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Excerpt: The American playwright and journalist Sophie Treadwell dedicated her literary career to exploring the lives and motives of lonely and trapped individuals.

Excerpt: Sam Shepard’s The God of Hell, which premiered Off-Broadway in late October of 2004, was negatively received by New York critics.

Unrivalled in its coverage of recent work and writers, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights surveys and analyses the breadth, vitality and development of theatrical work to emerge from America over the last fifty years.This authoritative guide leads you through the work of 25 major contemporary American playwrights, discussing more than 140 plays in detail. Written by a team of 25 eminent international scholars, each chapter provides:· a biographical introduction to the playwright's work; · a survey and concise analysis of the writer's most important plays; · a discussion of their style, dramaturgical concerns and critical reception; · a bibliography of published plays and a select list of critical works.Among the many Tony, Obie and Pulitzer prize-winning playwrights included are Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Paula Vogel and Neil LaBute. The abundance of work analysed enables fresh, illuminating conclusions to be drawn about the development of contemporary American playwriting.

A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams provides the essential guide to Williams' most studied and revived dramas. Authored by a team of leading scholars, it offers students a clear analysis and detailed commentary on four of Williams' plays: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. A consistent framework of analysis ensures that whether readers are wanting a summary of the play, a commentary on the themes or characters, or a discussion of the work in performance, they can readily find what they need to develop their understanding and aid their appreciation of Williams' artistry. A chronology of the writer's life and work helps to situate all his works in context and the introduction reinforces this by providing a clear overview of Williams' writing, its recurrent themes and concerns and how these are intertwined with his life and times. For each play the author provides a summary of the plot, followed by commentary on: * The context * Themes * Characters * Structure and language * The play in production (both on stage and screen adaptations) Questions for study, and notes on words and phrases in the text are also supplied to aid the reader. The wealth of authoritative and clear commentary on each play, together with further questions that encourage comparison across Williams' work and related plays by other leading writers, ensures that this is the clearest and fullest guide to Williams' greatest plays. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1183/thumbnail.jpg

An exploration of Annie Baker's play The Aliens through the perspective of student directing. This includes the process of research, casting, rehearsal, and performance of the play in the Spring of 2017 at East Tennessee State University.

A summary of the experience of directing The Aliens by Annie Baker including the process of research on the play and playwright, casting the production, rehearsing the play, and performing it.

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This doctoral study is grounded in the work of cultural studies and its concern for pedagogy and education. The study investigated a local pedagogical issue— Independent Enquiry Study (IES)—a specific form of social inquiry in the core subject Liberal Studies (LS) in Hong Kong senior secondary schools. It took a designated IES classroom as the point of intervention and as the basis for exploring transformed pedagogical practices in Hong Kong secondary school education. My vantage point of the intervention rested on participant-observation through action research and critical contextual analysis of the action-research site and its relations to the wider social contexts. With a conceptual-analytical framework of drama and the performative, developed from William’ notion of drama and Schechner’s notion of make-belief and make-believe performances, this study examined how the method of drama could mediate a group of senior secondary students’ extended process of inquiry into social issues in contemporary Hong Kong society. Findings reveal that IES in Hong Kong senior secondary schools is almost already performative in nature and IES students were almost already performers eager to present themselves to their teacher-assessors as knowledge builders capable of reflective thinking. In fact, these students subscribed to the positivistic and cynical practices of reproducing existing curricular (and media) discourses and applying them to understanding the social. In performing seeming acts of inquiry, these IES students would re-enact the prescribed curricular (and media) discourses of understanding and reproducing the existing social order. Research findings indicate that drama can be a method of work that supports student inquirers socially as a group. Liminal dramatic spaces and the use of dramatic role and real-life image afforded the participant-students the opportunity to create, experience, and interpret an imaginary world, promoting social inquiry. The spaces helped give shape to students’ diverse roles including those of IES co-informant, member of society, and peer IES learner-assessor. By activating these roles, students momentarily suspended self-other relations and the mechanically induced perceptions of social realities typified by conventional IES method. Drama also functions as a lens. It reflects how the method of IES typifies students’ roles as performers and sustains their dependence on templates of work and on the teachers’ assessment guides. Research findings further show that the performative make-belief schooling practices encompassed the everyday school life of the participating students and their teachers, and indeed subsumed and contained the effects of my dramatic interventions within the action-research context. The IES students at this specific research site were subjected to a process of cynical subject formation. When it comes to social inquiry, these students’ cynical IES practices, including cynical IES reasoning, is partly the result of the teachers’ instructional needs. Hence, dramatic and academic interventions in IES processes will be ineffective if wider school and social contextual elements are not reworked. The study calls for collective efforts from academics and scholars to intervene in all levels of educational practices, with the aim of remaking the vast contextual sweep of teaching and learning in Hong Kong as a way out of these cynical and positivistic inquiry-learning practices.

This paper examines the use of the anecdote in critical scholarship as an ethical approach to studying Aboriginal literature. As many scholars are now becoming aware of the damage that has been done to texts by critiquing Aboriginal literature from the position of cultural outsiders, this paper suggests that anecdotal theory proposed by Jane Gallop is an ethical approach to Aboriginal literature. The use of story to generate theory explored by Aboriginal scholars of literature is compared to anecdotal theory, which implies that the use of anecdotes is an ethical approach suggested by Aboriginal culture. Anecdotal theory, the practice of recording a personal anecdote and then reading it to generate theory, offers non-Aboriginal scholars as well as Aboriginal scholars a way to connect to the text. Using anecdotal theory helps scholars remain more responsible to the texts they are critiquing; anecdotes make scholars more self-aware and ground them in real experience, due to the anecdotes embodied nature and use of humour. This paper focuses on Aboriginal texts and scholars from North America. Helen Hoys critical work How Should I Read These: Native Women Writers in Canada is analysed for her use of the personal anecdote to examine its effectiveness. While Jane Gallop coins the term anecdotal theory, this paper attempts to connect personal anecdote, scholar, and literature in a way that Gallop does not.