Anton Chekhov was one of the most important short story writers and dramatists of all time. Ranked among the giants of Russian literature during his lifetime, this playwright's legacy includes The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Seagull. This invaluable new study guide in the "Bloom's Modern Critical Views" series contains a selection of the finest contemporary criticism of Chekhov and his works.

A playwright, poet, and activist, Bertolt Brecht was known for his theory of the epic theater and his attempts to break down the division between high art and popular culture. He was also a committed Marxist who lived through two world wars and a global depression. Looking at Brecht's life and works through his plays, stories, poems, and political essays, Philip Glahn illustrates how they trace a lifelong attempt to relate to the specific social, economic, and political circumstances of the early twentieth century.

Chekhov is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential literary figures of modern times. Russia's preeminent playwright, he played a significant role in revolutionizing the modern theatre. His impact on prose fiction writing is incalculable: he helped define the modern short story. Beginning with an engaging account of Chekhov's life and cultural context in nineteenth-century Russia, this book introduces the reader to this fascinating and complex personality. Unlike much criticism of Chekhov, it includes detailed discussions of both his fiction and his plays. The Introduction traces his concise, impressionistic prose style from early comic sketches to mature works such as 'Ward No. 6' and 'In the Ravine'. Examining Chekhov's development as a dramatist, the book considers his one-act vaudevilles and early works, while providing a detailed, act-by-act analysis of the masterpieces on which his reputation rests: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.

British theatre has long been regarded as a world-leader in terms of its quality, creativity and range. Starting in 1900, this book introduces the features that characterise modern and current British theatre. These features include experimental performances under motorways alongside plays by Stoppard and Ayckbourn, amateur theatre and virtual spaces, the emergence of the director, the changing role of writers and political and community shows. The book is clearly divided into four sections: where it happens, who does it, what they make and why they do it. It discusses theatre buildings and theatre which refuses buildings; company organisation, ensembles and collectives, and different sorts of acting. A large section describes the major work done for the stage, from Shaw through to Complicite, via poetic drama, different sorts of realism and documentary drama. The Introduction stands apart from other accounts of modern British theatre by bringing together buildings, people and plays.

Tom Stoppard is widely considered to be one of the most important dramatists of contemporary theatre. In this Introduction, William Demastes provides an accessible overview of Stoppard's life and work, exploring all the complexity and variety that makes his drama so unique. Illustrated with images from a diverse range of Stoppard productions, the book provides clear evaluations of his major works, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties, Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia, to provide the most up-to-date assessment available. Detailed chapters situate each play in the context of its sources, which include Shakespeare and contemporary existential thought, espionage, quantum physics, chaos theory, romanticism, landscape design, nineteenth-century European intellectual thought and European totalitarianism. The book also includes a section on Stoppard's Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love.

This short study traces the scope and development of Caryl Churchill's theatre from her early writing for radio and television, through her stage career of the 1970s and 1980s, to her recent major success, the Skriker.

Henrik Ibsen, the 'Father of Modern Drama', came from a seemingly inauspicious background. What are the key contexts for understanding his appearance on the world stage? This collection provides thirty contributions from leading scholars in theatre studies, literary studies, book history, philosophy, music, and history, offering a rich interdisciplinary understanding of Ibsen's work, with chapters ranging across cultural and aesthetic contexts including feminism, scientific discovery, genre, publishing, music, and the visual arts. The book ends by charting Ibsen's ongoing globalization and gives valuable overviews of major trends within Ibsen studies. Accessibly written, while drawing on the most recent scholarship, Ibsen in Context provides unique access to Ibsen the man, his works, and their afterlives across the world.

An important and comprehensive presentation of the social and political thought of Bertolt Brecht. Squiers argues that Brecht, the well-known poet and dramatist, should also be considered a social and political thinker in his own right. Relying on close readings of Brecht's poems, plays, stage directions and other writings, Squiers reveals the theoretical significance of Brecht's distinctive account of praxis as well as his critique of instrumental rationality. This is a truly interdisciplinary work that speaks to political and critical theorists as well as to scholars of contemporary literature and theatre.-Emily Hauptmann, Ph.D. Western Michigan University

This indispensable overview of modern black British drama spans seven decades of distinctive playwriting from the 1950s to the present. Interweaving social and cultural context with close critical analysis of key dramatists' plays, leading scholars explore how these dramatists have created an enduring, transformative and diverse cultural presence.

In the past decade, there has been an unprecedented upsurge of interest in Samuel Beckett's works. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett offers an accessible and engrossing introduction to a key set of issues animating the field of Beckett studies today. This companion considers Beckett's lasting significance by addressing a host of relevant topics. Written by a team of renowned scholars, this volume presents a continuum in Beckett studies ranging from theoretical approaches to performance studies, from manuscript research to the study of bilingualism, intertextuality, late modernism, history, philosophy, ethics, body and mind. The emphasis on burgeoning critical approaches aids the reader's understanding of recent developments in Beckett studies while prompting further exploration, assisted by the guide to further reading.

Rosemarie Tichler and Barry Jay Kaplan take us behind the scenes in conversations with thirteen of today's most distinguished playwrights, including Tony Kushner, John Guare, Wallace Shawn, Suzan-Lori Parks, David Henry Hwang, and Sarah Ruhl. To familiarize the reader with the world of each playwright, Tichler and Kaplan introduce us to the environments in which the work happens, conducting their interviews in the playwright's home, a dark theater, or a coffee shop. Topics of conversation range from the playwrights' earliest memories of the theater to finding their unique voices, and from their working relationships with directors, actors, and designers to their involvement in the purely commercial aspects of their profession. Taken together, these conversations constitute a collectively taught master class in the art and craft of writing for the stage.

When Samuel Beckett first came to international prominence with the success of Waiting for Godot, many critics believed the play was divorced from any recognisable context. The two tramps, and the master and servant they encounter, seemed to represent no one and everyone. Today, critics challenge the assumption that Beckett aimed to break definitively with context, highlighting images, allusions and motifs that tether Beckett's writings to real people, places and issues in his life. This wide-ranging collection of essays from 37 renowned Beckett scholars reveals how extensively Beckett entered into dialogue with important literary traditions and the realities of his time. Drawing on his major works, as well as on a range of letters and theoretical notebooks, the essays are designed to complement each other, building a broad overview that will allow students and scholars to come away with a better sense of Beckett's life, writings and legacy.

This work is a unique collection of key articles on feminist theatre and performance form The Drama Review (TDR). Carol Martin juxtaposes theory and practice to provide an exceptionally comprehensive overview of the development of feminist theatre.
This outstanding collection includes key texts by theorists such as Elin Diamond, Peggy Phelan and Lynda Hart and interviews with practitioners including Anna Deveare Smith and Robbie McCauley. It also contains full performances texts by two of the most influential and controversial practiitioners of feminist theatre: Dress Suits to Hireby Holly Hughes and The Constant State of Desireby Karen Finley.

A timely book that identifies the practice of '(syn)aesthetics' in artistic style and audience response, which helps to articulate the power of experiential practice in the arts. This exciting new approach includes interviews with leading practitioners in of theatre, dance, site-specific work, live art and technological performance practice.

This casebook gathers contemporary writing about Maria Irene Fornes and a broad selection of earlier essays, reviews and interviews. Along with the editor's commentary on playwriting and the creative process, the anthology includes critical essays on her work with the Judson Poets' and the Open Theater, her shift to greater psychological and formal complexity in the late 1970s, the lyrical politics of her theatre from the 1980s, and the metatheatricality of her plays from the 1990s.

Tom Stoppard is justly famous for his innovative theatrical techniques. Daniel Jernigan argues that while much of Tom Stoppard's early work (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound, for instance) is postmodern, the remainder of his career essentially tracks backward from there--becoming "late modernist" in the 1970s (Travesties) and fully modernist in the 80s and 90s (The Real Thing and Arcadia). This pattern also makes sense of Stoppard's recent and uncharacteristic foray into dramatic realism with The Coast of Utopia (2002) and Rock 'n' Roll (2006), at which point the playwright seems to embrace the more straightforward rhetorical advantages of literary realism.

David Henry Hwang is best known as the author of M. Butterfly, which won a 1988 Tony Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and he has written the Obie Award-winners Golden Child and FOB, as well as Family Devotions, Sound and Beauty, Rich Relations, and a revised version of Flower Drum Song. His Yellow Face won a 2008 Obie Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Understanding David Henry Hwang is a critical study of Hwang's playwriting process as well as the role of identity in each one of Hwang's major theatrical works. A first-generation Asian American, Hwang intrinsically understands the complications surrounding the competing attractiveness of an American identity with its freedoms in contrast to the importance of a cultural and ethnic identity connected to another society. William C. Boles examines Hwang's plays by exploring the perplexing struggles surrounding Asian and Asian American stereotypes, values, and identity. Boles argues that Hwang deliberately uses stereotypes in order to subvert them, while at other times he embraces the dual complexity of ethnicity when it is tied to national identity and ethnic history. In addition to the individual questions of identity as they pertain to ethnicity, Boles discusses how Hwang's plays explore identity issues of gender, religion, profession, and sexuality. The volume concludes with a treatment of Chinglish, both in the context of rising Chinese economic prominence and Hwang's previous work. Hwang has written ten short plays including The Dance and the Railroad, five screenplays, and many librettos for musical theatre. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, Hwang was appointed by Bill Clinton to the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Exploration and analysis of the innovative screenplays and novels by an award-winning playwright. Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks is a critical study of a playwright and screenwriter who was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Suzan-Lori Parks is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, a Whiting Writers Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, two Obie Awards, and a Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts. In this book Jennifer Larson examines how Parks, through the innovative language and narratives of her extensive body of work, investigates and invigorates literary and cultural history. Larson discusses all of Parks's genres--play, screenplay, essay, and novel--closely reading key texts from Parks's more experimental earlier pieces as well as her more linear later narratives. Larson's study begins with a survey of Parks's earliest and most difficult texts including Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Larson then analyses Venus, In the Blood, and the Lincoln Plays: The America Play and the Pulitzer Prize-winning TopDog/Underdog. Larson also discusses two of Parks's most important screenplays, Girl 6 and Their Eyes Were Watching God. In interpreting these screenplays, Larson examines film's role in the popularisation and representation of African American culture and history. These essays suggest an approach to all genres of literature and blend creativity, form, culture, and history into a revisionary aesthetic that allows for no identity or history to remain fixed, with Parks arguing that in order to be relevant they must all be dynamic and democratic.

"Understanding Tony Kushner surveys the acclaimed writings of the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Angels in America and coauthor of the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the film Munich. Viewing Tony Kushner as a sociopolitical dramatist in the tradition of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, James Fisher guides readers through Kushner's influences and creations to map the importance of the writer's body of work in expanding postmodern literary and cultural landscapes."--BOOK JACKET.