THE STORY: Six black minstrel players in a Pullman porter railroad car on a cold winter's afternoon in February, 1895, outside the rural town of Hannibal, Missouri, wait for showtime to arrive. The chilly wind blows outside as they pass the time wi

The standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the United States since the beginning of the 20th century, Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections has undergone seven previous editions, the latest in 1988, covering 1900 through 1985. In this new edition, Denise Montgomery has expanded the volume to include collections published in the entire English-speaking world through 2000 and beyond. This new volume lists more than 3,500 new plays and 2,000 new authors, as well as birth and/or death information for hundreds of authors. Representing the largest expansion between editions, this updated volume is a valuable resource for libraries worldwide.

Staging Migrations toward an American West examines how black women's theatrical and everyday performances of migration toward the American West expose the complexities of their struggles for sociopolitical emancipation. While migration is often viewed as merely a physical process, Effinger-Crichlow expands the concept to include a series of symbolic internal journeys within confined and unconfined spaces. Four case studies consider how the featured women—activist Ida B. Wells, singer Sissieretta "Black Patti” Jones, World War II black female defense-industry workers, and performance artist Rhodessa Jones—imagined and experienced the American West geographically and symbolically at different historical moments. Dissecting the varied ways they used migration to survive in the world from the viewpoint of theater and performance theory, Effinger-Crichlow reconceptualizes the migration histories of black women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. This interdisciplinary study expands the understanding of the African American struggle for unconstrained movement and full citizenship in the United States and will interest students and scholars of American and African American history, women and gender studies, theater, and performance theory.

Gathers highlights from the season's ten best plays and information on plays produced in the United States

This carefully constructed and thorough collection of theoretical engagements with Augusto Boal’s work is the first to look ’beyond Boal’ and critically assesses the Theatre of the Opressed (TO) movement in context. A Boal Companion looks at the cultural practices which inform TO and explore them within a larger frame of cultural politics and performance theory. The contributors put TO into dialogue with complexity theory – Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, race theory, feminist performance art, Deleuze and Guattari, and liberation psychology – to name just a few, and in doing so, the kinship between Boal’s project and multiple fields of social psychology, ethics, biology, comedy, trauma studies and political science is made visible. The ideas generated throughout A Boal Companion will: expand readers' understanding of TO as a complex, interdisciplinary, multivocal body of philosophical discourses provide a variety of lenses through which to practice and critique TO make explicit the relationship between TO and other bodies of work. This collection is ideal for TO practitioners and scholars who want to expand their knowledge, but it also provides unfamiliar readers and new students to the discipline with an excellent study resource.

This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It focuses on representative plays and performance texts that experiment with form and content, discussing influential playwrights and performance artists such as Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlum, Anna Deavere Smith, Karen Finley and Will Power, alongside avant-garde theatre groups. Saddik traces the development of contemporary drama since 1945, and discusses the cross-cultural impact of postwar British and European innovations on American theatre from the 1950s to the present day in order to examine the performance of American identity. She argues that contemporary American theatre is primarily a postmodern drama of inclusion and diversity that destabilizes the notion of fixed identity and questions the nature of reality.

The first major twenty-first century history of four hundred years of black writing, The Cambridge History of African American Literature presents a comprehensive overview of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the United States. Expert contributors, drawn from the United States and beyond, emphasise the dual nature of each text discussed as a work of art created by an individual and as a response to unfolding events in American cultural, political, and social history. Unprecedented in scope, sophistication and accessibility, the volume draws together current scholarship in the field. It also looks ahead to suggest new approaches, new areas of study, and as yet undervalued writers and works. The Cambridge History of African American Literature is a major achievement both as a work of reference and as a compelling narrative and will remain essential reading for scholars and students in years to come.

Macelle Mahala’s rich study of contemporary African American theater institutions reveals how they reflect and shape the histories and cultural realities of their cities. Arguing that the community in which a play is staged is as important to the work’s meaning as the script or set, Mahala focuses on four cities’ “arts ecologies” to shed new light on the unique relationship between performance and place: Cleveland, home to the oldest continuously operating Black theater in the country; Pittsburgh, birthplace of the legendary playwright August Wilson; San Francisco, a metropolis currently experiencing displacement of its Black population; and Atlanta, a city with forty years of progressive Black leadership and reverse migration. Black Theater, City Life looks at Karamu House Theatre, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh Playwrights’ Theatre Company, the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the African American Shakespeare Company, the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival, and Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company to demonstrate how each organization articulates the cultural specificities, sociopolitical realities, and histories of African Americans. These companies have faced challenges that mirror the larger racial and economic disparities in arts funding and social practice in America, while their achievements exemplify such institutions’ vital role in enacting an artistic practice that reflects the cultural backgrounds of their local communities. Timely, significant, and deeply researched, this book spotlights the artistic and civic import of Black theaters in American cities.

THE STORY: The high-stakes world of Civil War-era horse racing is the stage for this riveting drama of slavery and Reconstruction. Both Simon Cato, a smart, cocky 'colored' jockey, and his horse, Pure Confidence, are owned by Colonel Wiley Johnson.