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Tesla's Letters
by Jeffrey StanleyDrama / 2m, 2f / Tesla's Letters is a drama of ideas about war and peace, the exercise of humanity and the uses of science. Daisy Archer, an American doctoral candidate arrives at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade to examine its archives for her dissertation on the great scientist's life. She is not prepared for the museum's director, a Serb with family in Croatia, who probes her knowledge of Yugoslav history and of Tesla, the Croatian born Serbian genius who immigrated to the United States in 1884 and gave the world alternating electric current, wireless electric transmission and, perhaps, a death ray capable of inflicting instantaneous death. He also tests her willingness to risk her life and American innocence by entering Croatia to gather photographic evidence in Tesla's birthplace.
Text and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre
by Catherine LoveText and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre interrogates the paradoxical nature of theatre texts, which have been understood both as separate literary objects in their own right and as material for performance. Drawing on analysis of contemporary practitioners who are working creatively with text, the book re-examines the relationship between text and performance within the specific context of British theatre. The chapters discuss a wide range of theatre-makers creating work in the UK from the 1990s onwards, from playwrights like Tim Crouch and Jasmine Lee-Jones to companies including Action Hero and RashDash. In doing so, the book addresses issues such as theatrical authorship, artistic intention, and the apparent incompleteness of plays as both written and performed phenomena. Text and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre also explores the implications of changing technologies of page and stage, analysing the impact of recent developments in theatre-making, editing, and publishing on the status of the theatre text. Written for scholars, students, and practitioners alike, Text and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre provides an original perspective on one of the most enduring problems to occupy theatre practice and scholarship.
Text and Supertext in Ibsen’s Drama (G - Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects)
by Brian JohnstonBrian Johnston's approach to Ibsen, now well known, is unlike any other. Johnston sees Ibsen's twelve realist plays as a single cyclical work, the "realist" method of which hides a much larger poetic intention than has previously been suspected. He believes that the cycle constitutes one of the major works of the European imagination, comparable in scale to Goethe or Dante. And he has shown Ibsen to be the heir to Romantic and Hegelian art and thought, adapting this heritage to the circumstances of his own day.This work demonstrates how the language and scene, characters and "props," of the Ibsen dramas establish a bold and far-reaching theatrical goal: nothing less than an account of our biological and cultural identity in its multilayered totality. Johnston argues that Ibsen's realist text, while stimulating the appearance of nineteenth-century life, also objectively and precisely builds up an alternative image in which archetypal figures and situations from our cultural past repossess the realist stage. Thus he sees the Ibsen "strategy" in his realist plays as twofold: (1) the dialectical subversion of the nineteenth-century reality presented in the plays, and (2) the forced recovery of the archetypal from the past, in a procedure similar to James Joyce's in Ulysses. By "supertext" Johnston means a reservoir of cultural reference upon which Ibsen continuously drew in his realist work just as in is earlier poetic and historical dramas.
Thalian Hall
by D. Anthony RivenbarkThalian Hall is one of the oldest and most beautiful theaters in America. Forming the east wing of Wilmington's iconic city hall, this dual-purpose building has been at the center of the community's cultural and political life since it first opened in 1858. Thalian Hall is the only surviving theater designed by John Montague Trimble, one of America's foremost 19th-century theater architects. It was built at a time when Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina. Thalian Hall is the embodiment of a tradition of performance that stretches back for over two centuries. It has hosted Shakespearean tragedies, musical concerts, and even boxing and wrestling events. For generations, Wilmington audiences have witnessed touring stars, local actors, musicians, dancers, and movies in a parade of performances and celebratory events. The story of Thalian Hall is an embroidered tapestry reflecting the history of the American theater and the community that built it.
The Thanksgiving Play
by Larissa FasthorseGood intentions collide with absurd assumptions in Larissa FastHorse’s wickedly funny satire, as a troupe of terminally “woke” teaching artists scrambles to create a pageant that somehow manages to celebrate both Turkey Day and Native American Heritage Month.
That Berlin Moment
by Sarah Jane DickensonBold, challenging and compelling That Berlin Moment is a play for four adult characters, two female and two male, which explores how memory is more about the present and the future than the past. 'Why don't I feel husband? I look at you and I don't feel husband, I smell you and I don't smell husband, I look at you and I -' A tragic accident has robbed Alex of her memory. Her attentive husband is eager to fill the gaps for her. But the more he tells her the more she hates who he tells her she is. Determined not to remember at all costs and with the help of a young doctor with a head full of maverick theories and a very new stethoscope, she agrees to meet the mysterious fellow patient, Stranger. Together they begin to explore and enjoy the present, but it soon becomes clear that his memories won't stay forgotten with terrifying consequences for both them and the Doctor.
That Elusive Spark
by Janet MunsilNeuropsychologist Helen Harlow is an expert at understanding the functions of the human brain, and yet her own remains a mystery. Turning her back on a once-brilliant future filled with scientific promise, Helen attempts to escape the mess of her life by diving headfirst into a new one: living in a frat-house basement, teaching Psych 101 to clueless freshmen, and confronting both her depression and the puzzling attentions of her slacker housemate Finlay. Pushed to the brink and increasingly desperate for some semblance of normalcy, Helen finds herself in a doctor's office looking for a change. But not everyone chooses to change. Certainly not Phineas Gage, a construction foreman in 1848 who miraculously survives an explosion that shoots an iron rod though his head. While Phineas makes an extraordinary physical recovery, he has a dramatic change in personality. Attended to and observed by the young doctor James Harlow, Helen's ancestor, the legacy of Phineas's dramatic story shows how far we have come scientifically, and yet how little we can comprehend of the mystery of our own hearts and minds.
That Pretty Pretty; Or, The Rape Play
by Sheila CallaghanComedy / Characters: 2m, 3f A pair of radical feminist ex-strippers scour the country on a murderous rampage against right-wing pro-lifers, blogging about their exploits in gruesome detail. Meanwhile, a scruffy screenwriter named Owen tries to bang out his magnum opus in a hotel room as his best friend Rodney ("The Rod") holds forth on rape and other manly enterprises. When Owen decides to incorporate the strippers into his screenplay, the boundaries of reality begin to blur, and only a visit from Jane Fonda can help keep worlds from blowing apart. Sheila Callaghan's That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play is a violently funny and disturbing excavation of the dirty corners of our imaginations. "Mind-blowing images and soul-crushing language flowing wildly." -Back Stage "A submersion in the anarchy of ambivalence: variously a rant, a riff, a rumble - about our notions of naturalism, objectification, perversity, and beauty ... There's sass and sarcasm in Callaghan's high-energy punk writing." -John Lahr, The New Yorker "Raunchy, savvy... the twisted, caffeinated world of the show imagines the collective subconscious of a culture where girls never stiop going wild... [Callaghan] push(es) her audience's buttons with an aggressive treatment of some of the darker corners of the human psyche." -The New York Times
That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a critical process
by Terence HawkesFirst published in 1986. This collection of essays focuses on the ways in which our society 'processes' Shakespeare and the purposes for which this seems to be done. The case is made by examining the work of four highly influential critics: A C Bradley, Walter Raleigh, T S Eliot and John Dover Wilson. Terence Hawkes asks whether, beyond the readings to which the plays may be subjected, there lies any final, authoritative or essential meaning to which we can ultimately turn, concluding that jazz music offers the most fruitful model for twentieth-century criticism.
That Summer
by David FrenchIt's Memorial Day, 1990, and Margaret Ryan has returned from Vermont to the Ontario cottage country where, thirty-two years before, she had vacationed with her disintegrating family at a lakeside resort. For herself and her sister Daisy, it was a time of awakening, a time of discovery. Both of the girls fall in love with two of the local boys. Daisy, on the lookout for action, cruising the dances at the resort, can't deal with what she initiates, and falls victim to her own confusion and naiveté. Not even the neighbour, the eccentric, bourbon-drinking, cigar-smoking Mrs. Crump, who knows all the fairy-tale spells to capture the heart of a lover, can save Daisy from drowning in her own misadventure. At the same time, Margaret, bookish and withdrawn, inhabiting a universe defined by poets and novelists, is seduced in spite of herself. As Margaret, the narrator, watches Maggie, her younger self, relive the innocence and beauty of that summer, the play moves inexorably back to the heartbreak of a headlong surrender to experience, both won and lost in a single day. Cinematic in its feel and pacing, recalling the 1950s genre of Dirty Dancing and My American Cousin, That Summer is a meditation on what endures of fleeting moments over time. Cast of 5 women and 2 men.
That Was Entertainment: The Golden Age of the MGM Musical
by Bernard F. DickThat Was Entertainment: The Golden Age of the MGM Musical traces the development of the MGM musical from The Broadway Melody (1929) through its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s and its decline in the 1960s, culminating in the notorious 1970 MGM auction when Judy Garland's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, Charlton Heston's chariot from Ben-Hur, and Fred Astaire's trousers and dress shirt from Royal Wedding vanished to the highest bidders.That Was Entertainment uniquely reconstructs the life of Arthur Freed, whose unit at MGM became the gold standard against which the musicals of other studios were measured. Without Freed, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ann Miller, Betty Garrett, Cyd Charisse, Arlene Dahl, Vera-Ellen, Lucille Bremer, Gloria DeHaven, Howard Keel, and June Allyson would never have had the signature films that established them as movie legends.MGM's past is its present. No other studio produced such a range of musicals that are still shown today on television and all of which are covered in this volume, from integrated musicals in which song and dance were seamlessly embedded in the plot (Meet Me in St. Louis and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) to revues (The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Ziegfeld Follies); original musicals (Singin' in the Rain, Easter Parade, and It's Always Fair Weather); adaptations of Broadway shows (Girl Crazy, On the Town, Show Boat, Kiss Me Kate, Brigadoon, Kismet, and Bells Are Ringing); musical versions of novels and plays (Gigi, The Pirate, and Summer Holiday); operettas (the films of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy); mythico-historical biographies of composers (Johann Strauss Jr. in The Great Waltz and Sigmund Romberg in Deep in My Heart); and musicals featuring songwriting teams (Rodgers and Hart in Words and Music and Kalmar and Ruby in Three Little Words), opera stars (Enrico Caruso in The Great Caruso and Marjorie Lawrence in Interrupted Melody), and pop singers (Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me). Also covered is the water ballet musical--in a class by itself--with Esther Williams starring as MGM's resident mermaid. This is a book for longtime lovers of the movie musical and those discovering the genre for the first time.
Thataway Jack
by John RustanFarce / 6m, 2f / 1 Interior, 1 Exterior / The authors of The Tangled Snarl and The Attempted Murder of Peggy Sweetwater turn their manic imaginations loose in the Wild West in this hilarious spoof about a banker who fears losing his mail order bride to a desperado so he impersonates the outlaw. Things really get rolling when the rhyming cowboy and his faithful friend Talking Boar arrive to capture the badman.
THE CHILDRENS BOOK OF TRUTHS
by VariousWhy do people fight? What?s the use of education? Is India rich or poor? Why are stories important? Can anyone be a leader? Is science only about exams? Will planting trees save the earth? Growing up throws up a lot of questions ? about people, events and the world around us. Sometimes the answers are in simple black and white, wrong and right, but mostly they are not. In this book, ten truth-explorers and idea-shapers share with you their thought-provoking views on important topics close to your heart and mind. Drawing on their experiences, they help you see many different sides of a question and arrive at the most important truth ? your own conclusion, your own interpretation, your own answer. Subroto Bagchi on Leadership Shaheen Mistri on Education Vivek Menon on Nature Meeta Kumar on the Economy Manjula Padmanabhan on Gender Bias Omair Ahmad on Conflict Bibek Debroy on God and Religion Roopa Pai on Stories Hartosh Singh Bal on Science and Maths Kapil Dev on Sports
The Prom
by Saundra Mitchell Matthew Sklar Chad BeguelinLlega la novela de la nueva apuesta de Netflix: la adaptación del éxito de Broadway The Prom. Emma Nolan tiene quince años y solo sueña con una cosa en este mundo: bailar con su novia en el baile de graduación. Pero en su pequeño pueblo de Edgewater, Indiana, eso es como pedir la luna. Alyssa Greene es la chica más conocida del instituto, la más popular, jefa del consejo estudiantil e hija de la presidenta de la asociación de padres. Pero esconde un secreto: su relación con Emma. Cuando se corre la voz de que Emma planea llevar a una chica al baile, es tal el alboroto, que la asociación de padres amenaza con cancelarlo. Todo eso ocurre antes de que entren en acción Barry Glickman y Dee Dee Allen, dos estrellas de Broadway que deciden asumir la causa para obtener un poco de publicidad a cambio. Pero cuando llegan a Indiana para enarbolar la lucha en nombre de Emma, sus buenas intenciones se tuercen por completo. Con Emma enfrentada a los prejuicios de cabeza, Alyssa sumida en la duda sobre si salir del armario y Barry y Dee Dee disfrutando de toda la atención mediática, la tormenta perfecta está a punto de estallar. Sin embargo, cuando consiguen ir a la una, se dan cuenta de que siempre vale la pena luchar por el amor.
Thea Stilton and the Missing Myth: A Geronimo Stilton Adventure (Thea Stilton Graphic Novels #20)
by Thea StiltonJoin Thea Stilton and the Thea Sisters on an adventure packed with mystery and friendship! <p><p> While on vacation in Greece, the Thea Sisters make friends with a company of actors who are rehearsing for a play that's about to open. When an actress sprains her ankle, Colette ends up standing in for her! But suddenly, right before the performance, the lead actor goes missing. Can the mouselets find him in time for the show to go on? <p><i>Advisory: Bookshare has learned that this book offers only partial accessibility. We have kept it in the collection because it is useful for some of our members. To explore further access options with us, please contact us through the Book Quality link on the right sidebar. Benetech is actively working on projects to improve accessibility issues such as these.</i>
Theater: Participatory Performance And The Making Of Meaning
by Scott MagelssenAt an ecopark in Mexico, tourists pretend to be illegal migrants, braving inhospitable terrain and the U. S. Border Patrol as they attempt to cross the border. At a living history museum in Indiana, daytime visitors return after dark to play fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. In the Mojave Desert, the U. S. Army simulates entire provinces of Iraq and Afghanistan, complete with bustling villages, insurgents, and Arabic-speaking townspeople, to train soldiers for deployment to the Middle East. At a nursing home, trainees put on fogged glasses and earplugs, thick bands around their finger joints, and sandbag harnesses to simulate the effects of aging and to gain empathy for their patients. These immersive environments in which spectator-participants engage in simulations of various kinds—or “simming”—are the subject of Scott Magelssen’s book. His book lays out the ways in which simming can provide efficacy and promote social change through affective, embodied testimony. Using methodology from theater history and performance studies (particularly as these fields intersect with cultural studies, communication, history, popular culture, and American studies), Magelssen explores the ways these representational practices produce, reify, or contest cultural and societal perceptions of identity.
Theater and Crisis: Myth, Memory, and Racial Reckoning in America, 1964-2020
by Patrice D. RankineRacial reckoning was a recurrent theme throughout the summer of 2020, a response to George Floyd’s murder and the unprecedented impact of COVID on marginalized groups. Theater and Crisis proposes a literary and theatrical study of how Floyd's killing could possibly happen in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era, and in the supposedly post-racial era following the election of Barack Obama. In the days and months following Floyd's death, there were nightly protests in streets across the United States and broader world. At the same time, theater performances were forced to shift online to video conferencing platforms and to find new ways to engage audiences. In each case, groups made shared meaning through storytelling and narrative, a liberatory process of myth-making and reverence that author Patrice D. Rankine calls “epiphanic encoding.” Rather than approaching the problem of racial reckoning through history, where periodization and progress are dominant narratives, Theater and Crisis argues that myth and memory allow for better theorization about recurring events from the past, their haunting, and what these apparent ghosts ask of us. Building on the study of myth as active, processual storytelling, Rankine acknowledges that it grounds and orients groups toward significant events. Theater and Crisis aligns narratives about Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd, among others, with ancient, mythic figures such as Christ, Dionysus, Oedipus, and Moses. As living and verbal visitations, these stories performed on stage encode the past through their epiphanies in the present, urging audiences toward shared meaning. Rankine traces the cyclical hauntings of race through the refiguring of mythic stories across the past 75 years in the plays of James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Antoinette Nwandu, and many more, and in response to flashpoints in US racial history, such as the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the wars on drugs and crime, and the continued violence against and disenfranchisement of Black people into the twenty-first century. Theater and Crisis explores the appearance of myth on the American stage and showcases the ongoing response by the theatrical establishment to transform the stage into a space for racial reckoning. This timely book is essential reading for scholars of theater studies, classics, and American studies.
Theater and World: The Problematics of Shakespeare's History (Routledge Revivals)
by Jonathan HartFirst published in 1992, Theater and World is a detailed exploration of Shakespeare’s representation of history and how it affects the relation between theatre and world. The book focuses primarily on the Second Tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, and Henry V) and includes a wealth of analysis and interpretation of the plays. In doing so, it explores a wide range of topics, including the relation between literary and theatrical representations and the world; the nature of illusion and reality; genre; the connection between history and fiction (especially plays); historiography and literary criticism or theory; poetry and philosophy; and irony, both rhetorical and philosophical. Theater and World continues to have lasting relevance for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare’s words and his representation of history in particular.
The Theater Cat
by Marilyn HelmerFor generations, the LeChats had kept the mouse problem in the Old Lighthouse Theater under control. But Purrcey LeChat doesn't want to hunt mice—he wants to see his name up in lights!
Theater East and West: Perspectives Toward a Total Theater
by Leonard C. PronkoThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.
Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607–1789
by Jeffrey H. RichardsThe early settlers in America had a special relationship to the theater. Though largely without a theater of their own, they developed an ideology of theater that expressed their sense of history, as well as their version of life in the New World. Theater Enough provides an innovative analysis of early American culture by examining the rhetorical shaping of the experience of settlement in the new land through the metaphor of theater.The rhetoric, or discourse, of early American theater emerged out of the figures of speech that permeated the colonists' lives and literary productions. Jeffrey H. Richards examines a variety of texts--histories, diaries, letters, journals, poems, sermons, political tracts, trial transcripts, orations, and plays--and looks at the writings of such authors as John Winthrop and Mercy Otis Warren. Richards places the American usage of theatrum mundi--the world depicted as a stage--in the context of classical and Renaissance traditions, but shows how the trope functions in American rhetoric as a register for religious, political, and historical attitudes.
The Theater Experience (10th Edition)
by Edwin WilsonThe ideal theater appreciation text for courses focusing on theater elements, The Theater Experience encourages students to be active theater-goers as they learn about the fundamentals of a production. By addressing the importance of the audience, Wilson brings the art of performance to life for students who may have little experience with the medium.
Theater Festivals: Best Worldwide Venues for New Works
by Lisa MulcahyHere is the bible of theater festivals for any stage professional looking to showcase original work, full of expert tips on selecting festivals that are best suited to an individual's work. This directory of more than 50 festivals in the United States, Canada, and abroad covers every step of festival participation, including contact information, application requirements, auditions and tryout performances, face-to-face meetings and interviews, salary specifics, and performance space details. Serving as a full business primer, it also answers essential questions on negotiating and networking with producers, meeting casting obligations, and what responsibilities one has to a festival when his or her show goes on to become a hit.
Theater for Beginners
by Richard MaxwellRichard Maxwell, the downtown writer and director with a deadpan aesthetic and an ever-innovative body of work, has written a quasi-study guide to the art of making theater according to his "affecting affectless technique" (New York Times...) This illuminating volume will provide students and artists with a deeper understanding of Maxwell's work, aesthetic philosophy, and process for creating theater.
Theater Geek: The Real Life Drama of a Summer at Stagedoor Manor, the Famous Performing Arts Camp
by Mickey RapkinWhat do Natalie Portman, Robert Downey, Jr., Zach Braff, and Mandy Moore have in common? Before they were stars, they were campers at Stagedoor Manor, the premier summer theater camp for children and teenagers. Founded in 1975, Stagedoor continues to attract scores of young performers eager to find kindred spirits, to sing out loud, to become working actors--or maybe even stars. Every summer for the past thirty-five years, a new crop of campers has come to the Catskills for an intense, often wrenching introduction to professional theater. (The camp produces thirteen full-scale productions during each of its three sessions.) These kids come from varying backgrounds--the offspring of Hollywood players from Nora Ephron to Bruce Willis work alongside kids on scholarship. Some campers have agents, others are seeking representation. When Mickey Rapkin, a senior editor at GQ and self-proclaimed theater fanatic, learned about this place, he fled Manhattan for an escape to upstate New York. At Stagedoor, he tracked a trio of especially talented and determined teen actors through their final session at camp. Enter Rachael Singer, Brian Muller, and Harry Katzman, three high school seniors closing out their sometimes sheltered Stagedoor experiences and graduating into the real world of industry competition and rejection. These veteran campers--still battling childhood insecurities, but simultaneously searching for that professional gig that will catapult them to fame--pour their souls into what might be their last amateur shows. Their riveting stories are told in Theater Geek, an eye-opening, laugh-out-loud chronicle full of drama and heart, but also about the business of training kids to be professional thespians and, in some cases, child stars. (The camp has long acted as a farm system for Broadway and Hollywood, attracting visits from studio executives and casting directors.) Via original interviews with former and current campers and staff--including Mandy Moore, Zach Braff, and Jon Cryer--Rapkin also recounts Stagedoor Manor's colorful, star-studded history: What was Natalie Portman's breakout role as a camper? What big-time Hollywood director, then barely a teenager, dated a much older Stagedoor staff member? Why did Courtney Love (at Stagedoor visiting her daughter) get into an argument with a hot dog vendor who had set up shop at the camp? Theater Geek leads readers through the triumphs and tragedies of the three senior campers' final summer in an absorbing, thought-provoking narrative that reveals the dynamic and inspiring human beings who populate this world. It also explores what the proliferation of theater camps says about our celebrity-obsessed youth and our most basic but vital need to fit in. Through the rivalry, heartbreak, and joy of one summer at Stagedoor Manor, Rapkin offers theater geeks of all ages a dishy, illuminating romp through the lives of serious child actors. Rich, insightful, and thoroughly entertaining, Theater Geek pulls back the curtain on an elite and intriguing world to reveal what's really at its core: children who simply love to perform.