Playtext – serie

The 1930s were a period of triumph and turmoil in Poland, yet the decade saw the production of a number of exceptional dramatic works. Some dramatists of the period, among them Jerzy Tepa, are not well-known today because many of their plays were lost, or presumed to be lost, during the war years. However, the recent rediscoveries of Tepa’s Ivar Kreuger and Jeanne de la Motte allow a fascinating glimpse into a rich and vital period of Polish literary culture unfamiliar to most English readers and scholars. This book not only introduces Tepa and his work to new readers but also demonstrates why he was one of the leading voices of the Polish interwar era.

In a room in the middle of nowhere, a man and a woman dream up spectacular worlds: a decaying city, a lush and crumbling garden, a train journey across a drowned landscape. Darkly humorous, absurd and surreal, these are plays for a theatre in which time and space, character and setting are as uncertain as the maps this man and this woman draw. A co-founder of the legendary 1980s performance theatre company Impact Theatre Co-op, Claire MacDonald composed Utopia, a sequence of commissioned playtexts, between 1987 and 2008. This edition brings together both the plays and the story of how the plays came to be made and written. With a compelling introduction by the author, and including additional material by Tim Etchells, Deirdre Heddon, and Lenora Champagne, this book provides a range of historical and critical materials that put the plays in the context of MacDonald’s career as writer and collaborator, and show how visual practices and poetics, theories of real and imagined space, and new approaches to language itself have profoundly shaped the development of performance writing in the UK.

This book offers a series of compelling responses to the Jasmin Vardimon Company’s production of Justitia, a multilayered, multimedia dance theatre piece. Through an innovative, visually annotated text, which includes the original script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the book attempts to record the experience of the performance. Also included are nine critical responses from scholars and theatrical practitioners who consider the performance through lenses relating to time, collaboration, writing, confession and the law.

JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and Other Plays is a collection of three radically poetic works for live performance by OBIE award–winning playwright Caridad Svich. The playtexts include a lyrical meditation on the legacy of iconic queer artist Derek Jarman, a meditation on displacement and human suffering (Carthage/Cartagena) and an intimately operatic reflection on Penelope and Odysseus (The Orphan Sea). Accompanied by scholarly essays placing the plays in context, this book showcases the beautiful strangeness and profound resistance in Svich’s work.

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.

Disability studies have long been the domain of medical and pedagogical academics. However, in recent years, the subject has outgrown its clinical origins. In Freaks of History, James MacDonald presents two dramatic explorations of disability within the wider themes of sexuality, gender, foreignness and the Other. Originally directed by Martin Harvey and performed by undergraduate students at the University of Exeter, Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Here analyse cultural marginalization against the backdrop of infamous historical events.MacDonald, who is cerebral palsied, recognizes that disability narratives are rarely written by and for disabled people. Therefore, his plays, accompanied by critical essays and director’s notes, are a welcome addition to the emerging discourse of Crip theory and essential reading for disability students and academics alike.

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.

This book presents four plays by Caridad Svich that explore the rough waters of citizenship under the pressure of globalization and the threads of human connection – often tested, but never wholly severed – across multiple geographic landscapes. Featuring an introduction by Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands and essays by practitioners Zac Kline, Blair Baker, Neil Scharnick, Carla Melo and Sherrine Azab, this wide-ranging, daring collection of plays refuses to pretend that the complex and thorny questions of existence are easily settled.

The book provides an investigation grounded in creative writing and practice-as-research methodology and explores the issues of authorship and collaborative labour in contemporary performance. This investigation is set in the context of a world more and more characterized by fragmentation, displacement and virtual communication and relationships. It addresses and playfully engages with the following questions: what is a collaborative body? Can a sole performer carry out a collaborative practice ? Can we stand in for others? What forms of “coming-together” might take place when distance remains between those who perform and those who spectate?The book contains the full-length version of the score from A Duet Without You, an original performance piece created between 2013 and 2015 by Chloé Déchery in collaboration with a range of artistic collaborators working inter- and cross-disciplinary, including Karen Christopher, Pedro Iñes, Simone Kenyon, Marty Langthorne, Tom Parkinson, Michael Pinchbeck and Deborah Pearson.Alongside the playtext, the book entails a collection of essays written by independent writers, artists and academics and dedicated to the politics of collaboration, ranging from performative responses and co-authored articles to in-depth theoretical essays.Primary readership will be those teaching, researching or studying in theatre and performance studies, visual arts, fine arts, art history, creative writing, poetry, philosophy or French literature.  Will also be of interest to art school students and those with an interest in theatre.

A case study of one specific substantial three-part project inspired by the work of William Shakespeare. Three interconnected performances that interrogate roles in the theatre-making process, along with essays that contextualize the themes and approaches of the work, serve as provocations for the acts of dramaturgy the work entailed, juxtapose new writing and performance writing, and problematize the notion of playtexts.Taking as their starting point a stage direction or a moment in the narrative that is not the main focus, the playtexts recontextualize, deconstruct and disorientate the classic text within a landscape that is more polarized, free from the text and inherently and explicitly aware of its own theatricality. The work negotiates the ever-shifting relationship between the text and its performance, the performers and their audience, whilst acknowledging that Shakespeare often employed a play-within-a-play as a device, what we now call a meta-theatrical mode of representation.The three playtexts are The Beginning, an interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Middle, a deconstruction of Hamlet, and The End, triggered by a stage direction from The Winter’s Tale. Shown together as The Trilogy, each play asks the audience to enter a world where a performance can be a rehearsal, text can be both script and set … and they are always aware of where the fire exits are. The playtexts are presented with essays from a range of contributors that reflect on their poetics, themes and concerns in relation to dramaturgy. Brings together scholarship and creative work, places them in dialogue with each other and does so from a wide range of perspectives: from those involved in the process, those in the margins of that process and those encountering the works without having been part of that process. The particular strengths of this challenging but accessible book are in the ways it places these perspectives in conversation with and through dramaturgy, and contributes a dialogue about making and reflecting text and performance. A rich and thought-provoking text that has the potential to move the dialogue on dramaturgy forward both among practitioners and academics. It is a fresh, intellectually invigorating read; the change of perspective and the playful structure that brings a recognisable five-act dramatic structure and academic elaboration together keeps readers focused and guides them through the book. Very conscious of its own unorthodox format – a combination of script and reflection, by a variety of voices – which is certainly part of the freshness of the book and part of its appeal. Primary readership will be among practitioners, academics and researchers in the field of dramaturgy, teaching, devising, writing for performance and non-linear narrative; performance students making or reflecting on their own devised performance work; postgraduate students who are engaged in making practice as research. Also of relevance and interest to makers and scholars of theatre and performance, alongside those interested in creative critical writing; to those interested in how we make, and reflect on, theatre and performance; those interested in contemporary dramaturgy and embedded criticism; and those studying theatre and performance, and interdisciplinary practice research.

This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from Lightwork’s precursor company Academy Productions, presented between 1997 and 2011.Lightwork specialized in collaboratively created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, including verbatim and site-specific approaches. Because of this, the texts cover a range of forms and formats – scripted plays such as Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as The Good Actor, which took place in various spaces across Hoxton Hall, a Victorian theatre in London’s East End; and the use of verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story.The defining aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the mainstays of dramatic theatre: character, story and emotional resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between lovers or family members, confrontations with the past (both as personal and as cultural history) and, in many cases, matters of life or death that entail wrestling with causality, consequence and fate.The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage, process and production, text and ‘non-text’, were being radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre making that Lightwork exemplifies, the text may be one element among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than its precursor.How do such playtexts (or performance texts) differ from those that are conceived and scripted by a single desk-based playwright in advance of the rehearsal? What gaps are left when the work of many hands is channelled through the pen (or keyboard) of one among them? The texts featured in this volume represent a number of answers to these questions about the nature of writing for the stage.The performance texts are each preceded (and sometime followed) by short essays written by some of the many people who have been involved in productions by Lightwork, including established academics and theatre practitioners: David Annen, Clare Bayley, Gregg Fisher, Sarah Gorman, Andy Lavender, Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Merlin, Alex Mermikides, Jo Parker, Dan Rebellato, and Ayse Tashkiran. Their contributions reflect the collaborative nature of the company and the respect that it accorded the various disciplinary perspectives that make up a theatre company.There are sections on scenography, sound design and technical operation, as well as on those crafts that might more usually draw attention: directing, writing and acting. These contributions offer an insight into the collaborative, multi-layered and sometimes messy business of their creation from an individual maker’s or spectator’s point of view.This book will be invaluable for those who are making, studying or researching performance in the twenty-first century, and an essential resource for the rehearsal room.Primary readership will include researchers, educators, students and practitioners interested in creative practice, theatre-making, integrated design and performance, and contemporary theatre.It will be an important resource for those on theatre and performance courses at all levels, as well as acting, theatre and performance design, dramaturgy and direction courses, creative writing courses and media arts programmes.It will have appeal for general readers interested in new texts and processes in theatre and performance, and individual texts are likely to be of interest to specialist researchers working in related fields – for example performance and the occult (Blavatsky), performance and conflict (Sarajevo Story).

Two scripts were created in 2017 from the same source materials: preserved song lyrics from a performance created in 1943 in the Terezin Ghetto called Prince Bettliegend (the Bedridden Prince), the popular 1930s jazz melodies to which those lyrics were set, and fragments of testimony by survivors who performed in or witnessed that production. The development processes took place under the auspices of the £1.8 million AHRC-funded project Performing the Jewish Archive. PtJA co-investigator Lisa Peschel has spent the past two decades researching theatrical performance in Terezin, and the project’s planned performance festivals in Australia and South African in the summer of 2017 afforded a unique opportunity to allow Prince Bettliegend to speak to our present. Peschel synthesized the existing materials into a rough plot outline, then collaborated with local production teams at the University of Sydney (produced by Joseph Toltz, directed by Ian Maxwell) and Stellenbosch University (directed by Amelda Brand) to reconstruct/recreate/re-imagine the play.Both teams were extraordinarily sensitive to questions of trauma and pleasure in the original performance, and those questions manifested themselves in different underlying themes that emerged with each production. During the first, month-long development process at the University of Sydney (July 2017), Peschel, Maxwell and Toltz worked together to refine the plot outline, Toltz and musical director Kevin Hunt explored the 1930s music with the entire production team, then the actors, recruited from Sydney’s alternative theatre scene, developed the performance through improvisation. Due to fortuitous accidents of casting, a theme soon emerged that dovetailed with the historical reality of the ghetto: the desire of the older prisoners to protect the youth.While the Australian production was still in development, the South African team at Stellenbosch University, led by Amelda Brand, began creating their own version. Their performance was based on the same plot outline and, to some extent, the same text developed by the Sydney performers, but their production diverged radically due to their interest in addressing issues of more immediate interest to the multi-racial student case: race and power. Their musical approach also diverged: music director Leonore Bredekamp created a hybrid of 1930s jazz and klezmer music.Part I of the book is composed of a series of essays about the original material and about each production. The essays, written by Peschel and key collaborators on each development team, explore the Terezin production and both reconstructions. Part II comprises the scripts. Although the texts themselves are similar, detailed stage directions and illustrations make clear how each manifested its own themes.Part of Intellect's Playtext series.

Based on a recent touring project, The Ravel Trilogy, this title comprises playtexts and essays that contextualise the themes and approaches of the devised work: Bolero (2014), Concerto (2016) and Solo (2018). The book takes an interdisciplinary critical enquiry into the working dramaturgy of performance ‘scores’ inspired by the music.The book frames the playtexts of the trilogy alongside a series of reflective essays and provocations on contemporary dramaturgy and musicology from academics and artists in drama, music, linguistics and fine art. It contextualises themes and approaches of the trilogy and serves as a critical companion to a body of devised work. It stimulates a debate about dramaturgy and composition and invites discussion about postdramatic theatre's relationship to music.This publication marks the culmination of the trilogy and its critical legacy and explores the work through the dual lenses of postdramatic theatre and research questions articulated and addressed by the practice-research undertaken by its co-creators. The dramaturgical context for The Ravel Trilogy and the reflective essays around it allow the editors to explore the relationship between theatre and music.It raises questions about practice-research and notions of creating playtexts from musical scores. Pinchbeck and Smith reflect on making and performing The Ravel Trilogy and the process of researching, devising and presenting work inspired by music where score becomes script and dynamics become stage directions.

BODIES IN FLIGHT make performance where flesh utters and words move, challenging and re-energizing the relationship between audiences and performers, and audiences and place. Emerging from rigorous interdisciplinary and collaborative methods, often with new technologies in cutting-edge venues, we insist on the buzz of ideas, on philosophy and poetry, using words and images, movement and stillness, voices and bodies, through which they aim to move audiences emotionally and spiritually. Organized in a highly visual design, this volume is both a history and a workbook with selections of scripts and archival material from 30 years of making devised theatre and performance in the UK and internationally, plus texts by collaborators, arts professionals and scholars exploring the company’s collaborative working method, contextualizing it in the wider performance ecology and culture. Intended as an inspiration to emerging artists, the volume covers key questions for any maker of contemporary performance: the relationship of choreography and spoken word, the use of new technologies and multi-media, the role of original music and soundscapes, the differences between work presented in a theatre or gallery or sited in non-theatrical places, the persistence of theatre as an art-form in an increasingly digital culture.

BODIES IN FLIGHT make performance where flesh utters and words move, challenging and re-energizing the relationship between audiences and performers, and audiences and place. Emerging from rigorous interdisciplinary and collaborative methods, often with new technologies in cutting-edge venues, we insist on the buzz of ideas, on philosophy and poetry, using words and images, movement and stillness, voices and bodies, through which they aim to move audiences emotionally and spiritually. Organized in a highly visual design, this volume is both a history and a workbook with selections of scripts and archival material from 30 years of making devised theatre and performance in the UK and internationally, plus texts by collaborators, arts professionals and scholars exploring the company’s collaborative working method, contextualizing it in the wider performance ecology and culture. Intended as an inspiration to emerging artists, the volume covers key questions for any maker of contemporary performance: the relationship of choreography and spoken word, the use of new technologies and multi-media, the role of original music and soundscapes, the differences between work presented in a theatre or gallery or sited in non-theatrical places, the persistence of theatre as an art-form in an increasingly digital culture.

A collection of performance texts ranging from orthodox plays to group-devised texts. The book traces from most recent to earliest Schechner's work as a "writer" and a "wrighter" -- the author of plays and the conceptualizer and leader of teams of artists. The book includes several never before published early texts as well as updated versions of well-known productions such as "Dionysus in 69," "YokastaS," "Makbeth," and "Imagining O." The earliest texts are from the 1950s the most recent from 2014.This book brings together for the first time Schechner’s original plays and adaptations: Imagining O, YokastaS, Faust/gastronome, The Prometheus Project, Richard's Lear, Commune, Makbeth, Dionysus in 69, The Blessing of the Fleet, Briseis and the Sergeant, "Lot's Daughters," and "The Last Day of FK." The scripts engage with perennial canonical themes, such as Oedipus and Faust, and topical issues of our times. They embody Schechner’s world-famous environmental theatre approach. Marta Minier's general introduction and Schechner's introductions to each play, set the scripts in their intellectual and production context. The book complements Schechner’s other books which include, Performance Studies: An Introduction (now in its 4th ed.), Performance Theory, Between Theater and Anthropology, The Future of Ritual, and Performed Imaginaries.

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.

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.

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.

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.Additionally, Brecht in L.A., winner of the 2002 SWTA National New Play Contest (US), is already a critically acclaimed play, which suggests that the work has the potential to be widely (and successfully) produced. And such productions will enhance the marketability of the book. A play influenced by Brecht is, in itself, not unique, since many leading, contemporary dramatists--such as Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond, Tony Kushner, Heiner Muller, and Howard Barker--have been affected by Brechtian dramaturgy. But a Brechtian-influenced play with Brecht as the lead character is unique. The play represents the only dramatic work in English which features Brecht himself as the title character.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. Brecht in L.A. will also be an important addition to the considerable collections of books about Brecht which are carried by countless libraries.

A first volume of plays by a startlingly ambitious and inventive dramatist.The Back of Beyond takes, as its starting point, the route of a sequel to King Lear, in which the surviving Shakespearean characters set out on an odyssey through a perilous, blasted landscape, and encounter new agents of cruelty, desire and magic. Wildly humorous and fiercely shocking, the play charts a series of remorseless exposures, interrogating the idealisms and brutal repressions that have informed Anglo-Welsh relations whilst subverting Shakespearean motifs; tragically humorous poetic language and nightmarish visual imagery contribute to the sense of a land where the signposts have been smashed. A sequel to The Back of Beyond, The Battle of the Crows extends and concludes the stories of three characters - a maverick witch, a renegade knight, and an abuse victim made empress - in a harrowing and humorous exploration of border warfare, witchcraft, massacre, bitchery, hilarity and heartbreak. The Battle of the Crows is partly a dramatic speculation about desire as magic, partly a sad reckless laugh at internecine hostilities and the passionate and disastrous transformations which spring up in the face of Death itself.

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.

Point Blank, one of Britain’s most provocative new theater companies, has received a deluge of critical acclaim for its darkly comic political satire and bleak metaphorical landscapes. Point Blank: Nothing to Declare, Operation Wonderland, Roses and Morphine, here reproduces three prominent examples of the company’s early work and contextualizes these plays in the wider tradition and recent history of British political theater. In addition to the full performance scripts, Point Blank offers comprehensive notes to enable a range of potential restagings of the plays, as well as critical essays suggesting bold interpretations of the interplay between contemporary theatrical performance and the prevailing political climate. Editor Liz Tomlin offers invaluable insight into the company’s dramaturgical processes that transform theoretical ideas into mythical, absurd scenarios and visually striking theatrical metaphor. Subversive and incendiary, Point Blank is forging a radical new vision of twenty-first-century theater.

David Ian Rabey is one of the most explosive, pioneering, and erotic playwrights ever to emerge from Wales. Lovefuries features three of his performance texts that flaut national and personal pressure to keep silent, committing instead to explore the shocking resurgences of life that break through grief. These plays tackle such issues as the nature of the feminine, surviving sexual abuse, and the boundaries of human language and physicality. This unforgettable collection will introduce American audiences to one of the most gifted contemporary playwrights working in Britain.

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 is cerebral palsied, 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. To date, MacDonald is one of the few severely disabled playwrights to have their work staged and he deals with issues rarely covered in drama. Consequently, Russia, Freaks and Foreigners is a daring portrayal of disability from the inside.

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.

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 nineteenth 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.

When art and design students are asked for statements to accompany their work, reflective journals, or critiques, reviews and essays, they often freeze up because they have to put their thoughts in writing. Although these students are comfortable expressing themselves visually, they lack confidence working with words. Inspiring Writing in Art and Design is a practical aid for those students who are disheartened or overwhelmed by having to write. Pat Francis provides short writing exercises and creative writing techniques for tutors to use and which will help art and design students develop their ability to verbally articulate the concepts and aesthetics behind their art. Using Francis’s examples, students will build confidence and skills that can help them succeed in presenting their work and themselves in, and beyond, the studio world.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century marked a tumultuous period in Poland’s history, with artists and writers working under difficult sociopolitical conditions. This book contains the first English- language translations of four plays by Polish writers in the modernist tradition: Snow by Stanislaw Przybyszewski, In a Small House by Tadeusz Rittner, Ashanti by Wlodzimierz Perzynski, and All the Same by Leopold Staff. Well-chosen and carefully annotated, these translations provide important insight into this underexplored area of Polish dramatic history and practice and facilitate greater understanding of its role in the development of European theater. Also included is a broad discussion of the characteristics of translation for the theater.