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Neva: English/Spanish
By Guillermo Calder n, Andrea Thome. 2016
"Guillermo Calderón is an authentic genius of the theater . . . you can't say you've heard or seen any…
of it before, which may make you want to hear and see it again."--The New Yorker"Neva's neobrutalist punch demonstrates . . . the enduring power of art."--Time Out New York"Brilliant and provocative."--TheatreMania"A lovely, disturbing drama . . . Calderón's drama is Chekhovian in the best sense."--The Village VoiceThis politically charged, haunting yet humorous meditation on theater and the revolutionary impulse tells the story of three actors, including Anton Chekhov's widow, who gather to rehearse scenes from The Cherry Orchard as Russia faces an impending revolution. A savage examination of the relationship between theater and historical context, Neva is the author's first play, which he directed for its English language premiere at the Public Theater in New York City.Guillermo Calderon is Chile's foremost contemporary theater artist. His plays include Diciembre (December), Clase (Class), Villa, Discurso (Speech), Quake, and Escuela (School), and his productions have toured extensively through South America and Europe. His co-written screenplay Violeta won the World Cinema Jury Prize for Drama at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and other awards include Best Play of the Year (Art Critics Circle of Chile), three Chilean Altazor Awards for Best Playwright and Best Director, and the 2010 Bank of Scotland Angel Award (Edinburgh Fringe Festival).The Book of Grace
By Suzan-Lori Parks. 2016
"[Suzan-Lori Parks'] dislocating stage devices, stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and…
marvelous."--Time "An original whose fierce intelligence and fearless approach to craft subvert theatrical convention and produce a mature and inimitable art that is as exciting as it is fresh."--August Wilson Named one of the "100 Innovators for the Next New Wave" by Time magazine, Suzan-Lori Parks is a truly original voice of the American theater. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur "Genius" Award, Parks is renowned for her groundbreaking language, theatricality, and an aesthetic that continues to evolve in unexpected ways. Her first full-length play since her award-winning Topdog/Underdog, The Book of Grace is a scorching three-person drama in which a young man returns home to south Texas to confront his father, unearthing deep-seated passions and ambition. The play premiered in spring 2010 at the Public Theater, where Parks is in the midst of a three-year residency as the first recipient of the theater's master writer chair. Suzan-Lori Parks is a playwright, screenwriter, songwriter, and novelist. Her plays include Topdog/Underdog (winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize), In the Blood (a 2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Venus (OBIE Award winner) and Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (OBIE Award, Best New American Play).Espresso
By Lucia Frangione. 2004
Sexy, provocative and challenging, Espresso is a rich, dark, bitter hit of comedy and sensuality. One of Lucia Frangione's blasphemy…
plays,' it inverts the Catholic stereotypes of feminine sexuality to boldly examine their corresponding masculine sexual emblems of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In an erotic world where men are traditionally cast as either fathers to be looked up to or sons to be looked after, where, for women, is the possibility of a flesh-and-blood lover, challenging her to open her heart without trespassing her will--a lover as he appears in the Song of Solomon: passionate, earthy, creative, vulnerable and beautiful-- the avatar of the holy spirit? There has been a horrible car crash, and Vito, the patriarch of an immigrant family, has had his body smashed and his heart lacerated, his life hanging by threads of tubes and wires in an intensive care ward. His family has rushed in from all over the country for an anxious vigil of hope, prayer and memory by his bedside. In this crucible of anxiety, a single actress alternately narrates and enacts her own and her family's history along with an uninvited narrator/actor, Amante ("lover" in Italian). As Amante engages all the women of the clan Rosa plays in a swirl of sharply portrayed characters--Vito's mother, Nonna, forced into marriage at thirteen but only now, at sixty-seven, experiencing the first intimations of her body's desire; the pit-bull martyrdom of Vito's second wife, Vincenza; and Rosa herself in her own thin, urbane skin stretched tight to hold in the red, passionate blood that boils just below the surface--we are never sure whether Rosa has created Amante or he has created her. Cast of 1 woman and 1 man.Prodigal Son
By John Patrick Shanley. 2016
'What I admire most is that his plays are beautifully well made, economical, sharp and coherent. He's not a misanthrope,…
but he's in pursuit of why people behave as badly as they do along with having a great compassion for them. That's an unusual and interesting combination.'--Tony Kushner, on John Patrick ShanleyWhen a troubled but gifted boy from the South Bronx finds himself shipped off to a private school in New Hampshire, the adjustment to the alien environment will lead to his ultimate dissolution or redemption. Teachers in the affluent institution do not know what to make of the new boisterous student, though the challenge really lies in his self-perception. Like his most celebrated play, Doubt, the author has based this new work on his own personal experiences of growing up as a teenager in the South Bronx and his time spent at a prep school in New England. Shanley has created an elemental study of a young's man search for his place in the world.John Patrick Shanley's plays include Outside Mullingar, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, and Dirty Story, along with his "Church and State" trilogy, Doubt, Defiance, and Storefront Church. For his play Doubt, he received both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He has nine films to his credit, including the five-time Oscar-nominated Doubt, and Moonstruck, which received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The Writers Guild of America awarded Shanley the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing.Paper Tigers
By Damien Angelica Walters. 2015
In this haunting and hypnotizing novel, a young woman loses everything-half of her body, her fiancé, and possibly her unborn…
child-to a terrible apartment fire. While recovering from the trauma, she discovers a photo album inhabited by a predatory ghost who promises to make her whole again, all while slowly consuming her from the inside out.Damian Angelica Walters' work has appeared or is forthcoming in Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume One, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and Glitter & Mayhem. She was an associate editor of the Hugo Award-winning Electric Velocipede.Choir Boy
By Tarell Alvin Mccraney. 2015
"An exhilarating, multi-layered new play."-The Guardian"Stirring and stylishly told . . . McCraney's crispest and most confident work."-Daily News"Greatly affecting.…
. . . It takes a brave writer to set his language against the plaintive beauty of the hymns and spirituals . . . but McCraney's speech holds its own, locating poetry even in casual vernacular and again demonstrating his gift for simile and metaphor."-The Village VoiceThe Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys is dedicated to the creation of strong, ethical black men. Pharus wants nothing more than to take his rightful place as leader of the school's legendary gospel choir, but can he find his way inside the hallowed halls of this institution if he sings in his own key? Known for his unique brand of urban lyricism, Tarrell Alvin McCraney follows up his acclaimed trilogy The Brother/Sister Plays with this affecting portrait of a gay youth trying to find the courage to let the truth about himself be known. Set against the sorrowful sounds of hymns and spirituals, Choir Boy premiered at the Royal Court in London before receiving its Off-Broadway premiere in summer 2013 to critical and popular acclaim.Tarell Alvin McCraney is author of The Brother/Sister Plays: The Brothers Size, In the Red and Brown Water, and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet. Other works include Wig Out!, set in New York's drag clubs, and The Breach, which deals with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His awards include the 2009 Steinberg Playwrights Award and the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award.Suburban Motel
By George F. Walker. 1999
Six plays, united only by the fact that they take place in one and the same suburban motel room: Problem…
Child, Criminal Genius, Risk Everything, Adult Entertainment, Featuring Loretta, and The End of Civilization. Transients, lovers, the haunted, the hunted, the desperate, the dumb, each "strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard of no more.Paula Vogel
By Joanna Mansbridge. 2014
Paula Vogel's plays, including the Pulitzer-prizewinning How I Learned to Drive, initiate a conversation with contemporary culture, staging vexed issues…
like domestic violence, pornography, and AIDS. She does not write "about" these concerns, but instead examines how they have become framed as "issues"-as sensationalized topics-focusing on the histories and discourses that have defined them and the bodies that bear their meanings. Mobilizing campy humor, keen insight, and nonlinear structure, her plays defamiliarize the identities and issues that have been fixed as "just the way things are." Vogel crafts collage-like playworlds that are comprised of fragments of history and culture, and that are simultaneously inclusive and alienating, familiar and strange, funny and disturbing. At the center of these playworlds are female characters negotiating with the images and discourses that circumscribe their lives and bodies. In this, the first book-length study of Vogel and her work, Joanna Mansbridge explores how Vogel's plays speak back to the canon, responding to and rewriting works by William Shakespeare, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet, rearranging their plots, revising their conflicts, and recasting their dramatis personae. The book examines the theories shaping the playwright and her plays, the production and reception of her work, and the aesthetic structure of each play, grounding the work in cultural materialist, feminist and queer theory, and theater and performance studies scholarship.Religion and Spanish Film: Luis Buñuel, the Franco Era, and Contemporary Directors
By Elizabeth Scarlett. 2015
Treatments of religion found in Spanish cinema range from the pious to the anticlerical and atheistic, and every position in…
between. In a nation with a strong Catholic tradition, resistance to and rebellion against religious norms go back almost as far as the notion of "Sacred Spain." Religion and Spanish Film provides a sustained study of the religious film genre in Spain practiced by mainstream Francoist film makers, the evolving iconoclasm, parody, and reinvention of the Catholic by internationally renowned Surrealist Luis Buñuel, and the ongoing battle of the secular versus the religious manifested in critically and popularly acclaimed directors Pedro Almodóvar, Julio Medem, Alejandro Amenábar, and many others. The conflicted Catholicism that emerges from examining religious themes in Spanish film history shows no sign of ending, as unresolved issues from the Civil War and Franco dictatorship, as well as the unsettled relationship between Church and State, continue into the present.A Line in the Sand
By Guillermo Verdecchia, Marcus Youssef. 1997
In the autumn of 1990, during Operation Desert Storm, two young men, one a troubled Canadian soldier, the other a…
teenage Palestinian black-marketeer, meet in the scorched Qatari desert. Breaching the divide of a profound cultural misunderstanding and against a backdrop of massive global conflict, these two become unlikely and secret friends. This tenuous friendship is severed by the torture and murder of the 16-year-old Palestinian inside the Canadian base--an act to which the Canadian soldier was at least a witness and perhaps a willing participant. Weaving poetic drama with myriad documentary sources, A Line in the Sand rips the benevolent mask off recent western peacekeeping operations and challenges Canada's long treasured national mythology that it is a nation of quiet diplomats. It asks us to imagine how horrors like these could be perpetrated with our money, in our name and by people much like us. Cast of 3 to 5 men.Monkey Business Theatre
By Robert M. Laughlin. 2008
In 1983, a group of citizens in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, formed Sna Jtz'ibajom, the Tzotzil-Tzeltal Maya writers'…
cooperative. In the two decades since, this group has evolved from writing and publishing bilingual booklets to writing and performing plays that have earned them national and international renown. Anthropologist Robert M. Laughlin has been a part of the group since its beginnings, and he offers a unique perspective on its development as a Mayan cultural force. The Monkey Business Theatre, or Teatro Lo'il Maxil, as this branch of Sna Jtz'ibajom calls itself, has presented plays in virtually every corner of the state of Chiapas, as well as in Mexico City, Guatemala, Honduras, Canada, and in many museums and universities in the United States. It has presented to the world, for the first time in drama, a view of the culture of the Mayas of Chiapas. In this work, Laughlin presents a translation of twelve of the plays created by Sna Jtz'ibajom, along with an introduction for each. Half of the plays are based on myths and half on the social, political, and economic problems that have confronted--and continue to confront--the Mayas of Chiapas. In 1983, a group of citizens in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, formed Sna Jtz'ibajom, the Tzotzil-Tzeltal Maya writers' cooperative. In the two decades since, this group has evolved from writing and publishing bilingual booklets to writing and performing plays that have earned them national and international renown. Anthropologist Robert M. Laughlin has been a part of the group since its beginnings, and he offers a unique perspective on its development as a Mayan cultural force. The Monkey Business Theatre, or Teatro Lo'il Maxil, as this branch of Sna Jtz'ibajom calls itself, has presented plays in virtually every corner of the state of Chiapas, as well as in Mexico City, Guatemala, Honduras, Canada, and in many museums and universities in the United States. It has presented to the world, for the first time in drama, a view of the culture of the Mayas of Chiapas. In this work, Laughlin presents a translation of twelve of the plays created by Sna Jtz'ibajom, along with an introduction for each. Half of the plays are based on myths and half on the social, political, and economic problems that have confronted - and continue to confront - the Mayas of Chiapas.Hamlet
By Gabriel Josipovici. 2016
William Shakespeare's Hamlet is probably the best-known and most commented upon work of literature in Western culture. The paradox is…
that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusive--very like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in this stimulating and original study. Moreover, our desire to master this elusiveness, to "pluck the heart out of its mystery," as Hamlet himself says, precisely mirrors what is going on in the play; and what Shakespeare's play demonstrates is that to conceive human character (and works of art) in this way is profoundly misguided. Â Rather than rushing to conclusions or setting out a theory of what Hamlet is "about," therefore, we should read and watch patiently and openly, allowing the play to unfold before us in its own time and trying to see each moment in the context of the whole. Josipovici's valuable book is thus an exercise in analysis which puts the physical experience of watching and reading at the heart of the critical process--at once a practical introduction to a great and much-loved play and a sophisticated intervention in some of the key questions of theory and aesthetics of our time.The Price
By Arthur Miller. 1968
Years after an angry breakup, Victor and Walter Franz are reunited by the death of their father. As they sort…
through his possessions in an old brownstone attic, the memories evoked by his belongings stir up old hostilities. The Price was nominated for two Tony Awards, including best play.After the Fall
By Arthur Miller. 1964
Often called the most autobiographical of Arthur Miller's plays, After the Fall probes deeply into the psyche of Quentin, a…
man who ruthlessly revisits his past to explain the catastrophe that is his life. His journey backward takes him through a troubled upbringing, the bitter death of his mother, and a series of failed relationships.China Doll
By David Mamet. 2015
"The finest American author of his generation."--Sunday MailThis complex new work from celebrated playwright David Mamet revolves around a wealthy…
man, his young fiancée, and an airplane. The man has just bought a new plane as a wedding present for the girl. He intends to go into semiretirement and enjoy himself. While in the process of leaving his office, and giving last minute instructions to his young assistant, he takes one final phone call.The new, widely anticipated play premieres on Broadway this fall, starring Tony and Academy Award-winning actor Al Pacino, for whom the play was written. Pacino described the role of billionaire Mickey Ross as "one of the most daunting and challenging roles I've been given to explore in the theater" and declared, "it blew me away."David Mamet is an American playwright, director, and screenwriter whose most notable works include Glengarry Glen Ross (Pulitzer Prize for Drama), American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, Oleanna, November, Race, and The Anarchist. Besides the film adaptations of his plays, his major screenwriting credits include The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, Rising Sun, Wag the Dog, and Hannibal. Over the course of his prolific career, Mamet has earned Tony Award nominations, Academy Award nominations, Drama Desk Awards, and "Screenwriter of the Year" from the London Critics Circle Film Awards.Habib Tanvir
By Anjum Katyal. 2012
Anjum Katyal's work is the first comprehensive study on the life and contribution of Habib Tanvir to Indian theatre history.…
A playwright, director, actor, journalist and critic, Tanvir is perhaps best known for the play Charandas Chor. However, his real significance in the history of post-Independence Indian theatre is that he signposted an important path for the development of modern theatre. His productions with Naya Theatre using Chhattisgarhi folk actors established how one could do modern theatre integrated with age-old-yet equally contemporary-folk culture on a basis of equality. Habib Tanvir: Towards an Inclusive Theatre explores various important aspects of Tanvir's theatre philosophy and practice as he experimented with both content and form. Starting with his early life and work, Katyal charts his professional trajectory from Agra Bazaar to Gaon Ka Naam Sasural, when he was searching for his true form, to Charandas Chor, which portrayed the eventual maturing of his style, and beyond, to cover his entire oeuvre.Trilogy of Resistance
By Antonio Negri, Timothy S. Murphy. 1979
With Trilogy of Resistance, the political philosopher Antonio Negri extends his intervention in contemporary politics and culture into a new…
medium: drama. The three plays collected for the first time in this volume dramatize the central concepts of the innovative and influential thought he has articulated in his best-selling books Empire and Multitude, coauthored with Michael Hardt. In the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller, Negri's political dramas are designed to provoke debate around the fundamental questions they raise about resistance, violence, and tyranny. In Swarm, the protagonist searches for an effective mode of activism; with the help of a Greek-style chorus, she tries on different roles, from the suicide bomber and party apparatchik to the multitude. The Bent Man, set in fascist Italy, focuses on a woodcutter who resists fascism by bending himself in two and using his own now-twisted body as a weapon against war. In Cithaeron, perhaps the most audacious of the three plays, Negri reworks Euripides's Bacchae to explore the circumstances that would compel a diverse and creative community to withdraw from both the despotic government that constrains it and the traditional family relationships that reinforce that despotism.First published in France in 2009 and featuring an introduction by Negri, Trilogy of Resistance provides a direct and passionate distillation of Negri's concepts and offers insights into one of the most important projects in political philosophy currently under way, as well as a timely reminder of the power of theater to effectively dramatize complex and challenging ideas.A History of the Jana Natya Manch
By Arjun Ghosh. 2014
A History of the Jana Natya Manch chronicles the birth and growth of the Jana Natya Manch (Janam), a Delhi-based…
radical theater group which has been active since 1973. Beginning in the early 1970s, when a group of young students in Delhi sought to continue the legacy of the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association, the book takes a close but critical look at the various phases in the four decades of the theatre collective. The author has also captured within these pages the functioning of Janam as an organization, its methods of attracting and training fresh talent, the process of scripting, interactions with mass organizations, the experience of performing almost skin-to-skin with its spectators in the grime of Indian streets, and much more. This book is not only a narration of Janam's history, development and functioning, it is also an attempt to throw fresh light on the practice of theater.ThePerformanceofHeartbreak
By Scott Caan, Val Lauren, Robert Carnegie. 2015
A collection of eleven one-act plays. With hints of Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard, Neil LaBute, and Tracy Letts, Scott Caan…
grapples with the emotional interiors of people in a fractured world. Whether writing about actors, lovers, or co-workers, Caan takes on the complicated tension between what we say and what we feel, how we grapple with the world publicly and privately, and what that difference says about us as people. Caan's training as an actor imbues his words with a sense of play and the characters he leaves other actors to create within these plays are deep and open to interpretation. The Performance of Heartbreak and Other Plays is the introduction of an exciting new voice in American theater.SLUT
By Jennifer Baumgardner, Carol Gilligan, Katie Cappiello, Meg Mcinerney. 2015
"SLUT is truthful, raw, and immediate! Experience this play and witness what American young women live with everyday."--Gloria SteinemRemember the…
slut at your school? Whether used as a slur or reclaimed as an expression of sexy confidence, this word has been used as an acceptable excuse for rape, bullying, and the sexual double standard. In the spirit of The Vagina Monologues, this riveting, critically acclaimed play, written in collaboration with New York City high school students, sheds light on enduring feminist issues. The play is accompanied by production notes, a guide for talk-backs, and provocative essays by Carol Gilligan, Jennifer Baumgardner, and Jarrod Chin of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), among others, providing the resources to inspire change within our communities and ourselves.Katie Cappiello and Meg McInerney are the creative director and managing director of the revolutionary feminist acting school The Arts Effect. In their ten years of teaching, they have brought theater arts programming to public, private, and special education schools worldwide. Their work has been hailed by Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Kathy Najimy, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler, and they have been honored by The National Women's Hall of Fame and The United States Congress for their dedicated, cutting-edge work empowering young girls.Jennifer Baumgardner is the executive director of The Feminist Press at CUNY as well as an author, activist, and filmmaker.