The Longman Anthology of Drama and Theater


Book Description

The Longman Anthology of Drama and Theater, Compact Edition, is a fully-integrated text/anthology of drama with a global emphasis for the Introduction to Drama course. The Compact Edition is divided into three parts. Part One examines the roots of theater and the theoretical and critical foundations of theater and drama. Part Two, an anthology of Western Theater, and Part Three, an anthology of non-western theater, are divided into historical and geographical sections, each preceded by a brief overview of the cultural and historical context that shaped the plays. A map and timeline of key historical, cultural, and artistic events precedes each section in Parts II and III. Preceding each section of plays is a brief overview of the history of the theater from its origins in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas to the present. The ideas that inspired the dramas are considered, as well as the particulars of each performance. In the interest of creating a clean, uncluttered text, selected bibliographies are at the end of the book. Questions for Discussion and Writing are included in the accompanying Instructor's Manual, as well as more thorough bibliographies and a comprehensive list of films and videos that illustrate the ideas in the text.







The Longman Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Drama


Book Description

This collection of 31 American and international plays offers a truly global perspective of the drama and theater that has been produced during the past 150 years. In addition to essential plays from the West's modern canon, this anthology offers a richly varied selection of plays from regions underrepresented in other texts, such as Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The book's pedagogical features all work together to provide students with the historical and cultural background they need to read plays into context. Accessible, interesting, and inclusive, the broad range of plays in this anthology will inspire, intrigue, and provoke readers to understand more deeply the literary and production history of modern and contemporary drama. One reviewer says, The coverage is great: in terms of geography, gender, race, aesthetics, and cultural issues, the editors have selected plays that are recognized for their importance within an ongoing narrative history of world drama. I've seen no other anthology like this on the market. Matthew Roudan, Georgia State University




Catholic Theatre and Drama


Book Description

The relationship between the Catholic Church and theatre has a long and complicated history. This collection of fourteen critical essays seeks to demystify the ties--both practical and ideological--that have long bound Catholicism to theatrical production. This volume offers insights into medieval theatre, Jesuit drama, ballet and opera, modern stagings of medieval liturgical drama, Lorca and Lope de Vega as Catholic playwrights, Italian Catholic women's drama, Catholic play-wrighting and acting, and the unique challenges of teaching theatre in Catholic universities.







The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism


Book Description

The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is the first wide-ranging anthology of theatre theory and dramatic criticism by women writers. Reproducing key primary documents contextualized by short essays, the collection situates women’s writing within, and also reframes the field’s male-defined and male-dominated traditions. Its collection of documents demonstrates women’s consistent and wide-ranging engagement with writing about theatre and performance and offers a more expansive understanding of the forms and locations of such theoretical and critical writing, dealing with materials that often lie outside established production and publication venues. This alternative tradition of theatre writing that emerges allows contemporary readers to form new ways of conceptualizing the field, bringing to the fore a long-neglected, vibrant, intelligent, deeply informed, and expanded canon that generates a new era of scholarship, learning, and artistry. The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatrical Theory and Dramatic Criticism is an important intervention into the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural History, while adding new dimensions to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.




English Renaissance Drama


Book Description




A History of Collective Creation


Book Description

Collective creation - the practice of collaboratively devising works of performance - rose to prominence not simply as a performance making method, but as an institutional model. By examining theatre practices in Europe and North America, this book explores collective creation's roots in the theatrical experiments of the early twentieth century.




The Challenge of World Theatre History


Book Description

The future of theatre history studies requires consideration of theatre as a global phenomenon. The Challenge of World Theatre History offers the first full-scale argument for abandoning an obsolete and parochial Eurocentric approach to theatre history in favor of a more global perspective. This book exposes the fallacies that reinforce the conventional approach and defends the global perspective against possible objections. It moves beyond the conventional nation-based geography of theatre in favor of a regional geography and develops a new way to demarcate the periods of theatre history. Finally, the book outlines a history that recognizes the often-connected developments in theatre across Eurasia and around the world. It makes the case that world theatre history is necessary not only for itself, but for the powerful comparative and contextual insights it offers to all theatre scholars and students, whatever their special areas of interest.




A Play Analysis


Book Description

"Play Analysis: A Casebook on Modern Western Drama is a combined play-analysis textbook and course companion that contains twelve essays on major dramas from the modern European and American theaters: among them, Ghosts, The Ghost Sonata, The Doctor’s Dilemma, A Man’s a Man, The Homecoming, The Hairy Ape, The Front Page, Of Mice and Men, Our Town, The Glass Menagerie, and Death of a Salesman. Supplementing these essays are a Step-by-Step Approach to Play Analysis, a Glossary of Dramatic Terms, Study Guides, Topics for Writing and Discussion, and bibliographies. Written with college students in mind (and possibly also advanced high school students), these critical essays cover some of the central plays treated in courses on modern Euro-American drama and will provide students with practical models to help them improve their own writing and analytical skills. The author is a “close reader” committed to a detailed yet objective examination of the structure, style, imagery, and language of a play. Moreover, he is concerned chiefly with dramatic analysis that can be of benefit not only to playreaders and theatergoers, but also to directors, designers, and even actors—that is, with analysis of character, action, dialogue, and setting that can be translated into concepts for theatrical production, or that can at least provide the kind of understanding of a play with which a theater practitioner could fruitfully quarrel."