Theater Book List

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5 Plays 5On Sale

Lovecraft's Follies, The Ushers, Mother O, Shadows of Memory, The Last Romantics

By James Schevill

In 1970 Adrian Hall’s production of Lovecraft’s Follies by the Trinity Repertory Company was praised in The New York Times as a “hilarious extravaganza—with music—that is also an earnest attempt to come to grips with the guilts and terrors of the Age of Technology.…

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Coal and CultureOn Sale

Opera Houses in Appalachia

By William Faricy Condee

Opera houses were fixtures of Appalachian life from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s. Most towns and cities had at least one opera house during this golden age. Coal mining and railroads brought travelers, money, and change to the region.…


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Collected Short PlaysOn Sale

By James Schevill

In a time that emphasizes media spectaculars, the short play offers an exploration of minimal possibilities yet has the power to fix history in a moment's structure, a flash of revelation. The short play is a powerful and innovative theatrical medium, relying upon compression and clarity rather than amplification, and reducing character and action to a spare, dramatic core.…

Cover of Curtain Calls

Curtain Calls

British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820

Edited by Mary A. Schofield and Cecilia Macheski

“I here and there o’heard a Coxcomb cry,Ah, rot—’tis a Woman’s Comedy.” Thus Aphra Behn ushers in a new era for women in the British Theatre (Sir Patient Fancy, 1678). In the hundred years that were to follow—and exactly those years that Curtain Calls examines—women truly took the theater world by storm.…


Cover of Directing Shakespeare

Directing Shakespeare

A Scholar Onstage

By Sidney Homan

An impossible question from a Chinese actor—“Why is Shakespeare eternal?”—drove Sidney Homan after fifty years in the theater to ponder just what makes Shakespeare...well, Shakespeare.…

Cover of Framing Shakespeare on Film

Framing Shakespeare on FilmOn Sale

How the Frame Reveals Meaning

By Kathy M. Howlett

The aesthetics of frame theory form the basis of Framing Shakespeare on Film. This groundbreaking work expands on the discussion of film constructivists in its claim that the spectacle of Shakespeare on film is a problem-solving activity.…


Cover of In His Own Voice

In His Own Voice

The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar

Edited by Herbert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau

Paul Laurence Dunbar, introduced to the American public by William Dean Howells, was the first native-born African American poet to achieve national and international fame. While there have been many valuable editions of his works over time, gaps have developed when manuscripts were lost or access to uncollected works became difficult.…

Cover of The Komedie Stamboel

The Komedie Stamboel

Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903

By Matthew Isaac Cohen

Originating in 1891 in the port city of Surabaya, the Komedie Stamboel, or Istanbul-style theater, toured colonial Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia by rail and steamship. The company performed musical versions of the Arabian Nights and European fairy tales and operas such as Sleeping Beauty and Aida, as well as Indian and Persian romances, Southeast Asian chronicles, true crime stories, and political allegories.…


Cover of Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa

Oral Literature and Performance in Southern AfricaOn Sale

Edited by Duncan Brown

This book draws together contributions from literary studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and African language studies to analyze the complex functioning of oral texts and models in differing contexts.…

Cover of Power Plays

Power Plays

Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java

By Andrew N. Weintraub

Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning twenty years, Power Plays is the first scholarly book in English on wayang golek, the Sundanese rod-puppet theater of West Java. It is a detailed and lively account of the ways in which performers of this major Asian theatrical form have engaged with political discourses in Indonesia.…


Cover of The Practical Shakespeare

The Practical Shakespeare

The Plays in Practice and on the Page

By Colin Butler

A comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page illuminates for a general audience how and why the plays work so well. Noting in detail the practical and physical limitations the Bard faced as he worked out the logistics of his plays, Colin Butler demonstrates how Shakespeare incorporated those limitations and turned them to his advantage: his management of entrances and exits; his characterization techniques; his handling of scenes off-stage; his control of audience responses; his organization of major scenes; and his use of prologues and choruses.…

Cover of Realist in the American Theatre

Realist in the American TheatreOn Sale

Selected Drama Cricism of William Dean Howells

By W.D. Howells

William Dean Howells has long been recognized as the chief spokesman for post-1880s American Realism. Most of his writing appeared in popular magazines, however, and has been lost to us. This collection brings together for the first time his most significant essays about American drama written between 1875 and 1919 and a full bibliography of his writings on drama and theatre.…


Cover of Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825

Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825

Edited by Jeffrey N. Cox

The Gothic drama came at a critical moment in the history of the theater, of British culture, and of European politics in the shadow of France’s revolution and the fall of Napoleon. It offered playwrights a medium to express the prevailing ideological tensions of romanticism and revolution, and also responded to a growing and changing theater audience.…

Cover of Shakespeare at the Cineplex

Shakespeare at the Cineplex

The Kenneth Branagh Era

By Samuel Crowl

Samuel Crowl's Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era is the first thorough exploration of the fifteen major Shakespeare films released since the surprising success of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989).…


Cover of Shakespeare in Production

Shakespeare in Production

Whose History?

By H. R. Coursen

Shakespeare in Production examines a number of plays in context. Included are the 1936 Romeo and Juliet, unpopular with critics of filmed Shakespeare, but very much a "photoplay" if its time; the opening sequences of filmed Hamlets which span more than seventy years; The Comedy of Errors on television, where production of this script is almost impossible; and the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing, a "popular" film discussed in the context of comedy as a genre.…

Cover of Shakespeare Observed

Shakespeare Observed

Studies in Performance on Stage and Screen

By Samuel Crowl

In this lively study of both modern film and stage productions of Shakespeare, Samuel Crowl provides fascinating insights into the ways in which these productions have been influenced by one another as well as by contemporary developments in critical approaches to Shakespeare's plays.…


Cover of Sight Unseen

Sight UnseenOn Sale

Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, and Other

By Elissa S. Guralnick

In Sight Unseen radio drama, a genre traditionally dismissed as popular culture, is celebrated as high art. The radio plays discussed here range from the conventional (John Arden’s Pearl) to the docudramatic (David Rudkin’s Cries from Casement), from the curtly conversational (Harold Pinter’s A Slight Ache) to the virtually operatic (Robert Ferguson’s Transfigured Night), testifying to radio drama’s variety and literary stature.…

Cover of The Tables Turned

The Tables TurnedOn Sale

Or, Nupkins Awakened

By William Morris

William Morris is well recognized as an eclectic and energetic contributor to the Victorian artistic and literary scene. Readers of Morris’s languid poetic narratives and archaic prose romances will be intrigued by this editions of his single socialist play, a lively and rich experiment in political prose that offers an unusual example of Morris’s boisterous humor and satirical style.…


Cover of Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century

Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Ronald E. Salomone and James E. Davis

Shakespeare is a central shaping and defining figure in our culture. His plays are being taught, filmed, and performed every day in many places and in most of the world's languages. At the same time, teachers and students from junior high through the early undergraduate years often struggle with the Bard in discomfort and negativity that can only be counter-productive.…

Cover of The Tenth Muse

The Tenth MuseOn Sale

Classical Drama In Translation

By Charles Doria

Although classical drama has been translated before, this new collection is unique. The translations are modern in their poetry; the translations include poets as well as classicists; and the collection includes at least one example of every known type of ancient Greek and Latin drama.…


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