A celebrated new playwright's breakthrough trilogy.

This is the first book to dedicate scholarly attention to the work of Tarell Alvin McCraney, one of the most significant writers and theater-makers of the twenty-first century. Featuring essays, interviews, and commentaries by scholars and artists who span generations, geographies, and areas of interest, the volume examines McCraney’s theatrical imagination, his singular writerly voice, his incisive cultural critiques, his stylistic and formal creativity, and his distinct personal and professional trajectories. Contributors consider McCraney’s innovations as a playwright, adapter, director, performer, teacher, and collaborator, bringing fresh and diverse perspectives to their observations and analyses. In so doing, they expand and enrich the conversations on his much-celebrated and deeply resonant body of work, which includes the plays Choir Boy, Head of Passes, Ms. Blakk for President, The Breach, Wig Out!, and the critically acclaimed trilogy The Brother/Sister Plays: In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size, and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet, as well as the Oscar Award–winning film Moonlight, which was based on his play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.

This book argues that brother-sister relationships, idealized by the Romantics, intensified in nineteenth-century English domestic culture, and is a neglected key to understanding Victorian gender relations. Attracted by the apparent purity of the sibling bond, novelists and poets also acknowledged its innate ambivalence and instability, through conflicting patterns of sublimated devotion, revenge fantasy, and corrosive obsession. The final chapter shows how the brother-sister bond was permanently changed by the experience of the First World War.

THE STORY: In the Louisiana bayou, big brother Ogun Size is hardworking and steady. Younger brother Oshoosi is just out of prison and aimless. Elegba, Oshoosi's old prison-mate, is a mysterious complication. A simple circle defines a world that beg

The dramatic trilogy has been flourishing for some time now in new works and revivals of older works by American, British, and European playwrights. This book analyzes recent American works by Caucasian, African American, Asian American, and Hispanic American men and women. There are five chapters beginning with Opposing Families (trilogies of, e.g., Lanford Wilson, Foote, Machado, and McCraney are examined). Carson, Rabe, and McLaughlin are among those in the Classical Reimaginings chapter while Coen, Berc, and Wolfe constitute the Medieval Reimaginings chapter. Van Itallie, Havis, Rapp, and Hwang, among others, create New Forms. LaBute, Fierstein, and Nelson, among others, create New Selves. The concluding chapter is devoted to Ruhl's Passion Play, which spans 400 years of theatre-creating from Elizabethan England to Hitler's Germany to the Reagan era in America.

These new essays explore the ways in which contemporary dramatists have retold or otherwise made use of myths, fairy tales and legends from a variety of cultures, including Greek, West African, North American, Japanese, and various parts of Europe. The dramatists discussed range from well-established playwrights such as Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, and Timberlake Wertenbaker to new theatrical stars such as Sarah Ruhl and Tarell Alvin McCraney. The book contributes to the current discussion of adaptation theory by examining the different ways, and for what purposes, plays revise mythic stories and characters. The essays contribute to studies of literary uses of myth by focusing on how recent dramatists have used myths, fairy tales and legends to address contemporary concerns, especially changing representations of women and the politics of gender relations but also topics such as damage to the environment and political violence.

Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater. Second Edition covers theatrical practice and practitioners as well as the dramatic literature of the United States of America from 1930 to the present. The 90 years covered by this volume features the triumph of Broadway as the center of American drama from 1930 to the early 1960s through a Golden Age exemplified by the plays of Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge, Lorraine Hansberry, and Edward Albee, among others. The impact of the previous modernist era contributed greatly to this period of prodigious creativity on American stages. This volume will continue through an exploration of the decline of Broadway as the center of U.S. theater in the 1960s and the evolution of regional theaters, as well as fringe and university theaters that spawned a second Golden Age at the millennium that produced another – and significantly more diverse – generation of significant dramatists including such figures as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Maria Irené Fornes, Beth Henley, Terrence McNally, Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, and numerous others. The impact of the Great Depression and World War II profoundly influenced the development of the American stage, as did the conformist 1950s and the revolutionary 1960s on in to the complex times in which we currently live. Historical Dictionary of the Contemporary American Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 1.000 cross-referenced entries on plays, playwrights, directors, designers, actors, critics, producers, theaters, and terminology. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about American theater.

Previous surveys of the gay theatrical repertoire have concentrated on plays produced on Broadway or in London's West End. This comprehensive guide goes well beyond these earlier studies by introducing productions from Off Broadway, from regional theaters in the U.S. and U.K., and from Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Also included are Puerto Rican, Indian and Filipino plays written in English, as well as translations from other languages. Well over half of the works discussed here appear for the first time in such a study.

Critics have long suggested that August Wilson, who called blues "the best literature we have as black Americans," appropriated blues music for his plays. After August insists instead that Wilson’s work is direct blues expression. Patrick Maley argues that Wilson was not a dramatist importing blues music into his plays; he was a bluesman, expressing a blues ethos through drama. Reading Wilson’s American Century Cycle alongside the cultural history of blues music, as well as Wilson’s less discussed work—his interviews, the polemic speech "The Ground on Which I Stand," and his memoir play How I Learned What I Learned—Maley shows how Wilson’s plays deploy the blues technique of call-and-response, attempting to initiate a dialogue with his audience about how to be black in America. After August further contends that understanding Wilson as a bluesman demands a reinvestigation of his forebears and successors in American drama, many of whom echo his deep investment in social identity crafting. Wilson’s dramaturgical pursuit of culturally sustainable black identity sheds light on Tennessee Williams’s exploration of oppressive limits on masculine sexuality and Eugene O’Neill’s treatment of psychologically corrosive whiteness. Today, the contemporary African American playwrights Katori Hall and Tarell Alvin McCraney repeat and revise Wilson’s methods, exploring the fraught and fertile terrain of racial, gender, and sexual identity. After August makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on Wilson and his undeniable impact on American drama.

Deliberately considering relevant theories put forward by earlier writers and examining them in the light of the research for this particular book, the author spent over 100 days attending funeral ceremonies and he attended 25 burial services. First published in 1962.