Highbrow/Lowdown explores the twentieth century's first culture war and the forces that permanently transformed American theater into the art form we know today. The arrival of jazz in the 1920s sparked a cultural revolution that was impossible to contain. The music affected every stratum of U.S. society and culture, confusing and challenging long-entrenched hierarchies based on class, race, and ethnicity. But jazz was much more than the music -- it was also a powerful cultural force that ...

What happens when Broadway goes abroad? Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad offers a look at how the Broadway musical travels the world, influencing and even transforming local practices and traditions. It traces especially how the musical has been indigenized in South Korea and Germany, the commercial centers for Broadway musicals in East Asia and continental Europe. Both countries were occupied after World War II by the United States, which dissem...

This new volume of interviews with contemporary playwrights attests to the fact the dramatic art is alive and well in America and celebrates the art and talent of fifteen of the theatre's most important artists. In extensive interviews, they discuss their work, influences and their craft and how the art form relates to our cultural heritage, as well as the state of theatre-its-meaning and purposes as we approach the 21st Century. David Savran lays out their remarkable achievements and prov...

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In Taking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinemati...

Through interviews and descriptions of methodology, Breaking the Rules captures the essence of major works by the internationally acclaimed avant-garde company.

Includes: Lee Breuer, Christopher Durang, Richard Foreman, Maria Irene Fornes, Charles Fuller, John Guare, Joan Holden, David Henry Hwang, David Mamet, Emily Mann, Richard Nelson, Marsha Norman, David Rabe, Wallace Shawn, Stephen Sondheim, Megan Terry, Luis Valdez, Michael Weller, August Wilson and Lanford Wilson.