In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition. Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett’s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.

Edward Tulane, a cold-hearted and proud toy rabbit, loves only himself until he is separated from the little girl who adores him and travels across the country, acquiring new owners and listening to their hopes, dreams, and histories. Jr Lib Guild. Teacher's Guide available. Reprint.

Through the use of dialogue, music, chant, dance, pantomime, and image, the play satirizes attitudes toward the Vietnam war. It attempts to present the very complicated, tragic, and helplessly divided atmosphere that prevailed in America, and to look at hapless emotions in a hopelessly complex mythology of war. With the technique of "transformations" the play unfolds. People change from flowers to individuals to machines, from one character to another, from character into actor into bystander and back to character or abstract image or comment; women change to men and back to women again. Americans change into Vietnamese into Viet Cong and back to American soldiers. The line of the play follows several soldiers from birth, to induction, to indoctrination, to overseas, to battle, to fraternization, and to death. Along the way we meet their mothers, their instructors, their superiors, their elected officials, their friends and their enemies, their tormentors and finally their ghosts. A strong ensemble spirit emerges via the actors' technique and interaction with one another and with the audience. The form of the play is constructed so as to manifest the reality of theatre--not as a replica of or comment upon life but as a part of life--and thus restore its urgency and relevance. ..".the best new play since THE BRIG and THE CONNECTION...the theme and scope the variety and density of VIET ROCK would have excited Brecht." Richard Schechner, T D R "VIET ROCK vividly expressed is a breakthrough...extraordinary on at least two counts. It is the first realized theatrical statement about the Vietnam war...and a rare instance of theater confronting issues broader than individual psychology...I would like to assert my admiration." Michael Smith, Village Voice "Wild...an acid indictment...ensemble acting effects that have to be seen to be believed...VIET ROCK has been brilliantly staged, these Open Theater types are contributing something new to the concept and technique of stagecraft." Tomo., Variety

Tulane is the story of a southern school striving for national recognition in the post–World War II era of American research universities. Clarence L. Mohr and Joseph E. Gordon pre-sent a candid, in-depth treatment of the 150-year-old New Orleans institution during this transformative period, when it grappled with such pervasive issues as federal and private funding; academic freedom; an enrollment surge set in motion by the GI Bill and sustained by the postwar “baby boom”; the cold war; desegregation; the antiwar, civil rights, and student-power movements; expanding intercollegiate athletics; censorship; the clash between liberal and utilitarian conceptions of higher learning; revision of curricular content; and the role of universities as platforms for social criticism—all of which together profoundly altered the mission of American higher learning. In addition to these external forces, the authors examine the many individuals—administrators, professors, and students—whose responses in both calm and crises shaped the evolution of Tulane’s unique academic, physical, and demographic design. Like its regional peers in the 1950s and 1960s, Tulane faced the challenge of transcending its past without repudiating traditions of lasting value. From a loose confederation of locally oriented undergraduate and professional schools, it developed into a nationally focused research university serving a diverse student body selected through rigorous admissions standards. Its journey over the past half century should remind those who support, study, or teach in American universities that their own institutions during that period have in a very real sense made history as well.

Rescuing a squirrel after an accident involving a vacuum cleaner, comic-reading cynic Flora Belle Buckman is astonished when the squirrel, Ulysses, demonstrates astonishing powers of strength and flight after being revived. By the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Tale of Despereaux.

First Published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"In 1968, Jerzy Grotowski published his groundbreaking Towards a Poor Theatre, a record of the theatrical investigations conducted at his experimental theater in Poland. This classic work on acting and performance is now available once again. In his preface to the original edition, Peter Brook wrote: "Grotowski is unique. Why? Because no one else in the world, to my knowledge no one since Stanislavski, has investigated the nature of acting, its phenomenon, its meaning, the nature and science of its mental-physical-emotional processes as deeply as Grotowski." More recently, Richard Schechner has called Grotowski "one of the four great directors of Western theater." Jerzy Grotowski was born in Poland in 1933. In 1982 he moved to the United States and worked at the University of California. He later moved to Italy, where he continued his unique and intense theatrical investigation. He died in 1999"--Publisher description.

American independent filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) was one of the first to extend film projection into multimedia spectacle and to embrace video and computer technology: a supreme instance of what critic Gene Youngblood dubbed "Expanded Cinema."

First published in 1964 by Little, Brown. First Elephant paperback with a new preface by the author.