Writing and the Modern Stage

Writing and the Modern Stage PDF

Author: Julia Jarcho

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1108165842

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It is time to change the way we talk about writing in theater. This book offers a new argument that reimagines modern theater's critical power and places innovative writing at the heart of the experimental stage. While performance studies, German Theaterwissenschaft, and even text-based drama studies have commonly envisioned theatrical performance as something that must operate beyond the limits of the textual imagination, this book shows how a series of writers have actively shaped new conceptions of theater's radical potential. Engaging with a range of theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Jarcho reveals a modern tradition of 'negative theatrics,' whose artists undermine the here and now of performance in order to challenge the value and the power of the existing world. This vision emerges through surprising new readings of modernist classics - by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett - as well as contemporary American works by Suzan-Lori Parks, Elevator Repair Service, and Mac Wellman.

Mielziner

Mielziner PDF

Author: Mary C. Henderson

Publisher: Watson-Guptill Publications

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0823088235

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Jo Mielziner (1901-1976) was an acclaimed scenic designer of the Americanheatre. Over five decades his career spanned the flowering of the modernheatre in the USA, and he designed many of its most famous productions,ncluding "A Streetcar Named Desire", "Death of a Salesman", "Guys and Dolls"nd "Carousel". He worked with a roster of great playwrights, directors androducers on a staggering total of 260 shows, many of them theatricalremieres, but also including ballets, operas and motion pictures. Heioneered many concepts of design - such as the capturing of a visualetaphor for the production -that are taken for granted today. His influenceor succeeding generations has been enormous. This study covers his life andork and is illustrated with sketches and fully-rendered designs.

The Director & The Stage

The Director & The Stage PDF

Author: Edward Braun

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2014-03-10

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1408149257

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Beginning with the triple impulses of Naturalism, symbolism and the grotesque, the bulk of the book concentrates on the most famous directors of this century - Stanislavski, Reinhardt, Graig, Meyerhold, Piscator, Brecht, Artuaud and Grotowski. Braun's guide is more practical than theoretical, delineating how each director changed the tradition that came before him.

Spectral Characters

Spectral Characters PDF

Author: Sarah Balkin

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2019-07-31

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 0472131486

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Theater’s materiality and reliance on human actors has traditionally put it at odds with modernist principles of aesthetic autonomy and depersonalization. Spectral Characters argues that modern dramatists in fact emphasized the extent to which humans are fictional, made and changed by costumes, settings, props, and spoken dialogue. Examining work by Ibsen, Wilde, Strindberg, Genet, Kopit, and Beckett, the book takes up the apparent deadness of characters whose selves are made of other people, whose thoughts become exteriorized communication technologies, and whose bodies merge with walls and furniture. The ghostly, vampiric, and telepathic qualities of these characters, Sarah Balkin argues, mark a new relationship between the material and the imaginary in modern theater. By considering characters whose bodies respond to language, whose attempts to realize their individuality collapse into inanimacy, and who sometimes don’t appear at all, the book posits a new genealogy of modernist drama that emphasizes its continuities with nineteenth-century melodrama and realism.

The Theory of the Modern Stage

The Theory of the Modern Stage PDF

Author: Eric Bentley

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9781557832795

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(Applause Books). Including Antoin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, E. Gordon Craig, Luigi Pirandello, Konstantin Stanislavsky, W. B. Yeats, and Emile Zolaing.

Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage

Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage PDF

Author: Joel Berkowitz

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0814335047

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Collects leading scholars' insight on the plays, production, music, audiences, and political and aesthetic concerns of modern Yiddish theater. While Yiddish theater is best known as popular entertainment, it has been shaped by its creators' responses to changing social and political conditions. Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business showcases the diversity of modern Yiddish theater by focusing on the relentless and far-ranging capacity of its performers, producers, critics, and audiences for self-invention. Editors Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry have assembled essays from leading scholars that trace the roots of modern Yiddish drama and performance in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and span a century and a half and three continents, beyond the heyday of a Yiddish stage that was nearly eradicated by the Holocaust, to its post-war life in Western Europe and Israel. Each chapter takes its own distinct approach to its subject and is accompanied by an appendix consisting of primary material, much of it available in English translation for the first time, to enrich readers' appreciation of the issues explored and also to serve as supplementary classroom texts. Chapters explore Yiddish theater across a broad geographical span--from Poland and Russia to France, the United States, Argentina, and Israel and Palestine. Readers will spend time with notable individuals and troupes; meet creators, critics, and audiences; sample different dramatic genres; and learn about issues that preoccupied both artists and audiences. The final section presents an extensive bibliography of book-length works and scholarly articles on Yiddish drama and theater, the most comprehensive resource of its kind. Collectively these essays illuminate the modern Yiddish stage as a phenomenon that was constantly reinventing itself and simultaneously examining and questioning that very process. Scholars of Jewish performance and those interested in theater history will appreciate this wide-ranging volume.

The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater

The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater PDF

Author: Alyssa Quint

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0253038626

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Alyssa Quint focuses on the early years of the modern Yiddish theater, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Goldfaden (né Goldenfaden, 1840-1908) was one of the first playwrights to stage a commercially viable Yiddish-language theater, first in Romania and then in Russia. Goldfaden’s work was rapidly disseminated in print and his plays were performed frequently for Jewish audiences. Sholem Aleichem considered him as a forger of a new language that "breathed the European spirit into our old jargon." Quint uses Goldfaden’s theatrical works as a way to understand the social life of Jewish theater in Imperial Russia. Through a study of his libretti, she looks at the experiences of Russian Jewish actors, male and female, to explore connections between culture as artistic production and culture in the sense of broader social structures. Quint explores how Jewish actors who played Goldfaden’s work on stage absorbed the theater into their everyday lives. Goldfaden’s theater gives a rich view into the conduct, ideology, religion, and politics of Jews during an important moment in the history of late Imperial Russia.

Women, Writing, and the Theater in the Early Modern Period

Women, Writing, and the Theater in the Early Modern Period PDF

Author: Annette Kreis-Schinck

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0838638619

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The previous revolutionary period in England had changed the nation enough for women's participation in all areas of society, politics, and religion to become feasible and visible. This emergent visibility gave them a chance to become actresses after 1661, and sparked their desire to offer contributions to the public stage after 1669."--BOOK JACKET.

The Stage Life of Props

The Stage Life of Props PDF

Author: Andrew Sofer

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2010-02-22

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 047202633X

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In The Stage Life of Props, Andrew Sofer aims to restore to certain props the performance dimensions that literary critics are trained not to see, then to show that these props are not just accessories, but time machines of the theater. Using case studies that explore the Eucharistic wafer on the medieval stage, the bloody handkerchief on the Elizabethan stage, the skull on the Jacobean stage, the fan on the Restoration and early eighteenth-century stage, and the gun on the modern stage, Andrew Sofer reveals how stage props repeatedly thwart dramatic convention and reinvigorate theatrical practice. While the focus is on specific objects, Sofer also gives us a sweeping history of half a millennium of stage history as seen through the device of the prop, revealing that as material ghosts, stage props are a way for playwrights to animate stage action, question theatrical practice, and revitalize dramatic form. Andrew Sofer is Assistant Professor of English, Boston College. He was previously a stage director.