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Alchemies of Theater
Plays, Scores, Writings
Dick Higgins
University of Michigan Press, 2024
In addition to his work as visual artist, publisher, poet, and composer, Dick Higgins (1938–98) was also a genuine man of the theater. A founder of Fluxus, he was a major figure in artistic communities in downtown New York City, across Europe, and in Japan. Yet as important as Higgins’s work has been to historians of the American avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to his radical theatrical vision. 

Alchemies of Theater brings together a broad selection of Higgins’s writings and theater-related work, much of it unpublished or long out of print, including plays and performance scores, drawings, and writings on theater and performance. As this book demonstrates, Higgins deconstructed the drama long before it became a project of theater; undercut the traditional roles of author and director; created what is now considered “devised” theater; pioneered the use of media in theater, writing the first electronic opera; and was a precursor in deconstruction and  “postdramatic” avant-garde traditions. His Intermedia manifesto offered a sweeping view of interdisciplinarity—in effect, a new arts ecology.
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Avery Hopwood
His Life and Plays
Jack F. Sharrar
University of Michigan Press, 1998
In 1920 Avery Hopwood was America's most successful playwright, achieving the distinction of having four concurrent hits on the Broadway stage.
Jack F. Sharrar's critical biography makes use of a rich array of primary sources--including Hopwood's unpublished novel and his letters to such friends as Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, and Mary Roberts Rinehart--to chronicle Hopwood's life and career. The book provides fresh insights on the playwright, his plays and the personalities who produced and performed in them, by surveying the commercial theater of the period. Until recently out of print, the new edition includes a foreword by Nicholas Delbanco, director of the University of Michigan's Hopwood Awards in Creative Writing Program; an afterword by Sharrar that sheds new light on the passionate, tumultuous relationship between Hopwood and John Floyd; and many rare illustrations from American theater history.
"The definitive biography of this fascinating, somewhat tragic man, who so often made theatergoers forget their woes but who sometimes couldn't forget his own . . . . [A] wonderful book, as deep as it is entertaining." --TheaterWeek
Jack F. Sharrar, Ph.D., is Director of Academic Affiars, American Conservatory Theater. Nicholas Delbanco is Professor of English and Director of the University of Michigan's Hopwood Awards Program. His most recent novel is Old Scores (Warner Books, 1997).
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A Commentary on the Plays of Sophocles
James C. Hogan
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

James C. Hogan introduces each play by highlighting specific and interpretive problems relevant to that play before turning to a line-by-line analysis. The line analysis is comprehensive, ranging from the meanings of words and phrases that pertain to a variety of Greek ideas and institutions to metaphor and imagery specific to each play as well as plots and borrowings from earlier poetry, styles, and characterizations.

Along with his examination of the seven extant plays of Sophocles in English translations, Hogan provides a general introduction to the theatre in Sophocles’ time, discussing staging, the conventions of the Greek theatre, the text of the plays, and mythology and religion.

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The Crooked Mirror
Plays from a Modernist Russian Cabaret
Edited and translated from the Russian by Laurence Senelick
Northwestern University Press, 2023
An anthology of plays from the Crooked Mirror, the leading Russian cabaret of the Silver Age

“Don’t blame the mirror if your mug is crooked!”

Parody dominated early twentieth-century Russian cabaret, but the Crooked Mirror extended its lampooning to theatrical practice itself. Eclectic in its targets, the Saint Petersburg theater mocked not only naturalism but also symbolism, futurism, and “Meyerholditis.” Its shows parodied both the stale conventions of melodrama and opera and the stylized trends in staging, wielding satire to provoke artistic and social reform. Though the theater was liquidated in 1931, many of its innovations would become standard techniques in cabaret repertoires and improv revues.

As a cultural phenomenon of the Silver Age, the Crooked Mirror deserves critical attention, yet it has received only fleeting mention in histories of Russian theater and biographies of its major figures. This anthology fills a critical gap in our understanding of that heady era by bringing together key plays—most appearing in English here for the first time—together with short biographies of their authors and robust commentary and annotations. Laurence Senelick guides readers through the artistic and ideological evolution of the Crooked Mirror and provides performers with the material to bring its innovations back to the stage.
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Dramatizing Dementia
Madness In The Plays Of Tennessee Williams
Jacqueline O'Connor
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
Jacqueline O’Connor examines how Tennessee Williams portrayed society’s treatment of the mentally ill. The critical approach is eclectic and the author draws on a variety of psychological, literary, and biographical sources.
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Eight Plays for Children
The New Generation Play Project
Edited by Coleman A. Jennings
University of Texas Press, 1999

The New Generation Play Project was a daring experiment in American children's theatre. Begun in 1989 by a consortium that included the Seattle Children's Theatre, The Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, Stage One: The Louisville Children's Theatre, and the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, the NGPP raised half a million dollars to commission major American dramatists to create new works for young people and to produce these plays over a several-year period.

This book provides the full text of the plays produced through the NGPP:

  • Constance Congdon, Beauty and the Beast
  • Velina Hasu Houston, Hula Heart
  • Tina Howe, East of the Sun and West of the Moon
  • Len Jenkin, The Invisible Man
  • Mark Medoff, Kringle's Window
  • Eric Overmyer, Duke Kahanamoku vs. The Surfnappers
  • Michael Weller, Dogbrain
  • Y York, The Witch of Blackbird Pond

In his introduction, Coleman Jennings describes the work of the NGPP, some of the controversies surrounding its selection of playwrights who do not ordinarily write for young audiences, as well as the playwrights' reactions to the project, and the critical reception of the plays. Suzan Zeder, one of the nation's leading playwrights for family audiences, supplies the foreword.

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Geography and Plays
Gertrude Stein; Introduction by Cyrena N. Pondrom
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993
Geography and Plays is a collection of Gertrude Stein’s writing from about 1908 to 1920. Originally published in 1922 with an introduction by Sherwood Anderson, it was almost inaccessible for many years. This edition makes it possible for students and other devotees of Stein to see the developing strategies of one of the acknowledged giants of literary modernism, whose pathbreaking departures in literary style have recently been assigned still greater importance in light of new theories about women’s writing. An introduction by Cyrena N. Pondrom provides contemporary readers with a fine orientation to the importance of Stein’s achievement in this early work.
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Gogol
Plays and Selected Writings
Nikolai Gogol
Northwestern University Press, 1994
The theatrical genius of Gogol has gone largely unappreciated by English-speaking audiences because literal translations have left his plays virtually impossible to perform. These fresh translations restore the vitality of Gogol's language and humor, allowing his dramatic art to speak to readers, directors, actors, and theater-goers.
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Honouring the Strength of Indian Women
Plays, Stories, Poetry
Vera Manuel
University of Manitoba Press, 2019

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Italian Women's Theatre, 1930-1960
An Anthology of Plays
Translations and Critical Introductions by Daniela Cavallaro
Intellect Books, 2011
Between 1930 and 1960, popular female dramatists, including Paola Riccora, Anna Bonacci, Clotilde Masci, and Gici Ganzini Granata, set the stage for a new generation of feminist theatre and the development of contemporary Italian women’s theatre as a whole. Now largely forgotten, the lives and works of these dramatists are reintroduced into the scholarly conversation in Italian Women’s Theatre, 1930–1960. Following a general introduction, the book presents a selection of dramatic works, rounded out by commentary, performance histories, critical analyses, and biographical information.  
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Jim Crow, American
Selected Songs and Plays
T. D. Rice
Harvard University Press, 2009

Jim Crow is the figure that has long represented America’s imperfect union. When the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage in blackface as Jim Crow, during the 1830s, a ragged and charismatic trickster began channeling black folklore through American popular culture. This compact edition of the earliest Jim Crow plays and songs presents essential performances that assembled backtalk, banter, masquerade, and dance into the diagnostic American style. Quite contrary to Jim Crow’s reputation—which is to say, the term’s later meaning—these early acts undermine both racism and slavery. They celebrate an irresistibly attractive blackness in a young Republic that had failed to come together until Americans agreed to disagree over Jim Crow’s meaning.

As they permeated American popular culture, these distinctive themes formed a template which anticipated minstrel shows, vaudeville, ragtime, jazz, early talking film, and rock ‘n’ roll. They all show whites using rogue blackness to rehearse their mutual disaffection and uneven exclusion.

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Mapping Shakespeare's World
Peter Whitfield
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2015
Shakespeare never set a play in his own Elizabethan London. From the castle in Elsinore where Hamlet avenges his father’s death to Cleopatra’s Alexandria at the height of the Roman Empire to the seaport town in Cyprus where we await the arrival of Othello, each of Shakespeare’s plays is set in a time or space remote from his primary audience. Why is this? How much did the Bard and his contemporaries know about the foreign lands his characters often inhabit? What expectations did an audience have if the curtains rose on a play which claimed to take place in ancient Troy or the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre in northern Spain?
           
Mapping Shakespeare’s World explores these questions with surprising results. It has often been said that setting is irrelevant to Shakespeare’s plays—that, wherever they are set, their enduring appeal lies in their ability to speak to broad questions of human nature. Peter Whitfield shows that, on the contrary, many of Shakespeare’s locations were carefully chosen for their ability to convey subtle meanings an Elizabethan audience would have picked up on and understood. Through the use of paintings, drawings, contemporary maps and geographical texts, Whitfield suggests answers to such questions as where Illyria was located, why The Merry Wives of Windsor could only have taken place in Windsor, and how two utterly different comedies—The Comedy of Errors and Pericles, Prince of Tyre—both came to take place in ancient Ephesus.
           
Just when one might think there was nothing more to be said about Shakespeare, with Mapping Shakespeare’s World, Whitfield offers a fascinating new point of view.
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Mayakovsky
Plays
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Northwestern University Press, 1995
One of Russia's greatest poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was a Futurist, early Bolshevik, and champion of the avant-garde. Despite his revolutionary youth, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet society, and three of his plays—all banned until after Stalin's death—reflect his changing assessments of the Revolution.

Mayakovsky: Plays includes Mystery Bouffe, a mock medieval mystery written in 1918 to celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution; The Bathhouse, a sharp attack on Soviet bureaucracy subtitled "a drama of circus and fireworks"; and The Bedbug, in which a worker with bourgeois pretensions is frozen and resurrected fifty years later, when the world has become a material paradise. The collection also includes Mayakovsky's more personal first play, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy.
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Performing Captivity, Performing Escape
Cabarets and Plays from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto
Edited by Lisa Peschel
Seagull Books, 2014
A meticulously researched book that collects twelve playscripts written by European Jews imprisoned in the Terezín ghetto during the Holocaust.
 
The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezín, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death. But amid this horrific period, there was also a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children’s drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners’ theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavors, deserves serious attention as well.
 
Performing Captivity, Performing Escape collects twelve theatrical texts—cabaret songs and sketches, historical and verse dramas, puppet plays, and a Purim play—written by Czech and Austrian Jews. Together these works reveal the wide range of ways in which the prisoners engaged with and escaped from life in the ghetto through performance. The anthology opens with an insightful prologue by novelist Ivan Klíma, who was interned in the ghetto as a child and contains a detailed introduction by editor Lisa Peschel about the pre-war theatrical influences and wartime conditions that inspired the theater of the ghetto. The array of theatrical forms collected in this anthology speaks of the prisoners’ persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be a moving read for students and scholars of the Holocaust.
 
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Pinter In Play
Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter
Susan Hollis Merritt
Duke University Press, 1990
Pinter in Play provides a survey of diverse readings of the Harold Pinter canon organized around and presented in terms of the major critical schools of the past twenty-five years, from New Criticism to deconstruction to poststructuralism. Reflecting on the cultural, personal, sociological, and philosophical contexts of these diverse critical perspectives and the critics who express them, this book is equally about the act or the art of literary criticism and itself an important work of literary criticism. Drawing on interviews with Pinter scholars, Susan Hollis Merritt shows how critics "play" with Pinter and thereby seriously enforce personal, professional, and political affiliations. Cutting across traditional academic and nonacademic boundaries, Merritt argues that greater cooperation and collaboration among critics can resolve conflicts, promote greater social equity, and foster ameliorative critical and cultural change.
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Plays
Luigi Pirandello
Northwestern University Press, 1998

“How has the art of theater managed to survive at all into the era of modernism and the era of what is currently, however ineptly, called postmodernism?” asks preeminent theater scholar Eric Bentley. “Through the work of [Luigi] Pirandello, I should think, more than any other single individual.”  

Bentley’s English versions of four of Pirandello’s most celebrated plays—collected here for the first time—capture the playwright’s voice with remarkable perception. He has provided texts that are the standard for American productions, sensitive both to what is uniquely “Sicilian” in Pirandello’s language and to the rigors of the American stage.  

Along with Pirandello’s better-known works, Six Characters in Search of an AuthorEmperor Henry, and Right You Are, this edition includes the widely performed The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, unavailable in any other collection.  

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Plays in Time
The Beekeeper's Daughter, Prophecy, Another Life and Extreme Whether
Karen Malpede
Intellect Books, 2017
Plays in Time collects four plays by Karen Malpede set during influential events from the late twentieth century to the present: the Bosnian war and rape camps; the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Israel’s 2006 bombardment of Lebanon; 9/11 and the US torture program; and the heroism of climate scientists facing attack from well-funded climate change deniers. In each play in this anthology, nature, poetry, ritual, and empathy are presented in contrast to the abuse of persons and world. Despite their serious topics, the plays are full of humor and distinctively entertaining personalities.
 
Each play was developed by Theater Three Collaborative for production in New York and internationally in Italy, Australia, London, Berlin, and Paris.
 
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Plays, Movies, and Critics
Jody McAuliffe, ed.
Duke University Press, 1993
This exceptional collection explores the mutual concerns of dramatic theater, film, and those who comment on them. Plays, Movies, and Critics opens with an original play by Don DeLillo. In the form of an interview, DeLillo's short play works as a kind of paradigm of the theatrical or cinematic event and serves as a keynote for the volume.
DeLillo's interview play is accompanied in this collection by interviews with theater director Roberta Levitow, Martin Scorsese, and film/theater critic Stanley Kauffmann. Other contributions include a critical look at the current American theater scene, analyses of the place of politics in the careers of G. B. Shaw and Luigi Pirandello, a compelling reading of Chekhov's "The Seagull", a detailed inquiry into the obsessions that energize the works of Sam Shepard, provocative reinterpretations of the films Mean Streets and The Sheltering Sky, and a translation of André Bazin's important piece on theology and film.

Contributors. André Bazin, Robert Brustein, Bert Cardullo, Anthony DeCurtis, Don DeLillo, Jesse Ward Engdhal, Richard Gilman, Jim Hosney, Mame Hunt, Jonathan Kalb, Stanley Kauffmann, Jody McAuliffe, Mary Ann Frese Witt, Jacquelyn Wollman, David Wyatt

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The Plays of David Garrick, Volume 3
Garrick's Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1744 - 1756
Edited by Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann
Southern Illinois University Press, 1981

David Garrick’s accomplishments as an actor, manager, and theatrical innovator brought him great fame and fortune, and his ideas influenced not only his own age but succeeding ages as well. Yet as a playwright, a part of the elegant combination of talents that was David Garrick, he has never achieved the critical reputation he richly deserves, in main because of the unavailability of texts and the lack of proper assessment of the historic importance of his plays in the English theatre.

This first complete edition makes available to scholars and students all the plays of Gar­rick in well edited texts, with commentary and notes.

Contents: Macbeth. A Tragedy, 1744; Romeo and Juliet, 1748; The Fairies. An Opera, 1755; Catherine and Petruchio. A Comedy, 1756; Florizel and Perdita. A Dramatic Pastoral, 1756; The Tem­pest. An Opera, 1756; and King Lear. A Tragedy, 1756.

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The Plays of David Storey
A Thematic Study
By William Hutchings
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988

This is the first comprehensive play-by-play analysis of the drama of David Storey, one of the most acclaimed and innovative, sometimes controversial, writers in the British theatre since World War II. Grouping the plays according to theme, Hutchings demonstrates that the central focus in the drama of David Storey is the devaluation of traditional rituals in contemporary life and the disintegration of the family. A playwright attuned to the poetry in the ordinary, to the profundity, subtle eloquence, and dramatic tension in the mundane, Storey explores the ways people cope, or fail to cope, with complexity, with uncertainty, with constant, bewildering flux. He writes about groups—families (In Celebration, The Farm), rugby teams (The Changing Room), and construction crews (The Contractor). In his plays, individuals seek to overcome isolation and integrate themselves into a significant assemblage that transcends the self.

Hutchings notes that Storey frequently deals with working-class parents who cannot "understand their grown children’s anxieties, their discontentedness with life, their unstable marriages, and their inability to enjoy the benefits of the education and advantages they labored so hard for so many years to provide."

Storey understands and sympathizes with parents who have paid to educate their children out of their own spheres. He saw it happen in his own family, knew the disapproval of his father: "What else could my father think when, nearing sixty, he came home each day from the pit exhausted, shattered by fatigue, to find me—a young man ideally physically equipped to do the job which now left him totally prostrated—painting a picture of flowers, or writing a poem about a cloud. There was, and there is, no hope of reconciliation."

Hutchings supplements his thematic analysis of Storey’s plays by interweaving into his text 90 percent of a major interview with the playwright, the only such comprehensive interview in existence. Storey, who believes that readers "ought to be chary of all interviews," discusses alleged literary influences on his work, the current state of British theatre, and his reactions to critics. He also provides insight into various productions and performances in his work.

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The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson
From the New Negro Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement
Edited and with an Introduction by Judith L. Stephens
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Recovering the stage work of one of America's finest black female writers

This volume collects twelve of Georgia Douglas Johnson's one-act plays, including two never-before-published scripts found in the Library of Congress.  As an integral part of Washington, D.C.'s, thriving turn-of-the-century literary scene, Johnson hosted regular meetings with Harlem Renaissance writers and other artists, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, May Miller, and Jean Toomer, and was herself considered among the finest writers of the time.  Johnson also worked for U.S. government agencies and actively supported women's and minorities' rights.

As a leading authority on Johnson, Judith L. Stephens provides a brief overview of Johnson's career and significance as a playwright; sections on the creative environment in which she worked; her S Street Salon; "The Saturday Nighters," and its significance to the New Negro Theatre; selected photographs; and a discussion of Johnson's genres, themes, and artistic techniques.

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The Plays of Josefina Niggli
Recovered Landmarks of Latino Literature
Josefina Niggli; Edited by William Orchard and Yolanda Padilla
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Josefina Niggli (1910–1983) was one of the most successful Mexican American writers of the early twentieth century. Born of European parents and raised in Mexico, she spent most of her adult life in the United States, and in her plays and novels she aimed to portray authentic Mexican experiences for English-speaking audiences. Niggli crossed borders, cultures, and genres, and her life and work prompt interesting questions about race, class, gender, modernity, ethnic and national identity, and the formation of literary canons.
    Although Niggli is perhaps best known for her fiction and folk plays, this anthology recovers her historical dramas, most of which have been long out of print or were never published. These plays are deeply concerned with the aftermath of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, imagining its implications for Mexico, Mexican Americans, and U.S.-Mexico relations. Included are Mexican Silhouettes (1928), Singing Valley (1936), The Cry of Dolores (1936), The Fair God (1936), Soldadera (1938), This is Villa! (1939), and The Ring of General Macias (1943). These works reflect on the making of history and often portray the Revolution through the lens of women’s experiences.
            Also included in this volume are an extensive critical introduction to Niggli, a chronology of her life and writings, plus letters and reviews by, to, and about Josefina Niggli. that provide illuminating context for the plays.
 
 
Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association
 
“The Best of the Best of the University Presses: Books You Should Know About” presented at the 2008 American Library Association Annual Conference
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Playwrights for Tomorrow
A Collection of Plays, Volume 11
Arthur H. Ballet, EditorIntroduction by Arthur H. Ballet
University of Minnesota Press, 1973

Playwrights for Tomorrow was first published in 1973. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume presents four plays by writers who have worked under the program of the Office for Advanced Drama Research (O.A.D.R.) at the University of Minnesota, an experimental project which provides promising playwrights with the opportunity of working with cooperating theatres in the production of their plays. Arthur H. Ballet, the editor, is director of the

O.A.D.R.

The plays in this volume and the theatres which cooperated in their production are Boxes by Susan Yankowitz, Magic Theatre, Berkeley, California; Canvas by David Roszkowski, Scorpio Rising Theatre, Los Angeles; Bierce Takes on the Railroad! by Philip A. Bosakowski, Theatre III, College of Marin, Kentfield, California; and Chamber Piece by John O'Keefe, Magic Theatre, Berkeley, California.

In an introduction Professor Ballet discussed the program and accomplishments of the O. A.D.R., which was established with the aid of a Rockefeller Foundation grant. He writes: "It seemed obvious that no artist worked in more lonely isolation and needed more direct contact with the theatre than the playwright. Despite loud pronouncements . . . that theatres outside of New York were searching for new plays and writers, the evidence indicates that very few theatres really wanted to work with unknown but living playwrights. The O.A.D.R., in its small way, has tried to open a highway . . . between new, often untried writers and willing, even brave theatres.

As Speech and Drama (England) pointed out in a review of earlier volumes of the Playwrights for Tomorrow series: "Schemes like this one at Minnesota deserve the highest praise. On the evidence of these volumes, the executive committee which operates this venture is not attempting to impose any single imprint on its authors—a further example of the generosity of the patronage."

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Playwrights for Tomorrow
A Collection of Plays, Volume 4
Arthur H. Ballet, EditorIntroduction by Arthur H. Ballet
University of Minnesota Press, 1967

Playwrights for Tomorrow was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is the fourth in a series of volumes which offer collections of plays by dramatists who have participated in an experimental program conducted at the University of Minnesota under the auspices of the Office of Advanced Drama Research (O.A.D.R.). Dr. Arthur H. Ballet, editor of the series, is the director of the O.A.D.R.

This volume contains three full-length plays and one short play. They are The World Tipped Over, and Laying on Its Side (one act) by Mary Feldhaus-Weber, Visions of Sugar Plums by Barry Pritchard, The Strangler by Arnold Powell, and The Long War by Kevin O' Morrison. Mary Feldhaus-Weber is a St. Paul poet who has chosen to work in the theatre. Mr. Pritchard, a former playwright in residence at Theatre St. Paul, now writes for television and films in Hollywood. Mr. Powell is a teacher and theatre director at Birmingham-Southern College in Atlanta, and Mr. O'Morrison pursues an acting career in the Broadway theatre.

As Dr. Ballet explains in his introduction, the program of the O.A.D.R. is designed to give promising playwrights a testing ground for their ideas, skills, and talents by providing them with a chance to have their plays actually produced and, whenever possible, the opportunity of working with the producing groups. He points out that a number of the writers associated with the O.A.D.R. have subsequently moved into the mainstream of contemporary American theatre. Publication of the plays will, it is hoped, bring them to the attention of larger audiences and stimulate further critical appraisal.

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The Practical Shakespeare
The Plays in Practice and on the Page
Colin Butler
Ohio University Press, 2005

A comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page illuminates for a general audience how and why the plays work so well.

Noting in detail the practical and physical limitations the Bard faced as he worked out the logistics of his plays, Colin Butler demonstrates how Shakespeare incorporated those limitations and turned them to his advantage: his management of entrances and exits; his characterization techniques; his handling of scenes off-stage; his control of audience responses; his organization of major scenes; and his use of prologues and choruses. A different aspect of the plays is covered in each chapter.

Butler draws most of his examples from mainstream plays, such as Macbeth, Othello, and Much Ado about Nothing. He brings special focus to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is treated as one of Shakespeare’s most important plays. Butler supports his major points with quotations, so readers can understand an issue even if they are unfamiliar with the particular play being discussed. The author also cross-references the use of dramatic devices in the plays, increasing the reader’s enjoyment and understanding of Shakespeare’s achievements.

Clear, jargon-free, easy-to-use, and comprehensive, The Practical Shakespeare looks at stagecraft and playwriting as conduits for students, teachers, and general audiences to engage with, understand, and appreciate the genius of Shakespeare.

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Ronald Harwood's Tragic Vision
A Critical Analysis of His Novels, Plays, and Screenplays
Ann C. Hall
University of Iowa Press, 2024
“Art has a lot to answer for.” So says Sarah Bernhardt in Ronald Harwood’s play After the Lions. Harwood’s own career can be summarized by that same quote as well.
         Ronald Harwood’s Tragic Vision offers the first critical analysis of prolific and award-winning British author Ronald Harwood (1934–2020). Though he received an Oscar for The Pianist, a knighthood, and numerous other awards and nominations, Harwood worked as a ghostwriter, script doctor, and veritable unknown for many years. As he became successful, many critics still misread his works and positioned him as a less-fashionable counterpart to his lifelong friend Harold Pinter. This study proposes a conceptual framework to approach his, and others’, work based on the genre of tragedy, offering a greater appreciation for and understanding of the Harwood canon.
 
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Shadowed Cocktails
The Plays of Philip Barry from Paris Bound to The Philadelphia Story
Donald R. Anderson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010
An important and prolific playwright, Philip Barry wrote hit plays such as The Philadelphia Story and Holiday. However, he has been largely forgotten and no book-length analysis of his work has appeared in more than forty years. With this book, Donald R. Anderson rescues the playwright from obscurity.           
Although Barry’s successes were with comedies of manners, he also wrote dramatic and experimental works. Anderson analyzes all of Barry’s plays (twenty-one in total) and questions the traditional characterization of the American playwright’s work. He begins with Barry’s early plays concerning intergenerational tensions and lessons learned from the Great War. Subsequent chapters explore Barry’s preoccupation with fidelity and infidelity, his struggles with his Catholic beliefs, and his investigations into sources of evil and despair. Anderson also looks at the plays of the late 1930s and the 1940s, including the posthumously produced Second Threshold. One chapter is devoted to Barry’s synergistic relationship with Katharine Hepburn: her role in lifting the playwright out of a mid-1930s slump and his role in rescuing her from the label of “box-office poison” with both The Philadelphia Story and the World War II drama Without Love.
Anderson places Barry within the context of his times but also shows him drawing on past influences and anticipating theatrical developments of the latter part of the twentieth century. Part cultural history, part literary analysis, Shadowed Cocktails is sure to revitalize interest in this remarkable American author.
and his role in rescuing her from the label of 'box-office poison' with both The Philadelphia Story and the World War II drama Without Love.
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Theatre for Youth
Twelve Plays with Mature Themes
Edited by Coleman A. Jennings and Gretta Berghammer
University of Texas Press, 1986

Since the beginning of the theatre-for-youth movement in the United States, the majority of plays written for children have been fairy tales. By the 1960s, however, encouraged by changes in social attitudes toward children, playwrights began to respond to a growing tendency on the parts of both parents and teachers to have children face, rather than avoid, the more difficult truths of existence. Thus children's dramatic literature was opened to new subjects, themes and characters previously considered unsuitable for the young audience.

Theatre for Youth seeks to identify and illustrate this trend by examining twelve plays that deal with mature themes: aging, death and dying, conformity, sexuality, divorce, moral culpability. The plays have been chosen not only for their mature content, but also for their professional integrity, the delicacy with which they handle their subject matter, and their respect for their intended audience.

A foreword by Jed H. Davis, an introduction and summary paragraphs for each play by Jennings and Berghammer, and a lengthy annotated list of suggested plays for further reading or viewing make this volume extremely useful both for directors of children's theatre and for teachers.

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The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare
A Critical History
Peter J. Seng
Harvard University Press

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Woody on Rye
Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen
Edited by Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg
Brandeis University Press, 2013
Although Woody Allen’s films have received extensive attention from scholars and critics, no book has focused exclusively on Jewishness in his work, particularly that of the late 1990s and beyond. In this anthology, a distinguished group of contributors—whose work is richly contextualized in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, theater, and comedy—examine the schlemiel, Allen and women, the Jewish take on the “morality of murder,” Allen’s take on Hebrew scripture and Greek tragedy, his stage work, his cinematic treatment of food and dining, and what happens to “Jew York” when Woody takes his films out of New York City. Considered together, these essays delineate the intellectual, artistic, and moral development of one of cinema’s most durable and controversial directors.
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