Download or read book The War Against Naturalism in the Contemporary American Theatre written by Robert J. Andreach and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book applies playwright John Guare's statement that, "the war against naturalism," is the history of the American theatre in the Twentieth-Century to selected plays by important contemporary American playwrights. Crucial to the argument is the recognition that a war presupposes two sides with neither side defeating the other, for if naturalistic theatre were to win, all theatre would be linear with characters circumscribed by their heredity and environment. If non-naturalistic theatre were to win, all theatre would be a hodgepodge of incoherent images. After isolating elements of a naturalistic play in its philosophical and mode of production sense, the book examines plays that wage war in language and character. The plays are all of the past few decades: some by Foreman and Wellman are disorienting; some by Albee, Groff, and Maxwell are controversial; others by Eno and Corthron are by playwrights on the verge of major careers; still others by Overmyer and Jenkin are drawing aspiring playwrights to them as models of new, exciting writing for the theatre. All of them, whether colliding genres and styles or destabilizing meaning as in plays by Gibson and Long or reclaiming a mystery as in plays by Ludlam, Greenberg, and Donagy, challenge naturalism's boundaries. The book not only provides an approach to the contemporary American drama-theatre, but also brings together playwrights not perceived as having any connections other than the fact that they are creating plays today. The text is appropriate for undergraduate students through professors and practitioners.
Download or read book Dramatic Structure in the Contemporary American Theatre written by Robert Andreach and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this follow-up to his 2012 The Contemporary American Dramatic Trilogy, Robert J. Andreach continues his unique study of dramatic structure as evidenced through the overarching themes of contemporary American trilogies. The themes of the first play in a trilogy, he shows, can be far different from those developed as the sequence continues, citing examples from playwrights as varied as David Rabe and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Quiara Alegráa Hudes. Looking at the ways structure in a tragedy can be substituted for the Aristotelian plot, Andreach makes clear that because creating or reinventing oneself can be such a primary motivating force in American culture, a character's failed attempt to change the structure or plot of his or her life may indeed be tragic. The dramatic trilogy has been flourishing for some time now in new works and revivals of older ones by American, British, and European playwrights, with examples such as the Hunger Games trilogy and the Fifty Shades trilogy moving more recently even into the popular sphere. Combining his skills as both a professional reviewer of theater and a literary critic, Robert Andreach is in a unique position to provide coherence to what most observers perceive as an unrelated welter of contemporary theatrical experiences.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater written by James Fisher and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 1003 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From legends like Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller to successful present-day playwrights like Neil LaBute, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet, some of the most important names in the history of theater are from the past 80 years. Contemporary American theater has produced some of the most memorable, beloved, and important plays in history, including Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Barefoot in the Park, Our Town, The Crucible, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Odd Couple. Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater presents the plays and personages, movements and institutions, and cultural developments of the American stage from 1930 to 2010, a period of vast and almost continuous change. It covers the ever-changing history of the American theater with emphasis on major movements, persons, plays, and events. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 1,500 cross-referenced dictionary entries. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the history of American theater.
Download or read book Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre written by Robert J. Andreach and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book refutes the claim that tragedy is no longer a vital and relevant part of contemporary American theatre. Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre examines plays by multiple contemporary playwrights and compares them alongside the works of America’s major twentieth-century tragedians: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. The book argues that tragedy is not only present in contemporary American theatre, but issues from an expectation fundamental to American culture: the pressure on characters to create themselves. Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre concludes that tragedy is vital and relevant, though not always in the Aristotelian model, the standard for traditional evaluation.
Download or read book Len Jenkin s Theatre written by Robert J. Andreach and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2011 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in his career, Len Jenkin identified two qualities that theatre should have: wonder and heart. Imagination creates wonder by transforming nature to suggest more than nature. Love engages the heart on the quest to experience the wonder, for though Jenkin is an experimental playwright, his plays are not abstruse symbols. They are tales that take salesmen and actresses, historical figures and fictional characters, through a Stein landscape and a Kafka story, pop culture, and recreated scenes from the Bible and The Canterbury Tales, The Aeneid, and Headlong Hall to an amusement park ride and a penal colony, a flophouse and a garden. Bodacious verbal and visual images build in power until they soar as pilgrims tell tales to pass the night while waiting to cross the river; Hawthorne, Sophie, and Melville on the beach hear the ever-encroaching kraken; and Margo Veil essays the roles that all questing mortals play in life.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion written by Geoffrey A. Baker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-22 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What should literature with political aims look like? This book traces two rival responses to this question, one prizing clarity and the other confusion, which have dominated political aesthetics since the late nineteenth century. Revisiting recurrences of the avant-garde experimentalism versus critical realism debates from the twentieth century, Geoffrey A. Baker highlights the often violent reductions at work in earlier debates. Instead of prizing one approach over the other, as many participants in those debates have done, Baker focuses on the manner in which the debate itself between these approaches continues to prove productive and enabling for politically engaged writers. This book thus offers a way beyond the simplistic polarity of realism vs. anti-realism in a study that is focused on influential strands of thought in England, France, and Germany and that covers well-known authors such as Zola, Nietzsche, Arnold, Mann, Brecht, Sartre, Adorno, Lukács, Beauvoir, Morrison, and Coetzee.
Download or read book Beyond Naturalism written by William W. Demastes and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1988-11-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demastes draws a distinction between the genus realism and its central species, naturalism. He studies, from an historical perspective, the growth of realism into the foremost aesthetic form in 20th century theater, and focuses on American playwrights who have used realism to challenge outdated and essentially naturalist thought, thereby infusing realism with fresh and contemporary perspectives of the world around them. Demastes analyzes the unique contributions of David Rabe, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Charles Fuller, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman, and assesses their overall critical reception. ISBN 0-313-26320-5: $35.95.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Drama written by Jeffrey H. Richards and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the history of American drama from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It describes origins of early republican drama and its evolution during the pre-war and post-war periods. It traces the emergence of different types of American drama including protest plays, reform drama, political drama, experimental drama, urban plays, feminist drama and realist plays. This volume also analyzes the works of some of the most notable American playwrights including Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller and those written by women dramatists.
Download or read book Approaches to the Contemporary American Theatre written by Robert J. Andreach and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a series of essays on contemporary theatre in the United States"--
Download or read book John Guare s Theatre written by Robert J. Andreach and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1960s to the present day, John Guare’s plays have ranged from one-act to cyclic, realistic to surrealistic, naturalistic to experimental, and tragic to comic dramas. This study’s approach to the cornucopia the playwright himself provided when in an interview he gave a fundamental aesthetic principle of his craft. Like a person—and Guare’s plays develop the personal as well as the artistic self—a play must be grounded in reality; only then can it soar. The ground is traditional theatre with characters, no matter how larger than life they can be, and plot, no matter how illogical it can be. The soaring is in interrupting the action with monological narratives and musical interludes, bringing characters back from the dead, and having the action take hairpin turns into a mixture of genres and styles, modes and tones. In verbal and visual images, the flight invokes works by authors as varied as Aeschylus and Whitman, Dante and Feydeau, Verdi and Romberg. Soaring from ground to new ground, the theatre creates the transmission of the American heritage in Lake Hollywood, an idealism corrupted by a fraudulent American Dream in Lydie Breeze, and the recovery of the past in A Few Stout Individuals. As Guare said about his plays: they “interconnect.”
Download or read book The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights written by Christopher Innes and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unrivalled in its coverage of recent work and writers, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights surveys and analyses the breadth, vitality and development of theatrical work to emerge from America over the last fifty years. This authoritative guide leads you through the work of 25 major contemporary American playwrights, discussing more than 140 plays in detail. Written by a team of 25 eminent international scholars, each chapter provides: · a biographical introduction to the playwright's work; · a survey and concise analysis of the writer's most important plays; · a discussion of their style, dramaturgical concerns and critical reception; · a bibliography of published plays and a select list of critical works. Among the many Tony, Obie and Pulitzer prize-winning playwrights included are Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Paula Vogel and Neil LaBute. The abundance of work analysed enables fresh, illuminating conclusions to be drawn about the development of contemporary American playwriting.
Download or read book Contemporary American Drama written by Annette Saddik and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It focuses on representative plays and performance texts that experiment with form and content, discussing influential playwrights and performance artists such as Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlum, Anna Deavere Smith, Karen Finley and Will Power, alongside avant-garde theatre groups. Saddik traces the development of contemporary drama since 1945, and discusses the cross-cultural impact of postwar British and European innovations on American theatre from the 1950s to the present day in order to examine the performance of American identity. She argues that contemporary American theatre is primarily a postmodern drama of inclusion and diversity that destabilizes the notion of fixed identity and questions the nature of reality.
Download or read book Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre written by Robert J. Andreach and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Exploring the theatre from the 1960s to the present, Robert J. Andreach shows the various ways in which the contemporary American theatre creates a personal, theatrical, and national self." "Andreach argues that the contemporary American theatre creates multiple selves that reflect and give voice to the many communities within our multicultural society. These selves are fragmented and enclaved, however, which makes necessary a counter movement that seeks, through interaction among the various parts, to heal the divisions within, between, and among them." --Book Jacket.
Download or read book David Belasco written by Lise-Lone Marker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneer of stage naturalism, David Belasco has come to be universally recognized as one of the first important directors in the history of the American stage. Lise-Lone Marker's book is a full-length stylistic analysis and re-evaluation of his scenic art. Based on a rich body of primary sources, among which are Belasco's promptbooks and papers, the book synthesizes the aims, methods, and techniques inherent in the naturalistic production style that Belasco developed during the six decades of his career. The elements of that style—the magic reality of his stage settings, his innovations in plastic lighting, his directorial method—are also seen in the context of theatrical developments elsewhere. On the basis of this synthesis. Professor Marker reconstructs and analyzes four of Belasco's most important productions, each representative of a distinct phase of his directorial art. Her explorations uncover much new information about Belasco and the American theatre around the turn of the century. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Naturalism in Theatre written by Kenneth Pickering and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible survey of the development of naturalism and its effects on modern-day theatre. Taking into account the philosophical, scientific and aesthetic ideas that constituted the movement during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book examines why naturalism is still a dominant mode of performance in theatre.
Download or read book Modern Theatre written by Oscar Gross Brockett and published by Allyn & Bacon. This book was released on 1982 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contemporary American Theatre written by Bruce King and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
