Theater in the Americas – serie

An organized treatment of performance studies theory, practice and pedagogy. This collection of 18 essays by scholars and educators seeks to reflect the emergent and contested nature of performance studies, a field that looks at the broad range of human performance from everyday conversation to formal theatre and cultural ritual. The cross-disciplinary freedom enacted by the writers suggests a new vision of performance studies - a deliberate commerce between field and classroom.

Now available in paperback, ""That Furious Lesbian"": The Story of Mercedes de Acosta is the first book-length biography of the flamboyantly uninhibited early-twentieth-century author, poet, and playwright. Theater historian Robert A. Schanke adroitly mines lost archival materials and mixes in his own interviews with de Acosta's intimates to correct established myths and construct an accurate, detailed, and vibrant account of her life and loves on Broadway and in Hollywood.

Charting the origins of serious theatre, drama pedagogy, and the nonprofit model. The Little Theatre movement prompted and promoted the college theatre major, the inclusion of theatre pedagogy in K-12 education, prototypes for the nonprofit model, and the notion that theatre is a valuable form of self-expression. An important piece of revisionist history, ""Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience"" argues that the movement was a national phenomenon, not just the result of aspirants copying the efforts of the much-storied Provincetown Players, Washington Square Players, Neighborhood Playhouse, and Chicago Little Theatre. Going beyond the familiar histories of the best-known groups, Dorothy Chansky traces the origins of both the ideas and the infrastructures for serious theatre that are ordinary parts of the American cultural landscape today. She also investigates the gender discrimination, racism, and class insensitivity that were embedded in reformers' ideas of the ""universal"" and that still trouble the rhetoric of regional, educational, and community theatre. Fifteen illustrations complement the volume, now in paperback for the first time.

Pursues the social and historical contexts of a particularly unfinished theatrical genre. In this fresh approach to musical theatre history, Bruce Kirle challenges the commonly understood trajectory of the genre. Drawing on the notion that the world of the author stays fixed while the world of the audience is ever-changing, Kirle suggests that musicals are open, fluid products of the particular cultural moment in which they are performed. Incomplete as printed texts and scores, musicals take on unpredictable lives of their own in the complex transformation from page to stage. Using lenses borrowed from performance studies, cultural studies, queer studies, and ethnoracial studies, ""Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process"" argues that musicals are as interesting for the provocative issues they raise about shifting attitudes toward American identity as for their show-stopping song and dance numbers and conveniently happy endings. Kirle illustrates how performers such as Ed Wynn, Fanny Brice, and the Marx Brothers used their charismatic personalities and quirkiness to provide insights into the struggle of marginalized ethnoracial groups to assimilate. Using examples from timeless favorites including ""Oklahomal"", ""Fiddler on the Roof"", ""A Chorus Line"", and ""Les Miserables"", Kirle demonstrates Broadway's ability to bridge seemingly insoluble tensions in society, from economic and political anxiety surrounding World War II to generational conflict and youth counterculture to corporate America and the ""me"" generation. Enlivened by a gallery of some of Broadway's most memorable moments - and some amusingly obscure ones as well - this study will appeal to students, scholars, and lifelong musical theater enthusiasts.

This book helps you in restoring a lost legacy. The Hanlons - a family of six brothers from Manchester, England - were one of the world's premiere performing troupes in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet their legacy has been mostly forgotten. Mark Cosdon carefully documents the careers of this talented family and enumerates their many contributions to modern popular entertainment. As young men, the Hanlons stunned audiences all over the world with their daring acrobatic feats. After a tragic accident severely injured one brother (and indirectly led to his suicide in a manner achievable only by someone with considerable acrobatic talents), they moved into the safer arena of spectacle pantomime, where they became the rage of Parisian popular theatre. They achieved fame with their uproariously funny and technically astonishing production of ""Le Voyage en Suisse"". After settling permanently in the northeastern United States, they developed two more full-length pantomimes, ""Fantasma"" and ""Superba"". The three shows toured for more than thirty years, a testament to their popularity and to the Hanlons' impressive business acumen. The book's illustrations - including sketches of their performances, studio photographs of the Hanlons, and posters for all three of their major pantomimes - are essential to the understanding of their work. This thorough and engrossing account of the Hanlons' lives and careers is painstakingly researched yet accessible and engaging.

American Political Plays after 9/11 is a diverse collection of bold, urgent, and provocative plays that respond to the highly charged, post 9/11 political landscape. Sparked by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and subsequently fueled by a series of controversial events—the Iraq war, the passing and enforcement of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and the revelation of torture and other scandals at the Abu Ghraib prison—American political theater is currently experiencing a surge in activity. The plays in this collection include The Guys by Anne Nelson, At the Vanishing Point by Naomi Iizuka, The Venus de Milo Is Armed by Kia Corthron, Back of the Throat by Yusseff El Guindi, Three Nights in Prague by Allan Havis, and Question 27, Question 28 by Chay Yew.               The characters range from a New York City fire captain trying to respectfully memorialize eight of his lost comrades, to the citizens of a hog-killing Louisville neighborhood who poignantly exemplify the underside of the economic crisis, to an Arab American citizen being harshly (and possibly unfairly) interrogated by two officers as a “person of interest.” Though not all of the plays deal explicitly with the Al Qaeda attacks, they collectively reveal themes of sorrow and anxiety, moral indignation, alarmist self-preservation, and economic and social insecurity stemming from the United States’ fairly sudden shift from cold war superpower to vulnerable target.               The lively introduction by Allan Havis includes a brief history of political theater in the United States, an extensive discussion about how theater communities responded to 9/11, and an informative analysis of the six plays in the book.  A collection of dramatic material framed by this significant historical event, American Political Plays after 9/11 will be indispensable for theater and cultural studies scholars and students.

Theatre has long been an art form of subterfuge and concealment. Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor, edited by Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth, brings attention to what goes on behind-the-scenes in this essay collection that considers, challenges, and revises our understanding of work, theatre, and history.Essays consider a range of historic moments and geographic locations—from African Americans’ performance of the cakewalk in Florida’s resort hotels during the Gilded Age to the UAW Union Theatre and striking automobile workers in post–World War II Detroit to the creative struggle in the latter part of the twentieth century to finish an adaptation of Moby Dick for the stage before the memory of creator, Rinde Eckert, fails. Contributors incorporate methodologies and theories from fields as diverse as theatre history, historiography, work studies, legal studies, economics, and literary analysis and draw on traditional archival materials, including performance texts and architectural structures, as well as less tangible material traces of stagecraft.Working in the Wings looks at the ways in which workers' identities are shaped, influenced, and dictated by what they do; the traces left behind by workers whose contributions have been overwritten; the intersections between the sometimes repetitive and sometimes destructive process of creation and the end result—the play or performance; and the ways in which theatre affects the popular imagination. This collected volume draws attention to the significance of work in the theatre, encouraging a fresh examination of this important subject in the history of the theatre and beyond.

Working theatrically with technologySystemic Dramaturgy offers an invigorating, practical look at the daunting cultural problems of the digital age as they relate to performance. Authors Michael Mark Chemers and Mike Sell reject the incompatibility of theatre with robots, digital media, and videogames. Instead, they argue that problems with technology are really problems of art: How can we tell this story and move this audience with these tools? And when we have different tools, should that change the stories we tell?This volume attunes readers to “systemic dramaturgy”—the recursive elements of signification, innovation, and history that underlie all performance—arguing that theatre must be understood as a system of systems, a concatenation of people, places, things, politics, feelings, and interpretations, ideally working together to entertain and edify an audience. The authors discuss in-depth the application of time-tested dramaturgical skills to extra-theatrical endeavors, including multi-platform performance, installations, and videogames. And they identify the unique interventions that dramaturgs can and must make into these art forms.More than any other book that has been published in the field, Systemic Dramaturgy places historical dramaturgy in conversation with technologies as old as the deux ex machina and as new as artificial intelligence. A spirited and playful blend, the volume collates histories, transcripts, and case studies and applies the concepts of systemic dramaturgy to works both old and avant-garde. Between chapters, Chemers and Sell include conversations with some of the most forward-thinking, innovative, and creative people working in live media as they share their diverse approaches to the challenges of making performances, games, and digital media that move both heart and mind. This volume is nothing less than a guide for thinking about the future evolution of performance.

An inclusive history of the professionalization of American scenic designThe figure of the American theatrical scenic designer first emerged in the early twentieth century. As productions moved away from standardized, painted scenery and toward individualized scenic design, the demand for talented new designers grew. Within decades, scenic designers reinvented themselves as professional artists. They ran their own studios, proudly displayed their names on Broadway playbills, and even appeared in magazine and television profiles.American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism tells the history of the field through the figures, institutions, and movements that helped create and shape the profession. Taking a unique sociological approach, theatre scholar David Bisaha examines the work that designers performed outside of theatrical productions. He shows how figures such as Lee Simonson, Norman Bel Geddes, Jo Mielziner, and Donald Oenslager constructed a freelance, professional identity for scenic designers by working within their labor union (United Scenic Artists Local 829), generating self-promotional press, building university curricula, and volunteering in wartime service. However, while new institutions provided autonomy and intellectual property rights for many, women, queer, and Black designers were not always welcome to join the organizations that protected freelance designers’ interests. Among others, Aline Bernstein, Emeline Roche, Perry Watkins, Peggy Clark, and James Reynolds were excluded from professional groups because of their identities. They nonetheless established themselves among the most successful designers of their time. Their stories expand the history of American scenic design by showing how professionalism won designers substantial benefits, yet also created legacies of exclusion with which American theatre is still reckoning.