Criticism, Theory & History: New & Featured

See also: Canadian Theatre Studies and National Theatre Studies.

Grotowski's Empty Room
Paul Allain
This collection considers how Grotowski's explorartions in the theatre continue to challenge us, from his research-based investigations in his Laboratory days through to the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards' ongoing activities. The contributors, all specialists in the field, reflect with strong insight on how theatre scholars and practitioners can begin to work on and with Grotowski today. Hardcover, 233 pp. $34.95.

Talking Theatre: Interviews with Theatre People
Richard Eyre
This must-read volume brings together forty candid and insightful conversations between Richard Eyre and a stunning group of the most extraordinary theatre artists of the second half of the twentieth century. John Gielgud, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, Peter Brook, Tom Stoppard, Judi Dench, Robert Lepage, Tony Kushner, and Peter Hall are but a few of the artists profiled here. What emerges from these interviews is an unrivalled, behind-the-scenes account of the most important productions and performances in the theatre in recent times. Hardcover, 331 pp. $44.95.

Performance in Place of War
James Thompson, Jenny Hughes & Michael Balfour
From the Greeks and Shakespeare to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, war has always been a major theme for theatre artists. However, the most extraordinary performance projects in recent years have not only been about war but have also come from conflict zones themselves. This fascinating volume is concerned with these initiatives -- theatre in refugee camps, in war-affected villages, in towns under curfew, in cities under occupation. This books presents theatre and performance that occurs, literally, at the moment bombs are falling, as well as during times of ceasefire and in the aftermath of war. Hardcover, 351 pp. $34.95.

Essays
Wallace Shawn
In these bold essays, Wallace Shawn takes us on a revelatory journey through high art, war, culture, politics, and privilege. With his distinctive humour and insight, Shawn invites us to look at the world with new eyes, the better to understand it ... and change it. Hardcover, $18.95.

Empire of Illusion
Chris Hedges
In Empire of Illusion author Chris Hedges travels to the ringside of professional wrestling, through Los Vegas's porn industry, and to academic conferences held by positive psychologists -- who claim to be able to engineer happiness -- to chronicle our terrifying flight as a culture into a state of illusion. By attacking the absurd idea that we can always draws on inner resources and strengths to have everything we desire, Hedges exposes the mechanisms used to divert us from confronting the economic, political, and moral collapse around us. Hardcover, $29.95.

Speaking in Tongues: Language at Play in the Theatre
Marvin Carlson
The use of multiple languages in the contemporary theatre is in part a reflection of a more globalized culture, but it also calls attention to how the mixing of language has always been an important part of the functioning of theatre. This book presents a unique account of how language has been employed in the theatre, not simply as a means of communication but also as a stylistic and formal device, and for a number of cultural and political operations. Hardcover, 257 pp. $69.00.

The American Theatre Reader: Essays and Conversations from American Theatre Magazine
Editors of American Theatre Magazine
On the occasion of American Theatre magazine's 25th anniversary, the editors have selected the best essays and interviews from its pages to provide an intimate look at the people, plays and events that have shaped the American theatre over the past quarter-century? Softcover, 615 pp. $29.95.

The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography
Thomas Postlewait
Designed for students and teachers alike, this introduction provides a detailed guide for historical research in the performing arts. The book examines basic procedures and problems in both documentary scholarship and cultural history. A practical guide, this study demonstrates how to construct historical events -- large and small -- and place them in relation to the political, social, and economic conditions, the artistic traditions, audience responses and values, and historical periods. Softcover, 346 pp. $31.95.

The Death of the Critic
Ronan McDonald
The critic has long been a reviled figure, at best the mere handmaiden of the 'creative' arts, at worst a parasite upon them. In an age of book clubs, celebrity endorsements and internet bloggers, what role is there now for the professional critic as an arbiter of artistic value? Ronan McDonald comes to the defense of the public critic by countering recent claims that all artistic value is simply relative and subjective and considers why high-profile public critics, such as William Empson, F.R. Leavis, or Lionel Trilling, become much rarer in the later 20th century. Softcover, 160 pp. $20.95.

How Theatre Began: An Introduction to the History of Drama
Nancy Forderer
The theatre of today -- TV, movies, and stage -- where and how did it all begin? What role did theatre play in the cultural history of the West? Why has theatre evolved to what it is today? Beginning with Greek drama and continuing through Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, French, Spanish, English and American forms, this DVD gives an overview of how modern theatre came to be. The great playwrights, trends and artistic styles are briefly described to give the student a general understanding of both the history and cultural importance of theatre. A very adaptable reference item for library and classroom use. DVD, $37.95.

Performance, Technology, & Science
Johannes Birringer
This fascinating volume explores interactive performance, installations, and Internet art in theatre, dance, and visual arts, as well as in the worlds of fashion, games, architecture, robotics, and artificial intelligence. The work of numerous internationally renowned artists, theatres, and dance companies demonstrates how techno-cultural shifts have transformed the digital into a mainstream phenomenon on a global scale, articulating startling views of the contemporary body. Softcover, 338 pp. $27.50.

Peter Hall's Bacchai
Jonathan Croall
On the National's Olivier stage, Peter Hall presented a stunningly imaginative production of Bacchai using masks, a new translation by Colin Teevan, original music by Harrison Birtwistle and designs by Alison Chitty. Jonathan Croall observed the rehearsal process in minute detail, regularly interviewing the actors and creative team as the production moved from readthrough to preview. This book offers an intimate and absorbing picture of how a team of world-class theatrical talents brought one of the masterpieces of Greek theatre to the stage. Softcover, 93 pp. $27.50.

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia
John Fleming
This guide provides a comprehensive critical introduction to Stoppard's Arcadia, giving students a much-needed overview of the play's background and context, including Stoppard's source material as well as full discussion of the text and its performance history to date. Softcover, 122 pp. $20.95.

August Wilson's Fences
Ladrica Menson-Furr
Critics and scholars have lauded August Wilson's work for its universality and its ability, especially in Fences, to transcend racial barriers and this play helped earn him the titles of "America's greatest playwright" and "African American Shakespeare." Softcover, 107 pp. $20.95.

David Mamet's Oleanna
David K. Sauer
Oleanna is a particularly complex play despite its apparent simplicity of form and content and this guide offers a theoretically informed introductory analysis. It offers students a comprehensive critical introduction to the play and includes new interpretations of the play text in the light of Mamet's recent playwriting developments and the intervening shifts in the political landscape. Softcover, 116 pp. $20.95.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Juliette Taylor-Batty & Mark Taylor-Batty
This guide provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to Waiting for Godot from the controversial first performances to recent productions, including its structure, style and characters, performance history and key production issues and choices. Softcover, $20.95.

The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies
Edited by Tracy C. Davis
Presenting a clear overview of the diverse approaches to Performance Studies, this Companion provides a complete guide for students and scholars seeking a perspective on current trends. Bridging live art practices with technological media, and social sciences with humanities, it reflects the hybrid and experimental nature of this vibrant discipline. Softcover, 192 pp. $33.95.

The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies
Christopher B. Balme
Providing thorough coverage of the methods and tools required in studying historical and contemporary theatre, this introduction examines the complexities of a rapidly changing and dynamic discipline. Softcover, 230 pp. $23.95.

Stage Directions: Writing on Theatre 1970-2008
Michael Frayn
Whatever form the theatre takes, whether it concerns the exploration of the atomic nucleus or the mechanics of farce, Michael Frayn sees it as involving the creation of an alternative world existing in its own right. Collected here for the first time, the essays of Michael Frayn has written about his own plays over the years form an essential commentary on his life and work. Hardcover, 268 pp. $39.00.

Tony Kushner's Angels in America
Ken Nielson
Angels in America paved a new way for American theatre in its combination of heightened theatricality and politics. With the scope of characters' sexual, class, and religous affiliations that Tony Kushner created, the play offers a unique possibility to discuss the construction of American identity in the late 1980s and 1990s. This guide provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to the play, including its structure, style, characters and key productions issues and choices. It also offers an overview of the performance history of Millenium Approaches and Perestroika including the HBO adaptation. Softcover, 136 pp. $18.95.

Marina Abramovic
Kristine Stiles, Klaus Biesenbach & Chrissie Iles
Since the early 1970s, Marina Abramovic has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form, exploring her physical and emotional limits in some of the most iconic works in contemporary art. Including a wealth of photographs, spanning her career, this volume explores Abramovic's life and art with a detailed survey, interview, essay, as well as some of the artist's own writings. Softcover, 158 pp. $59.95.

Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell
Barbara Ozieblo & Jerry Dickey
This book presents critical introductions to two of the most significant American dramatists of the early twentieth century. This is the first book to deal with Glaspell's and Treadwell's plays from a theatrical rather than literary perspective, and presents a comprehensive overview of their work from lesser know plays to seminal productions of Trifles and Machinal. Softcover, 228 pp. $36.95.

Theatre Studies: The Basics
Robert Leach
Theatre Studies: The Basics is designed as an introduction to the ever expanding field of theatre and performance studies. It is an indispensible resource for anyone interested in studying theatre in any capacity. It provides an overview of dramatic genres, from ancient tragedy through to modern devised theatre and political documentary drama, an introduction to theatre history and theories of performance and even critical audience studies. Softcover, 194 pp. $18.95.

The Necessity of Theater
Paul Woodruff
The Necessity of Theater analyzes the unique power of theater by separating it into the twin arts of watching and being watched. Characteristically thoughtful, probing, and original, Paul Woodruff makes a case for theater as a unique form of expression connected to our most human instincts. The Necessity of Theater should appeal to anyone seriously interested or involved in theater or performance. Hardcover, 251 pp. $29.95.

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Migrations of Gesture
Edited by Carrie Noland & Sally Ann Ness
Migrations of Gesture provides a complex theory on the value of gesture for understanding human behaviour. Juxtaposing distinct approaches to gesture in order to explore the ways in which they at once shape and are influenced by culture, the contributors examine the work of various writers along with cultural practices such as gang walking, ballet, and classical Indian dance. Softcover, 296 pp. $29.95.

Caryl Churchill's Top Girls
Alicia Tycer
Top Girls is one of Caryl Churchill's most well-known and often studied works, using an all female cast to critique bourgeois feminism during the Thatcher era. This guide provides a comprehensive critical introduction to Top Girls including new interpretations of the text in the light of Churchill's recent playwriting and the intervening shifts in the political landscape. Softcover, 134 pp. $20.95.

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
Peter L. Hays and Kent Nicholson
Death of a Salesman is a classic, a staple of school anthologies of American literature and of acting companies' repertoires. It has received world-wide productions, whether as a study of parent-child relationships, or as a critique of Western capitalism. This guide provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to the play. A detailed production analysis written by a professional director and practical exercises for actors and directors make it a uniquely practical resource for anyone studying the play. Softcover, 111 pp. $20.95.

Waiting for Godot: Character Studies
Paul Lawley
This book provides an introductory study of Beckett's most famous play, dealing not just with the four main characters but with the pairings that they form, and the implications of these pairings for the very idea of the character of the play. Softcover, 125 pp. $45.00.

Performance, [Performance] and Performers
Volume1: Conversations
Bruce Barber
Since the early 1960s, the field of performance studies has been fed by the thoery-building and historical writings of artist participants. As the first recognizable performmance scholar in Canada, Bruce Barber's published writings of the last three decades hace consistently displayed a convincing expertise and digestible fluency. This, the first of two volumes, contains a selection of Barber's interviews with some of the world's most influential performance artists. Softcover, 141 pp. $29.95.

Staging the Screen: The use of film and video in theatre
Greg Giesekam
Greg Giesekam raises critical and theoretical questions about the use of multimedia and intermedia, examining how the aesthetic strategies of key practitioners and changing approaches to cultural production have radically challenged dominant theatre practice. Extensively illustrated, this clear and accessible text provides detailed and evocative case studies of individual productions from a wide range of contemporary theatre companies. An invaluable resource for students wishing to navigate their way through an expanding and exciting area of theatre practice. Softcover, 280 pp. $27.95.

Multi-Media: Video Installation Performance
Nick Kaye
Multi-Media charts the development of multi-media video, installation and performance in a unique dialogue between theoretical analysis and specially commmissioned documentations by some of the world's foremost artists. Nick Kaye explores the interdisciplinary history and character of experimental multi-media practice. Softcover, 249 pp. $35.95.

London Stage in the 20th Century
Robert Tanitch
The London Stage is an encyclopedaeic view of the plays, players and performers of London's Wesr End throughout the last century. No other city came close to rivalling London in terms of the volume and quality of its theatrical productions between 1900 and 2000. No serious follower of the London theatre will be able to resist the temptation of this book and the compendium of knowledge and information it contains. Hardcover, 330 pp. $46.50.

The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio
Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi, Joe Keller & Nicholas Ridout
In the first English-language book to document their work, the company founders of Societas Raffaello Sanzio discuss their approach to theatre making with Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout. This is a significant collection of theoretical and practical reflections on the subject of theatre in the twenty-first century and an indispensible written and visual document of the company's work. Softcover, 274 pp. $37.50.

Dramatis Personae: The Rise of Medieval and Renaissance Theatre
Phillip Freund
Dramatis Personae, the third volume in the Stage by Stage series, traces the return of religious theatre and ritual, with Passion Plays, Mysteries and Moralities taking over classical works, producing whimsical new dramatic forms, as well as exalted musical innovations. Dramatis Personae is a valuable resource for teachers, students, stagecraft professionals and all those who love the theatre. Hardcover, 930 pp. $121.50.

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830
Edited by Jane Moody & Daniel O'Quinn
Written by leading international scholars, chapters in this volume cover subjects such as actors and acting, playwrights and performers such as James Quin and Sarah Siddons, and the major theatrical forms of the period such as comedy, melodrama and pantomime. The Companion explains what made the theatre such an important political, social and cultural venue for spectators from all classes of British society during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An essential guide to one of the most exciting and innovative periods in British theatrical history. Softcover, 285 pp. $30.95.

The Routledge Guide to Broadway
Ken Bloom
This is an A-to-Z reference guide aimed at students of performance, theatre history, direction and production, as well as anyone with an interest in Broadway. Includes a comprehensive history of Broadway theatre, focusing on key performers, writers, directors, plays, musicals, and the folklore of Broadway. Softcover, 288 pp. $23.95.

Broadway Babylon: Glamour, Glitz, and Gossip on the Great White Way
Boze Hadleigh
Discerning fact from fiction, quoting hundreds of players, and revealing the stories behind over a century of major headlines, this hilarious and poignant volume raises the curtain on a legacy of top-of-the-line talent, outsized and clashing personalities, unprecedented greed, embarrassing disasters, and barely masked discrimination. Written with affection and audacity its subject demands, Broadway Babylon celebrates life on the Great White Way--warts and all. Hardcover, 342 pp. $31.00.

Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre
Helen Nicholson
Applied Theatre offers an insight into theatre-making that takes place in communities across the world. It celebrates the gift of practice that takes place in different - and sometimes unglamorous - settings: prisons, schools, hostels for the homeless, care homes for the elderly, and on the street. Ideal for students and practitioners, Helen Nicholson's lively study poses critical questions about the efficacy of applied drama, prompting debate about the significance of theatre in society as a whole. Softcover, 196 pp. $33.95.

The Playbill Broadway Yearbook June 2006 - May 2007
Robert Viagas
Taking the form of a school yearbook, this third edition is packed with photos, facts and memorabilia fro the 2006-2007 Broadway Season. Crammed with backstage stories on all 67 Broadway production of the season gathered from excellent sources including dressers, stage doormen, stage managers and cast members, this is the definitive “ go-to” for Broadway fans everywhere. Hardcover. $37.95. Coming in September.

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Last modified December 28, 2009.
Please note that all prices are in Canadian dollars. All prices are subject to change without notice.