese society. When Indiana University Press first published the text in 1981, it seemed doubtful that the work would ever be performed in its entirety again, but several spectacular and controversial productions have toured the world in recent years. For this second edition, which contains a fully revised text of the translation, Cyril Birch and Catherine Swatek reflect on contemporary performances of the play in light of its history.
Where Is Broadway? (Where Is?)
by Douglas Yacka Francesco Sedita Who HQTake your seats, because Where Is Broadway? is ready to take center stage!In a lively and engaging style, authors Douglas Yacka and Francesco Sedita cover the development of the first theaters and the birth of the American musical, as well as the shows and stars that have become Broadway legends. Readers will get the inside story on their favorite shows and may even discover some new ones.
Touring Theatrical Productions: An International Guide
by Dinesh YadavTouring Theatrical Productions: An International Guide is a practical and comprehensive overview of planning, staging and closing international touring productions. This book offers a step-by-step chronological journal of preparing a company for international touring, from applying for international visas to returning home after a tour. It includes discussions of invitations, contracts, scheduling, health and safety, personnel, packing and shipping, certifications, insurance, travel, unions, hotels, ethics and cuisines. Each chapter is filled with guidelines, samples of paperwork and checklists to ensure the smooth running of any international tour. Written by the Production Manager and Technical Director of India’s most travelled show The Manganiyar Seduction with Can & Abel Theatres, this book includes examples, incidents and experiences of performing in over 20 countries with over 200 shows. This how-to guide will benefit Technical Directors and Production Managers of touring productions, as well as students in Production Management, Tour Management, Art Administration and Technical Theater courses.
Winter of 88
by Mohammad YaghoubiThe events of this play are based on the author’s real experiences during the Iran–Iraq War.The play premiered in Farsi in 1997 in Tehran.The book will be published in both English and Farsi.First produced in English at the Next Stage Theatre Festival, Toronto, in January 2020
Experiencing Drama in the English Renaissance: Readers and Audiences (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)
by Akihiro YamadaThis book investigates the complex interactions, through experiencing drama, of readers and audiences in the English Renaissance. Around 1500 an absolute majority of population was illiterate. Henry VIII’s religious reformation changed this cultural structure of society. ‘The Act for the Advancement of True Religion’ of 1543, which prohibited the people belonging to the lower classes of society as well as women from reading the Bible, rather suggests that there already existed a number of these folks actively engaged in reading. The Act did not ban the works of Chaucer and Gower and stories of men’s lives – good reading for them. The successive sovereigns’ educational policies also contributed to rising literacy. This trend was speeded up by London’s growing population which invited the rise of commercial playhouses since 1567. Every citizen saw on average about seven performances every year: that is, about three per cent of London’s population saw a performance a day. From 1586 onwards merchants’ appearance in best-seller literature began to increase while stage representation of reading/writing scenes also increased and stimulated audiences towards reading. This was spurred by standardisation of the printing format of playbooks in the early 1580s and play-minded readers went to playbooks, eventually to create a class of playbook readers. Late in the 1590s, at last, playbooks matched with prose writings in ratio to all publications. Parts I and II of this book discuss these topics in numerical terms as much as possible and Part III discusses some monumental characteristics of contemporary readers of Chapman, Ford, Marston and Shakespeare.
Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946: Sounding Modernities (Transnational Theatre Histories)
by MeLê YamomoThis book examines the intersection between sound and modernity in dramatic and musical performance in Manila and the Asia-Pacific between 1869 and 1948. During this period, tolerant political regimes resulted in the globalization of capitalist relations and the improvement of transcontinental travel and worldwide communication. This allowed modern modes of theatre and music consumption to instigate the uniformization of cultural products and processes, while simultaneously fragmenting societies into distinct identities, institutions, and nascent nation-states.Taking the performing bodies of migrant musicians as the locus of sound, this book argues that the global movement of acoustic modernities was replicated and diversified through its multiple subjectivities within empire, nation, and individual agencies. It traces the arrival of European travelling music and theatre companies in Asia which re-casted listening into an act of modern cultural consumption, and follows the migration of Manila musicians as they engaged in the modernization project of the neighboring Asian cities.