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Contemporary American Drama
This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It focuses on representative plays and performance texts that experiment with form and content, discussing influential playwrights and performance artists such as Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlum, Anna Deavere Smith, Karen Finley and Will Power, alongside avant-garde theatre groups. Saddik traces the development of contemporary drama since 1945, and discusses the cross-cultural impact of postwar British and European innovations on American theatre from the 1950s to the present day in order to examine the performance of American identity. She argues that contemporary American theatre is primarily a postmodern drama of inclusion and diversity that destabilizes the notion of fixed identity and questions the nature of reality.
The Politics of Reputation
Author Annette J. Saddik researches Tennessee Williams' much-neglected later work (from 1961 to 1983), and argues that it deserves a central place in American experimental drama. Offering a new reading of Williams' career, she challenges the conventional wisdom that his later work represents a failure of his creative powers.
Gender and Jewelry
Jewelry responds to our most primitive urges, for control, honor, and sex. It is at once the most ancient and most immediate of art forms, one that is defined by its connection and interaction with the body. In this sense it is inescapably political, its meaning bound to the possibilities of the body it lies on. Indeed, the fate of the body is often bound to the jewelry. This study looks at gender and jewelry in order to gain some understanding into how jewelry is constructed by and constructs not just a single society, but human societies. It will explore how societal traditions that have sprung up around jewelry and ornamentation have affected the possibilities available to women across a broad spectrum of social and ethnic circumstances, determining which have served women well and which are constrictive and destructive. It also examines the possibilities for the intentional creation of feminist jewelry, including an overview of the author's own work.
Facial Choreographies
The face contributes a vital, yet often overlooked, component of dance performance. Facial Choreographies: Performing the Face in Popular Dance examines what the face does in dance and what it may mean. Author Sherril Dodds focuses on popular presentational dance, which permits the face to be one of excess and spectacle, as well as disclosure or deception. The concept of facial choreography resists the idea that the expressive countenance in dance is simply by chance, and instead conceives its movement as purposeful, creative, and communicative. The book centers on three facial case studies: global celebrity Michael Jackson, whose face has occupied a site of fervent controversy; Maddie Ziegl...
Remixing the Hip-Hop Narrative
Although hip hop is now a well-established global music genre and cultural form, its history and current impact have not yet been sufficiently studied. The interdisciplinary contributions to this volume address hip hop's historical and regional struggles for representation of race, gender, generation, place, and language, as well as the tension between authenticity and commercialization. Contributors offer approaches to historicizing hip-hop culture, and present new theoretical perspectives and methodological tools for addressing hip hop's global impact. This volume targets not only scholars and students but also resonates with recent public debates about identity politics and cultural appropriation.
Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams
Is Tennessee Williams a social writer at heart? Hooper questions this view, presenting a new interpretation of the dramatist.
Seriously Mad
Theatermakers in the United States have long been drawn to madness as a source of dramatic spectacle. During the Broadway musical’s golden age in the mid-twentieth century, creative teams used the currently in-vogue psychoanalytic ideas about mental life to construct troubled characters at odds with themselves and their worlds. As the clinical and cultural profile of madness transformed over the twentieth century, musicals continued to delve into the experience of those living with mental pain, trauma, and unhappiness. Seriously Mad offers a dynamic account of stage musicals’ engagement with historically significant theories about mental distress, illness, disability, and human variance in the United States. By exploring who is considered mad and what constitutes madness at different moments in U.S. history, Aleksei Grinenko shows how, in attempts to bring the musicals closer to highbrow sophistication, theater dramatized serious medical conditions and social problems. Among the many Broadway productions discussed are Next to Normal, A Strange Loop, Sweeney Todd, Man of La Mancha, Gypsy, Oklahoma!, and Lady in the Dark.
Therapeutic Revolutions
Therapeutic Revolutions examines the evolving relationship between American medicine, psychiatry, and culture from World War II to the dawn of the 1970s. In this richly layered intellectual history, Martin Halliwell ranges from national politics, public reports, and healthcare debates to the ways in which film, literature, and the mass media provided cultural channels for shaping and challenging preconceptions about health and illness. Beginning with a discussion of the profound impact of World War II and the Cold War on mental health, Halliwell moves from the influence of work, family, and growing up in the Eisenhower years to the critique of institutional practice and the search for altern...
Queering the South on Screen
Within the realm of American culture and its construction of its citizenry, geography, and ideology, who are southerners and who are queers, and what is the South and what is queerness? Queering the South on Screen addresses these questions by examining the intersections of queerness, regionalism, and identity depicted in film, television, and other visual media about the South during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Southern queers on screen often reflect the fantasy of cultural stereotypes. Editor Tison Pugh contends that when southern queers appear in films and on television, and when southern queers watch these portrayals, the inherent contradictions of these cultural depictions...
Tenn Years
The essays in this volume were all written by David Kaplan in conjunction with the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, of which he is the curator and a co-founder. They are organized in two sections. The first section consists of ten essays written for each year of the Provincetown Festival, most included in the Festival catalogue for the year indicated. Those essays focus on each year’s thematic selection of Williams plays—and other dance, music, and theater events—as well as some aspect of Williams’ plays not always obvious in the text but essential to understanding the plays in production. The second section includes seven occasional essays, written for productions of Williams plays associated with the Festival. All the essays relate, in one way or another, to the story of what happened to the playwright during the last twenty years of his life and how his reputation is evolving since his death.
