Books in the Playtext series

Raises questions about the interplay in contemporary theatre between the processes of rehearsal and the theatrical metaphors that shape our everyday dealings with trauma, including death. This title features essays in the areas of Performance Studies, Sociology, Death Studies/Health and Social Care, and more.

Collection of performance texts from the experimental theatre company Lightwork, along with short essays by key participants. Geared around collaborative creation, it covers an array of approaches including devised, multimedia and site-specific work, providing a rich resource for those making or studying contemporary performance. 20 illus.

This book comprises three related dramatic works, all of which use Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of carnival, a literary style designed to subvert dominant assumptions through chaos and humour. The texts blur the distinction between spectator and performer in an exploration of physical, moral and cultural upheaval in a postmodern age.

Gabriela Zapolska was an actor, journalist and playwright. Her best-known play, The Morality of Mrs. Dulska, is an uncompromising look at gender, class and relationships in fin-de-siecle Poland. The play is now available for the first time in an English-language edition that firmly situates the play in the context of its performance history.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century marked a tumultuous period in Poland's history, with artists and writers working under difficult sociopolitical conditions. This book contains the first English-language translations of four plays by Polish writers in the modernist tradition: Snow by Stanislaw Przybyszewski, In a Small House by Tadeusz Rittner, Ashanti by Wlodzimierz Perzynski and All the Same by Leopold Staff. Well-chosen and carefully annotated, these translations provide important insight into this under-explored area of Polish dramatic history and practice and facilitate greater understanding of its role in the development of European theatre. Also included is a broad discussion of the characteristics of translation for the theatre.

Between 1930 and 1960, popular female dramatists, including Paola Riccora, Anna Bonacci, Clotilde Masci and Gici Ganzini Granata, set the stage for a new generation of feminist theatre and the development of contemporary Italian women's theatre as a whole. Now largely forgotten, the lives and works of these dramatists are reintroduced into the scholarly conversation in Italian Women's Theatre, 1930-1960. Following a general introduction, the book presents a selection of dramatic works, rounded out by commentary, performance histories, critical analyses and biographical information.

This book investigates performance practice and practice-as-research methodology on the issues of authorship and collaborative labor in a world characterized by fragmentation, displacement, and virtual relationships. It addresses the following questions: What is a collaborative body? How can one sole performer enact and convey a collaborative practice? How can one body on stage carry out several voices at once? How can one maintain a sense of community while being alone in a room? Performing Collaboration in Solo Performance presents the full-length definitive version of the performance score from Chloé Déchery's original performance piece entitled A Duet Without You, created between 2013 and 2015 in collaboration with a range of high-profile artists including Karen Christopher, Michael Pinchbeck, Deborah Pearson, Simone Kenyon, and Pedro Ins. A collection of essays by preeminent writers, artists, and academics in the field complement the original performance scores, ranging from performative responses to in-depth theoretical essays. Bridging practical experiment and theoretical examination, this innovative interdisciplinary volume will appeal to anyone working in between artistic practices and scholarly research.

This book presents four plays by Caridad Svich that explore the rough waters of citizenship under the pressure of globalization and the threads of human connection across multiple geographic landscapes. Featuring essays by practitioners such as Zac Kline, this book refuses to pretend that the complex questions of existence are easily settled.

Karen Malpede's four plays are set during influential events from the late twentieth century to the present: the Bosnian war and rape camps; the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Israel's 2006 bombardment of Lebanon; 9/11 and the US torture programme; and the heroism of climate scientists facing attack from well-funded climate change deniers.

This volume is a collection of plays created by Andras Visky, one of the most innovative voices in Hungarian theatre. Translated for English-language audiences, the book provides critical analyses, scripts, director's notes and interviews with creative teams behind the productions to reveal a holistic, insider's view of Visky's artistic vision.

In a room in the middle of nowhere, a man and a woman dream up spectacular worlds: a decaying city, a lush and crumbling garden, a train journey across a drowned landscape. Darkly humorous, absurd and surreal, these are plays for a theatre in which time and space, character and setting are as uncertain as the maps this man and this woman draw.

Octave Mirbeau was one of the most prolific literary figures of France's storied Belle Epoque. This volume contains his two most celebrated plays for the first time in English-language translation: Business is Business and Charity. The book also includes an introduction contextualizing the works and the translation and adaptation process.

A collection of two plays.

Includes the plays: "Shadow Anthropology" (a dark comedy about the US occupation of Afghanistan), "Through the Roof" (a Faustian trip through the social history of 'natural' disaster in New Orleans), and "Celestial Flesh" (a sacrilegious romp through the 1980s sanctuary movement, sacred sex, and CIA drug running in a Los Angeles Catholic Church).

JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and Other Plays is a collection of three radically poetic works for live performance by OBIE Award-winning playwright Caridad Svich. The playtexts includes a lyrical meditation on the legacy of iconic queer artist Derek Jarman, a meditation on displacement and human suffering (Carthage/Cartagena) and an intimately operatic reflection on Penelope and Odysseus (The Orphan Sea). Accompanied by scholarly essays placing the plays in context, this book showcases the beautiful strangeness and profound resistance in Svich's work.'Svich is one of the finest poet/playwrights of this generation. . . . She is a playwright whose plays perform like dramatic poems that are wondrous to the ear and moving to the heart.' - Seth Gordon, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis

The Trustus Plays collects three full-length, award-winning performance texts by American playwright Jon Tuttle. Each play was a winner of the national Trustus Playwrights Festival contest and was then produced by the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina. The Hammerstone is a comedy about two professors aging gracelessly, Drift is a dark comedy about marriage and divorce, and Holy Ghost is the story of German POWs held in the camps in the American south. Jon Tuttle provides an introduction to the plays, and Trustus founder and artistic director, Jim Thigpen, offers a preface describing Tuttle's work within the context of the Trustus theatre's dedication to experimental, edgy social drama.

Challenges the subjects of grief and sexual abuse and defies national and personal pressures to keep silent about such issues.

Contains an introduction, which contextualises Point Blank's work in the wider tradition and history of British political theatre. This publication of Point Blank's early work is a useful reading for students, audiences, actors and directors interested in radical writing for performance.

This anthology contains three plays (Ceremonial Kisses, Shading the Crime, and The Maternal Cloister), analyses of their processes and themes, and photographs of the performances. The plays are different in style and include the use of physical theatre, naturalistic explorations of human rights abuses, and symbolic structures, puppets and poetry.

Bertold Brecht was an important dramatist/director/theorist of the 20th century. This play focuses on Brecht's life in America, where he resided from 1941 through to 1947. Brecht features as the main character and the play is also Brechtian-influenced. Endnotes and appendices are included.

The 1930s were a period of triumph and turmoil in Poland, yet the decade saw the production of a number of exceptional dramatic works. This book provides a glimpse into period of Polish literary culture unfamiliar to most English readers and scholars. It demonstrates why author was one of the leading voices of the Polish interwar era.