The theatre of Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players has received significant international recognition over the past ten years. The company has received three OBIEs, for House (1999), Drummer Wanted (2002) and Good Samaritans (2005). Maxwell received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010 and has been commissioned by venues in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Ireland. Although his productions generate a plethora of reviews, there is a deficit of material providing a critical and sustained engagement with his work. The aim of this book is to provide a critical survey of Maxwell’s work since 1992, including his early participation in Cook County Theater Department. Touching upon the acting, production and rehearsal processes of NYC Player’s work, and Maxwell's representations of space, community, race, and gender, this volume provides scholars with an important overview of a key figure in contemporary drama.

This is the first publication on the plays of New York-based experimental theater director and playwright Richard Maxwell (born 1967) and his company New York City Players. His plays have been commissioned by The Wexner Center, Columbus; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Performance Space 122, The Kitchen and Soho Rep in New York; and The Barbican Centre, London. The book captures the experience of actually watching the plays by way of screen-grabs and captions, and in doing so documents nearly 20 years of work. "The writer and director Richard Maxwell is a stylist of the first order ... When I read or think about a Maxwell text, I don't so much recall any other writer. Rather, I think about visual artists and colors...." --Hilton Als, The New Yorker

"One of the strongest directors out there—an artist committed to making us see the world for what it is." — New Yorker With his ongoing exploration into actor behavior and an ever-innovative body of work, Richard Maxwell has written a study guide to the art of making theater. This illuminating volume provides a deeper understanding of his work, aesthetic philosophy, and process for creating theater. Richard Maxwell is a director and playwright and the artistic director of New York City Players. Maxwell's plays have been commissioned and presented in over 20 countries. He is a Doris Duke Performing Artist. Maxwell has been selected for a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, and he was an invited artist in the Whitney Biennial (2012). Maxwell is the recipient of the 2014 Spalding Gray Award.

Evening Plays, three new dramas by award-winning playwright Richard Maxwell are a response to Dante's Divine Comedy. The Evening centers around three archetypal barflies who together form an elegy of universal loss. The loss of a loved one seeps poignantly into his illustration of the stark reality and emotional tumult of coping with death. Samara is a mythic tale of redemption that follows a messenger through a bleak frontier in his quest to collect a debt, though the human cost of the journey may be more than he bargained for. And Paradiso, which takes place in the not-too distant future, describes three great loves: family, country and God.

A selection of early work—including two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays—from Eugene O'Neill, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature A Penguin Classic Included in this volume are seven one-act plays (The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, Ile, Where the Cross Is Made, and The Rope), and five full-length plays (Beyond the Horizon, The Straw, Anna Christie, and the classics The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape), all written between 1914 and 1921 and produced for the stage between 1916 and 1922. The majority of these plays are heavily influenced by German expressionism—Freud, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and the radical leftist politics in which O'Neill was involved during his youth. Also included in this unique collection is the little-known and highly autobiographical play The Straw, which draws on O'Neill's confinement in the Gaylord Farm Sanatorium.

In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of work in International Politics and Performance Studies around the troubled, and often troubling, relationship between politics and aesthetics. Whilst examination of political aesthetics, aesthetic politics, and politics of aesthetic practice has been central to research in both disciplines for some time, the emergence of a distinctive ‘performative turn’ in International Politics and a critical return to the centrality of politics and the concept of ‘the political’ in Performance Studies highlights the importance of investigating the productivity of bringing the methods and approaches of the two fields of enquiry into dialogue and mutual relation. Exploring a wide range of issues including rioting, youth-driven protests, border security practices and the significance of cultural awareness in war, this text provides an accessible and cutting edge survey of the intersection of international politics and performance examining issues surrounding the politics of appearance, image, event and place; and discusses the development and deployment of innovative critical and creative research methods, from auto-ethnography to site-specific theatre-making, from philosophical aesthetics to the aesthetic thought of new securities scenario-planning. The book’s focus throughout is on the materiality of performance practices—on the politics of making, spectating, and participating in a variety of modes as political actors and audiences—whilst also seeking to explicate the performative dynamics of creative and critical thinking. Structured thematically and framed by a detailed introduction and conclusion, the focus is on producing a dialogue between contributors and providing an essential reference point in this developing field. This work is essential reading for students of politics and performance and will be of great interest to students and scholars of IR, performance studies and cultural studies.

This series of three volumes provides a groundbreaking study of the work of many of the most innovative and important British theatre companies from 1965 to the present. Each volume provides a survey of the political and cultural context, an extensive survey of the variety of theatre companies from the period, and detailed case studies of six of the major companies. Volume Two, 1980–1994, covers the period when cuts under Margaret Thatcher's Tory government changed the landscape for British theatre. Yet it also saw an expansion of companies that made feminism and gender central to their work, and the establishment of new black and Asian companies. Leading academics provide case studies of six of the most important companies, including: * Monstrous Regiment, by Kate Dorney (The Victoria & Albert Museum) *Forced Entertainment, by Sarah Gorman (University of Roehampton, London, UK) * Gay Sweatshop, by Sara Freeman (University of Puget Sound, USA) * Joint Stock, by Jaqueline Bolton (University of Lincoln, UK) * Theatre de Complicite, by Michael Fry * Talawa, by Kene Igweonu (Canterbury Christ Church University, UK)

This book offers a survey of how female and male characters in English Renaissance theatre participated and interacted in musical activities, both inside and outside the contemporary societal decorum. Wong’s analysis broadens our understanding of the general theatrical representation of music, or musical dramaturgy, and complicates the current discussion of musical portrayal and construction of gender during this period. Wong discusses dramaturgical meanings of music and its association with gender, love, and erotomania in Renaissance plays. The negotiation between the dichotomous qualities of the heavenly and the demonic finds extensive application in recent studies of music in early modern English plays. However, while ideological dualities identified in music in traditional Renaissance thinking may seem unequivocal, various musical representations of characters and situations in early modern drama would prove otherwise. Wong, building upon the conventional model of binarism, explores how playwrights created their musical characters and scenarios according to the received cultural use and perception of music, and, at the same time, experimented with the multivalent meanings and significance embodied in theatrical music.

This study of Egyptian theatre and its narrative construction explores the ways representations of Egypt are created of and within theatrical means, from the 19th century to the present day. Essays address the narratives that structure theatrical, textual, and performative representations and the ways the rewriting process has varied in different contexts and at different times. Drawing on concepts from Theatre and Performance Studies, Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Diaspora Studies, scholars and practitioners from Egypt and the West enter into dialogue with one another, expanding understanding of the different fields. The articles focus on the ways theatre texts and performances change (are rewritten) when crossing borders between different worlds. The concept of rewriting is seen to include translation, transformation, and reconstruction, and the different borders may be cultural and national, between languages and dramaturgies, or borders that are present in people’s everyday lives. Essays consider how rewritings and performances cross borders from one culture, nation, country, and language to another. They also study the process of rewriting, the resulting representations of foreign plays on stage, and representations of the Egyptian revolution on stage and in Tahrir Square. This assessment of the relationship between theatre practices, exchanges, and rewritings in Egyptian theatre brings vital coverage to an undervisited area and will be of interest to developments in theatre translation and beyond.

Nationalism and Youth in Theatre and Performance explores how children and young people fit into national political theatre and, moreover, how youth enact interrogative, patriotic, and/or antagonistic performances as they develop their own relationship with nationhood. Children are often seen as excluded from public discourse or political action. However, this idea of exclusion is false both because adults place children at the center of political debates (with the rhetoric of future generations) and because children actively insert themselves into public discourse. Whether performing a national anthem for visiting heads of state, creating a school play about a country’s birth, or marching in protest of a change in public policy, young people use theatre and performance as a means of publicly staking a claim in national politics, directly engaging with ideas of nationalism around the world. This collection explores the issues of how children fit into national discourse on international stages. The authors focus on national performances by/for/with youth and examine a wide range of performances from across the globe, from parades and protests to devised and traditional theatre. Nationalism and Youth in Theatre and Performance rethinks how national performance is defined and offers previously unexplored historical and theoretical discussions of political youth performance.