Bücher der Reihe Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History

Examining the work of impresarios, financiers, and the press as well as the artists themselves, Hohman demonstrates how a variety of Russian theatrical styles were introduced and incorporated into American theatre and dance during the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal plan to fund theatre and other live artistic performances during the Great Depression, had the primary goal of employing out-of-work artists, writers, and directors, with the secondary aim of entertaining poor families and creating relevant art.

From Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers to Arthur Kopit and Brian Friel, agent Audrey Wood encouraged and guided the unique talents of playwrights in the Broadway theatre of her day. Her quiet determination and burning enthusiasm brought America's finest mid-century playwrights to prominence and altered stage history.

This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.

Begun as an audacious experiment, for thirty years the Hedgerow Theatre prospered as America's most successful repertory company. While known for its famous alumnae (Ann Harding and Richard Basehart), Hedgerow's legacy is a living library of over 200 productions created by Jasper Deeter's idealistic and determined pursuit of 'truth and beauty.'

Frontier dramas were among the most popular and successful of early-twentieth-century Broadway type plays. The long runs of contemporary dramas not only indicate the popularity of these plays but also tell us that these plays offered views about the frontier that original audiences could and did embrace.

Drawing on traditional archival research, reception theory, cultural histories of slumming, and recent work in critical theory on literary representations of poverty, Westgate argues that the productions of slum plays served as enactments of the emergent definitions of the slum and the corresponding ethical obligations involved therein.

This book explores the religious foundations, political and social significance, and aesthetic aspects of the theatre created by the leaders of the Occult Revival. Lingan shows how theatre contributed to the fragmentation of Western religious culture and how contemporary theatre plays a part in the development of alternative, occult religions.

Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists - from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim - have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience;

Exploring the performance of masculinity on and off the nineteenth-century American stage, this book looks at the shift from the passionate muscularity to intellectual restraint as not a linear journey toward national refinement; but a multitude of masculinities fighting simultaneously for dominance and recognition.

In 1845, John Franklin's Northwest Passage expedition disappeared. The expedition left an archive of performative remains that entice one to consider the tension between material remains and memory and reflect on how substitution and surrogation work alongside mourning and melancholia as responses to loss.

This book traces blackface types from ancient masks of grinning Africans and phallus-bearing Roman fools through to comedic medieval devils, the pan-European black-masked Titivillus and Harlequin, and racial impersonation via stereotypical 'black speech' explored in the Renaissance by Lope de Vega and Shakespeare.

This book offers provocative readings of canonical Enlightenment dramas that reflect and shape the period's changing understanding of error. With striking interdisciplinary connections to theater treatises as well as works from the philosophical, legal, and medical discourses, it tracks the relocation of error from the moral to the physical realm, a movement that begins with Lessing and continues through the turn of the nineteenth century.Featuring detailed analyses of Lessing's Miß Sara Sampson, Diderot's Le Fils naturel, Schiller's Die Räuber, and Kleist's Die Familie Schroffenstein alongside rich close readings of diverse primary sources, ranging from previously untranslated acting treatises by Sainte-Albine and Engel to texts from the German Archiv des Criminalrechts, this study introduces the reader to new Enlightenment sources and compellingly concludes that ultimately it is no longer evil, but rather bodily irregularities and mistakes in reading the body that become the driving principle of Enlightenment drama.

This book examines the relationship between wartime conflict and theatre practices.

This book traces the history of noh and kyogen, the first major Japanese theatrical arts. O'Neill's Early No Drama of 1958, it covers the full period of noh's medieval development and includes a chapter dedicated to the comic art of kyogen, which has often been left in noh's shadow.

This book is a historical study of the use of Asian theatre for modern Western theatre as practiced by its founding fathers, including Aurelien Lugne-Poe, Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, W.

This book investigates how the British theatrical community offered an alternative and oppositional historical narrative to the heritage culture promulgated by the Thatcher and Major Governments in the 1980s and early 1990s.

This book traces blackface types from ancient masks of grinning Africans and phallus-bearing Roman fools through to comedic medieval devils, the pan-European black-masked Titivillus and Harlequin, and racial impersonation via stereotypical 'black speech' explored in the Renaissance by Lope de Vega and Shakespeare.

This book offers provocative readings of canonical Enlightenment dramas that reflect and shape the period¿s changing understanding of error. With striking interdisciplinary connections to theater treatises as well as works from the philosophical, legal, and medical discourses, it tracks the relocation of error from the moral to the physical realm, a movement that begins with Lessing and continues through the turn of the nineteenth century.Featuring detailed analyses of Lessing¿s Miß Sara Sampson, Diderot¿s Le Fils naturel, Schiller¿s Die Räuber, and Kleist¿s Die Familie Schroffenstein alongside rich close readings of diverse primary sources, ranging from previously untranslated acting treatises by Sainte-Albine and Engel to texts from the German Archiv des Criminalrechts, this study introduces the reader to new Enlightenment sources and compellingly concludes that ultimately it is no longer evil, but rather bodily irregularities and mistakes in reading the body that become the driving principle of Enlightenment drama.

This book shows how the totalitarian ideology of the Soviet period shaped the practices of Soviet theatre for youth. It weaves together politics, pedagogy and aesthetics to reveal the complex intersections between theatre and its socio-historical conditions. It paints a picture of the theatrical developments from 1917 through to the new millennium.

Children have been exploited as performers and wooed energetically as consumers throughout history. These essays offer scholarly investigations into the employment and participation of children in the entertainment industry with examples drawn from historical and contemporary contexts.

In this study Lei focuses on the notion of 'performing Chinese' in traditional opera in the 'contact zones', where two or more cultures, ethnicities, and/or ideologies meet and clash. This work seeks to create discourse among theatre and performance studies, Asian and Asian American studies, and transnational and diasporic studies.

W. C. Fields was a virtuoso comedian, often called a comic genius, legendary iconoclast, and "Great Man," who brought so much laughter to millions while enduring so much anguish. This book explores his little-known, long stage career from 1898 to 1930, which had a major influence on his comedy and screen presence.

Pizzato focuses on the staging of Self and Other as phantom characters inside the brain (in the 'mind's eye', as Hamlet says). He explores the brain's anatomical evolution from animal drives to human consciousness to divine aspirations, through distinctive cultural expressions in stage and screen technologies.

Performing Magic on the Western Stage examines magic as a performing art and as a meaningful social practice, linking magic to cultural arenas such as religion, finance, gender, and nationality and profiling magicians from Robert-Houdin to Pen& Teller.

This study analyses the history of puppet, mask, and performing object theatre in the United States over the past 150 years to understand how a peculiarly American mixture of global cultures, commercial theatre, modern-art idealism, and mechanical innovation reinvented the ancient art of puppetry.