When Richard Hoehler first walked through the doors of a medium security prison in upstate New York, he assumed it would be a one-time thing. As a busy freelance writer, actor and teacher he had nonetheless agreed to drive upstate to teach an acting class for inmates pro bono. At the very least he hoped the experience might give him new ideas for his teaching on the outside.
What he could not have anticipated was the beginning of an odyssey that led Hoehler to an incredibly popular series of acting and writing workshops and mounting seven full productions with prison inmates--men whom society has written off and locked away as irredeemable. In this account of his journey working with the men, we witness a rare kind of theatrical magic. Within the incredibly dehumanizing and often arbitrary prison system, participants work to express themselves and connect with dramatic works where anger, compassion, forgiveness and tears pour forth in the safety of the workshop.
It is clear that Hoehler is not a do-gooder but simply there to do good work. This is the remarkable story of theatre's ability to change lives even in the most unlikely of settings.

On 10 January 1936, the poet, actor, and dramatic theorist, Antonin Artaud departed Europe on a journey to Mexico that would take him from the streets, cafés, and lecture halls of Mexico City to the remote mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara. The journey would last only ten months, culminating in some six to eight weeks spent among the Tarahumara (Rarámuri), but it was a profound turning point in his life.

Artaud didn't just leave Europe. He fled it. I came to Mexico to escape European civilization ... I hoped to find a vital form of culture. The vital form of culture that he sought was one wherein individual and communal behaviors were rooted in the soil of a place, wherein the rituals of religion, reinforced a connection in human lives between the earth and the sun.

But Artaud's search for a vital form of culture would not be a simple one. His appeal to indigenous culture would first require an intense and intricate effort at aesthetic, religious, political, and philosophical decolonization. And this intellectual work would not be without a psychological cost.

Journey to Mexico collects very nearly all of Artaud's writings related to his voyage to the land of the Tarahumara: the writings he prepared prior to this journey; the pieces he published in Mexico and the lectures he delivered there; the essays, letters, and poems that he wrote in the years after his journey, reflecting on and reframing his experiences. A selection of letters written before, during, and after the trip conveys the very personal - the physical, emotional, and financial - challenges of the journey.

Artaud's Journey to Mexico takes us far from home to the limits of art and anthropology, myth and religion, to confront the legacies of colonial conquest and the possibility of decolonization in a desperate search for a vital form of culture.

Available for the First Time in Paperback!

From Aristotle's Poetics to Vaclav Havel, the debate about the nature and function of theatre has been marked by controversy. Daniel Gerould's landmark work, Theatre/Theory/Theatre, collects history's most influential Eastern and Western dramatic theorists - poets, playwrights, directors and philosophers - whose ideas about theatre continue to shape its future. In complete texts and choice excerpts spanning centuries, we see an ongoing dialogue and exchange of ideas between actors and directors like Craig and Meyerhold, and writers such as Nietzsche and Yeats. Each of Gerould's introductory essays shows fascinating insight into both the life and the theory of the author. From Horace to Soyinka, Corneille to Brecht, this is an indispensable compendium of the greatest dramatic theory ever written.

The purpose of a high school drama or theatre arts program is to introduce students to as many aspects of drama as possible, to allow them to experience for themselves the diversity and excitement of theatre and to encourage them to develop the love of theatre which is necessary for the successful production of a play at any level. So here it is, all in one book-a complete overview of all aspects of theatre! The history, the crafts and the art of the stage are presented in eighteen easy-to-understand units. Theatre history in four parts gives the text an orderly structure. Between these family album sections are chapters on acting, improvisation, makeup, lighting, props, costumes and more. Each craft is described with examples, illustrations, and hands-on exercises where appropriate. To guide any director or teacher in introducing students to theatre, this is an incredibly comprehensive survey of the arts and crafts of the stage.

In these pages, Rent offers what most theater books can't: a chance to step behind the curtain and feel the electricity of a stage phenomenon as it unfolds.

Rent has single-handedly reinvigorated Broadway and taken America by storm. Sweeping all major theater awards, including the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama, as well as four 1996 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score for a Musical, Rent captures the heart and spirit of a generation, refleting it onstage through the emotion of its stirring words and music, and the energy of its young cast. Now, for the first time, Rent comes to life on the page -- through vivid color photographs, the full libretto, and an utterly compelling behind-the-scenes oral history of the show's creation. Here is the exclusive and absolutely complete companion to Rent, told in the voices of the extraordinary talent behind its success: the actors, the director, the producers, and the librettist and composer himself, Jonathan Larson, whose sudden death, on the eve of the first performance, has made Rent's life-affirming message all the more poignant.

Boal and his work are marvelous examples of the post-modern situation-its problems and its opportunities. Twice exiled, Boal is 'at home' now wherever he finds himself to be. He makes a skeptical, comic, inquisitive and finally optimistic theatre involving spectators and performers in the search for community and integrity. This is a good book to be used even more than to be read. - Richard Schechner

Augusto Boal's achievement is so remarkable, so original and so groundbreaking that I have no hesitation in describing the book as the most important theoretical work in the theatre in modern times - a statement I make with having suffered any memory lapse with respect to Stanislavsky, Artaud or Grotowski. - Goerge E. Wellwarth

Originally basing himself at the Arena Stage in Sao Paolo, Brazil, Augusto Boal developed a series of imaginative theatre exercises which promote awareness of one's social situation and its limitations, individual attitudes, and even how our bodies are bound by tradition. Boal is continued his explorations in Paris, where he directed Le CEDITADE (Centre d'Etude et de Diffusion des Techniques Actives d'Expression - Methode Boal), in addition to traveling and lecturing extensively in other countries. On May 2, 2009, Boal died at age 78 in Rio de Janeiro.

Ben Hecht is most remembered as a famous Hollywood screenwriter and Broadway playwright, but only recently has his extensive Jewish activism during the Holocaust and its aftermath received scholarly attention. Unlike other, more expansive Hecht biographies, this book focuses in depth on his Jewish political theatre, drawing on extensive archival research of four dramas: We Will Never Die (1943), A Jewish Fairy Tale (1944), A Flag Is Born (1946), and The Terrorist (1947). Garrett Eisler's readings of these little-known (and out of print) texts reclaim them as pivotal to the history of Jewish American drama, being among the first works of U.S. theatre to address the Holocaust. The full texts of all four works are republished here for the first time, along with production details and full performance histories.

Hecht also introduced a new heroic Jewish identity to the American stage, one that challenged popular stereotypes of villainy or weakness. This powerful and (still) controversial body of work stands as a striking testament to the power of theatre to rise to the moment. In Hecht's use of the stage to aggressively engage with history as it was happening, his story is a compelling case of an artist who made a difference.

A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938, The Theater and Its Double is the fullest statement of the ideas of Antonin Artaud. We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, the only value of which is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger, he wrote. He fought vigorously against an encroaching conventionalism he found anathema to the very concept of theater. He sought to use theater to transcend writing, to break through the language in order to touch life.

The fifty-year history of the Mee-Ow Show at Northwestern University and its influence on contemporary comedy

In the fall of 1973, two students at Northwestern University resolved to create something on stage that was wholly their own. Soon, they would be joined by a cohort of performers, musicians, and staff, and the resulting production would go on to launch the careers of scores of entertainment professionals, including some of the most well-known and awarded names in comedy today. This book is not only an account of the rebellious fifty-year history of the Mee-Ow Show, now the longest-running student sketch comedy and improv show in the country, but also its far-reaching influence. The storied group's alumni include such household names as Craig Bierko, Ana Gasteyer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Cameron Mitchell, Dermot Mulroney, Seth Meyers, and Kristen Schaal.

Based on more than a hundred new interviews with group members, presenting their words alongside never-before-published photographs and ephemera, The Mee-Ow Show at 50 provides a chronicle of the last half-century of the American undergraduate experience--and reveals how, from New York to Los Angeles, contemporary comedy can trace its roots to an upstart student production in Evanston, Illinois.

Winner, 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

In this groundbreaking book, Matsuoka Shinpei--a leading scholar of noh theater--provides a detailed account of the birth of one of Japan's most celebrated art forms. Although noh has often been associated with the elite, Embodied Performance explores its links to a wider popular culture, revealing a rich and colorful public space where courtiers and commoners mingled.

Matsuoka traces noh's connections to popular and religious dances, linked verse, and chigo (beautiful temple boy) culture, emphasizing performance and the body. He describes the world of noh playwright Zeami as well as his views on dramaturgy and performance--and argues that Zeami was once a chigo. Matsuoka shows how religious rituals and cultural forms like ecstatic dance prayer and plays about demons in hell attracted people on the margins. Such activities, Matsuoka contends, drew on the tension between wild acrobatic movement and corporeal restraint, influencing the development of noh as well as the art of flower arranging and the tea ceremony. Janet Goff's translation makes available in English a classic work of Japanese scholarship that will be invaluable to those interested in medieval Japanese culture, noh, and theatrical practice.

In 1953, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents--Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others--shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters' inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition.

Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin's landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett's tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.

An insider's spirited history of Yale Repertory Theatre

In this serious and entertaining chronicle of the first fifty years of Yale Repertory Theatre, award-winning dramaturg James Magruder shows how dozens of theater artists have played their parts in the evolution of a sterling American institution. Each of its four chapters is dedicated to one of the Yale Rep's artistic directors to date: Robert Brustein, Lloyd Richards, Stan Wojewodski Jr., and James Bundy. Numerous sidebars--dedicated to the spaces used by the theater, the playwrights produced most often, casting, the prop shop, the costume shop, artist housing, and other topics--enliven the lavishly illustrated four-color text. This fascinating insider account, full of indelible descriptions of crucial moments in the Rep's history, is based in part on interviews with some of America's most respected actors about their experiences at the Rep, including Paul Giamatti, James Earl Jones, Frances McDormand, Meryl Streep, Courtney B. Vance, Dianne Wiest, and Henry Winkler--among many others.

More than just a valentine to an important American theater, The Play's the Thing is a story about institution-building and the force of personality; about the tug-of-war between vision and realpolitik; and about the continuous negotiation between educational needs and artistic demands.

New Drama--a collection of actors, directors, and playwrights in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus--is one of the most active and vibrant artistic movements in the Russophone world today yet remains understudied in the West. E. Susanna Weygandt demonstrates that the major innovation of New Drama is a sonic turn, an aesthetic development that moves away from traditional, Stanislavskian embodied performance to something almost purely aural. New Drama, which began in the tumult following the collapse of the Soviet Union and continues even in an increasingly censorious Russia today, emphasizes contemporary social issues and privileges disadvantaged voices, using documentary modes to literally bring the voices of the dispossessed to the ears of the audience members.

As a result, the Russophone New Dramatists speak dissent and dramatize resistance. Ultimately, they shift theatrical productions from something constrained and limited, in both place and time, to an ephemeral but unbounded gateway for social activism. The sonic stage thus effectively functions as a social forum, transposing action from the actors to the audience. From Metaphor to Direct Speech therefore contributes to cultural as well as performance studies, offering a compelling look not just at developments in theatrical modes but also at dissent and cultural aesthetics in Russia today.

Theatre Work: Reimagining the Labor of Theatrical Production investigates both the history and current realities of life and work in professional theatrical production in the United States and explores labor practices that are equitable, accessible, and sustainable.

In this book, Brídín Clements Cotton and Natalie Robin investigate the question of artmaking, specifically theatrical production, as work. When the art is the work, how do employers navigate the balance between creative freedom and these equitable, accessible, and sustainable personnel processes? Do theatrical production operations value the worker? Through data analyses, worker narratives, and analogues to the evolving gig economy, Theatre Work questions everything about theatrical production work - including our shared history, ways of operating, and assumptions about how theatre is made - and considers what might happen if the American Theatre was reborn in an entirely new form.

Written for members of the theatrical production workplace, leaders of theatrical institutions and productions, labor organizers, and industry union leaders, Theatre Work: Reimagining the Labor of Theatrical Production speaks to the ways that employers and workers can reimagine how we work.

Exploring a wide variety of examples of activist performances, such as David Buckel's self-immolation, and the January 6th capitol insurrection, this book analyses activist performance through the lens of postdramatic theatre theory.

Staging Change poses the provocative question: are activists addicted to drama? Scrimer examines the ways in which the performance and reception of protest is informed by the logic of dramatic theatre, and argues that such performative arrangements are so naturalized that they can limit the ability of activists and their audiences to imagine different ways of precipitating change. By combining performance analysis, interviews with artists and activists, and autoethnographic accounts of the author's own experiences as an environmental activist, the book illustrates the limitations and alternatives to dramatic representation in activist performance.

The last decade has seen an increase in political demonstrations worldwide, particularly following the excitement and disappointments of the Arab Spring uprisings. We have seen several notable movements such as the Occupy movement, the mobilization of Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement. In response, scholars, artists, and activists from diverse disciplines have produced an exciting array of practical and theoretical approaches for talking about and thinking through activism. Utilizing these interdisciplinary approaches, Scrimer offers us a theoretical inquiry into the possible applications of Hans-Thies Lehmann's postdramatic theatre theory in the context of political activism, and subsequently extends an alternative conceptual model for activist performance beyond the dramatic paradigm.

Starting in 1966, African American activist Stokely Carmichael and other political leaders adopted the phrase Black Power! The slogan captured a militant, revolutionary spirit that was already emerging in the work of playwrights, poets, musicians, and visual artists throughout the Black Arts movement of the mid-1960s. But the story of those theater artists and performers whose work helped bring about the Black Arts revolution has not fully been told. Readying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post-World War II to the Black Arts Movement explores the dynamic era of Black culture between the end of World War II and the start of the Black Arts Movement (1946-1964) by illuminating how artists and innovators such as Jackie Robinson, Lorraine Hansberry, Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, and others helped radicalize Black culture and Black political thought. In doing so, these artists defied white cultural hegemony in the United States, and built the foundation for the revolutionary movement in Black theater that followed in the mid 1960s. Through archival research, close textual reading, and an analysis of performance artifacts, Shandell demonstrates how these artists negotiated a space on the public stage for cultivating radical Black aesthetics and built the foundation for the revolutionary movement in Black theater that followed in the mid-1960s.

This is the first edition for students and general readers of a pro-woman reply to Shakespeare's 'The Tamer of the Shrew' written in Shakespeare's lifetime . Co-edited by a feminist critic and a distinguished textual scholar, it makes clear why 'The Tamer Tamed' should be restored to the theatrical repertoire and the literary canon.

The first English-language translation of the 1968 activist play about inequality and access to education

In The Inheritor, surrealist imagery and experimental forms convey the radically different experience of two students, the Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor, as they prepare for a high-stakes exam. Revealing a world of privilege where there is no such thing as luck, the play features a beheaded knight, a talking record player, and a boisterous chorus of professors depicted as a flock of squawking birds.

Based on sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture, the play was collectively created by Théâtre de l'Aquarium, a company then composed entirely of students. It proved a powerful success when it premiered in May 1968 amid student and worker protests in Paris, and it continues to speak forcefully to education inequity on campuses across anglophone countries today.

Showing how twenty-first-century Black theater and media arts challenge dominant conceptualizations of time

Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture examines works by contemporary Black artists in multiple media--drama, film, performance art, and photography--that trouble dominant conceptualizations and normative configurations of time in relation to race in the twenty-first century. Isaiah Matthew Wooden explores the ways in which an intentional and sometimes ludic engagement with time and temporality has enabled these artists to probe urgent questions and themes concerning the conditions of contemporary Black life.

Wooden surveys a diverse array of performance-based and visual texts to explore the rich practices of contemporary Black expressive culture: dramatic works by playwrights Eisa Davis, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Robert O'Hara; performance art and photography by visual artists Jefferson Pinder and LaToya Ruby Frazier; and feature-length cinema by director-producer Tanya Hamilton. These works expose normative time as specious and evidence the transformative potential in honing practices of Black temporal experimentation and intervention. By putting this cross-disciplinary set of texts in conversation with each other, Wooden sheds new light on the shrewd ways that they each reflect an investment in unbinding time from the exigencies of normativity and teleology, as well as on their shared commitments to reclaiming time to reimagine and represent Blackness in all its multiplicities.

The legendary 1964 Broadway run of Hamlet directed by John Gielgud is one of the most famous productions of Shakespeare's most important play. Audacious for its time in concept and execution, it placed the actors in everyday clothes within an unassuming rehearsal set, with the Ghost of Hamlet's father projected as a shadow against the rear wall and voiced by the director himself. It was also a runaway critical and financial success, breaking the then-record for most performances of a Broadway show. This was in no small part due to the starring role played by Richard Burton, whose romance with Elizabeth Taylor was the object of widespread fascination.

Present throughout, and ever attentive to the backstage drama and towering egos on display, was the actor William Redfield, who played Guildenstern. During the three months of the play's preparation, from rehearsals through out-of-town tryouts to the gala opening night on Broadway, Redfield wrote a series of letters describing the daily happenings and his impressions of them. In 1967, they were in 1967 collected into Letters from an Actor, a brilliant and unusual book that has since become a classic behind-the-scenes account that remains an indispensable contribution to theatrical history and lore.

This new edition at last brings Redfield's classic back into print, as The Motive and the Cue--the Sam Mendes-directed play about the Gielgud production that is based in part on the book--continues its successful run in London's West End.