Drama and Performance Studies – serie

" . . . insights and expertise which all together furnish a useful addition to Pinter studies." —Modern Language ReviewEssays by both scholars and theater artists examine the work of British playwright Harold Pinter. The essays focus on performance, politics, gender issues, interpersonal manipulation, style and language, on influence, and on the interplay between Pinter's theatrical and film-scripting careers. Illustrated.

" . . . a ground-breaking contribution to the field of African literature . . . " —Research in African Literatures"Anyone with the slightest interest in West African cultures, performance or theatre should immediately rush out and buy this book." —Leeds African Studies Bulletin"A seminal contribution to the fields of performance studies, cultural studies, and popular culture. " —Margaret Drewal"A fine book. The play texts are treasures." —Richard BaumanAfrican popular culture is an arena where the tensions and transformations of colonial and post-colonial society are played out, offering us a glimpse of the view from below in Africa. This book offers a comparative overview of the history, social context, and style of three major West African popular theatre genres: the concert party of Ghana, the concert party of Togo, and the traveling popular theatre of western Nigeria.

" . . . a solid addition to international drama." —Library JournalGoing beyond the parameters of conventional literary drama, these seven new plays express life issues in post-apartheid South Africa—Islamic fundamentalism, women's rights, ecology, Afrikaans culture and the new multi-racial life of the inner city. While theater rooted in the anti-apartheid movement was rich and vibrant, it was also singleminded in focus, obscuring the diversity of South African culture now brought to life in these works.

This book traces a significant shift in 20th century Irish theatre from the largely national plays produced in Dublin to a more expansive international art form. Confirmed by the recent success outside of Ireland of the "third wave" of Irish playwrights writing in the 1990s, the new Irish drama has encouraged critics to reconsider both the early national theatre and the dramatic tradition it fostered.On the occasion of the centenary of the first professional production of the Irish Literary Theatre, the contributors to this volume investigate contemporary Irish drama's aesthetic features and socio-political commitments and re-read the plays produced earlier in the century. Although these essayists cover a wide range of topics, from the productions and objectives of the Abbey Theatre'sfirst rivals to mid-century theatre festivals, to plays about the "Troubles" in the North, they all reassess the oppositions so commonplace in critical discussions of Irish drama: nationalism vs. internationalism, high vs. low culture, urban experience vs. rural or peasant life. A Century of Irish Drama includes essays on such figures as W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan, Samuel Beckett, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Christina Read, Martin McDonagh, and many more.Stephen Watt is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, and author of Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage, Joyce, O'Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre, and essays on Irish and Irish-American culture. He has also written extensively on higher education, most recently Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education (with Cary Nelson).Eileen M. Morgan is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is currently working on Sean O'Faolain's biographies of De Valera and on Edna O'Brien's 1990s trilogy, and is preparing a book-length study on the influence of radio in Ireland.Shakir Mustafa is a Visiting Instructor in the English department at Indiana University. His work has appeared in such journals as New Hibernia Review and The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and he is now translating Arabic short stories into English.Drama and Performance Studies—Timothy Wiles, general editor

". . . a thoughtful and important treatment of the international tensions of the period as they were embodied in theatre practice. It is the only book of its kind on the subject, and a valuable source of production information." —Theatre Journal" . . . an excellent discussion of the aesthetics of theater." —ChoiceThe escalation of the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s unleashed worldwide protest. Playwrights grappled with the complexities of post-imperialist politics and with the problems of creating effective political theatre in the television age. The ephemeral theatre these writers created, today little-known and rarely studied, provides an important window on a complex moment in culture and history.

This book studies how popular theater can act as the vehicle for the construction of American ideology. It looks at five popular nineteenth-century melodramas that took as their subjects important issues in "American life: Metamora and the Indian Question", "The Drunkard and the temperance movement", "Uncle Tom's Cabin and slavery", "My Partner and the American West", and "Shenandoah and the Civil War". By examining the plays and their popular success and by reconstructing the social and political backdrop against which they were viewed, Mason shows how they functioned in the social discourse of the time. They were, he argues, expressions of what Americans wanted other Americans, and the world at large, to believe that they believed about America as such. Although acts of communal belief in, or affirmation of, certain cultural myths, these melodramas were acted out on the contested stage of American ideological debate. They show mainstream America's attempt to grapple with the key social issues of the day and to stage the dramatic emergence of the American myth.