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Catiline
by VoltaireIn his preface to this play Voltaire says: "The learned will not here meet with a faithful narrative of Catiline's conspiracy: a tragedy, they very well know, is not a history, but they will see a true picture of the manners of those times: all that Cicero, Catiline, Cato and Cæsar do in this piece is not true, but their genius and character are faithfully represented: if we do not there discover the eloquence of Cicero, we shall at least find displayed all that courage and virtue which he showed in the hour of danger. In Catiline is described that contrast of fierceness and dissimulation which formed his real character; Cæsar is represented as growing into power, factious, and brave; that Cæsar who was born at once to be the glory and the scourge of Rome." Wilder Publications is a green publisher. All of our books are printed to order. This reduces waste and helps us keep prices low while greatly reducing our impact on the environment.
The Cat's Away
by Cleve HauboldAnother play woven around another set of daft characters from San Francisco's Union Street. Crusty but confused Estelle Bentwood insists her cat, Miss Pearl, has been writing naughty sea faring novels on her Underwood. Her niece, Mary, and Horace, the long suffering waiter, almost talk her out of the notion-- when an excitable publisher shows up with a manuscript, a contract, certified check and a passion for Miss Pearl! There's laughable confusion to comic chaos as everyone tries to close the deal in a different way. In the unexpected climax. Miss Pearl herself appears-- and her unlikely visit is a shock to everyone. Lovable off beat characters and an ingenious plot full of surprises makes this play an audience pleaser.
The Cat's Meow
by Steven PerosFull Length, Comic Drama / 6 m, 8 f, Doubling is possible / Based on the true story of a mysterious Hollywood death, The Cat's Meow offers a fascinating cross section of Jazz Era characters who intersect for one notorious weekend on board William Randolph Hearst's yacht in 1924. The play was adapted for film in 2002, with a screenplay by the author, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, and starring Kirsten Dunst, Eddie Izzard, and Edward Herrmann. Weekend guests include: Charlie Chaplin, who has been carrying on with movie star Marion Davies, a secret known to Davies' paramour, the married - and much older -- Hearst; and movie mogul Thomas Ince, who is hoping to revive his flagging fortunes by forming a partnership with Hearst. Playing with fire, Ince tries to convince Hearst that he can handle both Marion's movie career... and her private life as well. During its 1997 Los Angeles premiere, audiences and critics were both entertained and moved by this darkly comic morality play, laced with clandestine romance, Hollywood excess, and steadily heating tensions, which erupt in a shocking act of violence. "Hearst Yacht Mystery is The Cat's Meow...A stylish and sardonically funny expose of corrupt Tinseltown values." -Los Angeles Times
The Cave Painter & The Woodcutter
by Don HannahDianne is a printmaker who derives her imagery from pre-history—Neanderthal teeth, the Jericho skulls, old bones. Too many people close to her have passed away, and her only son has rebelled by embracing a life of religious fundamentalism. The Cave Painter is a funny, moving one-woman show about being an artist and dealing with loss. In The Woodcutter, a scruffy, exhausted man is lost in the woods at nightfall with only a few sentimental objects in his pockets. Alone in a clearing, he unloads his thoughts to the surrounding wilderness, ranting and raging, unravelling a story of a troubled past and of the family he adores, eventually coming to terms with the impossible truth of what he's done.
CBA
by Sarah Jane DickensonTrialled in schools with young people, CBA is a play that asks the really urgent questions of today. It seems so private, just you and the screen. You click 'send'. Then the whole world crashes through. Keisha has a secret, Georgia has a security problem and Tom is afraid to speak out. When should you tell someone's secret? How can jokes go so wrong? Fast paced and thought-provoking , CBA examines growing up in a digital world.
The CBS Radio Mystery Theater: An Episode Guide and Handbook to Nine Years of Broadcasting, 1974-1982
by Gordon Payton Martin GramsAlmost every evening for nine years during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre brought monsters, murderers and mayhem together for an hour. Created, produced and directed by Himan Brown, the series remains a landmark in radio drama. This book is a detailed history and episode guide to the show. Descriptive information includes exact titles, airdates and rebroadcast dates, episode numbers, cast lists, writer and adapter credits, and a storyline synopsis. This material comes directly from CBS press releases in order to insure complete accuracy. Also included wherever possible are information about the actors and actresses, quotes from performers and writers (many from personal interviews), anecdotes about various scripts and sound effects, and other notes of interest.
The Celebrated Hannah Cowley: Experiments in Dramatic Genre, 1776–1794 (Gender and Genre)
by Angela EscottHannah Cowley (1743–1809) was a very successful dramatist, and something of an eighteenth-century celebrity. New critical interest in the drama of this period has meant a resurgence of interest in Cowley’s writing and in the performance of her plays. This is the first substantial monograph study to examine Cowley’s life and work.
Celebrating Katherine Mansfield
by Gerri Kimber Janet WilsonA revisionist study of Mansfield as a profoundly colonial yet daringly experimental writer, at the forefront of modernism. The essays in this volume draw on the complete journals, letters and stories, to reveal Mansfield as a modernist who transcended her artistic influences through a supreme understanding of voice, being and subjectivity.
Celebrating Shakespeare
by Calvo, Clara and Kahn, Coppélia Clara Calvo Coppélia KahnOn the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this collection opens up the social practices of commemoration to new research and analysis. An international team of leading scholars explores a broad spectrum of celebrations, showing how key events - such as the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Second Vatican Council of 1964 and the Great Exhibition of 1851 - drew on Shakespeare to express political agendas. In the USA, commemoration in 1864 counted on him to symbolise unity transcending the Civil War, while the First World War pulled the 1916 anniversary celebration into the war effort, enlisting Shakespeare as patriotic poet. The essays also consider how the dream of Shakespeare as a rural poet took shape in gardens, how cartoons challenged the poet's élite status and how statues of him mutated into advertisements for gin and Disney cartoons. Richly varied illustrations supplement these case studies of the diverse, complex and contradictory aims of memorialising Shakespeare.
A Celebration of Ben Jonson
by William F. Blissett Julian Patrick R.W. Van FossenThe papers in this volume were given by some of the world's foremost Jonsonian scholars at a conference at the University of Toronto which marked the 400th anniversary of his birth. Each contributor came from a different institution, and Canada, the United States, Great Britain, and New Zealand were represented. The balance of papers likewise reflects the range of Ben Jonson's achievement and the combination of brio and control so characteristic of him.The papers arrange themselves in pairs: 'The Incredibility of Jonsonian Comedy,' as discussed by Professor Clifford Leech, is of a piece with distrust and defiance of the audience as discussed in the paper 'Jonson and the Loathèd Stage' by Professor Jonas Barish; Professor George Hibbard in 'Ben Jonson and Human Nature' and Professor D.I. McKenzie in 'The Staple of News and the Late Plays' offer critical assessment of plays, the one wide-ranging, the other closely focused on a previously neglected play; and Professor H.N. Maclean in '"A More Secret Cause": The Wit of Jonson's Poetry' and Professor L.C. Knights in 'Ben Jonson: Public Attitudes and Social Poetry' approach the difficult and rewarding task of defining Jonson's poetry of appraisal in different but complementary styles.
Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750–1850 (Performing Celebrity)
by Ariane Fichtl Chris Haffenden Emrys Jones Miranda Kiek Antoine Lilti Margaret Mason Anaïs Pédron Laure Philip Anna Senkiw Clare Siviter Blake Smith Gabriel WickCelebrity Across the Channel, 1750-1850 is the first book to study and compare the concept of celebrity in France and Britain from 1750 to 1850, offering a transnational perspective. It places in dialogue the growing field of celebrity studies in the two countries, especially by engaging with Antoine Lilti’s seminal work, The Invention of Celebrity, translated into English in 2017. With contributions from a diverse range of fields, such as history, politics, literature, theater studies, and musicology, the volume employs a firmly interdisciplinary scope to explore an era marked by social, political, and cultural upheaval. The organization of the collection allows for new readings of the similarities and differences in the understanding of celebrity in Britain and France. Consequently, the volume builds upon questions that are currently at the heart of celebrity studies.
The Celebrity Monarch: Empress Elisabeth and the Modern Female Portrait (Performing Celebrity)
by Olivia Gruber FlorekEmpress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898), wife of Habsburg Emperor Francis Joseph I, was celebrated as the most beautiful woman in Europe. Glamorous painted portraits by Franz Xaver Winterhalter and widely collected photographs spread news of her beauty, and the twentieth-century German-language film trilogy Sissi (1955-57) cemented this legacy. Despite the enduring fascination with the empress, art historians have never considered Elisabeth’s role in producing her public portraiture or the influence of her creation. The Celebrity Monarch reveals how portraits of Elisabeth transformed monarchs from divinely appointed sovereigns to public personalities whose daily lives were consumed by spectators. With resources ranging from the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Elisabeth’s private collection of celebrity photography to twenty-first century collages and films by T. J. Wilcox, this book positions Elisabeth herself as the primary engineer of her public image and argues for the widespread influence of her construction on both modern art and the emerging phenomenon of celebrity.
Celebrity, Performance, Reception
by David WorrallBy 1800 London had as many theatre seats for sale as the city's population. This was the start of the capital's rise as a centre for performing arts. Bringing to life a period of extraordinary theatrical vitality, David Worrall re-examines the beginnings of celebrity culture amidst a monopolistic commercial theatrical marketplace. The book presents an innovative transposition of social assemblage theory into performance history. It argues that the cultural meaning of drama changes with every change in the performance location. This theoretical model is applied to a wide range of archival materials including censor's manuscripts, theatre ledger books, performance schedules, unfamiliar play texts and rare printed sources. By examining prompters' records, box office receipts and benefit night takings, the study questions the status of David Garrick, Sarah Siddons and Edmund Kean, and recovers the neglected actress, Elizabeth Younge, and her importance to Edmund Burke.
Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet
by Laura JacobsA distinguished dance critic offers an enchanting introduction to the art of balletAs much as we may enjoy Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, for many of us ballet is a foreign language. It communicates through movement, not words, and its history lies almost entirely abroad--in Russia, Italy, and France. In Celestial Bodies, dance critic Laura Jacobs makes the foreign familiar, providing a lively, poetic, and uniquely accessible introduction to the world of classical dance. Combining history, interviews with dancers, technical definitions, descriptions of performances, and personal stories, Jacobs offers an intimate and passionate guide to watching ballet and understanding the central elements of choreography.Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated with original drawings, Celestial Bodies is essential reading for all lovers of this magnificent art form.
Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature
by Roberto González EchevarríaPublished in 1499 and centered on the figure of a bawd and witch, Fernando de Rojas' dark and disturbing Celestina was destined to become the most suppressed classic in Spanish literary history. Routinely ignored in Spanish letters, the book nonetheless echoes through contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature. This is the phenomenon that Celestina's Brood explores.Roberto González Echevarría, one of the most eminent and influential critics of Hispanic literature writing today, uses Rojas' text as his starting point to offer an exploration of modernity in the Hispanic literary tradition, and of the Baroque as an expression of the modern. His analysis of Celestina reveals the relentless probing of the limits of language and morality that mark the work as the beginning of literary modernity in Spanish, and the start of a tradition distinguished by a penchant for the excesses of the Baroque. González Echevarría pursues this tradition and its meaning through the works of major figures such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Nicolás Guillén, and Severo Sarduy, as well as through the works of lesser-known authors.By revealing continuities of the Baroque, Celestina's Brood cuts across conventional distinctions between Spanish and Latin American literary traditions to show their profound and previously unimagined affinity.
Celia, a Slave
by Nicholas Wright Barbara SeydaThe ninth winner of the Yale Drama Series is a searing and powerful drama of slave litigation, injustice, institutional racism, and the rule of law. The winner of the 2015 Yale Drama Series playwriting competition was selected by Nicholas Wright, former Associate Director of London's Royal Court. Barbara Seyda's stunningly theatrical Celia, a Slave is a vivid tableau of interviews with the dead that interweaves oral histories with official archival records. Powerful, poetic, and stylistically bold, this work foregrounds twenty-three diverse characters to recall the events that led to the hanging of nineteen-year-old Celia, an African American slave convicted in a Missouri court of murdering her master, the prosperous landowner Robert Newsom, in 1855. Excavating actual trial transcripts and court records, Seyda bears witness to racial and sexual violence in U. S. history, illuminating the brutal realities of female slave life in the pre-Civil War South while exploring the intersection of rape, morality, economics, and gender politics that continue to resonate today.
Celine the Crippled Giant: Reading The Maternal Imaginary
by Milton HindusLouis Ferdinand Céline (the pseudonym of Louis Destouches) was a famous novelist and ferocious anti-Semitic pamphleteer who rose to fame before Hitler, but perfectly represented the fascist mind-set that swept across Europe between 1932 and 1944. Never a Nazi himself, he was author of Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, Guignol's Band, Homage to Zola, and a series of "pamphlets." The latter are a potpourri of racist editorials, ballet scenarios, and anti-Semitic confessions so violent that an aesthete like Andre Gide thought them parodies of other anti-Semitic literature. Little wonder the Nazis regarded Céline as a fellow-traveler. He retreated with the Nazis across the Rhine and sought refuge with them, first in Germany and then in Denmark. In 1951, he benefitted from an amnesty as a wounded veteran of both World Wars. Before his death in 1961 he had regained his popularity with the public and was regarded as a classic writer. Now that the body of his work is in translation, Céline's fame in the literary world circles the globe.Céline, perhaps more than any other analysis, helps shed some light on this enigmatic figure. It establishes his literary importance, and, at the same time, examines his anti-Semitism. After a final meeting, Hindus declared that "Celine is a splinter in my mind that I've got either to absorb completely or eject completely." The reader of this fascinating critical memoir of one of the twentieth century's most controversial literary figures is apt to be left with a similar dilemma.
Cell
by Judy KlassCell is a murder mystery - to about the same extent that Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is a murder mystery. Lieutenant Rodriguez questions Dennis Kadman about his older brother Michael, who has OD’d on heroin in Dennis’ apartment. Dennis wants to know: who gave Michael the drugs? Michael was a cunning, manipulative addict. But he was placed in his brother’s care by the courts – and Dennis tried to keep him alive and drug-free. Through flashbacks, we see the fractious relationship between the brothers, and how they interacted with other “suspects,” including Edith, the Jamaican nurse who believed Michael should be allowed to choose to die; Julie, Dennis’ fiancée who hated what Michael was doing to Dennis and to their relationship; and Byron, Michael’s homeless friend with whom he had lived on the streets. Like Oedipus, while looking for the culprit, Dennis learns far too much about himself.
The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake
by Adam PutzThis book reconsiders the Celtic Revival by examining appropriations of Shakespeare, using close readings of works by Arnold, Dowden, Yeats and Joyce to reveal the pernicious manner in which the discourse of Anglo-Irish cultural politics informed the critical paradigms that mediated the reading of Shakespeare in Ireland for a generation.
Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers
by Rory LoughnaneDrawing together some of the leading academics in the field of Shakespeare studies, this volume examines the commonalities and differences in addressing a notionally 'Celtic' Shakespeare. Celtic contexts have been established for many of Shakespeare's plays, and there has been interest too in the ways in which Irish, Scottish and Welsh critics, editors and translators have reimagined Shakespeare, claiming, connecting with and correcting him. This collection fills a major gap in literary criticism by bringing together the best scholarship on the individual nations of Ireland, Scotland and Wales in a way that emphasizes cultural crossovers and crucibles of conflict. The volume is divided into three chronologically ordered sections: Tudor Reflections, Stuart Revisions and Celtic Afterlives. This division of essays directs attention to Shakespeare's transformed treatment of national identity in plays written respectively in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, but also takes account of later regional receptions and the cultural impact of the playwright's dramatic works. The first two sections contain fresh readings of a number of the individual plays, and pay particular attention to the ways in which Shakespeare attends to contemporary understandings of national identity in the light of recent history. Juxtaposing this material with subsequent critical receptions of Shakespeare's works, from Milton to Shaw, this volume addresses a significant critical lacuna in Shakespearean criticism. Rather than reading these plays from a solitary national perspective, the essays in this volume cohere in a wide-ranging treatment of Shakespeare's direct and oblique references to the archipelago, and the problematic issue of national identity.
Cementville
by Jane MartinComedy / 5m, 9f / Interior / The comic sensation of the 1991 Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, this play by the author of Talking With and numerous hits is a brilliant portrayal of America's fascination with fantasy entertainment. In a locker room in a seedy arena in Tennessee, the scurvy bunch of professional lady wrestlers includes Tiger who has a drinking problem and a small dog; Dani who displays a chip on her shoulder against the promoter who owes the girls several weeks' pay; Lessa, an Olympic shot putter with delusions of being a pro athlete and Netty, an overweight older woman who appears in the ring as "Pajama Mama." The eager beaver go fer Nola and the Knockout Sisters, refugees from the Big Time banned for drug and other abuses, complete the roster for tonight's main attraction. Sparks fly when the other women find out about them.
The Cemetery Club
by Ivan MenchellIvan MenchellComedyCharacters: 1 male, 5 femaleMultiple SetsThree Jewish widows meet once a month for tea before going to visit their husband's graves. Ida is sweet tempered and ready to begin a new life, Lucille is a feisty embodiment of the girl who just wants to have fun, and Doris is priggish and judgmental, particularly when Sam the butcher enters the scene. He meets the widows while visiting his wife's grave. Doris and Lucille squash the budding romance between Sam and Ida. They are guilt stricken when this nearly breaks Ida's heart. The Broadway production starred Eileen Heckart as Lucille."Funny, sweet tempered, moving." -Boston Globe"Very touching and humorous. An evening of pure pleasure that will make you glad you went to the theatre."-Washington Journal Newspapers
The Censorship of Eighteenth-Century Theatre: Playhouses and Prohibition, 1737–1843
by David O’ShaughnessyThis collection reveals the wide-ranging impact of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 on literary and theatrical culture in Georgian Britain. Demonstrating the differing motivations of the state in censoring public performances of plays after the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 and until the Theatres Act 1843, chapters cover a wide variety of theatrical genres across a century and show how the mechanisms of formal censorship operated under the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays. They also explore the effects of informal censorship, whereby playwrights, audiences and managers internalized the censorship regime. As such, the volume moves beyond a narrow focus on erasures and emendations visible on manuscripts to elucidate censorship's wide-ranging significance across the long eighteenth century. Demonstrating theatre archives' potency as a resource for historical research, this volume is of exceptional value for researchers interested in the evolving complexities of Georgian society, its politics and mores.
Centre Stage: Lessons from Actors on the Art of Charisma
by Jeannette Nelson'The theatre stars' voice guru' Daily MailEvery time you deliver a speech, give a presentation, or simply tell a good story, you are taking centre stage. Here, one of the world’s leading voice coaches introduces the simple exercises that great actors use to hold people’s attention – and reveals how anyone speaking in public can use them.Drawing on 25 years working at the National Theatre in London, Jeannette Nelson explains:How to warm up your voice and body before a big speech.How learning to breathe deeply can improve your clarity and pace.How to divide a script into individual ‘thoughts’ so it flows more naturally.How to adapt your delivery to suit any environment, be it a 1,000-seater auditorium or an intimate Zoom meeting.Along the way, she recounts stories from leading actors that pull back the curtain on how they learnt to own the room, and how you can too. If all the world’s a stage, this book will turn you into its lead actor.
Certain Fragments: Texts and Writings on Performance
by Tim EtchellsWhat is the relationship between performance and play? Between performance and technology? Between performance and death? Certain Fragments is an extraordinary exploration of what lies at the heart of contemporary theatre. Written by the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, acknowledged to be Britains most brilliant experimental theatre company (Guardian), Certain Fragments investigates the processes of devising performance, the role of writing in an interdisciplinary theatre, and the influence of the city on contemporary art practice. Tim Etchells unique and provocative voice shifts from intimate anecdote to critical analysis and back again. And as in his theatre-making so in his book: with Certain Fragments Etchells disrupts traditional notions of creative, academic, and intellectual work. The book is an exciting and radical fusion of story-telling and criticism. It also makes available, for the first time, four seminal Forced Entertainment texts by Etchells.