Erwin Piscator's Political Theatre


Book Description

This 1977 text was the first full study of Erwin Piscator, the German theatrical producer who was prominent in the 1920s and worked after 1945 with the writers Hochhuth, Kipphardt and Weiss. Professor Innes sketches the background of Dadaism and Expressionism from which Piscator came, and points out the differences between Piscator and the other experimenters of his time. He also gives a vivid description of Piscator's technical innovations, the modern means of communication such as film, the illumination of the stage from below and 'the treadmill', a flat moving band along which the characters walked. These turned drama into a multi-media event. Professor Innes uses Piscator's career as a focus to describe theatrical developments in the twentieth century and to discuss the role of the author, the director, and the actor in drama, the purpose of the theatre, and the involvement of the audience.




The Theatre of Erwin Piscator


Book Description

This is the first book in English to cover the theatrical career of Erwin Piscator. As one of the leading authorities on 20th century German theatre, the author is well-equipped to write about this important director. Most of the text is devoted to the Weimar period and is illustrated with rare pictures and documents.




The Political Theatre


Book Description

'The Political Theatre' is among the most important documents of the modern stage. It tells of the foundation and flowering in Weimar Germany of a new form of theatre - epic theatre - designed to bring on to the stage the real political issues of the time, and to do so with all the aids that modern technology could supply.




The Piscator Notebook


Book Description

Piscator founded the Workshop after emigrating to New York, having collaborated with Brecht to create "epic theatre" in Germany. The Piscator Notebook documents the author Malina's intensive and idiosyncratic training at Piscator's school.




Staged


Book Description

Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages? In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.




Space and Time in Epic Theater


Book Description

The development of epic theater before, during, and after Brecht's time, and analysis of epic productions, showing the form's continued relevance.




The Performance of Power


Book Description

Recently in the field of theatre studies there has been an increasing amount of debate and dissonance regarding the borders of its territory, its methodologies, subject matter, and scholarly perspectives. The nature of this debate could be termed "political" and, in fact, concerns "the performance of power"—the struggle over power relations embedded in texts, methodologies, and the academy itself. This striking new collection of nineteen divergent essays represents this performance of power and the way in which the recent convergence of new critical theories with historical studies has politicized the study of the theatre. Neither play text, performance, nor scholarship and teaching can safely reside any longer in the "free," politically neutral, self-signifying realm of the aesthetic. Politicizing theatrical discourse means that both the hermeneutics and the histories of theatre reveal the role of ideology and power dynamics. New strategies and concepts—and a vital new phase of awareness—appear in these illuminating essays. A variety of historical periods, from the Renaissance through the Victorian and up to the most contemporary work of the Wooster group, illustrate the ways in which contemporary strategies do not require contemporary texts and performances but can combine with historical methods and subjects to produce new theatrical discourse.




The Plays of Ernst Toller


Book Description

This book is the fullest and most detailed study yet published in English of Ernst Toller's plays and their most significant productions. In particular the productions directed by Karl-Heinz Martin, Jurgen Fehling and Erwin Piscator are closely analyzed and the author demonstrates how, brilliant though they were, they obscured or even distorted Toller's intentions. The plays are seen as eminently stage-worthy while worth lies in Toller's use of language, both in prose and inverse. The neglected puppet-play The Scorned Lovers' Revenge is analyzed from a new perspective in the light, both of its language and its sexual theme, so important in Toller's writings as a whole. The reader is led to appreciate why Toller was regarded as the most outstanding German dramatist of his generation until, after his death in 1939 his reputation was overlaid by that of Brecht. This book should do much to restore Toller to his proper place in theatre history.




Homeland Elegies


Book Description

This "profound and provocative" work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish followsan immigrant father and his son as they search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews). "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie ​ A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. ​Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process. One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A Best Book of 2020 * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly




The Weimar Republic Sourcebook


Book Description

Reproduces (translated into English) contemporary documents or writings with an introduction to each section.