Download or read book Plays by Women from the Contemporary American Theater Festival written by Susan Miller and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based at Shepherd University, in West Virginia, the Contemporary American Theater Festival is nationally and internationally recognized as a home for playwrights and the development and production of new plays. The Festival makes it a priority to celebrate and produce playwrights with strong, distinct voices, with a core value to tell diverse stories. This anthology of work provides plays that speak to one of the most compelling virtues of artists everywhere – freedom of speech. A necessary volume of women playwrights' work, ranging from a two-time Obie Award-winning author to emerging writers just beginning their careers, it represents a group of women who vary in age, race and sexual orientation and offers an invitation to artistic leaders, scholars and students to embrace gritty, thought-provoking new dramatic work. Edited by The Festival's Producing Directors Peggy McKowen and Ed Herendeen, this anthology features an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage. Each of the five powerful plays is followed by an informative and discursive playwright interview conducted by Sharon J. Anderson that contextualizes and develops the works within the wider context of the annual festival. The plays include: Gidion's Knot by Johnna Adams The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess Memoirs of a Forgotten Man by D.W Gregory Dead and Breathing by Chisa Hutchinson 20th Century Blues by Susan Miller

Download or read book Plays by Women from the Contemporary American Theater Festival written by Susan Miller and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based at Shepherd University, in West Virginia, the Contemporary American Theater Festival is nationally and internationally recognized as a home for playwrights and the development and production of new plays. The Festival makes it a priority to celebrate and produce playwrights with strong, distinct voices, with a core value to tell diverse stories. This anthology of work provides plays that speak to one of the most compelling virtues of artists everywhere – freedom of speech. A necessary volume of women playwrights' work, ranging from a two-time Obie Award-winning author to emerging writers just beginning their careers, it represents a group of women who vary in age, race and sexual orientation and offers an invitation to artistic leaders, scholars and students to embrace gritty, thought-provoking new dramatic work. Edited by The Festival's Producing Directors Peggy McKowen and Ed Herendeen, this anthology features an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage. Each of the five powerful plays is followed by an informative and discursive playwright interview conducted by Sharon J. Anderson that contextualizes and develops the works within the wider context of the annual festival. The plays include: Gidion's Knot by Johnna Adams The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess Memoirs of a Forgotten Man by D.W Gregory Dead and Breathing by Chisa Hutchinson 20th Century Blues by Susan Miller

Download or read book The Cake written by Bekah Brunstetter and published by Concord Theatricals. This book was released on 2018 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Della makes cakes, not judgment calls – those she leaves to her husband, Tim. But when the girl she helped raise comes back home to North Carolina to get married, and the fiancé is actually a fiancée, Della’s life gets turned upside down. She can’t really make a cake for such a wedding, can she? For the first time in her life, Della has to think for herself.

Download or read book Sheepdog written by Kevin Artigue and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amina and Ryan are both officers on the Cleveland police force. Amina is black, Ryan is white, and they are falling deeply and passionately in love. When an officer-involved shooting roils the department, small cracks in their relationship widen into a chasm of confusion and self-doubt. A mystery and a love story with high stakes and no easy answers, SHEEPDOG fearlessly examines police violence, interracial love, and class in the 21st century.

Download or read book Gidion s Knot written by Johnna Adams and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 2014-03-03 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of a parent/teacher conference, a grieving mother and an emotionally overwhelmed primary school teacher have a fraught conversation about the tragic suicide of the mother's son, Gidion. Gidion may have been bullied severely—or he may have been an abuser. As his story is slowly uncovered, the women try to reconstruct a satisfying explanation for Gidion's act and come to terms with excruciating feelings of culpability.

Download or read book Kick Ass Plays for Women written by Jane Shepard and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 2005 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2f per play / Drama / Unit set Award-winning new playwright Jane Shepard comes to print with four powerful short plays for women. Edgy, original, and with a darkly funny humanity, here are four pieces that give new muscle to actresses, providing roles of exceptional range. All successfully produced on the New York stage, each play features two-woman casts, with age-open roles, in work that explores our tender, brave, and sometimes brutal search for meaning. Includes both comedy and drama, with

Download or read book Performing Gender Violence written by B. Ozieblo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-01-02 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Violence against women in plays bywomen has earned little mention. This revolutionary collection fills that gap, focusing on plays by American women dramatists, written in the last thirty years, that deal with different forms of gender violence. Each author discusses specific manifestations of violence in carefully selected plays: psychological, familial, war-time, and social injustice. This book encompasses the theatrical devices used to represent violence on the stage in an age of virtual, immediate reality as much as the problematics of gender violence in modern society.

Download or read book One Night written by Charles Fuller and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After surviving a fire in a homeless shelter, two Iraqi Freedom vets, Alicia G. and Horace Lloyd, are sent to a motel outside the city where they will be safe for the night. Both are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder-- Alicia as a consequence of a gang rape by three fellow soldiers while in Iraq and Horace from battlefield pressure linked to his Army MOS as a sniper. The two of them have been together for more than nine months, Horace acting as a kind of helpmate to Alicia, who was so traumatized by the rape that she can't even consider having a normal relationship with a man. Their arrival at the motel introduces them to the owner Doug Mensing, called Meny, and the beginning of our understanding of the trials sexually abused women face in the American military. Alicia refused to stay silent like so many other women and fought while she was in the Army to have the rapists punished. But only two of the men were charged and merely given pay reductions, while the third man was never named or prosecuted. Once discharged, she received little help from the VA. She found herself rejected by a religious mother who blamed everything that happened to Alicia on a "God-less army peopled by marching masturbators." Exhausted from the loss of all their possessions, and having reached a motel they thought would provide them with shelter, Alicia and Horace find themselves instead in a highway bordello. Here, throughout one night, old wounds are opened, flashbacks recount their histories and the truth of events they both hoped were over emerge from the past to color the rest of their future.

Download or read book Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women written by Penny Farfan and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how women playwrights illuminate the contemporary world and contribute to its reshaping

Download or read book Women in American Theatre written by Helen Krich Chinoy and published by Theatre Communications Grou. This book was released on 2006 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First full-scale revision since 1987.

Download or read book American Next Wave written by Stella Fawn Ragsdale and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-03-10 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of four plays by new American writers curated from the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater, New York. These plays represent the finest works developed by the Public Theater, addressing contemporary social preoccupations: race, class, heritage, economic hardship, family values and identity. The plays included are: Perish by Stella Fawn Ragsdale: when Porter's father kidnaps her son, she must go back to the woods of East Tennessee to find him, where she is distracted by a mysterious firebird. Textured with poetry and grit, this play follows the plight of women in Appalachia and the disappearance of the working class. The Hour of Feeling by Mona Mansour: in 1967, fuelled by a love of English Romantic poetry, a young Palestinian academic, Adham, and his new wife, Abir, take a trip to London, where he will deliver a career defining lecture. While the situation in his home "country" deteriorates and his marriage threatens to dissolve, Adham confronts his fear of failure and the reality that he may be an outsider no matter where he goes. Bethany by Laura Marks: when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and the going has gotten very tough indeed for Crystal. Her job is in jeopardy, her house has been repossessed and her daughter taken by social services. It's time for Crystal to get going. But in her effort to get her daughter back and put her life on the right track, Crystal is forced to question just how far she's willing to go to survive. Neighbors by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Black face, not on my doorstep, not today. Richard Patterson is not happy. The family of black actors that has moved in next door is rowdy, tacky, shameless, and uncouth. And they are not just invading his neighborhood-they're infiltrating his family, his sanity, and his entirely post-racial lifestyle. This wildly theatrical, explosive play on race is an unconventional comedy which uses minstrelsy both to explore the history of black theater and to confront tensions in 'post-racial' America.

Download or read book The Theatrical Professoriate written by Emily Roxworthy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that today’s professoriate has become increasingly theatrical, largely as a result of neoliberal policies in higher education, but also in response to an anti-intellectual scrutiny that has become pervasive throughout the Western world. The Theatrical Professoriate: Contemporary Higher Education and Its Academic Dramas examines how the Western professoriate increasingly finds itself enacting command performances that utilize scripting, characterization, surrogation, and spectacle—the hallmarks of theatricality—toward neoliberal ends. Roxworthy explores how the theatrical nature of today’s professoriate and the resultant glut of performances about academia on stage and screen have contributed to a highly ambivalent public fascination with academia. She further documents the "theatrical turn" witnessed in American higher education, as academic institutions use performance to intervene in the diversity issues and disciplinary disparities fueled by neoliberalism. By analyzing academic dramas and their audience reception alongside theoretical approaches, the author reveals how contemporary academia drives the professoriate to perform in what seem like increasingly artificial ways. Ideal for practitioners and students of education, ethnic, and science studies, The Theatrical Professoriate deftly intervenes in Performance Studies’ still-unsettled debates over the differential impact of live versus mediated performances.

Download or read book Contemporary Plays by Women of Color written by Roberta Uno and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the two decades since the first edition of Contemporary Plays by Women of Color was published, its significance to the theatrical landscape in the United States has grown exponentially. Work by female writers and writers of color is more widely produced, published, and studied than ever before. Drawing from an exciting range of theaters, large and small, from across the country, Roberta Uno brings together an up-to-date selection of plays from renowned and emerging playwrights tackling a variety of topics. From the playful to the painful, this revised and updated edition presents a rich array of voices, aesthetics, and stories for a transforming America.

Download or read book Lidless written by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-03-10 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's powerful drama Lidless asks important and difficult questions: is guilt a necessary form of moral reckoning, or is it an obstacle to be overcome? Will the price of national political amnesia be paid only by the next generation - the daughters and sons who were never there? It's been fifteen years since Guantánamo, fifteen years since Bashir last saw his U.S. Army interrogator, Alice. Bashir is now dying of a disease of the liver, an organ that he believes is the home of the soul. He tracks down Alice in Texas and demands that she donate half her liver as restitution for the damage wrought during her interrogations. But Alice doesn't remember Bashir; a PTSD pill trial she participated in while in the army has left her without any memory of her time there. It is only when her inquisitive fourteen-year-old daughter begins her own investigation that the fragile peace of mind that Alice's drug-induced oblivion enabled begins to falter. Although politically engaged and topical, the play's significance is further-reaching and taps into timeless questions. Lidless portrays the inevitable consequences of moral crimes, in spite of the lapse of time and the oblivion of the perpetrators. Guilt inexorably engenders retribution with a horrible symmetry, so comeuppance is exacted upon what is held most dear. Within a modern and politically-charged setting, Lidless has a tight plot of cyclical, interfamilial violence and inevitable, if blindly executed, vengeance.

Download or read book Dramaturgy The Basics written by Anne M. Hamilton and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dramaturgy: The Basics introduces the art of dramaturgy, explaining how dramaturgy works, what a dramaturg is, and how to appreciate their unique contribution to theatre-making. A wide-ranging account of the role of this vital element of theatre helps students and aspiring performance makers to apply dramaturgy to a full spectrum of theatrical disciplines. This guidebook teaches dramatic theories and script analysis as essential skills for aspiring dramaturgs and illustrates the various methods of reading for specific functions of dramaturgy. Dramaturgy: The Basics offers practical step-by-step instructions on how to practice production dramaturgy, dramaturgy of new work, translation, adaptation, devised theatre, site-specific theatre, literary management, criticism, editing, producing, and dramaturgical innovation, with detailed questions to consider at each stage of the process. This book aims to help students develop a dramaturgical mindset, enabling them to build a critical, inquisitive, and socially conscious perspective that is beneficial in all professions and relationships. Resource lists, further reading guides, and chapter summaries make this an outstanding guidebook. An essential read for anyone hoping to make, understand, or discuss theatre, Dramaturgy: The Basics provides a clear, accessible resource for approaching this integral but often misunderstood facet of theatre-making.

Download or read book 20th Century Blues written by Susan Miller and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four women meet once a year for a ritual photo shoot, chronicling their changing (and aging) selves as they navigate love, careers, children, and the complications of history. But when these private photographs threaten to go public, relationships are tested, forcing the women to confront who they are and how they’ll deal with whatever lies ahead. 20TH CENTURY BLUES is a sharply funny and evocative play by Obie Award and Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winner Susan Miller that questions our place in the world and with one another.

Download or read book Dance We Do written by Ntozake Shange and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her first posthumous work, the revered poet crafts a personal history of Black dance and captures the careers of legendary dancers along with her own rhythmic beginnings. Many learned of Ntozake Shange’s ability to blend movement with words when her acclaimed choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf made its way to Broadway in 1976, eventually winning an Obie Award the following year. But before she found fame as a writer, poet, performer, dancer, and storyteller, she was an untrained student who found her footing in others’ classrooms. Dance We Do is a tribute to those who taught her and her passion for rhythm, movement, and dance. After 20 years of research, writing, and devotion, Ntozake Shange tells her history of Black dance through a series of portraits of the dancers who trained her, moved with her, and inspired her to share the power of the Black body with her audience. Shange celebrates and honors the contributions of the often unrecognized pioneers who continued the path Katherine Dunham paved through the twentieth century. Dance We Do features a stunning photo insert along with personal interviews with Mickey Davidson, Halifu Osumare, Camille Brown, and Dianne McIntyre. In what is now one of her final works, Ntozake Shange welcomes the reader into the world she loved best.