Playtext

This play, which contains biographical information relating to Herman Melville, is fundamentally an exploration of the ways in which these two things take place. The play admits the truth of Walter Benjamin's view of history as 'time filled by the presence of the now'. Parallels between past and present (e.g., racism, domestic abuse, and the plight of the visionary American artist) are clearly implied, but the play also utilizes new technologies, in particular video, in order to represent the kind of dialectical history and representation promoted by Benjamin. During Melville's lifetime, and in his own creative imagination, the archaic was undergoing its transformation into modernity. Thus, Melville is an especially apt subject for an exploration of modernity and representation that utilizes both the modern—i.e., video, montage—and elements of the archaic—i.e., the performing body, allusions to whaling, 'discovery' in the South Seas. The Composition of Herman Melville utilizes performance strategies in an effort to embody the complex textuality of a writer who haunts the landscape of America, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This book is believed to represent the only work of historical fiction—albeit in dramatic form—that focuses primarily on Herman Melville, considered by many to be America's greatest writer.

“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 programme; 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 humour 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.

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.

Gabriela Zapolska (1857-1921) was an actor, journalist and playwright. She was born during the 123-year partition of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia and wrote over thirty plays. “The Morality of Mrs. Dulska” (1906), a 'petty-bourgeois tragic-farce', is probably her best known. Mrs. Dulska is a cross between Patricia Routledge¹s Hyacinth Bucket and Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage. She is the tyrannical and hilarious landlady of a fine stone tenement building—proud, shrewd and highly preoccupied with appearances. Dulska keeps her purse strings tightly drawn and exploits her tenants in a most unforgiving fashion. To the unhappy woman from the first-floor apartment who tries to poison herself by swallowing some match heads, she shows no mercy. To her serving maid, who she effectively prostitutes to her son in order to keep his philandering under her own roof and within her control, she shows no compassion. Her daughters struggle through the torments of adolescence with the facts of life skillfully concealed from them, and her husband, worn down over the years by his power-hungry wife, has barely a word to say to his family. It is her son that Mrs. Dulska loves—loves with an unhealthy possessiveness. Her fear that he will leave prompts her to fund the servicing of his every desire. Why is it, then, that he resents her so much? Why is it that he feels compelled to seek revenge? Zapolska's uncompromising look at gender construction and class oppression in fin-de-siecle Poland is witty, entertaining and incisive. This is the first published UK translation of this popular Polish classic. It was prepared by Teresa Murjas, a lecturer in Theatre at the University of Reading. In her introduction, Teresa discusses how the translation and first UK production, which she directed, were developed. She introduces Zapolska's work in its historical contexts, provides the reader with relevant biographical information and considers the play's performance history up to the present day. She draws these strands together into a narrative of deportation, exile and emigration.

‘Alisa, Alice' is a humanely cruel and deeply moving drama, full of passion and desire. The clash of two cultures — two worlds — is described with psychological accuracy and depth. Alisa, a young Muslim refugee scarred by the Balkan war finds shelter with Magda, a representative of the common so-called civilised but self-destructive and self-loving western world. Magda, through the sadism arising from her despair and loss of purpose, her psychological confusion, causes the suicide of Alisa. Their relationship permeated as much with love as with hatred, is decanted through the dictatorship of language into a miraculous, irrational and mysterious atmosphere. In places, the style of the play is reminiscent of Pinter's comedy of menace. The realistically based dramatic events are firmly grounded in a recognisable and actual contemporaneity. Poetic ambiguity facilitates universal interpretation, and here and there extends to the magical and surreal.

Contents: “The Back of Beyond” and “The Battle of the Crows”

Octave Mirbeau was one of the most prolific literary figures of France's storied Belle Époque, and his innovative theatrical works are only recently being rediscovered and appreciated by modern audiences. Here for the first time in English-language translation are his two most celebrated and successful plays: Business is Business, a classical comedy of manners recalling Molière; and Charity, a satirical comedy centered around the exploitation of adolescents in a dubious charity home. In addition to the play texts, this volume also includes an introduction contextualizing the works and the translation and adaptation process.

“Russia, Freaks and Foreigners” is a collection of three thematically linked plays set against the backdrop of a fractured, post-Soviet Russian society. Written by acclaimed playwright James MacDonald, who has cerebral palsy, these performance texts critique accepted notions of normality within authority, offering various models of difference-physical, cultural, and moral-and their stories of dislocation. Their themes, contextualized here by companion essays, expand the boundaries of British drama and connect to the comic grotesque tradition by giving the "abnormal" a broad appeal. Russia, Freaks and Foreigners is a daring portrayal of disability from the inside.

“Lovefuries” offers a double bill of performance pieces that explode national and personal pressures to keep silent, and explore the surprising and shocking resurgences of life that break through grief. In “The Contracting Sea”, the fiancée of a just-shipwrecked sailor is challenged by a feminine elemental force of catastrophe to throw off the shackles of her common humanity. The second play, “The Hanging Judge”, explores from the inside an occurrence of sexual abuse in a contemporary Welsh context, and how one survivor finds the courage to discover defiance.

The book includes three full-length plays: “Shadow Anthropology” (a dark comedy about the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan), “Through the Roof” (a Faustian trip through the social history of "natural" disaster in New Orleans), and “Celestial Flesh” (a sacrilegious romp through the 1980s sanctuary movement, sacred sex, and CIA drug running in a Los Angeles Catholic Church). Placing the plays within an historical and thematic context, the author introduces the collection with an essay examining catastrophe, capitalism, and what he calls "Apocalypse Theatre for the Twenty-First Century."

Gabriela Zapolska (1857—1921) was one of the foremost modernist Polish playwrights. “Zapolska's Women” features three of her performance texts that focus on the economic and social pressures faced by women in partitioned Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. In addition to the plays, “Zapolska's Women” provides a detailed biography of Zapolska, relating her life story to the themes of each play; an analysis of her significance within Polish and European literary and theatrical traditions; and background on the social and historical conditions within Poland during the time the plays were written and originally performed. This informative collection of groundbreaking plays will introduce an English-speaking audience to Zapolska's important work.

Contains these stories, 'Nothing to Declare', 'Operation Wonderland', and 'Roses and Morphine'.

Widely considered one of the most innovative voices in Hungarian theatre, András Visky has enjoyed growing audiences and increased critical acclaim over the last fifteen years. Nonetheless, his plays have yet to reach a wider English-language audience. This volume, edited by Jozefina Komporaly, begins to correct this by bringing together a translated collection of Visky's work. The book includes the first English-language anthology of Visky's best known plays — Juliet, I Killed My Mother, and Porn — as well as critical analysis and an exploration of Visky's 'Barrack Dramaturgy', a dramaturgical theory in which he considers the theatre as a space for exploring feelings of cultural and personal captivity. Inspired by personal experience of the oppressive communist regime in Romania, Visky's work explores the themes of gender, justice and trauma, encouraging shared moments of remembrance and collective memory. This collection makes use of scripts and director's notes, as well as interviews with creative teams behind the productions, to reveal a holistic, insider's view of Visky's artistic vision. Scholars and practitioners alike will benefit from this rare, English-language collection of Visky's work and dramaturgy.

“Red Sun” and “Merlin Unchained” are the most recent original stage works by one of the most acknowledged yet neglected dramatists of our time. “Red Sun” is a two-hander, tightly tethered within the classical unities of theme and space and the span of a single day. “Merlin Unchained” is an explosive, multitudinous epic, crossing continents and centuries and passing between worlds. Yet though technically so contrasting, both works speak with the same distinctive voice, offering an exhilarating and sometimes disturbing challenge to the cultural and political perceptions of a contemporary audience, and exploring alien worlds that, alarmingly, begin to become recognizable as our own.

“The Trustus Plays” collects three full-length, award-winning performance texts by American playwright Jon Tuttle. Each play was a winner of the national Trustus Playwrights Festival contest and was then produced by the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina. The Hammerstone is a comedy about two professors aging gracelessly, Drift is a dark comedy about marriage and divorce, and Holy Ghost is the story of German POWs held in the camps in the American south. Jon Tuttle provides an introduction to the plays, and Trustus founder and artistic director, Jim Thigpen, offers a preface describing Tuttle's work within the context of the Trustus theatre's dedication to experimental, edgy social drama.

Bertolt Brecht, perhaps the most important dramatist/director/theorist of the twentieth century, is still widely studied and his plays and theories remain staples in the curricula of university theatre departments, literature departments, and theatre-artist training programs throughout the world. Additionally, productions of Brecht's dramas continue to be popular. The play “Brecht in L.A. focuses” on Brecht's life in America, where he resided from 1941 through 1947. “Brecht in L.A.”, centering on Brecht while adapting/critiquing Brechtian dramatic form, also provides a unique opportunity for the instructor who is teaching Brechtian theatre since-with just one text (which will includes endnotes and appendices)-the instructor can cover epic theatre, the "Brecht debate," Brecht's biography, and contradictions between Brecht's theatrical practices and his everyday life. The book's wide-ranging audience will include theatre artists; playgoers; students of drama, theatre, English, and performance studies; scholars; and readers interested in Brecht, Hollywood, and/or biography.

This anthology contains three plays (Ceremonial Kisses, Shading the Crime, and The Maternal Cloister) that feature a protagonist who is compelled to confront his or her particular oppressors. The critique of this oppression through theatre falls on particular social institutions and differs for each character. The main institutions under scrutiny are religion and the state. The plays are very different in style and include the use of physical theatre, naturalistic explorations of human rights abuses, and symbolic structures, puppets and poetry. The plays are supported by an analysis of their processes and themes. All have reached production and the text is supplemented by photographs of these performances.