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Taking its cue from Eugene O'Neill's questioning of «faithful realism», voiced by Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, this book examines the distant legacy of the Irish American playwright in contemporary multiethnic drama in the U.S. It explores the labyrinth of formal devices through which African American, Latina/o, First Nations, and Asian American dramatists have unconsciously reinterpreted O'Neill's questioning of mimesis. In their works, hybridizations of stage realism function as aesthetic celebrations of the spiritual potentialities of cultural in-betweenness. This volume provides detailed analyses of over forty plays authored by such key artists as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, José Rivera, Cherríe Moraga, Hanay Geiogamah, Diane Glancy, David Henry Hwang, and Chay Yew, to give only a few prominent examples. All in all, Labyrinth of Hybridities invites its readers to reassess the cross-cultural patterns characterizing the history of twentieth century American drama.
How do twentieth and twenty-first century artists bring forth the powerful reality of death when it exists in memory and lived experience as something that happens only to others? Death in American Texts and Performances takes up this question to explore the modern and postmodern aesthetics of death. Working between and across genres, the contributors examine literary texts and performance media, including Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead, Luis Valdez' Dark Root of a Scream, Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, Toni Morrison's Sula and Song of Solomon, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Falling Man, and HBO's Six Feet Under. As the contri...
Since its release in 2010, Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy has become the international standard for dramaturgy training and practice. As the field of dramaturgy continues to shift and change, this new edition prepares theatre students and practitioners to create powerful, relevant performances of all types.
The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature presents over forty essays by leading and emerging international scholars of Latino/a literature and analyses: Regional, cultural and sexual identities in Latino/a literature Worldviews and traditions of Latino/a cultural creation Latino/a literature in different international contexts The impact of differing literary forms of Latino/a literature The politics of canon formation in Latino/a literature. This collection provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of this literary culture.
GIRL UNDER GRAIN is US dramatist Karen Hartman's evocative dust bowl love story inspired by the book of Ruth. Two women travel a long road to a search for beauty and grace in this poetic drama, With an introduction by director Jean Randich.
As Barranger traces Crawford’s career as an independent producer, she tells the parallel story of American theater in the mid-twentieth century, making A Gambler’s Instinct both an enjoyable and informative biography of a remarkable woman and an important addition to the literature of the modern theater.
Once called "America's greatest actress," renowned for the passion and power of her performances, Clara Morris (1847-1925) has been largely forgotten. A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage is the first full-length study of the actress's importance as a feminist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Detailing her daunting health problems and the changing tastes in entertainment that led to her retirement from the stage, Barbara Wallace Grossman explores Morris's dramatic reinvention as an author. During a second robust career, she published hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and nine books—six works of fiction and three memoirs. Grossman draws...
This book explores the different trends and the various changes in the representational history of femmes fatales within twentieth century American culture. While providing precedents, discussing the Western cultural history of this iconic female figure, as well as presenting the cultural and theoretical debates surrounding ‘her,’ the major focus lies in Maurine Dallas Watkins’s story entitled Chicago and how its diachronic and transmedial revivals contributed to this debate and what kind of an interpretation it provided of the lethal woman. Through a cultural, historical, literary and cinematic excavation this book argues that the story of Chicago produces a unique kind of deathly wom...
Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernacular covers an unconventional array of topics—from handkerchiefs, votives, and graffiti to food, fútbol, and the Internet—as well as cutting edge literature, cinema, photography, and more. In its cross-disciplinary approach, this collection makes an invaluable contribution to the scholarship on Chicana and Chicano culture and provides engaging readings for courses in race/ethnic studies, media studies, and American studies. Collected chapters critically interrogate the underlying tensions between personal expressions and public demonstrations in their on-going negotiation of Chicana and Chicano identity. Drawing on the revolution...
Working theatrically with technology Systemic Dramaturgy offers an invigorating, practical look at the daunting cultural problems of the digital age as they relate to performance. Authors Michael Mark Chemers and Mike Sell reject the incompatibility of theatre with robots, digital media, or video games. Instead, they argue that technology is the original problem of theatre: How can we tell this story and move this audience with these tools? And if we have different tools, how can that change the stories we tell? This volume attunes readers to “systemic dramaturgy”—the recursive elements of signification, innovation, and history that underlie all performance—arguing that theatre must ...