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Foreign Rights: Available Now: TheaterArthur Miller's America by Enoch Brater Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism by Mike Sell From Inner Worlds to Outer Space by Dan Kwong The Haunted Stage by Marvin Carlson Language and Theatre by Marvin Carlson Looking into the Abyss by Arnold Aronson The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson by Harry J. Elam, Jr. Playing Underground by Stephen J. Bottoms Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of ChangeEnoch Brater Rights: World Arthur Miller's America contains essays by international scholars and critics, offering a fresh appraisal of playwright Arthur Miller's artistic and cultural contributions to American theater. The book traces Arthur Miller's commitment to forging a uniquely American theater and his development from student activist to mature playwright. It also contains contributions by some of the most renowned Miller scholars, as well as younger critics and theorists, and includes an afterword by New York Times critic Mel Gussow. Enoch Brater is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage, and editor of the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. Fall 2004 Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts MovementMike Sell Rights: World Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism is a path-breaking book that looks at the American avant-garde during the Cold War period, focusing on the interrelated questions of performance practices (theater, performance art, public activism), cultural resistance, and the politics of criticism and scholarship in the U.S. counterculture. It develops three case studies: the Living Theatre's influential production The Connection, the earliest productions of performance art, and the poetry and plays of the Black Arts Movement, and examines the role of the scholar and critic in the cultural struggles of radical artists and activists. The book also explores the popularization of the avant-garde, when subversive art is discovered by the mass media, gobbled up by the marketplace, and eventually finds its way onto the syllabi of college and university courses. Mike Sell is one of the best young scholars currently working in the fields of theater and performance studies, with intellectual interests that reach well beyond those fields. He is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and holds a PhD from the University of Michigan. Fall 2005 From Inner Worlds to Outer Space: The Multimedia Performances of Dan KwongDan Kwong Rights: World Praise for Dan Kwong: "Somehow, Kwong has held onto his sense of childlike wonder about the cosmos, and that awe informs his free-wheeling and uproarious performance." "He weaves striking, multi-focus stage pictures around simple monologues about his Chinese and Japanese grandfathers, ironic accounts of his own childhood, and litanies of the trials facing Asian American males." "Saturated with high-spirited enthusiasm . . . a refreshingly forthright approach to his often dark material." "Kwong's humor is warm and loving . . . it stems from a delightfully twisted taste for the absurdity of human behavior. . . . Be prepared to laugh, to be moved, and to fall in love with a performer." Dan Kwong's performances delve into the complexities of growing up as a working-class Chinese-Japanese-American male in L.A., land of Hollywood and Disney. Kwong's remarkable performances, a potent array of multimedia effects and athletic physicalization, investigate questions of identity and the intersecting effects of race, culture, class, gender, and sexuality. From Inner Worlds to Outer Space brings together Kwong's scripts with illuminating commentary by critic Robert Vorlicky. The book includes interviews that reveal Kwong's personal and artistic influences, his evolution as an artist, and his philosophical and technical approach to art-making. Dan Kwong is a veteran performance artist, writer, teacher, and visual artist. Robert Vorlicky is Professor of Theater at New York University, and author of Act Like a Man: Challenging Identities in American Drama and Tony Kushner in Conversation. July 2004 The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Figures in American Stage History in the Pre-Stonewall EraBilly J. Harbin, Kimberley Bell Marra and Robert A. Schanke Rights: World This encyclopedic survey collects biographies of many pre-eminent men and women of the American stage in the pre-Stonewall era, making the presence of gays and lesbians in American theater history more visible and accessible, and promoting a richer understanding and appreciation of their enormous cultural contributions. The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy includes concise biographies of more than 100 important actors, playwrights, composers, directors, designers, dancers, producers, managers, critics, choreographers, and technicians. The book also contributes to continuing efforts to recover lost gay and lesbian history, and builds on the historical recovery work of two previous UMP volumes, Passing Performances (1998) and Staging Desire (2002). Billy J. Harbin is Professor of Theatre Emeritus at Louisiana State University. Kimberley Bell Marra is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Iowa. Robert A. Schanke is Professor of Theatre Emeritus at Central College, Pella, Iowa. Spring 2005 The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory MachineMarvin Carlson Rights: World* Throughout theatrical history, almost every element in stage production has been recycled. Indeed any regular theatergoer is familiar with the experience of a performance that conjures the ghosts of previous productions. The Haunted Stage explores this theatrical déjà vu, and examines how it stimulates the spectator's memory. Relating the dynamics of reception to the interaction between theater and memory, The Haunted Stage uncovers the ways in which the memory of the spectator informs the process of theatrical reception. Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. June 2003 *World Arabic rights are not available. Language and TheatreMarvin Carlson Rights: World This important volume presents a unique account of how language has been employed in the theatre not simply as a means of communication, but as a stylistic device essential to theatre's function. The book begins by investigating various "levels" of language—high and low style, prose and poetry—and the ways in which these have been used historically to mark social positions and relationships. It then considers a range of examples of multiple-language and multiple-dialect theatre, from classical Greece to the postmodern era. The volume treats with special attention the triangulation of language in the postcolonial world, including the theatrical dynamics of Arabic and Indian dialects juxtaposed with French and English. Finally, Carlson considers layering of languages in the theatre, such as with supertitles or simultaneous singing. Language and Theatre offers a comprehensive exploration of the political, social, and historical implications of staged language, drawing important conclusions about the role of language in cultural power. Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Center. He is author of Performance: A Critical Introduction; Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present; and The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, among others. Fall 2005 Looking into the Abyss: Essays on ScenographyArnold Aronson Rights: World Looking into the Abyss collects essays by the internationally renowned historian and theorist of theatrical set design Arnold Aronson. The book fills a lacuna in the scholarly literature on set design, lighting, and mise-en-scene. Most scenographers are stage artists, not writers or theorists—but Aronson is all three. Looking into the Abyss' appeal extends beyond other practitioners of stage design to include a wide range of theater scholars and professionals. Arnold Aronson is Professor of Theater, Columbia University. Spring 2005 The Past as Present in the Drama of August WilsonHarry J. Elam, Jr. Rights: World Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright August Wilson, author of Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson, among other dramatic works, is one of the most well respected American playwrights on the contemporary stage. The founder of the Black Horizon Theater Company, his self-defined dramatic project is to review twentieth-century African American history by creating a play for each decade. Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam examines Wilson's published plays within the context of contemporary African American literature and in relation to concepts of memory and history, culture and resistance, race and representation. Elam finds that each of Wilson's plays recaptures narratives lost, ignored, or avoided to create a new experience of the past that questions the historical categories of race and the meanings of blackness. Harry J. Elam, Jr. is Professor of Drama at Stanford University and author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (The University of Michigan Press). January 2004 Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway MovementStephen J. Bottoms Rights: World "Scrupulously researched, critically acute, and written with care, Playing Underground will become a classic account of an era of hard-won free expression." "At last—a book documenting the beginnings of Off-Off Broadway theater. Playing Underground is an insightful, illuminating, and honest appraisal of this important period in American theater." Few books address the legendary age of 1960s off-off Broadway theater. Fortunately, Stephen Bottoms fills that gap with Playing Underground—the first comprehensive history of the roots of off-off Broadway. This is a theater whose legacy is still felt today: it was the launching pad for many leading contemporary theater artists, including Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, and others, and it was a pivotal influence on improv comedy and shows like Saturday Night Live. Off-off Broadway groups such as the Living Theatre, La Mama, and Caffe Cino captured the spirit of nontraditional theater with their edgy, unscripted, boundary-crossing subjects. Yet, as Bottoms discovers, there is no one set of truths about off-off Broadway to uncover; the entire scene was always more a matter of competing perceptions than a singular, concrete reality. No other author has managed to illuminate this shifting tableau as Bottoms does. Through interviews with dozens of the era's leading playwrights, performers, directors, and critics, he unearths a countercultural theater movement that was both influential and transforming-yet ephemeral and quintessentially of its moment. Playing Underground will be a definitive work on the subject, offering a complete picture of an important but little-studied period in American theater. Stephen J. Bottoms is Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? August 2004 The Stage Life of PropsAndrew Sofer Rights: World Props have often been taken for granted in our notions of the theater, yet they've helped alter the course of dramatic history by providing playwrights with a concrete way to keep theatrical meaning in motion. 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 story 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. June 2003 Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915-48J. Ellen Gainor Rights: World Susan Glaspell in Context not only discusses the dramatic work of this key American author—perhaps best known for her short story "A Jury of Her Peers" and its dramatic counterpart, Trifles—but also places it within the theatrical, cultural, political, social, historical, and biographical climates in which Glaspell's dramas were created: the worlds of Greenwich Village and Provincetown bohemia, of the American frontier, and of American modernism. J. Ellen Gainor is Professor of Theatre, Women's Studies, and American Studies, Cornell University. Her other books include Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (co-edited with Jeffrey D. Mason) from the University of Michigan Press. January 2004 |
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