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44 results in American Theatre

Page 1 of 3

The Cambridge Companion to Stand-Up Comedy
  • Edited by Oliver Double
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Stand-up comedy is one of the simplest theatre forms in existence. The comedian stands on a (usually) bare stage, talking straight to the audience in the hope of getting laughs. Yet it has never been more popular, with national scenes developing across every continent except Antarctica. In this insightful and accessibly written volume, diverse chapters explore the subject from many angles, ranging from national scenes, live venues, and recordings to politics, race, sexuality, and the question of offensiveness. Chapters also consider the performance dynamics of stand-up in detail, examining audience, persona, and trauma. Interspersed throughout the chapters are a series of originally commissioned interviews with comedians from nine different countries, including Maria Bamford, Jo Brand, Aditi Mittal, and Rod Quantock, providing rare insights into their craft.

María Irene Fornés In Context
  • Edited by Brian Eugenio Herrera, Anne García-Romero
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • María Irene Fornés is both one of the most influential and one of the least well-known US theatermakers of the late twentieth century, with former students including leading US playwrights, directors and scholars. This is the first major scholarly collection to elucidate Fornés' rich life, work, and legacy. Providing concise and wide-ranging contributions from notable scholars, practitioners and advocates drawn from the academic and artistic communities most informed and inspired by her work, this engaging volume provides diverse points of entry to specialists and students alike.

August Wilson in Context
  • Edited by Khalid Y. Long, Isaiah Matthew Wooden
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • August Wilson is one of the twentieth century's most important and acclaimed playwrights. This volume demonstrates Wilson's significance to contemporary theatre, culture, and politics by providing fresh and compelling insights into his life, practices, and contributions as an artist and public intellectual. Across four thematically organized sections, contributors situate Wilson's work in his social, cultural and political contexts, examine ongoing developments in Wilson studies, explore the production contexts of his plays, and explicate his dramaturgical sensibilities and strategies. This is the authoritative guide to Wilson's career and artistic legacy for students, theatre practitioners, and general readers interested in this remarkable figure.

The Cambridge Companion to West Side Story
  • Edited by Paul R. Laird, Elizabeth A. Wells
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Over sixty years after its opening night, West Side Story is perhaps the most famous and beloved of twentieth-century musicals and stands as a colossus of musical and dramatic achievement. It not only helped define a generation of musical theatre lovers but is among the handful of shows that have contributed to our understanding of American musical identity at mid-century. Bringing together contemporary scholars in music, theatre, dance, literature, and performance, this Companion explores this explosive 1950s remake of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and its portrayal of the raw passion, rivalries, jealousy and rage that doom the young lovers to their tragic fate. Organised thematically, chapters range from Broadway's history and precursors to West Side Story; the early careers of its creators; the show's score with emphasis on writing, production, and orchestrations; issues of class, colourism, and racism; New York's gang culture, and how the show's legacy can be found in popular culture throughout the world.

The Great Gatsby: The 1926 Broadway Script
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by James L. W. West III, Anne Margaret Daniel
  • Published online:
    25 April 2024
    Print publication:
    25 April 2024
  • The cultural ubiquity of The Great Gatsby is such that it is tempting to think we know almost all there is to say about it. But F. Scott Fitzgerald's most famous work still has the capacity to surprise us. Perhaps few admirers of the novel know that it was also adapted for the stage by Owen Davis. In 1926 a successful production ran at the Ambassador Theater in New York City. This edition presents, for the first time in print, the original Broadway script: a fascinating social and literary document, now all but forgotten. The play re-forged Fitzgerald's novel into a fast-moving dramatization of parties and bootlegging, dancing and drinking, hot jazz, adultery and violence. It afforded an evening of first-rate entertainment for Manhattan theatergoers. Incorporating photographs of the original sets and actors, reviews, and publicity pasted into Fitzgerald's scrapbooks, this volume lifts the curtain anew on a singular drama.

Susan Glaspell in Context
  • Edited by J. Ellen Gainor
  • Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    27 July 2023
  • Susan Glaspell in Context provides new, accessible, and informative essays by leading international scholars and artists on Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Glaspell's life, career development, writing, and ongoing global creative impact. The collection features wide-ranging discussions of Glaspell's fiction, plays, and non-fiction in both historical and contemporary critical contexts, and demonstrates the significance of Glaspell's writing and other professional activities to a range of academic disciplines and artistic engagements. The volume also includes the first analyses of six previously unknown Glaspell short stories, as well as interviews with contemporary stage and film artists who have produced Glaspell's works or adapted them for audiences worldwide. Organized around key locations, influences, and phases in Glaspell's career, as well as core methodological and pedagogical approaches to her work, the collection's thirty-one essays place Glaspell in historical, geographical, political, cultural, and creative contexts of value to students, scholars, teachers, and artists alike.

The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre
  • 2nd edition
  • Edited by Harvey Young
  • Published online:
    08 June 2023
    Print publication:
    22 June 2023
  • This new edition provides an expanded, comprehensive history of African American theatre, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Including discussions of slave rebellions on the national stage, African Americans on Broadway, the Harlem Renaissance, African American women dramatists, and the New Negro and Black Arts movements, the Companion also features fresh chapters on significant contemporary developments, such as the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the mainstream successes of Black Queer Drama and the evolution of African American Dance Theatre. Leading scholars spotlight the producers, directors, playwrights, and actors who have fashioned a more accurate appearance of Black life on stage, revealing the impact of African American theatre both within the United States and around the world. Addressing recent theatre productions in the context of political and cultural change, it invites readers to reflect on where African American theatre is heading in the twenty-first century.

Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America
  • Revolution, Race and Popular Performance
  • Peter Reed
  • Published online:
    18 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022
  • American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In this study, Peter P. Reed reveals how Americans embodied and re-enacted their connections to Haiti through a wide array of performance forms. In the wake of Haiti's slave revolts in the 1790s, generations of actors, theatre professionals, spectators, and commentators looked to Haiti as a source of both inspiring freedom and vexing disorder. French colonial refugees, university students, Black theatre stars, blackface minstrels, abolitionists, and even writers such as Herman Melville all reinvented and restaged Haiti in distinctive ways. Reed demonstrates how Haiti's example of Black freedom and national independence helped redefine American popular culture, as actors and audiences repeatedly invoked and suppressed Haiti's revolutionary narratives, characters, and themes. Ultimately, Haiti shaped generations of performances, transforming America's understandings of race, power, freedom, and violence in ways that still reverberate today.

Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856–1951
  • Brent S. Salter
  • Published online:
    23 December 2021
    Print publication:
    06 January 2022
  • Drawing on fascinating archival discoveries from the past two centuries, Brent Salter shows how copyright has been negotiated in the American theatre. Who controls the space between authors and audiences? Does copyright law actually protect playwrights and help them make a living? At the center of these negotiations are mediating businesses with extraordinary power that rapidly evolved from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries: agents, publishers, producers, labor associations, administrators, accountants, lawyers, government bureaucrats, and film studio executives. As these mediators asserted authority over creativity, creators organized to respond, through collective minimum contracts, informal guild expectations, and professional norms, to protect their presumed rights as authors. This institutional, relational, legal, and business history of the entertainment history in America illuminates both the historical context and the present law. An innovative new kind of intellectual property history, the book maps the relations between the different players from the ground up.

Performance and Modernity
  • Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage
  • Julia A. Walker
  • Published online:
    09 December 2021
    Print publication:
    06 January 2022
  • How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body, often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity, Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of economic, industrial, political, social, and psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took shape on stage. In new styles of performance-acting, dance, music, pageantry, avant-garde provocations, film, video and networked media-this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modelling new habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world.

The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre since 1945
  • Edited by Julia Listengarten, Stephen Di Benedetto
  • Published online:
    20 August 2021
    Print publication:
    09 September 2021
  • The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre since 1945 provides an overview and analysis of developments in the organization and practices of American theatre. It examines key demographic and geographical shifts American theatre after 1945 experienced in spectatorship, and addresses the economic, social, and political challenges theatre artists have faced across cultural climates and geographical locations. Specifically, it explores artistic communities, collaborative practices, and theatre methodologies across mainstream, regional, and experimental theatre practices, forms, and expressions. As American theatre has embraced diversity in practice and representation, the volume examines the various creative voices, communities, and perspectives that prior to the 1940s was mostly excluded from the theatrical landscape. This diversity has led to changing dramaturgical and theatrical languages that take us in to the twenty-first century. These shifting perspectives and evolving forms of theatrical expressions paved the ground for contemporary American theatrical innovation.

Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770–1911
  • Derek Miller
  • Published online:
    11 August 2018
    Print publication:
    16 August 2018
  • In the nineteenth century, copyright law expanded to include performances of theatrical and musical works. These laws transformed how people made and consumed performances. Exploring precedent-setting litigation on both sides of the Atlantic, this book traces how courts developed definitions of theater and music to suit new performance rights laws. From Gilbert and Sullivan battling to protect The Mikado to Augustin Daly petitioning to control his spectacular 'railroad scene', artists worked with courts to refine vague legal language into clear, functional theories of drama, music, and performance. Through cases that ensnared figures including Lord Byron, Laura Keene, and Dion Boucicault, this book discovers how the law theorized central aspects of performance including embodiment, affect, audience response, and the relationship between scripts and performances. This history reveals how the advent of performance rights reshaped how we value performance both as an artistic medium and as property.

Writing and the Modern Stage
  • Theater beyond Drama
  • Julia Jarcho
  • Published online:
    28 April 2017
    Print publication:
    18 April 2017
  • It is time to change the way we talk about writing in theater. This book offers a new argument that reimagines modern theater's critical power and places innovative writing at the heart of the experimental stage. While performance studies, German Theaterwissenschaft, and even text-based drama studies have commonly envisioned theatrical performance as something that must operate beyond the limits of the textual imagination, this book shows how a series of writers have actively shaped new conceptions of theater's radical potential. Engaging with a range of theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Jarcho reveals a modern tradition of 'negative theatrics,' whose artists undermine the here and now of performance in order to challenge the value and the power of the existing world. This vision emerges through surprising new readings of modernist classics - by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett - as well as contemporary American works by Suzan-Lori Parks, Elevator Repair Service, and Mac Wellman.

Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess
  • The Strange, the Crazed, the Queer
  • Annette J. Saddik
  • Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    26 January 2015
  • The plays of Tennessee Williams' post-1961 period have often been misunderstood and dismissed. In light of Williams' centennial in 2011, which was marked internationally by productions and world premieres of his late plays, Annette J. Saddik's new reading of these works illuminates them in the context of what she terms a 'theatre of excess', which seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter. Saddik explains why they are now gaining increasing acclaim, and analyzes recent productions that successfully captured elements central to Williams' late aesthetic, particularly a delicate balance of laughter and horror with a self-consciously ironic acting style. Grounding the plays through the work of Bakhtin, Artaud, and Kristeva, as well as through the carnivalesque, the grotesque, and psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, Saddik demonstrates how Williams engaged the freedom of exaggeration and excess in celebration of what he called 'the strange, the crazed, the queer'.

Home on the Stage
  • Domestic Spaces in Modern Drama
  • Nicholas Grene
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    02 October 2014
  • As a serious drama set in an ordinary middle-class home, Ibsen's A Doll's House established a new politics of the interior that was to have a lasting impact upon twentieth-century drama. In this innovative study, Nicholas Grene traces the changing forms of the home on the stage through nine of the greatest of modern plays and playwrights. From Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard through to Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, domestic spaces and personal crises have been employed to express wider social conditions and themes of class, gender and family. In the later twentieth century and beyond, the most radically experimental dramatists created their own challenging theatrical interiors, including Beckett in Endgame, Pinter in The Homecoming and Parks in Topdog/Underdog. Grene analyses the full significance of these versions of domestic spaces to offer fresh insights into the portrayal of the naturalistic environment in modern drama.

Viewing America
  • Twenty-First-Century Television Drama
  • Christopher Bigsby
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    10 October 2013
  • Something has happened in the world of television drama. For the last decade and a half America has assumed a dominant position. Novelists, screenwriters and journalists, who would once have had no interest in writing for television, indeed who often despised it, suddenly realised that it was where America could have a dialogue with itself. The new television drama was where writers could engage with the social and political realities of the time, interrogating the myths and values of a society moving into a new century. Familiar genres have been reinvented, from crime fiction to science fiction. This is a book as much about a changing America as about the television series which have addressed it, from The Sopranos and The Wire to The West Wing, Mad Men and Treme, in what has emerged as the second golden age of American television drama.

Performing Anti-Slavery
  • Activist Women on Antebellum Stages
  • Gay Gibson Cima
  • Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014
  • In Performing Anti-Slavery, Gay Gibson Cima reimagines the connection between the self and the other within activist performance, providing fascinating new insights into women's nineteenth-century reform efforts, revising the history of abolition, and illuminating an affective repertoire that haunts both present-day theatrical stages and anti-trafficking organizations. Cima argues that black and white American women in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement transformed mainstream performance practices into successful activism. In family circles, literary associations, religious gatherings, and transatlantic anti-slavery societies, women debated activist performance strategies across racial and religious differences: they staged abolitionist dialogues, recited anti-slavery poems, gave speeches, shared narratives, and published essays. Drawing on liberal religious traditions as well as the Eastern notion of transmigration, Elizabeth Chandler, Sarah Forten, Maria W. Stewart, Sarah Douglass, Lucretia Mott, Ellen Craft and others forged activist pathways that reverberate to this day.

The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre
  • Edited by Harvey Young
  • Published online:
    05 December 2012
    Print publication:
    25 October 2012
  • This Companion provides a comprehensive overview of African American theatre, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Along the way, it chronicles the evolution of African American theatre and its engagement with the wider community, including discussions of slave rebellions on the national stage, African Americans on Broadway, the Harlem Renaissance, African American women dramatists, and the 'New Negro' and 'Black Arts' movements. Leading scholars spotlight the producers, directors, playwrights and actors whose efforts helped to fashion a more accurate appearance of black life on stage, and reveal the impact of African American theatre both within the United States and further afield. Chapters also address recent theatre productions in the context of political and cultural change and ask where African American theatre is heading in the twenty-first century.

The Making of American Audiences
  • From Stage to Television, 1750–1990
  • Richard Butsch
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 April 2000
  • In The Making of American Audiences, Richard Butsch provides a comprehensive survey of American entertainment audiences from the colonial period to the modern day. Providing coverage of theatre, opera, vaudeville, minstrelsy, movies, radio and television, he examines the evolution of audience practices as each genre supplanted another as the primary popular entertainment. Based on original historical research, this volume exposes how audiences made themselves through their practices - how they asserted control over their own entertainments and their own behaviour. Importantly, Butsch articulates two long-term processes: pacification and privatization. Whereas during the nineteenth century, overactive audiences represented a threat to civic order through their unruly behaviour, in the twentieth century, audiences have become more passive, dependent upon and controlled by media messages. This timely study serves as an important contribution to communication research, as well as American cultural history and cultural studies.

Plays by Susan Glaspell
  • Susan Glaspell
  • Edited by C. W. E. Bigsby
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    02 July 1987
  • A cofounder of the Provincetown Players - the group that acted as midwife to the American theatre - Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) can also lay claim to be a major figure in her own right. Her early plays were in many respects as challenging and original as those with which O'Neill made his debut. Her concern with language as subject, with character as an expression of social role, with plot as a mechanism that may ensnare rather than locate the self, mode her very much a modern. In Trifles (1916) she developed a feminist critique of social role. In The Outside (1917) she staged a debate between the life force and a perverse celebration of death. In both plays silence becomes an eloquent expression of meaning. The Verge (1921) is an experimental work of considerable proportions, more daring in many ways than anything attempted by O'Neill. Though Inheritors (1921) is far more conventional it touched a contemporary nerve, questioning the nature and reality of American pieties. Long known only for a single play, Susan Glaspell now emerges as a significant figure in the history of American drama, a woman of genuine creative daring.

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