Books in the Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama series

Amy S. Green's book salutes the vision and talents of a group of artists who, depending on one's perspective, either revitalized or disfigured the standard dramatic repertoire by adapting canonical dramas for the contemporary American stage. This versatile and insightful study is a full-scale investigation of a remarkably rich and controversial genre.

For almost a hundred years before Uncle Tom's Cabin burst on to the scene in 1852, the American theatre struggled to represent the evils of slavery. Slavery and Sentiment examines how both black and white Americans used the theatre to fight negative stereotypes of African Americans in the United States.

Drawing upon archival resources, official correspondence and personal interviews, this 2003 book provides a detailed examination of the operations of the US Federal Theatre Project in the decade of the 1930s. The book recreates the often chaotic but frequently exhilarating story of Uncle Sam as producer.

John Houchin explores the impact of censorship in twentieth-century American theatre, arguing that theatrical censorship coincided with significant challenges to religious, political and cultural systems. This study provides a summary of theatre censorship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then analyses key episodes from 1900 to 2000.

McNamara explores the world of the American concert saloon, establishments offering theatrical shows, alcohol, and sometimes gambling and prostitution. McNamara focuses on the period from the Civil War to the early twentieth century and examines sources of the shows, performing spaces and equipment, as well as employees and patrons.

A comprehensive attempt to assemble all that is known of theatre at the time of America's political birth. Brown provides a chronicle of this little-researched Revolutionary theatre, demonstrating how theatre impacted on the military and political objectives of both sides.

Based on over seventy interviews and archival findings, this book surveys the history of Asian American theatre from 1965 to 2005. Subjects included in the study are: actors, playwrights, audiences, alternative performances and the Miss Saigon controversy. It was the first study to document the history of Asian American theatre.

Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic explores how theatre both reflects and shapes the question of identity in post-revolutionary American culture. In this 2005 book Richards investigates the ways in which American theatre and playwrights struggled with representing national, cultural, and ethnic details for American audiences.

Focusing on two of the most important contemporary American theater artists, the playwright Charles Mee, the director Anne Bogart, and also the actors and designers of the SITI Company, this book considers how theater is made. A 2003 account of modern theater practice in its most collaborative and dynamic form.

Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 examines how the American frontier was presented in theatrical productions during the critical period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of cinema. The book demonstrates the extraordinary variety of subject matter and theatrical styles used to dramatize the frontier.

Susan Harris Smith here looks at the many often conflicting cultural and academic reasons for the neglect and dismissal of American drama as a legitimate literary form. Smith's study is a contentious and revisionist historical inquiry into the troubled cultural and canonical status of American drama.

The Provincetown Players, an experimental theatre group that flourished in Greenwich Village from 1916 to 1922, included such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St Vincent Millay. Murphy considers the group's vital role in the development of modernism, and its wider significance in twentieth century American culture.

A unique contribution to the study of American theatre, Sisters in Sin recovers a slice of theatre history in demonstrating how the prostitute was central to American realist theatre. Introducing previously unexamined archival documents and unpublished play scripts, Johnson provides an original examination of the forgotten 'brothel drama'.

Although often dismissed as a minor offshoot of the better-known German movement, expressionism on the American stage represents a critical phase in the development of American dramatic modernism. Situating expressionism within the context of early twentieth-century American culture, Walker demonstrates how playwrights who wrote in this mode were responding both to new communications technologies and to the perceived threat they posed to the embodied act of meaning. At a time when mute bodies gesticulated on the silver screen, ghostly voices emanated from tin horns, and inked words stamped out the personality of the hand that composed them, expressionist playwrights began to represent these new cultural experiences by disarticulating the theatrical languages of bodies, voices and words. In doing so, they not only innovated a new dramatic form, but redefined playwriting from a theatrical craft to a literary art form, heralding the birth of American dramatic modernism.

This book traces the history of African American theatre from its beginnings to the present.

This is the story of African-American performance and theatre from slavery to the present. Its breadth and vitality - from the individual performance to large-scale company productions, from political nationalism to integration - is conveyed in this volume. There is detailed coverage of plays, musicals, actors, directors, designers, producers, and theatres.

John Barrymore's Richard III and Hamlet, first seen in New York during the 1919-20 and 1922-3 seasons, stand as high-water marks of 20th-century Shakespearean interpretation. In this 1997 book, Morrison reconstructs these historic performances through analysis of production preparation, audience response, reviews, and memoirs.

Heather Nathans examines the growth and influence of the theatre in the development of the young American Republic, from the Revolution through to the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. This 2003 book explores the lives and motives of the people working behind the scenes to establish a new national drama.

Nineteenth-century America witnessed a movement against alcohol and as part of the cause a new genre of theatre developed. John Frick examines the role of temperance drama in American theatre, taking examples from both mainstream productions and amateur theatricals, and also compares the American genre to its British counterpart.

Steve Wilmer selects key historical moments in American history and examines how the theatre, in formal and informal settings, responded to these events, from the Colonial fight for independence, through Native American struggles, the Socialist Worker play, the Civil Rights Movement, and up to works of the last decade.

Examines how Americans staged their cultures in the decades before the Civil War and advances the idea that cultures are performances which take place both inside and outside of playhouses.

This book proposes a correlation between the divided 'mind' of America during the Depression and popular stage works of the era, which are interpreted as theatrical reflections of Depression culture's sense of being trapped between a discredited past and a nightmarish future.

In this book, first published in 2000, Huerta explores the energy of Chicano theatre. He takes as his starting point 1979, and through informative biographies of each playwright and analyses of their plays, offers an accessible introduction to this important aspect of American theatre and culture.

Congressional Theatre is the first book to identify and examine the significant body of plays, films, and teleplays that responded to the actions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the 'show business hearings' it held between 1947 and 1960. Among the writers discussed are Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht, and Elia Kazan.

Through the gangsters, businessmen, soldiers, sailors, athletes, frontiersmen and thugs he created, David Mamet celebrates and criticizes American macho. Presenting close readings of Mamet's plays, this book demonstrates how the playwright addresses complex issues of masculinity and provides revealing insights into the masculine malaise.

This comprehensive analysis traces Sam Shepard's career from his experimental one-act plays of the 1960s to the 1994 play Simpatico. Concentrating on his playwriting, this book charts Shepard's various developments and shifts of direction, and the changing contexts in which his work his appeared.

In Demons of Disorder, the first book on the blackface tradition, musicologist Dale Cockrell studies issues of race and class by analysing the cultural expressions of blackface minstrels, and investigates the roots of still-remembered songs.