Women's Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century

Women's Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century
Author: L. Durham
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2013-02-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113728711X

Women are at the center of American theatre and have the potential to shape the cultural imagination of theatre-goers as a complex new era unfolds. Sarah Ruhl, one of the twenty-first century's most honored playwrights, is read in concert with her contemporaries whose writing also wrestles with the vexing issues facing Americans in the new century.

Modern American Drama: Playwriting 2000-2009

Modern American Drama: Playwriting 2000-2009
Author: Julia Listengarten
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2019-11-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350024759

The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their plays to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: * Theresa Rebeck: Omnium Gatherum (2003), Mauritius (2007), and The Understudy (2008); * Sarah Ruhl: Eurydice (2003), Clean House (2004), and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) (2009); * Lynn Nottage: Intimate Apparel (2003), Fabulation or Re-Education of Undine (2004), and Ruined (2008); * Charles Mee: Big Love (2000), Wintertime (2005), and Hotel Cassiopeia (2006).

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl

The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl
Author: Amy Muse
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2018-07-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 135000782X

Sarah Ruhl is one of the most highly-acclaimed and frequently-produced American playwrights of the 21st century. Author of eighteen plays and the essay collection 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, she has won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, been nominated for a Tony Award for In the Next Room or the vibrator play and twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for The Clean House and In the Next Room. Ruhl is a writer unafraid of the soul. She writes not about “this or that issue,” but “about being,” creating plays that ask “big questions about death, love, and how we should treat each other in this lifetime.” In this volume, Amy Muse situates Ruhl as an artist-thinker and organizes her work around its artistic and ethical concerns. Through a finely-grained account of each play, readers are guided through Ruhl's early influences, the themes of intimacy, transcendence, and communion, and her inventive stagecraft to dramatize “moments of being” onstage. Enriched by essays from scholars Jill Stevenson, Thomas Butler, and Christina Dokou, an interview with directors Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn, and a chronology of Ruhl's life and work, this is a companionable guide for students of American drama and theatre studies. Amy Muse specializes in dramatic literature and performance studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department. She is the author of “Sarah Ruhl's Sex Ed for Grownups” (Text & Presentation 2013) and essays on Romantic drama, intimate theatre, female Hamlets, and travel in Romantic Circles, Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture & Criticism, Frontiers, and other journals. METHUEN DRAMA CRITICAL COMPANIONS Series Editors: Patrick Lonergan (National University of Ireland, Galway) and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Loyola Marymount University, USA)

Theatre History Studies 2014, Vol. 33

Theatre History Studies 2014, Vol. 33
Author: Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2014-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817358072

Theatre History Studies 2014, Volume 33, brings together an original collection of essays that explore a topic of growing interest--theatre and war.

Theatre History Studies 2016, Vol. 35

Theatre History Studies 2016, Vol. 35
Author: Sara Freeman
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2016-12-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0817371109

Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka, eds., Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter / Reviewed by Danny Devlin

A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House"

A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's
Author: Gale, Cengage Learning
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Total Pages: 34
Release:
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 141039283X

A Study Guide for Sarah Ruhl's "The Clean House", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.

Re-Thinking Literary Identities

Re-Thinking Literary Identities
Author: Laura Monrós-Gaspar
Publisher: Universitat de València
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2018-06-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 8491342613

Great Britain is changing, and so is Europe. The aim of this book, therefore, is to reflect upon the processes of (re)creation of art and literature within and against the backdrop of the shifting paradigms of the world as we know it. At a time when the political relations between Great Britain, Europe and the rest of the world are being redefined, this book examines the (de)construction of modern identities through the (de)codification of classical and contemporary mythologies.

Playwriting, Dramaturgy and Space

Playwriting, Dramaturgy and Space
Author: Sara Freeman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2024-01-10
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1009370235

Theatre has come back to text, but with perspectives shifted by the experimental practices of the twentieth century across performance forms. Contemporary playwriting brings its scenographic engagement to the foreground of the text, reflecting the spatial turn in theory and practice. In production, this spatiality has renewed and enlivened the status and impact of text-based theatre. Theatre studies needs to better describe the artfulness of contemporary text-based theatre, bringing to it the same sophisticated lenses scholars and critics have used for performance-based theatre and other experimental theatre practices. This Element does that by presenting the work of Caryl Churchill, Naomi Iizuka, and Sarah Ruhl as exemplary of the way text-based theatre, both its scripts and productions, now creates and expects a spatialized imaginary and demonstrates the potentials of text-based theatre in an increasingly visual and spatial field of cultural production.

Female Performers in British and American Fiction

Female Performers in British and American Fiction
Author: Barbara Straumann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2018-05-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110561042

The female performer with a public voice constitutes a remarkably vibrant theme in British and American narratives of the long nineteenth century. The tension between fictional female performers and other textual voices can be seen to refigure the cultural debate over the ‘voice’ of women in aesthetically complex ways. By focusing on singers, actresses, preachers and speakers, this book traces and explores an important tradition of feminine articulation. Drawing on critical approaches in literary studies, gender studies and philosophy, the book conceptualizes voice for the discussion of narrative texts. Examining voice both as a thematic concern and as an aesthetic effect, the individual chapters analyse how the actual articulation by female performers correlates with their cultural visibility and agency. What this study foregrounds is how women characters succeed in making themselves heard even if their voices are silenced in the end.