The plays collected in this volume give artistic expression to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. In so doing, they also illuminate many social, political, and environmental issues central to American life. Besides telling the kinds of stories that the news media could not, these plays explore the deeply rooted problems plaguing New Orleans. The factual basis of these plays serves a documentary purpose, but, as drama, they also depict the flood's consequences for individuals—unimaginable loss, powerlessness, displacement. The plays collected here - Rising Water by John Biguenet; The Breach by Catherine Filloux, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Joe Sutton; Because They Have No Words by Tim Maddock and Lotti Louise Pharrissis; Trash Bag Tourist by Samuel Brett Williams; and Katrina: The K Word by Lisa Brenner and Suzanne Trauth—show how theatre can both enhance our understanding of disastrous events and facilitate a sense of community between audiences and those who experienced them.

Taking King Lear as her central text, Judy Kronenfeld seriously questions the critical assumptions of much of today’s most fashionable Shakespeare scholarship. Charting a new course beyond both New Historicist and deconstructionist critics, she suggests a theory of language and interpretation that provides essential historical and linguistic contexts for the key terms and concepts of the play. Opening the play up to the implications of these contexts and this interpretive theory, she reveals much about Lear, English Reformation religious culture, and the state of contemporary criticism.

Kronenfeld’s focus expands from the text of Shakespeare’s play to a discussion of a shared Christian culture—a shared language and set of values—a common discursive field that frames the social ethics of the play. That expanded focus is used to address the multiple ways that clothing and nakedness function in the play, as well as the ways that these particular images and terms are understood in that shared context. As Kronenfeld moves beyond Lear to uncover the complex resonances of clothing and nakedness in sermons, polemical tracts, legislation, rhetoric, morality plays, and actual or alleged practices such as naked revolts by Anabaptists and the Adamians’ ritual disrobing during religious services, she demonstrates that many key terms and concepts of the period cannot be tied to a single ideology. Instead, they represent part of an intricate network of thought shared by people of seemingly opposite views, and it is within such shared cultural networks that dissent, resistance, and creativity can emerge. Warning her readers not to take the language of literary texts out of the linguistic context within which it first appeared, Kronenfeld has written a book that reinterprets the linguistic model that has been the basis for much poststructuralist criticism.

A trio of short dramas set in the South and spanning 1968 to the present, King Me features compelling characters and relevant themes that examine our ongoing understanding of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bound by Blood, #communicate, and Paradox in the Parish richly dramatize three of King's popular quotes, offering creative methods for teaching history and social studies and setting the stage for inspiring discussions for contemporary theater goers. Readers and audiences will also learn about current civil rights issues such as the Jena Six Case in Jena, Louisiana, while appreciating, or appreciating anew, how King impacted the lives of his own and future generations.

From 1918’s Tickless Time through Waiting for Lefty, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Prisoner of Second Avenue to 2005’s The Clean House, domestic labor has figured largely on American stages. No dramatic genre has done more than the one often dismissively dubbed “kitchen sink realism” to both support and contest the idea that the home is naturally women’s sphere. But there is more to the genre than even its supporters suggest.

In analyzing kitchen sink realisms, Dorothy Chansky reveals the ways that food preparation, domestic labor, dining, serving, entertaining, and cleanup saturate the lives of dramatic characters and situations even when they do not take center stage. Offering resistant readings that rely on close attention to the particular cultural and semiotic environments in which plays and their audiences operated, she sheds compelling light on the changing debates about women’s roles and the importance of their household labor across lines of class and race in the twentieth century.

The story begins just after World War I, as more households were electrified and fewer middle-class housewives could afford to hire maids. In the 1920s, popular mainstream plays staged the plight of women seeking escape from the daily grind; African American playwrights, meanwhile, argued that housework was the least of women’s worries. Plays of the 1930s recognized housework as work to a greater degree than ever before, while during the war years domestic labor was predictably recruited to the war effort—sometimes with gender-bending results. In the famously quiescent and anxious 1950s, critiques of domestic normalcy became common, and African American maids gained a complexity previously reserved for white leading ladies. These critiques proliferated with the re-emergence of feminism as a political movement from the 1960s on. After the turn of the century, the problems and comforts of domestic labor in black and white took center stage. In highlighting these shifts, Chansky brings the real home.