Gavin Bolton’s Contextual Drama is the result of more than two decades of study of Bolton’s theory and practice. For teachers and those in the caring professions, it will clarify the power of contextual drama as a beneficial learning medium for children and adults, both within and beyond the classroom. The core of the book is a detailed analysis of nine examples of the contextual drama mode; the first five demonstrate and analyze Bolton’s practice with children and young people and the final four describe his teaching with adults. Each chapter is framed by an introduction that contextualizes Bolton, from his initial beginnings working with visually and aurally-challenged children to his position as reader in drama at Durham University. The final two chapters offer reflection on the nature of this work and, in particular, the significance of Bolton’s contributions to education.

A new edition of the celebrated introduction to dramaturgy training and practice
 
Since its release in 2010, Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy has become the international standard for dramaturgy training and practice. The first textbook introduced students to the “ghost light” model of dramaturgy—a creatively engaged, artistically vibrant approach that draws on extensive knowledge of theatre history, practice, and theory—and this second edition brings the conversation up to the present.
 
Over three parts, author and theory creator Michael Mark Chemers helps students explore the world of the dramaturg. Part 1 describes what dramaturgs do, presents a detailed history of dramaturgy, and summarizes many of the critical theories needed to analyze and understand dramatic texts. Part 2 teaches students to read, write, and analyze scripts through a twelve-step program with suggestions about how to approach various genres and play structures. The final part delves into the relationships dramaturgs forge and offers useful advice about collaborating with other artists. It also includes ideas for audience outreach initiatives such as marketing and publicity plans, educational programs, program notes and lobby displays, and more.   
 
Perfectly suited for the undergraduate theatre classroom, this holistic guide includes chapter exercises for students to practice the skills as they learn. The new edition also incorporates recent theory and new resources on multimedia performance and dramaturgy in the digital age. As the field of dramaturgy continues to shift and change, this new edition of Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy prepares theatre students and practitioners to create powerful, relevant performances of all types.

Drawn from the first ten years of the Goodman Theatre’s renowned biennial festival of Latino plays, the works in this collection expand the definition of Latino theater, resisting the confines of a particular language, locale, or assumed audience. Instead of focusing on similarities that outline the boundaries of Latino identity, these plays look outward, representing the multiplicity of actual Latino experience. The plays were written and performed sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish; their stories are set in heterogeneous milieus; they’re directed at both Latino and non-Latino audiences; and they incorporate cultural or theatrical elements from vastly different traditions. As a group, these plays indicate the extraordinary range of the festival’s offerings and show how it has contributed to a more complex notion of what Latino theater is and can be.

This collection of five award-winning plays by Charles Smith includes Jelly Belly, Free Man of Color, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Knock Me a Kiss, and The Gospel According to James. Powerful, provocative, and entertaining, these plays have been produced by professional theater companies across the country and abroad. Four of the plays are based on historical people and events from W.E.B. Du Bois and Countee Cullen to the Harlem Renaissance. Accurate in the way they capture the political and cultural milieu of their historical settings, and courageous in the way they grapple with difficult questions such as race, education, religion, and social class, these plays jump off the page just as powerfully as they come to life on stage. This first-ever collection from one of the nation’s leading African American playwrights is a journey down the complex road of race and history.

The difference between belief and knowledge and the con­sequences of mistaking one for the other are at the heart of Craig Wright’s play Grace. An evangelical Christian couple, Sara and Steve, leave a dreary life in Minnesota for sunny Florida and the hope of fast money from turn­ing abandoned hotels into a chain of gospel-themed inns. Their new neighbor, Sam, is struggling to emerge from the trauma of a car accident that killed his fiancée and left him badly maimed. And the building’s pest exterminator, Karl, is still tormented by a dark childhood episode. As their stories converge, Wright’s characters find themselves face-to-face with the most eternally vexing questions—the nature of faith, the meaning of suffering, and the possibil­ity of redemption. Acidly funny and relentlessly search­ing, Grace is a trenchant work from an immensely gifted playwright.

We know that size matters in many areas of human endeavor, but what about works of the imagination? Why do some dramatic creations extend to five hours or more, and how does their extreme length help them accomplish extraordinarily ambitious aims? In Great Lengths, theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalb addresses these and other questions through a close look at seven internationally prominent theater productions, including Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby, and the "durational works" of the British experimental company Forced Entertainment. This is a book about extreme length, monumental scope, and intensive immersion in the theater in general, written by a passionate spectator reflecting on selected pinnacles of his theatergoing over thirty years.

The book's examples, deliberately chosen for their diversity, range from adapted novels and epics, to dramatic chronicles with macrohistorical and macropolitical implications, to stagings of super-size classic plays, to "postdramatic" works that negotiate the border between life and art. Kalb reconstructs each of the works, re-creating the experience of seeing it while at the same time explaining how it maintained attention and interest over so many hours, and then expanding the scope to embrace a wider view and ask broader questions. The discussion of Nicholas Nickleby, for example, considers melodrama as a basic tool of theatrical communication, and the section on Peter Brook's The Mahabharata explores the ethical problems surrounding theatrical exoticism. The chapter on Einstein on the Beach grows into a reflection on the media-age status of the much-debated Gesamtkunstwerk (or "total artwork") and a reassessment of the long avant-gardist tradition of challenging the primacy of rational language in theater. The essay on Peter Stein's Faust I + II becomes a reflection on the interpretive role of theater directors and the theatrical viability of antitheatrical closet drama. Great Lengths thus offers a remarkable panorama of the surprisingly broad field of contemporary marathon theater—an art form that diverse audiences of savvy, screen-weaned spectators continue to seek out, for the increasingly rare experiences of awe, transcendence, and sustained immersion that it provides.

Great Lengths will appeal to general readers as well as theater specialists. It situates the chosen productions in various historical and critical contexts and engages with the many lively scholarly debates that have swirled around them. At the same time, it uses the productions as springboards for wide-ranging reflections on the basic purpose and enduring power of theater in an attention-challenged, media-saturated era.

Greek Tragedies, Volume I contains Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon,” translated by Richmond Lattimore; Aeschylus’s “Prometheus Bound,” translated by David Grene; Sophocles’s “Oedipus the King,” translated by David Grene; Sophocles’s “Antigone,” translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff; and Euripides’s “Hippolytus,” translated by David Grene.

 

Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.

 

In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.

 

In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

Greek Tragedies, Volume II contains Aeschylus’s “The Libation Bearers,” translated by Richmond Lattimore; Sophocles’s “Electra,” translated by David Grene; Euripides’s “Iphigenia among the Taurians,” translated by Anne Carson; Euripides’s “Electra,” translated by Emily Townsend Vermeule; and Euripides’s “The Trojan Women,” translated by Richmond Lattimore.

 

Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.

 

In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.

 

In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

Greek Tragedies, Volume III contains Aeschylus’s “The Eumenides,” translated by Richmond Lattimore; Sophocles’s “Philoctetes,” translated by David Grene; Sophocles’s “Oedipus at Colonus,” translated by Robert Fitzgerald; Euripides’s “The Bacchae,” translated by William Arrowsmith; and Euripides’s “Alecestis,” translated by Richmond Lattimore.

 

Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.

 

In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.

 

In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

In three paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer a selection of the most important and characteristic plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the nine-volume anthology of The Complete Greek Tragedies. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of more than three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.

In three paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer a selection of the most important and characteristic plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the nine-volume anthology of The Complete Greek Tragedies. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of more than three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.

In three paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer a selection of the most important and characteristic plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the nine-volume anthology of The Complete Greek Tragedies. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of more than three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.