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An Introduction to: The Art of Theatre
Marsh Cassady
A comprehensive text--past, present, and future - The Art of Theatre explains the classic definition of theatre and drama; their structure; style and genre; architecture and space in Part I. Part II analyzes the production; the playwright; the actor; the director; the designers and supporting artists; the business side of theatre, and the audience and the critic. Part III contains theatre's history, explaining its beginnings; medieval, Renaissance, seventeenth to eighteenth-century theatre, and nineteenth to twenty-first-century theatre. Softcover, 355 pp. $29.95.
The Comic Mask in the Comedia dell'Arte
Antonio Fava
The mask--as object, symbol, character, theatrical practice, even spectacle--is the central metaphor around which Antonio Fava builds his discussion of structure, themes, characters, and methods. His book combines historical fact, personal experience, philosophical speculation, and passionate opinion. Including period drawings, prints, and color photographs of leather masks made by Fava himself, The Comic Mask in the Commedia dell'Arte is a work of singular insight into one of the world's most venerable forms of theater. Softcover, 182 pp. $50.95.
The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett
Ronan McDonald
This is an accessible introduction to one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, explaining how we might interpret famously difficult and experimental works such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days, and providing an overview of Beckett and his time. Softcover, 140 pp. $23.95.
The Cambridge Companion to The Actress
Maggie B. Gale & John Stokes
This is a collection of original essays on the cultural role of performing women on stage and on screen, throughout history and across continents - from Nell Gwyn to Lily Langtry, from Bernhardt to Peggy Ashcroft, from Joyce Grenfell to Vanessa Redgrave, from Ellen Terry to Halle Berry. Topics covered include cross-dressing, solo performance, racial constraints, recent Shakespeare, and the actress in early photography and on film. Softcover, 348 pp. $34.95.
The Cambridge Companion to Brecht
Peter Thomson & Glendyr Sacks
This updated edition properly retains much that was in the original Companion, but also introduces new voices and themes. It brings together the contrasting views of major critics and active practitioners and contains new essays on Brecht's early experience of cabaret, his significance in the development of film theory and his unique approach to dramaturgy. A detailed calendar of Brecht's life and work and a selective bibliography of English criticism complete this overview of a writer who constantly aimed to provoke. Softcover, 333 pp. $28.95.
Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution
Pascale Casanova
In this fascinating new exploration of Samuel Beckett's work, Pascale Casanova argues that Beckett's reputation rests on a pervasive misreading of his oeuvre, which neglects entirely the literary revolution he instigated. Reintroducing the historical into the heart of this body of work, Casanova provides an arresting portrait of Beckett as radically subversive and, in the process, presents the key to some of the most profound enigmas of Beckett's writing. Hardcover, 119 pp. $30.00.
Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker
Karoline Gritzner & David Ian Rabey
This collection of essays is the first to consider the full range of Barker's theatrical objectives and achievements, and reflects his international status as an artistic thinker and practitioner. Contributors from around the world consider key events and themes in Barker's plays such as death, sexuality, performance, blindness, politics, eroticism and cruelty. Overviews of Barker's career explore his rejection of standard dramatic and theatrical techniques and his pursuit of a new tragic form. Softcover, 240 pp. $37.95.
Living Justice: Love, Freedom, and the Making of The Exonerated
Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen
In 2000, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen embarked on a tour across America.
They were a pair of young actors from New York who wanted to learn
more about the country's exonerated -- men and women who had been sentenced
to die for crimes they didn't commit, and who were freed amidst overwhelming
evidence of their innocence. The result of their journey was The Exonerated. Living Justice is Jessica and Erik's fascinating account
of the creation of their play. Softcover, 310 pp. $19.00.
Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems
Nicholas Ridout
Why do actors get stage fright? What is so embarassing about joining in?
Why not work with animals and children, and why is it so hard to
collapse into helpless laughter when things go wrong? In trying to
answer these questions -- usually ignored by theatre scholarship
but of enduring interest to theatre professionals and audiences alike
-- Nicholas Ridout attempts to explain the relationship between these
apparently unwanted and anomalous phenomena and the wider social
and political meanings of the modern theatre. Softcover, 197 pp.
$38.95.
Outsider: John Rockwell on the Arts, 1967-2006
John Rockwell
This compliation by longtime New York Times music, dance and arts critic
John Rockwell features the renowned journalist's own seleciton of
his finest, most pungent criticism and commentary from 1967 to the
present. These writings epitomize Rockwell's unique vision of the
arts scene over the last 40 years. Any literate reader, any lover
of culture in its full range and scope, from genre to genre, high
to low, will relish Rockwell's trenchant, witty, frank analysis.
Hardcover, 544 pp. $45.95.
Stretching My Mind
Edward Albee
All throughout his playwriting career, Edward Albee also managed to bring
his singular critical force to a large body of nontheatrical prose. Stretching My Mind collects for the first time the author's writings
about theatre, literature, the visual arts, and the political and
cultural battlegrounds that have defined our times. Here he discusses
artistic figures as varied as Samuel Beckett, Carson McCullers, Noel
Coward, Lee Krasner, Eugene Ionesco, Louise Nevelson, James Purdy,
Lillian Ross, Milton Avery, and Uta Hagen, among others. Hardcover,
294 pp. $33.95.
Millenial Stages: Essays and Reviews: 2001-2005
Robert Brunstein
In this wise, witty, and wide-ranging collection of recent writings, Robert
Brustein examines critical issues relating to theatre in the post-9/11
years, analyzing specific plays, emerging and established performers,
and theatrical production throughout the world. Brustein relates
our theatre to our society in a manner that reminds us why the
performing arts matter. Hardcover, 282 pp. $49.00.
All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater
Benjamin Bennett
All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater is the first book to consider
why, in the Western tradition (and only in the Western tradition),
theatrical drama is regarded as its own literary or poetic type,
when the criteria needed to differentiate drama from other forms
of writing do not resemble the criteria by which types of prose
or verse are ordinarily distinguised. Bennett's historical investigations
into theoretical works ranging from Aristotle to Artaud, Brecht,
and Diderot suggest that the attempt to include drama in the system
of Western literature causes certain specific incongruities that,
in his view, have the salutary effect of preserving the otherwise
endangered possibility of a truly liberal, progressive or revolutionary
literature. Hardcover, 241 pp. $51.95.

Friedrich Durrenmatt: Selected Writings, Volume 3: Essays
Joel Agee, Kenneth J. Northcott & Brian Evenson
Though virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, Durrenmatt's
essays are among his most impressive achievements. Their range
alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art,
literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. Most of the
essays appear here for the first time in English, and all have
been expertly translated by Joel Agee. Durrenmatt has long been
considered a great writer, but one unfairly neglected in the modern
world of letters. With the three-volume Selected Writings (the
other volumes gather the best of Durrenmatt's plays and fictions),
a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.
Hardcover, 201 pp. $37.95.
The
Cambridge Companion to Moliere
David Bradby & Andrew Calder
A broad and detailed introduction to Moliere and his plays, this Companion
evokes his own theatrical career, his theatres and patrons, the performers
and theatre staff with whom he worked, and the various publics he
and his troups entertained with such success. It looks at his particular
brand of comedy and satire. L'Ecole des femmes, Le
Tartuffe, Dom
Juan, Le Misanthrope, L'Avare and Les
Femmes savantes are examined
from various different viewpoints. The comedies-ballet are reinstated
to the central position which they held in his oeuvre in Moliere's
own lifetime. The Companion looks at looks at modern directors' theatre,
exploring the central role played by productions of his work in successive
'revolutions' in the dramatic arts in France. Softcover, 242 pp.
$34.95.
Henrik
Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism
Toril Moi
Henrik Ibsen's standing as a founder of modern theatre is unquestioned;
yet to many he is seen as a dull realist, with little significance
to the nineteenth-century's larger cultural trajectory. One hundred
years after his death, Toril Moi presents a radical new appraisal.
Ibsen is here an astonishing innovator; a powerful influence on a
generation of European writers; a painter and philosopher whose clear-eyed
chronicling of relationships overturned idealism, the dominant aesthetic
of his age. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism rewrites nineteenth-century
literary history, placing Ibsen in his rightful place alongside Baudelaire,
Flaubert, and Manet as a founder of European modernism. Hardcover,
382 pp. $48.95.
The
Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre
Janette Dillon
Covering early English theatre from the earliest recorded vernacular
texts in the late medieval period to the closing of the theatres
in 1642, this introduction gives an accessible overview of the historical
development of theatre. The five chapters focus on: Place of performance,
Actors and audiences, Writers and the place of the theatre, Genre
and tradition, and Instruction and spectacle. Softcover, 296 pp.
$28.95.
Chekhov:
The Cherry Orchard
James N. Loehlin
Chekhov's masterpiece, about a Russian family losing its
ancestral home, combines a lament for a vanishing past with a hopeful
dream of the future. In the century since its first performance, The Cherry Orchard has undergone a wide range of conflicting interpretations:
tragic and comic, naturalistic and symbolic, reactionary and radical.
This study traces the performance history of one of the landmark
plays of the modern theatre. Considering the work of such directors
as Anatoly Efros, Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook, and Peter Stein, Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard explores the way different artists,
periods, and cultures have reinvented Chekhov's poignant comedy
of failure and hope. Softcover, 245 pp. $28.95.
Women
in American Theatre
Third Edition
Helen Chinoy & Linda Walsh Jenkins
This new edition of Women in American Theatre, the
first full-scale revision since 1987, collects interviews and essays
that explore and celebrate the complete spectrum of women's contributions
to the theatre
field, beginning with female rites, such as beauty pageants and Native
American performance; through in-depth coverage of actresses, playwrights,
and feminist theatres. A new chapter, "Voices at the Millenium," profiles
cutting edge women working in the field today.
Softcover, 560 pp. $27.95.
Stop
the Show!
Brad Schreiber
In Stop the Show! Brad Schreiber has compiled the funniest, most frightening,
and most truly bizarre stories of top directors, actors, playwrights,
and technicians from the nineteenth century to today: stories about
missed entrances and exits; onstage, unscripted fights between performers;
improvised lines; accidental pratfalls; falling scenery; and so much
more.
Softcover, 262 pp. $19.95.
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