Broadway Bookshelf

Boleros for the Disenchanted and Other Plays

(6/26/2012)

Three new works from José Rivera, a writer known for his lush language, open heart, and stylistic flirting with the surreal. Boleros for the Disenchanted is the moving story of the playwrights own parents: their sweet courtship in 1950s Puerto Rico, and then forty years later in more difficult times in America. With Brainpeople, Rivera explores the troubled minds of three women in a post-apocalyptic setting who feast on a freshly slaughtered tiger. In School of the Americas, he imagines Che Gue...

The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theatre

(5/12/2012)

The autobiographical account by one of German theater's great actors of his life in the theater.

Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of No Plays of the Genpei War

(12/31/2011)

David Hare (Writers and their Work)

(12/31/2011)

A short, clear, critical study of David Hare's work for theatre, film and television, concentrating on questions of staging, performance and narrative and dramatic form.

The Making of the West End Stage

(12/31/2011)

All roads lead to London - and to the West End theatre. This book presents a new history of the beginnings of the modern world of London entertainment. Putting female-centred, gender-challenging managements and styles at the centre, it redraws the map of performance history in the Victorian capital of the world. Bratton argues for the importance in Victorian culture of venues like the little Strand Theatre and the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street in the experience of mid-century London, ...

New Playwriting Strategies: Language and Media in the 21st Century

(12/30/2011)

New Playwriting Strategies has become a canonical text in the study and teaching of playwriting, offering a fresh and dynamic insight into the subject. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition explores and highlights the wide spread of new techniques that form contemporary theatre writing, as well as their influence on other dramatic forms. Paul Castagno builds on the innovative plays of Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to investigate groundbreaking new ...

Performing Greek Comedy

(12/28/2011)

Alan Hughes presents a new complete account of production methods in Greek comedy. The book summarises contemporary research and disputes, on such topics as acting techniques, theatre buildings, masks and costumes, music and the chorus. Evidence is re-interpreted and traditional doctrine overthrown. Comedy is presented as the pan-Hellenic, visual art of theatre, not as Athenian literature. Recent discoveries in visual evidence are used to stimulate significant historical revisions. The author ha...

Maria Irene Fornes

(12/27/2011)

Maria Irene Fornes provides an enlightening introduction to a pivotal figure in both Hispanic-American and experimental theater. From her theatrical origins in 1960s Cuba to her precedent plays for the US stage, this book presents an important guide of work to this politically-charged playwright.

Drama at the Heart of the Secondary School: Projects to Promote Authentic Learning

(12/27/2011)

Drama at the Heart of the Secondary School provides a rationale for the curricular centrality of drama together with rich and detailed examples of cross-phase thematic projects which are drama-led, but which promote learning across a wide range of curriculum areas, from the humanities and other arts, to English and literacy, science and PSHE. Each unit explores relevant and stimulating themes and topics that will engage the students, promote empathy, pose questions, and produce creative respo...

Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith

(12/21/2011)

This book examines the intersection of religion and theatrical performance in modernity/postmodernity. Religion, no longer sequestered in the "private sphere," has become an explicitly public force. It stimulates and complicates public actions; it is a crucial component of performance. The writings here suggest that performance studies and religious studies can inform one another, leading to innovative and deepened understandings within and between the disciplines. Religion must receive its ...

The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the Maghreb

(12/20/2011)

Modern international studies of world theatre and drama have begun to acknowledge the Arab world only after the contributions of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Within the Arab world, the contributions of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco to modern drama and to post-colonial expression remain especially neglected, a problem that this book addresses.

Shakespeare and Genre: From Early Modern Inheritances to Postmodern Legacies

(12/20/2011)

Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect

(12/20/2011)

Performance Affects, now in paperback and with a new preface, explores performance projects in disaster and war zones to argue that joy, beauty and celebration should be the inspiration for the politics of community-based or participatory performance practice. Applied Theatre has traditionally concentrated on effects - impacts, themes communicated or 'truths' revealed. Performance Affects challenges this orientation by suggesting that an affective realm needs to be the focus for a renewed aesthe...

An Actor's Craft: The Art and Technique of Acting

(12/20/2011)

An Actor's Craft is a handbook for acting students that provides critical approaches and guidance. Speaking passionately about the art of acting, David Krasner illuminates the multifaceted job of an actor. Combining technique with personal examples, he demonstrates how to achieve excellence in performance, how to recognize quality acting, and how to use the technique of acting in an advanced way.

The Limits of Performance in the French Romantic Theatre

(12/20/2011)

This volume analyzes major French plays of the 1830s, focusing on their theatricality, and on the ways in which they expose the workings of the theatre rather than conceal them. Through an examination of performance within these plays, the study posits that the stage is a privileged site of demonstration, a literal "proving ground" that lends a physical reality to abstract values announced in the text and shared or questioned by the audience. Negotiating between the literary study of drama and p...

Embodying Difference: Scripting Social Images of the Female Body in Latina Theatre

(12/16/2011)

Embodying Difference: Scripting Social Images of the Female Body in US Latina Theatre explores contemporary theatrical productions by Latina dramatists in the United States and focuses on the effects that neoliberal politics, global market strategies, gender formation, and racial and ethnical marginalization have had on Latinas. Through the analysis of select plays by dramatists Nao Bustamante, Coco Fusco, Anne García-Romero, Josefina López, Cherríe Moraga, Linda Nieves-Powell, Dolores Prida,...

Scenic Art for the Theatre

(12/15/2011)

Now in its Third Edition, Scenic Art for the Theatre: History, Tools and Techniques continues to be the most trusted source for both student and professional scenic artists. With new information on scenic design using Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and other digital imaging softwares this test expands to offer the developing artist more step-by-step instuction and more practical techniques for work in the field. It goes beyond detailing job functions and discussing techniques to serve as a trouble-sh...

Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent

(12/15/2011)

This collection documents and examines political and protest theatre produced between the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and Obama’s election in 2008 by British and American artists responding to their own governments’ actions and policies during this time. The plays take up topics such as the ongoing wars on terror, Blair’s support of U.S. policies, the flawed intelligence that led to the Iraq war, and illegal detentions and torture at Abu Ghraib. The authors argue that engaged artists faced a rad...

Ibsen's Foreign Contagion: Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Wing Pinero and Modernism on The London Stage

(12/15/2011)

..Matos's important book provides a well-researched, well-written ,and fascinating discussion of the notion of contagion from Ibsen and into Pineo and Jones. Professor Gregory Tague, St Francis College, editor of Origins of English Literary Modernism,1870-1914 The Independent Theatre's production of Ghosts at the Royalty Theatre, London in 1891 precipitated one of the most famous theatrical quarrels in European theater history. Although many have commented on the extremity of the response from t...

Billy the Kid and Other Plays

(12/10/2011)

While award-winning author Rudolfo Anaya is known primarily as a novelist, his genius is also evident in dramatic works performed regularly in his native New Mexico and throughout the world. Billy the Kid and Other Plays collects seven of these works and offers them together for the first time. Like his novels, many of Anaya’s plays are built from the folklore of the Southwest. This volume opens with The Season of La Llorona, in which Anaya fuses the Mexican legend of the dreaded “crying...

Inspired Drama Teaching: A Practical Guide for Teachers

(12/8/2011)

A practical guide to teaching and championing drama across the curriculum. The ideas in this book will inspire even the most unlikely thespian.

Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama

(12/6/2011)

This exciting new work argues for the exploration of drama as a conduit to deep emotional learning that has the ability to change the somatic identity of performers and audiences alike. Rokotnitz suggests that the preference for reciprocity exhibited by human physiological systems also extends into psychological and cognitive processes. Modeling her epistemological inquiry upon the paradigms instantiated by our biological architecture, she argues that effective knowledge acquisition and interper...

Playing with Theory in Theatre Practice

(12/6/2011)

Through a collection of original essays and case studies, this book introduces ideas and raises questions about building dynamic, theoretically minded production work. Artists and scholars grapple with the shifting value and function of theory in theatre, exploring the multi-faceted and complex relationship between theory and theatre practice.

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights

(12/6/2011)

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights is an authoritative guide to the work of twenty-five playwrights who have risen to prominence since the 1980s. Written by an international team of scholars , it provides an illuminating survey and analysis of each writer's plays and will be invaluable to anyone interested in, studying or teaching contemporary drama. Among the many playwrights whose work is examined are Sarah Daniels, Terry Johnson, Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Anthony Nei...

The Stage Lighting - The Technicians Guide: An On-The-Job Reference Tool

(12/6/2011)

Stage technicians or “teckies” traditionally apprentice for knowledge about their craft. This is a new, unique practical guide for teckies that can be read or used as a reference manual for all aspects of stage lighting, from equipment to lighting a performance space to special effects and design. Information is easily accessed through tabbed sections and keywords. The information in each chapter is presented at three levels: “A Quick Start,” enough basic information to get started; ...

Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre

(12/6/2011)

Provides a comparative approach to the internationally wide-spread phenomenon of the contemporary director-auteur in the theatre, urging a historical and theoretical exploration of the visions, methods, and stage idioms in the work of established artists. Sidiropoulou examines prominent examples of both older and more recent director-auteur work, aiming at re-asserting – to its artistic and academic audience – the value of balancing the established emphasis on the diegetic aspects of theatre...

Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance

(12/2/2011)

In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video "Dangerous." In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of "whiting up," in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial i...

Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916 to 2000

(12/1/2011)

Far too often young theater and film artists, as well as educators, make the jump from film to theater without being fully aware of the ways in which the qualities of each medium affect content and artistic expression. Starting with a history of the relationship between theater and film, the collection includes essays from a variety of writers, directors, and theorists by examining the differences between working in, and creating for, drama and film. The playwright Bernard Shaw looks at the ways...

The Sketchbooks of Jocelyn Herbert

(12/1/2011)

From her early work with such writers as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and John Osborne, to her time with Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre, Jocelyn Herbert (1917–2003) pioneered a simple yet atmospheric set design style that remains influential today. Britain’s leading stage designer brought her innovative approach to the big screen on such films as Lindsay Anderson’s Isadora. Published for the first time, Herbert’s sketchbooks provide an intimate portrait of her life and work...

Playwriting Across the Curriculum

(11/30/2011)

This book is a guide to introducing the craft of playwriting into the secondary English curriculum at key stage 3, using the TEEP (Teacher Effectiveness Enhancement Programme) framework. The authors also provide a particular focus on applying this versatile scheme of work to other areas of the curriculum, including Citizenship and PSHE. Playwriting Across the Curriculum also contains schemes of work for: • pupils with special educational needs (SEN) • pupils with English as an addit...

Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire

(11/30/2011)

Claire Cochrane maps the experience of theatre across the British Isles during the twentieth century through the social and economic factors which shaped it. Three topographies for 1900, 1950 and 2000 survey the complex plurality of theatre within the nation-state which at the beginning of the century was at the hub of world-wide imperial interests and after one hundred years had seen unprecedented demographic, economic and industrial change. Cochrane analyses the dominance of London theatre, bu...

The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage

(11/30/2011)

Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts. Across a century of literary production using the physical space of the theatre and the discursive space of the page, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zo...

Acting in Moving-Image Culture

(11/30/2011)

This volume offers transdisciplinary approaches to discuss acting in moving-image culture. It assembles international scholars from dance, theatre, film, media and cultural studies, art and philosophy, who scrutinie both the actor’s presence and art in analog and digital film from historical, generic, and particularly theoretical perspectives: phenomenology, Deleue studies, new media theory to cognitive research, along with re-animated classical approaches and case studies. Each perspective in...

Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present

(11/25/2011)

Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. This has led to an astonishing range of performance styles, ways of working and modes of intervention in varied sites of theatrical production. The essays in this collection place this work in context, exploring historical and contemporary examples of documentary and 'verbatim' theatre, and applying a range of critical perspectives tha...

Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction

(11/22/2011)

This critical introduction to Performance Studies provides undergraduates with an accessible way into terminology and context. Using an innovative tripartite structure that combines the voices of artists, critics and teachers, it addresses a variety of practices moving through body, space, time, technology, interactivity and organization.

Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical

(11/22/2011)

Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists--from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim--have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience’s aspirations and concerns have played out in the shows themselves. Musicals thus became a paradigm which instructed newcomers in how to assimilate while correspondingly envisioning "American Dream" America as democratic and inclusive. Broadway musicals sti...

Look, I Made a Hat

(11/22/2011)

Stephen Sondheim returns with the second volume of his collected lyrics, giving us another remarkable glimpse into his life’s work, and into his life. As he did in the acclaimed and best-selling Finishing the Hat (one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010), Sondheim richly annotates his lyrics with personal and theater history, discussions of his collaborations, and exacting, charming dissections of his work — both the successes and the failures. Picking up where he left off in Fin...

African Theatre 10: Media and Performance

(11/20/2011)

Focuses on the ways African theatre and performance relate to various kinds of media. Several of the articles deal with popular video, with an emphasis on video drama and soaps from Eastern and Southern Africa, though the Nigerian 'Nollywood' phenomenon is not completely neglected. One article addresses the interface between live performance and video (or still photography) and the way popular live or recorded music in South Africa creates layers of theatrical and ideological expression and link...

The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre

(11/19/2011)

Di Benedetto considers theatrical practice through the lens of contemporary neuroscientific discoveries in this provoking study, which lays the foundation for considering the physiological basis of the power of theatre practice to affect human behavior. He presents a basic summary of the ways that the senses function in relation to cognitive science and physiology, offering an overview of dominant trends of discussion on the realm of the senses in performance. Also presented are examples of how ...

Who Hears in Shakespeare?: Shakespeare's Auditory World, Stage and Screen

(11/16/2011)

This volume, examining the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are designed for hearers as well as spectators, has been prompted by recent explorations of the auditory dimension of early modern drama by scholars such as Andrew Gurr, Bruce Smith, and James Hirsh. To look at the acoustic world of the plays involves a real paradigm shift that changes how we understand virtually everything about Shakespeare’s plays: from the architecture of the buildings, to playing spaces, to blocking, and to lar...

Costume in Greek Tragedy

(11/15/2011)

This is the first book-length survey of tragic costume to be published for over forty years. The core of the book focuses on tragic costume in its original performance context of fifth-century Athens, but the implications of subsequent uses in Roman and more recent performances are also taken into consideration. Most importantly, the reader is invited to think about how tragic costume worked as a language in ancient performance and was manipulated physically and verbally in order to create meani...

Theatre for Beginners

(11/15/2011)

Theater is the room where performance happens. Where people sit and watch other people. The moment to moment event that unfolds hinges on our imperfect-ness. . . . Theatre for Beginners is a manual for the actor based in the belief that the person is interesting before the performing happens, and the essence of good stage work is rooted in a constant state of beginning. Richard Maxwell, the downtown writer and director with a deadpan aesthetic and an ever-innovative body of work, has written ...

Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes

(11/15/2011)

A unique contribution to an emerging field, Composed Theatre explores musical strategies of organization as viable alternative means of organizing theatrical work. In addition to insightful essays by a stellar group of international contributors, this volume also includes interviews with important practitioners, shedding light on historical and theoretical aspects of composed theatre.

Bringing the Body to the Stage and Screen: Expressive Movement for Performers

(11/15/2011)

As stage and screen artists explore new means to enhance their craft, a new wave of interest in expressive movement and physical improvisation has developed. And in order to bring authenticity and believability to a character, it has become increasingly vital for actors to be aware of movement and physical acting. Stage and screen artists - including dancers, clowns, puppeteers, singers, and other performers who combine acting with their art - must now call upon physical presence, movement on st...

Acting Together II: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict

(11/15/2011)

Acting Together II continues where the first volume left off, presenting more inspiring examples of peace-building performances in conflict-ridden regions. Where the first volume emphasizes theater and ritual's potential for resistance and catharsis in the midst of direct violence and in the aftermath of mass violence, the second volume focuses on performance's ability to bridge gaps and create inclusion in the more subtle context of structural violence and social exclusion. Drawing examples fro...

Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be: The Life of Lionel Bart

(11/7/2011)

Lionel Bart was a writer and composer of British pop music and musicals, best known for creating the book, music and lyrics for Oliver! He also wrote the famous songs Living Doll (Cliff Richard) and From Russia With Love (Matt Munroe).He was a millionaire aged thirty in the Sixties, bankrupt in the Seventies and died in 1999.In this first revealing biography, the authors gained exclusive access to Bart's personal archives - his unfinished autobiography, his letters and scrapbooks. They detail ho...

Learning to Live Out Loud: A Memoir

(11/1/2011)

One of Hollywood's most talented and memorable actresses ("The Hustler, Carrie") and three-time Oscar nominee presents an intimate memoir covering her life and career.

Modern Chinese Drama

(11/1/2011)

This is a book for all fans of Chinese theater arts, from Kunqu and Peking Opera to Chinese and Western plays, operas, and stage or variety shows; from the smallest, most intimate neighborhood theaters to China's cutting edge or avante-garde playhouses to its grandest concert halls. Hongfan Zhao examines themes, plots, characters, and all aspects of stagecraft (artistic and technical) in China from the twentieth century to the present. This is the definitive history and appreciation of stage dra...

Lux Presents Hollywood: A Show-by-show History of the Lux Radio Theatre and the Lux Video Theatre, 1934-1957

(10/31/2011)

This reference work is a show-by-show chronicle of the series, arranged by broadcast season, and showing network affiliation, host, announcer, director, musical director, and adaptation writer. Show listings include title, date first broadcast, cast, cast of the Lux commercials, plot synopsis, and film versions of the story. Also provided are the intermission guests-D.W. Griffith, Theda Bara, King Vidor, Sid Grauman among others-interviewed between acts of the broadcasts.

Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater

(10/28/2011)

We easily accept that size matters in other areas of human endeavor, but what about works of the imagination? Why do some dramatic creations extend to five hours or more, and how does their great length help them accomplish extraordinarily ambitious aims? In Great Lengths, theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalbexamines internationally prominent, marathon-length theater productions, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, the Royal Shakespeare Comp...