Jr. Kevin J. Wetmore – författare

In this volume, Lee Brewer Jones examines Paula Vogel as both a playwright and renowned teacher, analyzing texts and early reviews of Vogel’s major plays—including Indecent, Desdemona, How I Learned to Drive, and The Baltimore Waltz—before turning attention to her influence upon other major American playwrights, including Sarah Ruhl, Lynn Nottage, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Chapters explore Vogel’s plays in chronological order, consider her early influences and offer detailed accounts of her work in performance. Enriched by an interview with Lynn Nottage and essays from scholars Ana Fernández-Caparrós and Amy Muse, this is a vibrant exploration of Paula Vogel as a major American playwright.By the time Paula Vogel made her Broadway debut with her 2017 Rebecca Taichman collaboration Indecent, she was already an accomplished playwright, with a Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned to Drive (1998) and two Obie Awards. She had also enjoyed a brilliant career as a professor at Brown and Yale with students such as Sarah Ruhl, a MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner, Pulitzer Prize winners Nilo Cruz, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and the only woman to win two Pulitzers for Drama, Lynn Nottage. Vogel’s theatre draws upon Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and uses devices such as “defamiliarization” and “negative empathy” to challenge conventional definitions of protagonists and antagonists.

This is the first full-length exploration of the work of Laura Wade, providing critical and performance perspectives on one of the UK’s most frequently staged female playwrights.Laura Wade is one of the most exciting, challenging and commercially successful playwrights in the UK. Her work has been widely translated and performed across the globe, but despite the prolific appearance of her plays on professional stages, in university studios and school classrooms, she is a writer who is yet to have a book dedicated to her award-winning oeuvre.Throughout the volume, key creative practitioners add rehearsal room insight, alongside the perspective of Laura Wade herself and a foreword by Tamara Harvey, Co-Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Regular collaborators Harvey, Katherine Parkinson, Lyndsey Turner and Samuel West provide perspectives on Wade’s work, including the Olivier Award-winning Home, I’m Darling, the frequently staged Alice and her inventive adaptation of The Watsons. Actor Natalie Dormer also provides new insights which connect together Posh and the subsequent film adaptation, The Riot Club.Teachers, lecturers and theatre-makers are given resources to explore Wade’s plays in detail, including Posh, with key thoughts from the original production’s director as well as Cressida Carré, director of the first all-female staging in 2017. Those working with the increasingly popular early plays, Breathing Corpses, Colder than Here and Other Hands, have access to fresh scholarship deconstructing the narrative ingenuity and dark themes contained within. Each chapter draws attention to a range of international and performance contexts from which the plays can be explored.

The first comprehensive study of August Wilson’s drama introduces the major themes and motifs that unite Wilson’s ten-play cycle about African American life in each decade of the twentieth century. Framed by Wilson’s life experiences and informed by his extensive interviews, this book provides fresh, coherent, detailed readings of each play, well-situated in the extant scholarship. It also provides an overview of the cycle as a whole, demonstrating how it comprises a compelling interrogation of American culture and historiography.Keenly aware of the musical paradigms informing Wilson’s dramatic technique, Nadel shows how jazz and, particularly, the blues provide the structural mechanisms that allow Wilson to examine alternative notions of time, property, and law. Wilson’s improvisational logics become crucial to expressing his notions of black identity and resituating the relationship of literal to figurative in the African American community. The final two chapters include contributions by scholars Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Donald E. Pease