Hippies and Bolsheviks and Other Plays collects three works by one of Canada's dramatic luminaries. Hippies and Bolsheviks is set in that hotbed of hippie idealism, 1970s British Columbia. Young Star stumbles home from a Led Zeppelin concert with a draft dodger and sets in motion a crisis of love and of faith in their idealism against the Establishment. In Lena's Car , a woman whose marriage is on the verge of collapse reflects on how it got to that point, harkening back to a youth when things were both more simple and more complicated. In The Wedding Pool , a group of dissatisfied single friends decide to each contribute fifty dollars a month to a pool to be collected by the first one to marry. But when one of the friends starts dating the bank teller who opens their account, the others are forced to confront their ideas about loneliness and personal responsibility. ' The Wedding Pool is a particularly smart and entertaining example of the thirtysomething angst genre.' - The Globe and Mail 'If Hippies and Bolsheviks is any indication of the quality of work at this years playrites Festival, Calgary theatregoers are in for a phenomenal month.' Calgary Sun

In the last decades of the twentieth century, North American drama has powerfully enacted the problematic notions of cultural memory and identity, as the essays assembled in this critical anthology demonstrate. Echoing Derrida's non-essentialist interpretation of the term «signature», this collection provides an innovative focus on North American theatre and drama as a site of latent cultural memories. In this volume, the concept of cultural memory offers a privileged vantage point from which to redefine issues of diasporic identities, exilic predicaments, and multi-ethnic subject positions at the dawn of a new century. Playwrights examined here include noted Canadian and US artists such as Marie Clements, Eva Ensler, Lorraine Hansberry, Tomson Highway, Cherríe Moraga, Djanet Sears, Guillermo Verdecchia, August Wilson, and Chay Yew, to cite but a few. In the process of remembering, North American dramatists develop new aesthetic modes in which the signatures of the past merge with the present and foreshadow an imagined future.

Series sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available.

Among the most significant subcultures in modern U.S. history, the hippies had a far-reaching impact. Their influence essentially defined the 1960s--hippie antifashion, divergent music, dropout politics and "make love not war" philosophy extended to virtually every corner of the world and remains influential. The political and cultural institutions that the hippies challenged, or abandoned, mainly prevailed. Yet the nonviolent, egalitarian hippie principles led an era of civic protest that brought an end to the Vietnam War. Their enduring impact was the creation of a 1960s frame of reference among millions of baby boomers, whose attitudes and aspirations continue to reflect the hip ethos of their youth.

Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland takes the reader on a journey into the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies. In the face of disapproval and repression, they created a version of Western counterculture, skillfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. Flowers through Concrete takes its readers into the underground hippieland and beyond, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering both an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study of transnational youth culture and East-West globalization. Flowers through Concrete is based on over a hundred interviews, declassified documents, and private archives hidden for many decades. It tells the almost forgotten story of how hippie communities sprang up across the Soviet Union in the late-60s, often under the tutelage of the rebellious offspring of privileged households at the heart of the Soviet establishment. It charts how these communities linked up to create an impressive network with elaborate customs and rituals, ensuring its survival for more than two decades. Flowers through Concrete recounts not only a compelling story of survival against the odds - hippies who were harassed by police, shorn of their hair by civilian guards, and confined in psychiatric hospitals by doctors who believed non-conformism was a symptom of schizophrenia - but also advances a surprising argument. It suggests that the land of Soviet hippies and the world of late socialism were not entirely incompatible, but in fact meshed surprisingly well. Ultimately, it was not the KGB but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that ended the Soviet hippie sistema.

A century after Leo Tolstoy's death, the author of War and Peace is widely admired but too often thought of only with reference to his realism and moral sense. The many sides of Tolstoy revealed in these essays speak to readers with astonishing force, relevance, and complexity. In a lively, challenging style, leading scholars range over his long life, from his first work Childhood to the works of his old age like Hadji Murat, and the many genres in which he worked, from the major novels to aphorisms and short stories. The essays present fresh approaches to his central themes: love, death, religious faith and doubt, violence, the animal kingdom, and war. They also assess his reception both in his lifetime and subsequently. Setting new agendas for the study of this classic author, this volume provides a snapshot of more current scholarship on Tolstoy.

This collection of classic essays focuses on the theoretical frameworks that informed the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, the methodologies and working practices that the Centre developed for conducting academic research and examples of the studies carried out under the auspices of the Centre. This volume is split into seven thematic sections that are introduced by key academics working in the field of cultural studies, and includes a preface by eminent scholar, Stuart Hall. The thematic sections are: Literature and Society Popular Culture and Youth Subculture Media Women's Studies and Feminism Race History Education and Work.

The kid sells lemonade. Not a lot of people buy lemonade, especially now that it's winter, but the kid makes good lemonade, even if his friend Mullen thinks it ought to be sweeter. They don't talk much with the other ten-year-olds - most of the others are Dead Kids anyway. Except for Jenny Tierney, but she's busy breaking kids' faces with her math book. Besides, the Russians from the meat-packing plant are a lot cooler, and they always win at curling. But in small-town Alberta, there are just too many roman-candle fights, bonspiels, retaliatory river diversions, black-market submarines, exploding boilers, meat-packing-plant suicides and recess-time lightning strikes for one lonely kid to get any attention. He might as well go to Kazakhstan. Then the adults in his life start disappearing down tunnels and into rendering vats. Being ten is hard enough without all that, especially when your best friend is ruining the lemonade. But the Milk Chicken Bomb should change everything. Frenetic, hilarious and gently heartrending, The Milk Chicken Bomb takes us inside the mind of a troubled ten-year-old who is just beginning to understand that the adults around him are as lonely and bewildered as he is in the face of the slapstick demands of the world.

Cast size: small.