In Microdramas, John H. Muse argues that plays shorter than twenty minutes deserve sustained attention, and that brevity should be considered a distinct mode of theatrical practice. Focusing on artists for whom brevity became both a structural principle and a tool to investigate theater itself (August Strindberg, Maurice Maeterlinck, F. T. Marinetti, Samuel Beckett, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Caryl Churchill), the book explores four episodes in the history of very short theater, all ch...

ANTONIO, his Brother, the usurping Duke of Milan

The world according to David Ives is a very add place, and his plays constitute a virtual stress test of the English language -- and of the audience's capacity for disorientation and delight. Ives's characters plunge into black holes called "Philadelphias," where the simplest desires are hilariously thwarted. Chimps named Milton, Swift, and Kafka are locked in a room and made to re-create Hamlet. And a con man peddles courses in a dubious language in which "hello" translates as "velcro" an...

This volume contains Harold Pinter's first six plays, including The Birthday Party.The Birthday PartyStanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by two strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare.'Mr Pinter's terrifying blend of pathos and hatred fuses unforgettably into the stuff of art.' Sunday TimesThe Room and The Dumb WaiterIn these two early...

Euripides' Medea comes alive in this new translation that will be useful for both academic study and stage production. Diane J. Rayor's accurate yet accessible translation reflects the play's inherent theatricality and vibrant poetry. The book includes an analytical introduction and comprehensive notes, and an essay on directing Medea by stage director Karen Libman. The play begins after Medea, a princess in her own land, has sacrificed everything for Jason: she helped him in his quest for...

Coriolanus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1605 and 1608. The play is based on the life of the legendary Roman leader Caius Marcius Coriolanus.[Critical appraisal]A. C. Bradley described this play as "built on the grand scale," like King Lear and Macbeth, but it differs from those two masterpieces in an important way. The warrior Coriolanus is perhaps the most opaque of Shakespeare's tragi...

War widow Dorothy lives in a London suburb with her 15-year-old daughter Victoria and her older bachelor brother Edwin. More and more isolated from her married friends with their successful children, Dorothy tries to cope with Victoria's increasingly hostile behaviour. But is she doing her best, as she thinks, or is she in fact responsible for what threatens to become an unendurable situation?'A exquisitely observed, profoundly quiet slice of 1950s suburba...

This is the first collection from groundbreaking playwright Alistair McDowall*,* "an exceptionally talented and fast-rising writer. Still only in his twenties, this writer is surely going places. Whatever he dreams up next, his name will almost certainly be in lights at the Royal Court soon, if not at the National Theatre." (The Times)Having won a Judges Award at the Bruntwood Prize in 2011 and been shortlisted for the Writers' Guild Best Play Award in 20...

Japanese Theatre presents a full historical account for Westerners of the theater arts that have flourished for centuries in Japan.Kabuki, arising in the late seventeenth century, is the theater of the commoner. The successive syllables of Kabuki mean "song dance skill." The precursors of Kabuki were the puppet theater and the comic interludes in the stately, aristocratic Noh drama all fully described by the author. In the modem era the Japanese have...

Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries, Thomas Mann and Shakespeare is the first book-length study to explore the always fascinating, if sometimes disturbing, connections between Shakespeare and Mann. It establishes startling resonances between the central works of these two authors, pairing, for instance, Der Zauberberg with The Tempest, Der Tod in Venedig with The Merchant of Venice, Tonio Kröger with Ot...

A ForeWord magazine Book of the Year for 2007Charismatic, highly intelligent, and splendidly talented, Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was a Victorian celebrity, known on both sides of the Atlantic as an actress and member of the famous Kemble theatrical dynasty, as a fierce opponent of slavery despite her marriage to a wealthy slave owner, as a brilliantly successful solo performer of Shakespeare, and as the author of journals about her career and life on her husband's Georgia pla...

Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote plays-and these, together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre-shaped the dramatic experiments of th...