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Showing 141 - 160 of 4035 items
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.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.By Taylor Mac. 2015
Discharged from the Marines under suspicious circumstances, Isaac comes home from the wars, only to find the life he remembers…
upended. Isaac’s father, who once ruled the family with an iron fist, has had a debilitating stroke; his younger sister, Maxine, is now his brother, Max; and their mother, Paige, is committed to revolution at any cost. Determined to be free of any responsibility toward her formerly abusive husband—or the home he created—Paige fervently believes she can lead the way to a "new world order." Hir, Taylor Mac’s subversive comedy, leaves many of our so-called normative and progressive ideas about gender, families, the middle class—and cleaning—in hilarious and ultimately tragic disarray.By Georgia Douglas Johnson. 2006
Recovering the stage work of one of America's finest black female writers This volume collects twelve of Georgia Douglas Johnson's…
one-act plays, including two never-before-published scripts found in the Library of Congress. As an integral part of Washington, D.C.'s, thriving turn-of-the-century literary scene, Johnson hosted regular meetings with Harlem Renaissance writers and other artists, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, May Miller, and Jean Toomer, and was herself considered among the finest writers of the time. Johnson also worked for U.S. government agencies and actively supported women's and minorities' rights. As a leading authority on Johnson, Judith L. Stephens provides a brief overview of Johnson's career and significance as a playwright; sections on the creative environment in which she worked; her S Street Salon; "The Saturday Nighters," and its significance to the New Negro Theatre; selected photographs; and a discussion of Johnson's genres, themes, and artistic techniques.By Jen Harvie, Dan Rebellato. 2024
British theatre underwent a vast transformation and expansion in the decades after World War II. This Companion explores the historical,…
political, and social contexts and conditions that not only allowed it to expand but, crucially, shaped it. Resisting a critical tendency to focus on plays alone, the collection expands understanding of British theatre by illuminating contexts such as funding, unionisation, devolution, immigration, and changes to legislation. Divided into four parts, it guides readers through changing attitudes to theatre-making (acting, directing, writing), theatre sectors (West End, subsidised, Fringe), theatre communities (audiences, Black theatre, queer theatre), and theatre's relationship to the state (government, infrastructure, nationhood). Supplemented by a valuable Chronology and Guide to Further Reading, it presents up-to-date approaches informed by critical race theory, queer studies, audience studies, and archival research to demonstrate important new ways of conceptualising post-war British theatre's history, practices and potential futures.By J. F. Jacques. 2024
This edited volume explores the singularity of embodiment and somatic approaches in the healing of trauma from a dramatherapy, theatre…
and performance perspective.Collating voices from across the fields of dramatherapy, theatre and performance, this book examines how different interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches offer unique and unexplored perspectives on the body as a medium for the exploration, expression and resolution of chronic, acute and complex trauma as well as collective and intergenerational trauma. The diverse chapters highlight how the intersection between dramatherapy and body-based approaches in theatre and performance offers additional opportunities to explore and understand the creative, expressive and imaginative capacity of the body, and its application to the healing of trauma.The book will be of particular interest to dramatherapists and other creative and expressive arts therapists. It will also appeal to counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists and theatre scholars.By Lo Fine. 2016
Jem is a self-described butch dyke from Montreal who always imagined spending her life in bars and having multiple flings.…
When she meets Freda, a woman who exposes Jem’s vulnerabilities, her preconceived notions of who she is become moot as she finds herself partnered in a long-term relationship with kids. Which she surprisingly loves—most of the time. But that’s all changing as Jem and Freda’s marriage shifts from one of love and lust to one of gripes and grumbles. Freda & Jem’s Best of the Week is a love story that explores the struggle for identity as a couple reconciles a new way of loving one another while accepting their new familial reality.By Robert Chafe. 2017
Spanning two decades, Smallwood’s story is anchored and propelled by one of Johnston’s most memorable creations: the fictitious Sheilagh Fielding,…
a caustic newspaper columnist whose own battles with the past and alcohol addiction find full vent and expression in her tireless dogging of Smallwood’s climb to power. At its heart, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is the story of a man whose career is buoyed and sometimes sunk by his unresolved feelings for a woman he never allowed himself to love. It is also the story of Newfoundland’s final years as a country, the end of one cultural and political trajectory, and the beginning of another.By Megan Gail Coles. 2017
Annie Runningbird doesn’t have time for the games boys want her to play. She’s aging out of foster care on…
her next birthday. The system has decided she is an adult, so Annie must make adult decisions. Where will she live? How will she make money? Demanding grown-up choices preoccupy the young girl’s mind as she navigates relationships with boys and men in her company. Does she like Isaac, a cute yet naive boy she met at the mall food court? Can she trust Louis, her older and increasingly overbearing foster care worker? Who can Annie depend on in her ever-shifting world? This intel is important. Because Annie needs to win the very real game she’s playing. She must save herself to save the day.By Rosa Laborde. 2002
Set in Santiago, Chile, three young friends form a bittersweet love triangle during the political upheaval surrounding President Salvador Allende’s…
assassination. Told through Leo’s memories, the play travels through childhood, first friends, and first loves. Passion and poetry weave together in this story of innocence disappeared.By Jordan Tannahill. 2018
One year after the suicide of their teenage son Joel, Debora and Michael Shaun-Hastings sit down to dinner with their…
son’s bully and his parents. Closure is on the menu, but accusations are the main course as everyone takes a turn in the hot seat for their real or imagined part in the tragedy. Blame shifts over the course of the evening from one person to the next, raising questions no one is prepared to answer.By Anosh Irani. 2017
In The Matka King—a story that pits human nature against love and chance—a landscape of betrayal and redemption comes to…
life in the red-light district of Bombay, India. One very powerful eunuch, Top Rani, operates an illicit lottery through his brothel, and when a gambler who is deeply in debt makes an unexpected wager, the stakes become life and death. Bombay Black—winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play—tells the story of Apsara, Bombay’s most infamous dancer, who lives with her iron-willed mother, Padma, in an apartment by the sea. Padma takes money from men so they can watch her daughter perform a mesmerizing dance. When a mysterious blind man named Kamal visits for a private dance, his secret link to their past threatens to change each of their lives forever. At turns lyrical and brutal, Bombay Black charts the seduction of Apsara by Kamal, and Padma’s violent enmity towards the blind man and the secret he holds.By Kate Hennig. 2017
Fifteen-year-old Bess has no idea when she heads to London to see her Uncle Ted that she is about to…
find herself at the heart of a scandal involving sexual impropriety; her stepfather, Thom; and an attempted overthrow of the government. What does all this have to do with her? How adroitly can Bess manoeuvre through a series of interviews to avoid being swept up in the peril that might ensue? And will she be able to spin the facts to create a myth based on her own innocence?By Hiro Kanagawa. 2016
Rita and Alfred Allmers live in an isolated family cabin on native leasehold land overlooking Indian Arm, a still untamed…
glacial fjord just north of Vancouver, BC. With Alfred—a formerly promising novelist—now struggling with his latest work, Rita has been tasked with caring for their adopted son Wolfie, a sensitive First Nations teen who has been designated as “special needs” for much of his life. Rita’s resentments and frustrations are further embittered by her younger half-sister, Asta, a constant reminder of the innocence, idealism, and sexual allure Rita once had and yearns for again. The fragile impasse of their lives is torn asunder by the appearance of Janice, the surviving member of the Indigenous family who leased the land to Rita and Asta’s reclusive and mysterious father over fifty years ago. With the lease now expired, they are all engulfed by the secrets and contradictions of their lives and of the land itself—in both the past and the present—and their stories are drawn inexorably toward an unspeakable tragedy.By Erin Shields. 2015
In a sweaty hotel room, a lonely businessman and a young woman meet for sex. Somewhere between reality and fantasy,…
the sex becomes talk and the talk becomes dangerous. Nothing is off limits in this battle of morality, economics and desire. This witty, dark and sexually charged new play by Governor General's Award–winner Erin Shields shines a light on the complexities of sex tourism and our preconceptions about love.By Martyna Majok. 2018
“Immensely haunting… The first of many great things about Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living… is the way it slams the…
door on uplifting stereotypes… Ms. Majok has engineered her plot to lead naturally to moments of intense and complicated pungency… If you don’t find yourself in someone in Cost of Living, you’re not looking.” —Jesse Green, New York Times Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Cost of Living deftly challenges the typical perceptions of those living with disabilities and delves deep into the ways class, race, nationality, and wealth can create gulfs between people, even as they long for the ability to connect. Eddie, an unemployed truck driver, and his estranged ex-wife, Ani, find themselves unexpectedly reunited after a terrible accident leaves her quadriplegic. John, a brilliant PhD student with cerebral palsy, hires Jess, a first-generation recent graduate who has fallen on desperate times, as his new aide.By Patrice D. Rankine. 2024
Racial reckoning was a recurrent theme throughout the summer of 2020, a response to George Floyd’s murder and the unprecedented…
impact of COVID on marginalized groups. Theater and Crisis proposes a literary and theatrical study of how Floyd's killing could possibly happen in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era, and in the supposedly post-racial era following the election of Barack Obama. In the days and months following Floyd's death, there were nightly protests in streets across the United States and broader world. At the same time, theater performances were forced to shift online to video conferencing platforms and to find new ways to engage audiences. In each case, groups made shared meaning through storytelling and narrative, a liberatory process of myth-making and reverence that author Patrice D. Rankine calls “epiphanic encoding.” Rather than approaching the problem of racial reckoning through history, where periodization and progress are dominant narratives, Theater and Crisis argues that myth and memory allow for better theorization about recurring events from the past, their haunting, and what these apparent ghosts ask of us. Building on the study of myth as active, processual storytelling, Rankine acknowledges that it grounds and orients groups toward significant events. Theater and Crisis aligns narratives about Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd, among others, with ancient, mythic figures such as Christ, Dionysus, Oedipus, and Moses. As living and verbal visitations, these stories performed on stage encode the past through their epiphanies in the present, urging audiences toward shared meaning. Rankine traces the cyclical hauntings of race through the refiguring of mythic stories across the past 75 years in the plays of James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Antoinette Nwandu, and many more, and in response to flashpoints in US racial history, such as the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the wars on drugs and crime, and the continued violence against and disenfranchisement of Black people into the twenty-first century. Theater and Crisis explores the appearance of myth on the American stage and showcases the ongoing response by the theatrical establishment to transform the stage into a space for racial reckoning. This timely book is essential reading for scholars of theater studies, classics, and American studies.By William Shakespeare. 2015
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare stages the workings of love. Theseus and Hippolyta, about to marry, are figures from…
mythology. In the woods outside Theseus’s Athens, two young men and two young women sort themselves out into couples—but not before they form first one love triangle, and then another.Also in the woods, the king and queen of fairyland, Oberon and Titania, battle over custody of an orphan boy; Oberon uses magic to make Titania fall in love with a weaver named Bottom, whose head is temporarily transformed into that of a donkey by a hobgoblin or “puck,” Robin Goodfellow. Finally, Bottom and his companions ineptly stage the tragedy of “Pyramus and Thisbe.”The authoritative edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play-Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play-Scene-by-scene plot summaries-A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases-An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books-An annotated guide to further readingEssay by Catherine BelseyThe Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.By William Shakespeare. 2015
The authoritative edition of The Tempest from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for both…
students and general readers.Putting romance onstage, The Tempest gives us a magician, Prospero, a former duke of Milan who was displaced by his treacherous brother, Antonio. Prospero is exiled on an island, where his only companions are his daughter, Miranda, the spirit Ariel, and the monster Caliban. When his enemies are among those caught in a storm near the island, Prospero turns his power upon them through Ariel and other spirits. The characters exceed the roles of villains and heroes. Prospero seems heroic, yet he enslaves Caliban and has an appetite for revenge. Caliban seems to be a monster for attacking Miranda, but appears heroic in resisting Prospero, evoking the period of colonialism during which the play was written. Miranda&’s engagement to Ferdinand, the Prince of Naples and a member of the shipwrecked party, helps resolve the drama. This edition includes: -Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play -Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play -Scene-by-scene plot summaries -A key to the play&’s famous lines and phrases -An introduction to reading Shakespeare&’s language -An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play -Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library&’s vast holdings of rare books -An annotated guide to further reading Essay by Barbara A. Mowat The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world&’s largest collection of Shakespeare&’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.By William Shakespeare. 2008
The authoritative edition Henry VI, Part 1 from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for…
students and general readers.Henry VI, Part 1 is an uncompromising celebration of early English nationalism that contrasts the English with the French, portrayed here as effeminate and scheming.A boy king, Henry VI, is on the English throne, and the indomitable Talbot leads the English cause in France. Joan La Pucelle (Joan of Arc), who becomes captain of the French, claims to be chosen by the Virgin Mary to liberate France. The English, however, consider her a sensual witch.Many of the English nobility remain, quarreling, at home. Once in France, some seek permission to fight each other there. Talbot and his son cannot prevail; the English defeat themselves by preying on each other.This edition includes: -Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play -Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play -Scene-by-scene plot summaries -A key to the play&’s famous lines and phrases -An introduction to reading Shakespeare&’s language -An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play -Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library&’s vast holdings of rare books -An annotated guide to further readingEssay by Phyllis RackinThe Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world&’s largest collection of Shakespeare&’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.