Clifford Odets. Arthur Miller. Paddy Chayefsky. Neil Simon. Jules Feiffer. Wendy Wasserstein. Tony Kushner. These leading American playwrights do not just happen to be Jewish: they are Jewish playwrig
Directors and the New Musical Drama offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic shifts in musical theatre in the 1980s and 90s. Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen explores the cultural differences between Briti
This study analyzes the history of puppet, mask, and performing object theater in the United States over the past 150 years to understand how a peculiarly American mixture of global cultures,
E. Christin Essin documents theatre's backstage history through the cultural roles played by designers during the modern development of their profession. Featuring work by Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Sim
Baggy Pants Comedy takes readers inside the burlesque houses of Depression-era America to explore the role of comedy in a show remembered mostly for strip-tease. It examines how burlesque comics, stra
In 1845, John Franklin's Northwest Passage expedition disappeared. The expedition left a remarkable archive of performative remains that entice one to consider the tension between material remains and
Through his study of American masculinity, Kippola constructs a theatrical history inextricably linked to the dynamic social, political, and cultural changes of the nineteenth-century American stage.
Between 1890 and 1918, over 125 American, English, Irish and AngloIndian plays by 70 dramatists were published in 14 American general interest periodicals aimed at the middle-class reader and consumer
In American Puppet Modernism, Bell reveals how understanding puppetry is integral to understanding the nature of the material world in performance and in turn argues that the material world in perform
This collection brings together a diverse group of essays dissecting American plays, movies, theatre productions, and other performance types that examine America and its history and culture. From Ame
No play in the history of the American stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book traces the major dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic from its inc
From Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers to Arthur Kopit and Brian Friel, New York-based literary agent Audrey Wood encouraged and guided the unique talents of playwrights in the Broadway theatre
In Shanghai during the early portion of the twentieth century, a hybrid theatrical form emerged that was based on Western spoken theatre, classical Chinese theatre, and a Japanese hybrid form of kabuk
Performing Magic on the Western Stage examines magic as a performing art and meaningful social practice, linking magic to cultural arenas such as religion, finance, gender, and nationality.
Memory in Play makes evident that memory, though critically neglected, is as significant as race, gender, and class as a feature of dramatic character construction. Favorini skillfully argues that dra
Mendel's Theatre uncovers the rich convergence of scientific theories of heredity, the American eugenics movement, and innovative modern drama from the 1890s to 1930. Obsessions with heredity played o
From Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers to Arthur Kopit and Brian Friel, New York-based literary agent Audrey Wood encouraged and guided the unique talents of playwrights in the Broadway theatre
Vaudeville Wars illuminates the exciting and intriguing story about how the tycoons of the two most powerful circuits, Keith-Albee in the East and the Orpheum in the West, conspired to control the big
Examining twenty-five years of theatre history, this book covers the major plays that feature representations of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), or "Wobblies". American class movement an
"The New Humor in the Progressive Era defines this brand of humor and how it was practiced by comic vaudevillians from the 1880s to the early 1920s, vaudeville's golden era. Providing a comprehensive