Book picks similar to
Asian American Plays for a New Generation by Josephine Lee
plays
affect-body-performance
asian-americanist-discourses
plays-and-theatre
Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard
James N. Loehlin - 2006
In the century since its first performance, The Cherry Orchard has undergone a wide range of conflicting interpretations: tragic and comic, naturalistic and symbolic, reactionary and radical. Beginning with the 1904 premiere at Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, this study traces the performance history of one of the landmark plays of the modern theatre. Considering the work of such directors as Anatoly Efros, Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook, and Peter Stein, Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard explores the way different artists, periods and cultures have reinvented Chekhov's poignant comedy of failure and hope.
Mary Page Marlowe (TCG Edition)
Tracy Letts - 2017
In a series of elegant, nonchronological scenes spanning the years from 1946 to 2015, the play hopscotches through Mary Page Marlowe’s quiet existence as an accountant from Ohio—complicating notions of what it means to lead a “simple life.”
Men on Boats
Jaclyn Backhaus - 2017
Four boats. One Grand Canyon. MEN ON BOATS is the true(ish) history of an 1869 expedition, when a one-armed captain and a crew of insane yet loyal volunteers set out to chart the course of the Colorado River.
The Playboy of the Western World
J.M. Synge - 1907
Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Another Part of the Forest
Lillian Hellman - 1948
Marcus Hubbard, rich, despotic and despised, made a fortune during the Civil War by running the blockade and worse. In his family life he is equally injurious: one son he bulldozes while the other he holds in contempt for his frailty. By Marcus's side stands his mentally deranged wife and, finally, Regina, the adored daughter amoral, conniving, and beautiful as an evil flower. Marcus, it would seem, has been on the top of the heap long enough and someone must depose him. Turning the tables on a tyrant has always made for high drama, and when Hellman puts her brilliant talents to work on such a theme the result is a play of great theatrical intensity.
The Habit of Art
Alan Bennett - 2009
Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, W H Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first for twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by amongst others their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station.You are a rent boy. I am a poet. Over the wall lives the Dean of Christ Church. We all have our parts to play.Alan Bennett's new play is as much about the theatre as it is about poetry or music. It looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men, and at the ethics of biography. It reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion's spent: ultimately, on the habit of art. 'In the end,' said Auden, 'art is small beer. The really serious things in life are earning one's living and loving one's neighbour.'
A Bright New Boise
Samuel D. Hunter - 2011
Hunter's A Bright New Boise is a earnest comedy about the meager profits of modern faith. In the bleak, corporate break room of a craft store in Idaho, someone is summoning The Rapture. Will, who has fled his rural hometown after a scandal at his Evangelical church, comes to the Hobby Lobby, not only f
boom
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb - 2009
But when a major global catastrophic event strikes the planet, their date takes on evolutionary significance and the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. Will they survive? What about the fish in the tank? And who is that woman pulling levers and playing the timpani? An epic and intimate comedy that spans over billions of years, boom explores the influences of fate versus randomness in the course of one's life, and life as we know it on the planet.
R.U.R. and The Insect Play
Josef Čapek - 1961
Josef won a considerable reputation as a painter of the Cubist school, later developing his own playful primitive style. He collaborated with his brother in composing sketches, stories, and plays, as well as writing two short novels of his own and critical essays in which he defended the art of the unconscious, of children, and of savages. Following Hitler's invasion of 1939, Josef Capek was sent to a German concentration camp. He died at Belsen in April 1945.Karel Capek became a journalist and for a time stage manager of the theatre in Vinohrady. Though a writer of novels, visionary romances, travel books, stories, and essays, Karel is best known for his plays. His last plays, written just before the entry of Hitler into Czechoslovakia, deal with the rise of dictatorship and the terrible consequences of war. Karel Capek died on Christmas day, 1938.After the success of R.U.R. (Rossums' Universal Robots, 1920) seen in London in 1923, the brothers collaborated in their best-known work, The Insect Play (1921). Both plays are satires depicting the horrors of a regimented technical world and the terrible end of the populace if they fail to rise against their oppressors. They reflect the world in which the Capeks lived and give a commentary on its grosser follies.