Why theatre now? Reflecting on the mix of challenges and opportunities that face theatre in communities that are necessarily becoming global in scope and technologically driven, In Defence of Theatre offers a range of passionate reflections on this important question. Kathleen Gallagher and Barry Freeman bring together nineteen playwrights, actors, directors, scholars, and educators who discuss the role that theatre can – and must – play in professional, community, and educational venues. Stepping back from their daily work, they offer scholarly research, artists’ reflections, interviews, and creative texts that argue for theatre as a response to the political and cultural challenges emerging in the twenty-first century. Contributors address theatre’s contribution to local and global politics of place, its power as an antidote to various modern social ailments, and its pursuit of equality. Of equal concern are the systematic and practical challenges that confront those involved in realizing theatre’s full potential.

"Why theatre now? Reflecting on the mix of challenges and opportunities that face theatre in communities that are necessarily becoming global in scope and technologically driven, In Defence of Theatre offers a range of passionate reflections on this important question. Kathleen Gallagher and Barry Freeman bring together nineteen playwrights, actors, directors, scholars, and educators who discuss the role that theatre can--and must--play in professional, community, and educational venues. Stepping back from their daily work, they offer scholarly research, artists' reflections, interviews, and creative texts that argue for theatre as a response to the political and cultural challenges emerging in the twenty-first century. Contributors address theatre's contribution to local and global politics of place, its power as an antidote to various modern social ailemnts, and its pursuit of equality. Of equal concern are the systematic and practical challenges that confront those involved in realizing theatre's full potential."--

For years theater director Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient Greek tragedies for a wide range of at-risk people in society. His is the personal and deeply passionate story of a life devoted to reclaiming the timeless power of an ancient artistic tradition to comfort the afflicted. Doerries leads an innovative public health project—Theater of War—that produces ancient dramas for current and returned soldiers, people in recovery from alcohol and substance abuse, tornado and hurricane survivors, and more. Tracing a path that links the personal to the artistic to the social and back again, Doerries shows us how suffering and healing are part of a timeless process in which dialogue and empathy are inextricably linked. The originality and generosity of Doerries’s work is startling, and The Theater of War—wholly unsentimental, but intensely felt and emotionally engaging—is a humane, knowledgeable, and accessible book that will both inspire and enlighten.

Theatre of Anger examines contemporary transnational theatre in Berlin through the political scope of anger, and its trajectory from Aristotle all the way to Audre Lorde and bell hooks.

An insider's account of the battle to build the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 1971.

Theatre & Law offers the first comprehensive account of the complex relations between legal process and performances. Through ten major principles of performance within law, it establishes how law itself is a performative mode of practice and reflects upon the co-dependence of law, performance and politics in celebrated works of theatre.

In this volume, 15 contributions discuss the role or roles of early modern ('literacy' and non-literary) forms of theatre in the formation of public opinion or its use in making statements in public or private debates.

Provides an international forum where theatrical scholarship and practice can meet.

This is the first book to examine the rise of Spain's extraordinary national theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in all its aspects - the commercial theatre, the court drama and the Corpus autos, the organisation of theatrical life, the playhouses themselves and their public, the literary and moral controversies, and the plays as literary texts. The book has been written for students of drama as well as Hispanists: Spanish theatre is set in its national and international context; Spanish titles and theatrical terms are translated. Considerable space has been devoted to the experimental drama of the sixteenth century before Lope de Vega. At the core of the book is a highly distinctive, successful national theatre which mirrored the energies, beliefs and anxieties of a great nation in crisis, yet at the same time granted full expression to the individual genius of its greatest exponents - Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderon de la Barca.