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.

The musical Bernarda Alba tells the story of a woman who is confined within the heavily patriarchal and Catholic society that was 1930s Spain. Because of this, I thought it the perfect arena to explore power dynamics on stage. My thesis will explore status, hierarchies, relationships, and identity via the stolid matriarchal character Bernarda Alba. Through analyzing the playwright's words, fleshing out the character, and exploring the character's relationships with others in rehearsal, I have studied how to activate status on stage. There are many sociology theories and psychological studies that can be applied to theatre-making in order to create fleshed out relationships, characters, and worlds. I have taken these theories into practice, as I battled with my own hierarchies in real life, and I let art and life do what they do best: imitate each other. I will analyze and play with the physical movement and posture of the character, the vocal choices in the delivery of the scripted words, and the psychological choices in the form of subtext and unspoken thought. There is an abundance of agency one holds when creating status and identity for a character, and I break down the different facets to explore. More importantly, outside of the stage, if we realize that status is more intricate and flexible than we think it is, then we as individuals can unlock invaluable freedoms that can unchain us from daily oppression.

This thesis proposes a critical study of the theoretical framework of Urinetown, asking the question of whether or not the show is truly a “Brechtian musical,” utilizing the tenets and beliefs of Bertolt Brecht. Set in a quirky, Gotham-like town where you have “to pay to pee” due to a severe drought, Urinetown follows a cast of absurdist characters as they navigate a society plagued by the perils of big business, ecological devastation, and the inequalities of capitalism. While the show appears to make a relevant social commentary, supporting a righteous rebellion to overthrow the evil Urine Good Company, in the end, by proving that revolution does not always succeed, writers, Kotis and Hollman invalidate these commentaries, proving that despite its Brechtian appearance, the show in its textual form is much more simply a comedic parody. However, Pomona College’s production, in which I played Hope Cladwell, takes on a much more severe tone, creating legitimate commentary by replacing many of the comedic, two-dimensional characters with living breathing, realities. In a text traditionally lacking authenticity, I approached Hope Cladwell with the intention of finding strength and satire in an otherwise vapid character.