A poignant family drama set in Chicago against a backdrop of the Great Depression and the inescapable racism of the times. Chicago's South Side in the 1920s. Struggling to keep his dreams alive and his family together, Victor Mason is an educated black man reduced to working on building sites. His loyalty to Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement clashes with his family's pursuit of the American Dream despite the twin evils of the Depression and of ubiquitous racism. Never seen outside America until 2007, Theodore Ward's landmark family drama, Big White Fog, remains as poignant today as it was when it burst upon the Chicago stage in 1937 - and on to New York, where it was produced by the Negro Playwrights' Company, of which Ward was a co-founder with, among others, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. This volume also contains extensive introductory material by writers, thinkers and activists such as Marcus Garvey, Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

A collection of 51 plays that features previously unpublished works, contemporary plays by women, and the modern classics.

In the 1930s, the Work Progress Administration funded a massive Federal Theatre Project in America's major urban centres, presenting hundreds of productions, some of the most popular and memorable of which were produced in the highly controversial and avant garde 'Negro Units'. This experiment in government-supported culture brought to the forefront one of the central problems in American democratic culture - the representation of racial difference. Those in the profession quickly discovered inescapable ideological responsibilities attending any sort of show, whether apparently entertaining or political in nature. Exploring the liberal idealism of the thirties and the critical debates in black journals over the role of an African American theatre, Fraden also looks at the obstacles facing black playwrights, audiences, and actors in a changing milieu.

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This remarkably illuminating portrait of Tennessee Williams lifts the veil on the heart and soul of his artistic inspiration: the unspoken collaboration between playwright and actor. At a low moment in Williams’s life, he summoned to New Orleans a young twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written him a letter asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on his behalf to find out if he or his work had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him. Among the more than seventy women and men with whom Grissom talked were giants of American theater and film: Lillian Gish, (“the escort who brought me to Blanche”), Jessica Tandy (the original Blanche DuBois on Broadway), Eva Le Gallienne (“She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper”), Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and many more. Follies of God provides dazzling insight into how Williams conjured the dramatic characters and plays that so transformed American theater.

No Surrender! No Retreat! examines the careers of fifteen pioneer performers and their triumphs over herculean obstacles. It is a look back over the 20th century and documents personal histories of staggering achievement in spite of institutional racism, gender oppression, and classism. Twenty-four years in the making, No Surrender! No Retreat! is an indispensable work on African Americans in the performing arts, examining well-known performers, such as James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, and Pearl Bailey. Rare archival material and a number of personal interviews enrich this tome. Glenda E. Gill s work is a moving and sometimes tragic account of the lives and careers of some of America s most outstanding African American pioneers in theater.

Eugene O'Neill - Clifford Odets - Left-wing theatre - Black drama - Thornton Wilder - Lillian Hellman - Luigi Pirandello - Arthur Miller.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

The rich history of African-American theatre has often been overlooked, both in theoretical discourse and in practice. This volume seeks a critical engagement with black theatre artists and theorists of the twentieth century. It reveals a comprehensive view of the Art or Propaganda debate that dominated twentieth century African-American dramatic theory. Among others, this text addresses the writings of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Sidney Poitier, and August Wilson. Of particular note is the manner in which black theory collides or intersects with canonical theorists, including Aristotle, Keats, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, and O'Neill.