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The Amen Corner: A Play (Vintage International)
By James Baldwin. 1996
From one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century—a masterpiece of the modern American theater: a play about…
faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons."[Baldwin] uses words as the sea uses waves." —Langston HughesIn his first work for the theater, James Baldwin brought all the fervor and majestic rhetoric of the storefront churches of his childhood along with an unwavering awareness of the price those churches exacted from their worshipers. For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her Harlem congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when Margaret's estranged husband, a scapegrace jazz musician, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path.Our Country's Good
By Timberlake Wertenbaker. 1989
Australia 1789. A young married lieutenant is directing rehearsals of the first play ever to be staged in that country.…
With only two copies of the text, a cast of convicts, and one leading lady who may be about to be hanged, conditions are hardly ideal...Winner of the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year Award in 1988, and many other major awards, Our Country's Good premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1988 and opened on Broadway in 1991. 'Rarely has the redemptive, transcendental power of theatre been argued with such eloquence and passion.' Georgina Brown, Independent Methuen Student Editions are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from modern and classic repertoires. As well as the complete text of the play itself, the volume contains a chronology of the playwright's life and work; an introduction giving the background to the play; a discussion of the various interpretations; and notes on individual words and phrases in the text.Pirandello in Context (Literature in Context)
By Patricia Gaborik. 2024
For students of Luigi Pirandello's life and works, this volume provides a multi-faceted view spanning the many genres in which…
he wrote, from poetry and essays to fiction and drama. It gives a true sense of Pirandello's remarkable sensitivity to place – from his native Sicily to Germany and Latin America – and of how his perspective was shaped by a wide range of interlocutors with varying professional backgrounds, from contemporary philosophers to fellow playwrights like Bernard Shaw, directors like Max Reinhardt and the actress Marta Abba. Diverse contributors explore the sheer genre-bending originality of Pirandello's humor, metatheatre, and fantastic tales, and reveal how profound shifts in society, culture, and politics in his time – Freud, Futurism, Fascism – conditioned not just his thought but also his meteoric rise to fame. A final section is dedicated to Pirandello's legacy in literature and drama throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.Aeschylus' Oresteia: Translation and Theatrical Commentary
By Michael Ewans. 2024
This is a fully revised new edition of Michael Ewans’ 1995 English translation of the Oresteia, taking into account the…
extensive work published on the trilogy in recent years.Accompanying this lucid, accurate and actable translation is a substantial introduction, outlining the festival setting of the plays, the original performance conditions and performance style, the form and meaning of the trilogy, the issues surrounding the act of translation, and finally a survey of some major productions since 1980. The text itself is a thoroughly competitive translation into modern English verse, now significantly revised in the light of recent scholarship on the text. It is followed by a theatrical commentary on each scene and chorus, providing unique insights into how the plays might have been staged in ancient Athens and how they can be staged today. The book also includes notes on the translation, two glossaries of names and Greek terms, selected further reading, and a chronology of Aeschylus’ life and times.Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Translation and Theatrical Commentary is the most comprehensive English edition of Aeschylus’ masterpiece, and this new edition fully meets the needs of teachers, students and practitioners working on the trilogy as well as those interested in ancient Greek drama and literature more broadly.Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender
By Casey Kayser. 2021
Winner of the 2021 Eudora Welty PrizeIn contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies,…
and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. In Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, author Casey Kayser addresses these gaps by examining the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region. Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and productions, Kayser delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights draw on various conscious strategies in response. These strategies, evident in the work of such playwrights as Pearl Cleage, Sandra Deer, Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Shay Youngblood, provide them with the opportunity to lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and, ultimately, create new visions of the South.Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama, and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s
By Carol Bunch Davis. 2015
Prefiguring Postblackness explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American freedom struggle and representations of African American identity…
staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural context in which they were produced, Carol Bunch Davis shows how these representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining the civil rights movement's advances.These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity, and their staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that very era. In their use of a "postblack ethos" to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle.The plays under discussion range from the canonical (Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman) to celebrated, yet understudied works (Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness, Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope, and Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody). Finally, Davis discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation.The Edward Tales
By Elizabeth Spencer. 2022
In conferring upon Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer (1921–2019) the 2013 Rea Award for the Short Story, the jury said that…
at the then age of ninety-two, she “has thrived at the height of her powers to a degree that is unparalleled in modern letters.” Over a celebrated six-decade career, Spencer published every type of literary fiction: novels and short stories, a memoir, and a play. Like her best-known work, The Light in the Piazza, most of her narratives explore the inner lives of restless, searching southern women. Yet one mercurial male character, Edward Glenn, deserves attention for the way he insists on returning to her pages. Speaking of Edward in unusually personal terms, Spencer admitted a strong attraction to his type: the elusive, intelligent southern man, “maybe an unresolved part of my psyche.” In The Edward Tales, Sally Greene brings together the four narratives in which Edward figures: the play For Lease or Sale (1989) and three short stories, “The Runaways” (1994), “Master of Shongalo” (1996), and “Return Trip” (2009). The collection allows readers to observe Spencer’s evolving style while offering glimpses of the moral reasoning that lies at the heart of all her work. Greene’s critical introduction helpfully places these narratives within the context of Spencer’s entire body of writing. The Edward Tales confirms Spencer’s place as one of our most beloved and accomplished writers.Marina Carr and Greek Tragedy examines the feminist transposition of Greek tragedy in the theatre of the contemporary Irish dramatist…
Marina Carr. Through a comparison of the plays based on classical drama with their ancient models, it investigates Carr’s transformation not only of the narrative but also of the form of Greek tragedy. As a religious and political institution of the 5th-century Athenian democracy, tragedy endorsed the sexist oppression of women. Indeed, the construction of female characters in Greek tragedy was entirely disconnected from the experience of womanhood lived by real women in order to embody the patriarchal values of Athenian democracy. Whether praised for their passivity or demonized for showing unnatural agency and subjectivity, women in Greek tragedy were conceived to (re)assert the supremacy of men. Carr’s theatre stands in stark opposition to such a purpose. Focusing on women’s struggle to achieve agency and subjectivity in a male-dominated world, her plays show the diversity of experiencing womanhood and sexist oppression in the Republic of Ireland, and the Western societies more generally. Yet, Carr’s enduring conversation with the classics in her theatre demonstrates the feminist willingness to alter the founding myths of Western civilisation to advocate for gender equality.The Metal Children: A Play
By Adam Rapp. 2010
A play about fiction's power to both divide and unite, from Pulitzer finalist Adam RappIn small-town America, a young adult…
novel about teen pregnancy is banned by the local school board, igniting a fierce and violent debate over abortion, religious beliefs, and modern feminism. Its directionless New York City author arrives in town to defend the book and finds that it has inspired a group of local teens to rebel in strange and unexpected ways. A timely and unforgettable drama about the failure of urban and heartland America to understand each other, The Metal Children explores what happens when fiction becomes a matter of life and death.Urinetown: The Musical
By Greg Kotis, Mark Hollmann. 2001
Winner of three Tony Awards, including Best Book, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann's Urinetown: The Musical is a tale of…
greed, corruption, love, and revolution in a time when water is worth its weight in gold.After a twenty-year drought made water a scarce commodity, private toilets became outlawed. Now, all restroom necessaries are controlled by the Urine Good Company (UGC), a megacorporation that charges fees for using public toilets. Anyone unable to pay fees--or who dares to relieve themselves outside the commode--are arrested and banished to "Urinetown".When UGC employee Bobby Strong's father falls victim to this tyranny, he spearheads a revolution, inspiring the people to rise up and reclaim their own restroom duties--unaware of the realities and consequences of his actions...With a preface by David Auburn, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of ProofAnd an introduction by the authorsSpring Awakening: A Play
By Frank Wedekind. 2007
From Jonathan Franzen, bestselling author of The Corrections and Crossroads, comes his razor-sharp translation of Frank Wedekind's major modern play,…
Spring Awakening.Featuring an introduction by Franzen.First performed in Germany in 1906, Frank Wedekind's controversial play Spring Awakening closed after one night in New York in 1917 amid charges of obscenity and public outrage. For the better part of the twentieth century Wedekind's intense body of work was largely unpublished and rarely performed. Yet the play's subject matter—teenage desire, suicide, abortion, and homosexuality—is as explosive and important today as it was a century ago. Spring Awakening follows the lives of three teenagers, Melchior, Moritz, and Wendl, as they navigate their entry into sexual awareness. Unlike so many works that claim to tell the truth of adolescence, Spring Awakening offers no easy answers or redemption.Today, more than a hundred years after the play's first performance, a new musical version of this essential modern masterpiece is being hailed as the "best new musical . . . in a generation" (John Heilpern, The New York Observer). Franzen's rendition of the text—for so long poorly served in English—is unique in capturing the bizarre and inimitable comic spirit that animates almost every line of this unrelentingly tragic play. There couldn't be a better time for this thrilling, definitive new translation.A Steady Rain: A Play
By Keith Huff. 2010
Joey and Denny have been best friends since kindergarten, and after working together for several years as policemen in Chicago,…
they are practically family: Joey helps out with Denny's wife and kids; Denny keeps Joey away from the bottle. But when a domestic disturbance call takes a turn for the worse, their friendship is put on the line. The result is a difficult journey into a moral gray area where trust and loyalty struggle for survival against a sobering backdrop of pimps, prostitutes, and criminal lowlifes.A dark duologue filled with sharp storytelling and biting repartee, A Steady Rain explores the complexities of a lifelong bond tainted by domestic affairs, violence, and the rough streets of Chicago.Stone Cold Dead Serious: And Other Plays
By Adam Rapp. 2004
A collection of plays from Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp, "one of the more daring young stylists working today" (Time…
Out New York)Adam Rapp's plays have captivated audiences across the country with their unflinching explorations of the good, the bad, and the ugly in America's heartland and cities. Gathered here are three of his works: Faster, in which two young grifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record; Finer Noble Gases, a lament for a band of arrested thirty-year-olds slouching toward adulthood amid East Village decay; and the Off-Broadway hit Stone Cold Dead Serious. An honest, strange, and humorous look at a blue-collar family struggling to survive in the face of disability and addiction, and the seemingly surreal lengths their teenage son will go to save them from themselves."Rapp is very gifted, and, even rarer, he has something to say . . . Stone Cold Dead Serious [is] brave, compassionate, and . . . breathtakingly moving." -(New York Times)Assessment in the Drama Classroom: A Culturally Responsive and Student-Centered Approach
By Jonathan P. Jones. 2024
This textbook offers a practical approach for designing and implementing assessment for learning in the drama classroom.Assessment in the Drama…
Classroom begins with a theoretical overview that covers the purpose of assessment with student-centered, culturally responsive methods. The following chapters present an in-depth analysis of how to organize drama curriculum, develop measurable learning objectives, and implement a backward planning approach to summative assessment. Models and tools for generating diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments for various grade levels invite the reader to adapt these approaches to their classrooms.Ideal for drama education and pedagogy courses, this book is an accessible tool for drama educators to engage in critical reflection on assessment. Drama educators will find methods and suggestions for reimagining their assessment practices and be empowered to meet the learning needs of their students.Bone Cage
By Catherine Banks. 2008
Jamie is twenty-two years old and works twelve-hour shifts operating a wood processor, clear-cutting for pulp. At the end of…
each shift, he walks through the destruction he has created looking for injured birds and animals and rescues those he can. Jamie's desire to escape this world is thwarted by his fear of leaving the place where he has some status.Bone Cage examines how young people in rural communities, employed in the destruction of the environment they love, treat the people they love at the end of their shift. Bone Cage is about the difficulty in growing and hanging on to dreams in a world where dreams are seen as impractical or weak. It is funny. It is tragic. It is about different kinds of escaping. It is about a soul trapped in its own rib cage, a cage of bone, a Bone Cage.The Diamond Eye: A Novel
By Kate Quinn. 2022
New York Times BestsellerThe bestselling author of The Rose Code returns with an unforgettable World War II tale of a quiet bookworm…
who becomes history’s deadliest female sniper. Based on a true story.In 1937 in the snowbound city of Kyiv, wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son—but Hitler’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper—a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. When news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, Mila finds herself torn from the bloody battlefields of the eastern front and sent to America on a goodwill tour.Still reeling from war wounds and devastated by loss, Mila finds herself isolated and lonely in the glittering world of Washington, DC—until an unexpected friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and an even more unexpected connection with a silent fellow sniper offer the possibility of happiness. But when an old enemy from Mila’s past joins forces with a deadly new foe lurking in the shadows, Lady Death finds herself battling her own demons and enemy bullets in the deadliest duel of her life.Based on a true story, The Diamond Eye is a haunting novel of heroism born of desperation, of a mother who became a soldier, of a woman who found her place in the world and changed the course of history forever.The True Friend: English translation of Il vero amico
By Carlo Goldoni. 2009
True to Goldoni's mixture of comic wit and farce, the plot is a breathtakingly fast succession of twists and turns…
which only unravel in the final lines with a surprise ending.Two friends are in love with the same young woman. Neither wants to place their friendship in jeopardy. How can love triumph without breaking off their friendship? Goldoni explores the conflicts brought about when Florindo has to choose between Lelio, his best friend, and Rosaura, his friend's fiancée. Added to this conundrum are the issues of whether Ottavio, the old miser, will provide a dowry and the mature Beatrice's unashamed incessant pursuit of Florindo.The play is set in Bologna in Lelio's house. Florindo is a guest along with his faithful manservant. From the opening of the play, Florindo seeks to return home to Venice in order not to damage his friend's relationship. However, his departure is obstructed by his hosts, leading to one complication after another.From the beginning, the plot is intense and fast-moving with inversions fed into the action in quick succession. This creates suspense which continues throughout the play as potential marriage partners are switched back and forth until the very ending when the audience finally discovers what the main characters' destiny will be. Will love or friendship prevail?The Venetian element is brought into this play through Florindo and his manservant, both Venetians. Apart from these two characters, all the others are portrayed as self-seeking, selfish and sly - whether servants or masters. The tension is kept at a constantly high level by the struggles between the characters. These struggles are not just brought about through love and friendship but are also generational and social. Furthermore, there is the added complication in the contrast of the characters' ideas of reality as they deceive one another. This creates dramatic irony and humour as the audience know more than any of the characters on stage.Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams: Twenty Plays from the Nō Tradition
By Royall Tyler. 2024
Nō drama, which integrates speech, song, dance, music, mask, and costume into a distinctive art form, is among Japan’s most…
revered cultural traditions. It gained popularity in the fourteenth century, when the actor and playwright Zeami (1363–1443) drew the favor of the shogun with his theatrical innovations. Nō’s intricacies and highly stylized conventions continue to attract Japanese and Western appreciation, and a repertoire of some 250 plays is performed today.Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams presents a selection of Nō plays, magnificently rendered in English by Royall Tyler, an eminent scholar and translator of classical Japanese literature. It includes both canonical and lesser-known works of Zeami’s, as well as anonymous works. Several are outside the established repertoire, offering glimpses of Nō before the tradition was codified in the Edo period, and have not previously been translated into English. An introduction describes the structure, formal features, and performance conventions of Nō plays, and brief essays precede each work. Through Tyler’s authoritative scholarship and keen ear for the subtlety and beauty of the language, Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams gives Anglophone readers access to the complex art of Nō.The Birds and Other Plays
By Aristophanes. 1978
The plays in this volume all contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In THE BIRDS, two frustrated…
Athenians join the birds to build the utopian city of 'Much Cuckoo in the Clouds'. THE KNIGHTS is a venomous satire on Cleon, a prominent Athenian demagogue, while THE ASSEMBLY WOMEN deals with the battle of the sexes as the women of Athens infiltrate the all-male Assembly in disguise. The lengthy conflict with Sparta is the subject of PEACE, inspired by the hope of a settlement in 421 BC, and WEALTH reflects on the economic catastrophe that hit Athens after the war.The Beggar's Opera
By John Gay. 1986
The tale of Peachum, thief-taker and informer, conspiring to send the dashing and promiscuous highwayman Macheath to the gallows, became…
the theatrical sensation of the eighteenth century.In THE BEGGAR'S OPERA, John Gay turned conventions of Italian opera riotously upside-down, instead using traditional popular ballads and street tunes, while also indulging in political satire at the expense of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Gay's highly original depiction of the thieves, informers, prostitutes and highwaymen thronging the slums and prisons of the corrupt London underworld proved brilliantly successful in exposing the dark side of a corrupt and jaded society.