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Quiver
by Anna Chatterton“She doesn’t care about me; she doesn’t even want to see me; she just pretends she does.” Shy, fourteen-year-old Maddie wasn’t expecting to have to worry about taking care of herself just yet. Her sixteen-year-old party-girl sister Bea has scandalously moved in with their mom’s ex-boyfriend, and in turn their brassy mother Sheila has run straight to the comfort of another lover. Maddie is finding that an empty apartment is quiet and lonely, even though her time is normally spent reading comics in her closet. Feeling abandoned and vulnerable, she turns to her favourite superhero, Arrowette. Armed with a backpack filled with a bow and arrows, she embarks on a radical plan to join the army, where she thinks she will find a new family she can count on. Meanwhile, Bea is second-guessing the whole dating an older man thing, and Sheila defends her unorthodox sexual candour, entertaining the ideals of freedom. When Bea and Sheila decide to come home for Maddie’s birthday, they’re faced with the pointed arrow of Maddie’s newfound power and the startling reality of the kind of family they’ve become.
Quotable Shakespeare (Quotable Ser.)
by Max MorrisThis entertaining collection gathers together William Shakespeare's wisest and wittiest quotations. Quotable Shakespeare proves that brevity is the soul of wit and is sure to delight all lovers of the Bard's uniquely perceptive and influential works.
Quotable Shakespeare (Quotable Ser.)
by Max MorrisThis entertaining collection gathers together William Shakespeare's wisest and wittiest quotations. Quotable Shakespeare proves that brevity is the soul of wit and is sure to delight all lovers of the Bard's uniquely perceptive and influential works.
R.U.R.
by Karel CapekBased on a pair of comic dramas from ancient Rome, The Comedy of Errors presents a spectacle of pure farce in the spirit of utmost fun and -- as the title suggests -- hilarious confusion. Two sets of identical twins provide the basis for ongoing incidents of mistaken identity, within a lively plot of quarrels, arrests, and a grand courtroom denouement. One of Shakespeare's earliest dramatic efforts, the play abounds in his trademark conceits, puns, and other forms of fanciful wordplay. It also foreshadows his later and greater comedies, offering students and scholars a valuable key to the playwright's development.
R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life
by Karel CapekA new translation of Karel Čapek&’s play R.U.R.—which famously coined the term &“robot&”—and a collection of essays reflecting on the play&’s legacy from scientists and scholars who work in artificial life and robotics.Karel Čapek's &“R.U.R.&” and the Vision of Artificial Life offers a new, highly faithful translation by Štěpán Šimek of Czech novelist, playwright, and critic Karel Čapek&’s play R.U.R.: Rossum&’s Universal Robots, as well as twenty essays from contemporary writers on the 1920 play. R.U.R. is perhaps best known for first coining the term &“robot&” (in Czech, robota means serfdom or arduous drudgery). The twenty essays in this new English edition, beautifully edited by Jitka Čejková, are selected from Robot 100, an edited collection in Czech with perspectives from 100 contemporary voices that was published in 2020 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the play.Čapek&’s robots were autonomous beings, but biological, not mechanical, made of chemically synthesized soft matter resembling living tissue, like the synthetic humans in Blade Runner, Westworld, or Ex Machina. The contributors to the collection—scientists and other scholars—explore the legacy of the play and its connections to the current state of research in artificial life, or ALife. Throughout the book, it is impossible to ignore Čapek&’s prescience, as his century-old science fiction play raises contemporary questions with respect to robotics, synthetic biology, technology, artificial life, and artificial intelligence, anticipating many of the formidable challenges we face today.ContributorsJitka Čejková, Miguel Aguilera, Iñigo R. Arandia, Josh Bongard, Julyan Cartwright, Seth Bullock, Dominique Chen, Gusz Eiben, Tom Froese, Carlos Gershenson, Inman Harvey, Jana Horáková, Takashi Ikegami, Sina Khajehabdollahi, George Musser, Geoff Nitschke, Julie Nováková, Antoine Pasquali, Hemma Philamore, Lana Sinapayen, Hiroki Sayama, Nathaniel Virgo, Olaf Witkowski
Rabbit Hole (movie tie-in)
by David Lindsay-AbaireMovie tie-in edition of the film from Lions Gate starring Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart and Dianne Wiest. Life for a happy couple is turned upside down after their young son dies in an accident.
Rabelais's Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais
by E. Bruce HayesIn the first extended investigation of the importance of dramatic farce in Rabelais studies, Bruce Hayes makes an important contribution to the understanding of the theater of farce and its literary possibilities. By tracing the development of farce in late medieval and Renaissance comedic theater in comparison to the evolution of farce in Rabelais's work, Hayes distinguishes Rabelais's use of the device from traditional farce. While traditional farce is primarily conservative in its aims, with an emphasis on maintaining the status quo, Rabelais puts farce to radical new uses, making it subversive in his own work. Bruce Hayes examines the use of farce in Pantagruel, Gargantua, and the Tiers and Quart livres, showing how Rabelais recast farce in a humanist context, making it a vehicle for attacking the status quo and posing alternatives to contemporary legal, educational, and theological systems. Rabelais's Radical Farce illustrates the rich possibilities of a genre often considered simplistic and unsophisticated, disclosing how Rabelais in fact introduced both a radical reformulation of farce, and a new form of humanist satire.
Rabindranath Tagore's Theatre: From Page to Stage
by Abhijit SenThis book analyses Rabindranath Tagore’s contribution to Bengali drama and theatre. Throughout this book, Abhijit Sen locates and studies Rabindranath’s experiments with drama/theatre in the context of the theatre available in nineteenth-century Bengal, and explores the innovative strategies he adopted to promote his ‘brand’ of theatre. This approach finds validation in the fact that Rabindranath combined in himself the roles of author-actor-producer, who always felt that, without performance, his dramatic compositions fell short of the desired completeness. Various facets of his plays as theatre and his own role as a theatre-practitioner are the prime focus of this book. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in Theatre and Performance Studies and most notably, those focusing on Indian Theatre and Postcolonial Theatre.
Race
by David Mamet"Gripping. . . . Deep in its gut, Mamet's new play argues, everything in America-and this play throws in sex, rape, the law, employment and relationships-is still about race."-Chicago Tribune"A dramatist celebrated for introducing expletives to the American theatre now tackles a truly taboo four-letter word. . . . Most concerned with the power and treachery of language, Mamet remains American theatre's most urgent five-letter word."-GuardianDavid Mamet, who took on the subject of sexual harassment with his 1992 drama Oleanna, has once again ignited controversy, hitting the hot-button issue of our so-called post-racial society. When a rich white man is accused of raping a younger African American woman, he looks to a multicultural law firm for his defense. But even as his lawyers-one of them white, another black-begin to strategize, they must confront their own biases and assumptions about race relations in America. Currently playing to acclaim on Broadway in a production directed by Mamet, audience members may be moved to self-scrutiny by his signature gritty yet finely tuned language.David Mamet is a playwright, director, author, essayist, screenwriter, and film director. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, which also received a Tony Award nomination, along with Speed-the-Plow. Other of his plays include American Buffalo, Oleanna, and The Cryptogram.
Race and Performance after Repetition
by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane VogelThe contributors to Race and Performance after Repetition explore how theater and performance studies account for the complex relationship between race and time. Pointing out that repetition has been the primary point of reference for understanding both the complex temporality of theater and the historical persistence of race, they identify and pursue critical alternatives to the conceptualization, organization, measurement, and politics of race in performance. The contributors examine theater, performance art, music, sports, dance, photography, and other forms of performance in topics that range from the movement of boxer Joe Louis to George C. Wolfe's 2016 reimagining of the 1921 all-black musical comedy Shuffle Along to the relationship between dance, mourning, and black adolescence in Flying Lotus's music video “Never Catch Me.” Proposing a spectrum of coexisting racial temporalities that are not tethered to repetition, this collection reconsiders central theories in performance studies in order to find new understandings of race.Contributors. Joshua Chambers-Letson, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Nicholas Fesette, Patricia Herrera, Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Mario LaMothe, Daphne P. Lei, Jisha Menon, Tavia Nyong’o, Tina Post, Elizabeth W. Son, Shane Vogel, Catherine M. Young, Katherine Zien
Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama
by Rena M. HeinrichMixed-race Asian American plays are often overlooked for their failure to fit smoothly into static racial categories, rendering mixed-race drama inconsequential in conversations about race and performance. Since the nineteenth century, however, these plays have long advocated for the social significance of multiracial Asian people. Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Experience in American Drama traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and explores the ways that mixed-race Asian identity transforms our understanding of race. Mixed-Asian playwrights harness theater’s generative power to enact performances of “double liminality” and expose the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.
Racism and Early Blackface Comic Traditions: From the Old World to the New (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)
by Robert HornbackThis book traces blackface types from ancient masks of grinning Africans and phallus-bearing Roman fools through to comedic medieval devils, the pan-European black-masked Titivillus and Harlequin, and racial impersonation via stereotypical 'black speech' explored in the Renaissance by Lope de Vega and Shakespeare. Jim Crow and antebellum minstrelsy recycled Old World blackface stereotypes of irrationality, ignorance, pride, and immorality. Drawing upon biblical interpretations and philosophy, comic types from moral allegory originated supposedly modern racial stereotypes. Early blackface traditions thus spread damning race-belief that black people were less rational, hence less moral and less human. Such notions furthered the global Renaissance’s intertwined Atlantic slave and sugar trades and early nationalist movements. The latter featured overlapping definitions of race and nation, as well as of purity of blood, language, and religion in opposition to 'Strangers'. Ultimately, Old World beliefs still animate supposed 'biological racism' and so-called 'white nationalism' in the age of Trump.
The Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre
by KJ SanchezThe Radical Act of Listening: Making Documenatry and Investigative Theatre explores best practices in the field of Documentary and Investigative theatre and offers readers a how-to guide for making their own work, written by a leading practitioner in the field.This book looks at how listening can radically bring about change through documentary and investigative theatre. It examines the mechanics and value of listening and how theatre practitioners can use these skills to create theatre. What does it mean to really listen, especially during a time when everyone is shouting? Can we listen without an agenda? Can we take what we hear and find ethical ways to share it with others so that we capture nuance, complexity, contradiction, i.e., all things human? In exploring these questions, author KJ Sanchez shares conversations with peers and fellow artists who work in the fields of interview-based and non-fiction art practices, to look at what it takes to be a great listener and a great theatre maker.Featuring key artists, themes, and practices, this book is written for students and practitioners interested in creating documentary and investigative theatre, as well as other interview-based artforms.
Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)
by Kate DossettBetween 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.
Radical Doubt: The Joker System, after Boal
by Mady SchutzmanRadical Doubt investigates ethical play across a spectrum of performances, on and off the stage. In witty, recursive, personal, and propulsive prose, Mady Schutzman elaborates on the Joker System, conceived by Augusto Boal, best known for Theatre of the Oppressed. The Joker System is a collaborative approach to representing social dilemmas through a rare fusion of destabilizing ambiguity and journalistic rigor. Schutzman models the Joker System while expanding well beyond the theatrical. In polyphonic compositions that perform their own philosophy, she uncovers illuminating links between calculus and conjuring, kōans and resistance, humor and witnessing, complexity theory and sorely needed new practices of living in our divisive times. These life practices rely upon crafty and circuitous strategies to deliver their subversive punch. Jok(er)ing matters, Schutzman insists. When communities fragment and identities fixate, enter the trickster! Sonja KuftinecTheatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota
The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard
by Baz KershawThe Radical in Performance investigates the crisis in contemporary theatre, and celebrates the subversive in performance. It is the first full-length study to explore the link between a western theatre which, says Kershaw, is largely outdated and the blossoming of postmodern performance, much of which has a genuinely radical edge. In staying focused on the period between Brecht and Baudrillard, modernity and postmodernism, Baz Kershaw identifies crucial resources for the revitalisation of the radical across a wide spectrum of cultural practices. This is a timely, necessary and rigorous book. It will be a compelling read for anyone searching for a critical catalyst for new ways of viewing and practising cultural politics.
Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by Chris FitterThis book argues that Shakespeare was permanently preoccupied with the brutality, corruption, and ultimate groundlessness of the political order of his state, and that the impact of original Tudor censorship, supplemented by the relatively depoliticizing aesthetic traditions of later centuries, have together obscured the consistent subversiveness of his work. Traditionally, Shakespeare’s political attitudes have been construed either as primarily conservative, or as essays in richly imaginative ambiguation, irreducible to settled viewpoints. Fitter contends that government censorship forced superficial acquiescence upon Shakespeare in establishment ideologies — monarchic, aristocratic and patriarchal — that were enunciated through rhetorical set pieces, but that Shakespeare the dramatist learned from Shakespeare the actor a variety of creative methods for sabotaging those perspectives in performance in the public theatres. Using historical contextualizations and recuperation of original performance values, the book argues that Shakespeare emerged as a radical writer not in middle age with King Lear and Coriolanus — plays whose radicalism is becoming widely recognized — but from his outset, with Henry VI and Taming of the Shrew. Recognizing Shakespeare’s allusiveness to 1590s controversies and dissident thought, and recovering the subtextual politics of Shakespeare’s distinctive stagecraft reveals populist, at times even radical meaning and a substantially new, and astonishingly interventionist, Shakespeare.
Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology
by Jan Cohen-CruzRadical Street Performance is the first volume to collect together the fascinating array of writings by activists, directors, performers, critics, scholars and journalists who have documented street theatre around the world. More than thirty essays explore the myriad forms this most public of performances can take: * agit-prop * invisible theatre * demonstrations and rallies * direct action * puppetry * parades and pageants * performance art * guerrilla theatre * circuses These essays look at performaces in Europe, Africa, China, India and both the Americas. They describe engagement with issues as diverse as abortion, colonialism, the environment and homophobia, to name only a few. Introduced by editor Jan Cohen-Cruz, the essays are organized into thematic sections: Agitating; Witnessing; Involving; Imagining; and Popularizing. Radical Street Performance is an inspiring testimony to this international performance phenomenon, and an invaluable record of a form of theatre which continues to flourish in a televisual age.
Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry
by Soyica Diggs ColbertA &“loving, lavishly detailed&” (New York Times) and captivating portrait of Lorraine Hansberry&’s life, art, and political activism—one of O Magazine's best books of April 2021&“Hits the mark as a fresh and timely portrait of an influential playwright.&”—Publishers Weekly In this first scholarly biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Soyica Diggs Colbert narrates a life at the intersection of art and politics, arguing that for Hansberry the theater operated as a rehearsal room for her political and intellectual work. Celebrated for her play A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was also the author of innovative journalism and of plays touching on slavery, interracial communities, and Black freedom movements. Hansberry was deeply involved in the Black freedom struggle during the Cold War and in the early civil rights movement, and here Colbert shows us an artist&’s life with the background of the Greenwich Village art scene in the 1960s, the homophile movement, Black diasporic freedom movements, and third-wave feminism. Drawing from Hansberry&’s papers, speeches, and interviews, this book provides a new point of entry in the history of Black radicalism, and a new perspective on Black women in mid‑twentieth‑century political movements.
Radio Golf
by August WilsonA real-estate developer sets about trying to redevelop the 'blighted' Hill District of Pittsburgh in the final part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatisation of the African American experience in the twentieth century. Ivy League-educated Harmond Wilks has a plan to redevelop Pittsburgh's Hill District and hopes to become the town's first black mayor. But an old mansion slated for demolition, 1839 Wylie Avenue, turns out to have a significant past. 'I would encourage people to rave in the nonlinearity of his well-made plots, to big up his quirky architecture, to honor guard the house at 1839 Wylie so that it will always remain standing' Suzan-Lori Parks, from her Foreword.
The Railway Siding
by Jonathan HollowayOut of work, out of luck, and out of favor with his wife, architect Jack Webb retreats to a cottage in Wales to concentrate on a new design project for a friend's business. With the deadline imminent, Jack takes the overnight train from Haverfordwest back to London to deliver his drawings. On the otherwise deserted train Jack encounters first an unusually friendly guard and then an aloof and otherworldly woman, Hope Cairns, who has just abandoned a planned rendezvous in Milford with a lover, also named Jack. When Hope suddenly disappears, and the guard reveals her story, we discover that Jack's journey is not all it seems. The Railway Siding is a stunningly crafted, highly atmospheric play in one act.
The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy
by Augusto BoalRainbow of Desire is a handbook of exercises with a difference. It is Augusto Boal's bold and brilliant statement about the therapeutic ability of theatre to liberate individuals and change lives. Now translated into English and comprehensively updated from the French, Rainbow of Desire sets out the techniques which help us `see' for the first time the oppressions we have internalised. Boal, a Brazilian theatre director, writer and politician, has been confronting oppression in various forms for over thirty years. His belief that theatre is a means to create the future has inspired hundreds of groups all over the world to use his techniques in a multitude of settings. This, his latest work, includes such exercises as: * The Cops in the Head and their anti-bodies * The screen image * The image of the future we are afraid of * Image and counter-image ....and many more. Rainbow of Desire will make fascinating reading for those already familiar with Boal's work and is also completely accessible to anyone new to Theatre of the Oppressed techniques.
Raindance
by M. Z. RibalowComedy / 5m, 1f / Interior / In a metaphysical wild west saloon are gathered a Black man named Jim Crow, gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, Sitting Bull, arch capitalist J.P. Standard and wicked Falina, the Mexican saloon girl. There has been no rain for who knows how long. Nothing will induce young George, who sometimes has seizures and dances about causing rain, into a fit. Finally, George spontaneously begins to dance. At the start of the second act, it has been raining for who knows how long. Every effort to force George into a reverse rain dance fails. The play ends with the waters rising and no Ark in sight.
Rainmaker
by N. Richard NashAt the time of a paralyzing drought in the West, we discover a girl whose father and two brothers are worried as much about her becoming an old maid as they are about their dying cattle. For the truth is, she is indeed a plain girl. The brothers try every possible scheme to marry her off but without success. Nor is there any sign of relief from the dry heat. Suddenly from out of nowhere appears a picaresque character with a mellifluous tongue and the most grandiose notions a man could imagine. He claims to be a rainmaker. And he promises to bring rain, for $100. It's a silly idea, but the rainmaker is so refreshing and ingratiating that the family finally consents. Forthwith they begin banging on big brass drums to rattle the sky; while the rainmaker turns his magic on the girl, and persuades her that she has a very real beauty of her own. And she believes it, just as her father believes the fellow can actually bring rain. And rain does come, and so does love.
Raised in Captivity
by Nicky SilverWith sharp comic turns and absurdist twists, Raised in Captivity explores the guilt, self-punishment, and redemption in the lives of two estranged and equally odd siblings when they reunite at the funeral of their mother--whose demise was caused by nothing less than an errant showerhead.