Category: Theatre

By Sarah Ruhl

“Passionate. Show-stopping. Daringly over-the-top and impressively constant in its delirious extra. The fresh condo shines.”—New Haven Advocate

“The fresh home is no longer, whatsoever, a conventional boy-meets-girl tale. in truth affliction, dying, and grime are one of the matters it addresses. This comedy is romantic, deeply so, yet within the extra arcane experience of the be aware: visionary, tinged with delusion, extravagant in feeling, probably a bit nuts.”—The manhattan Times

“Touching, creative, invigoratingly compact, and luminously liquid, Eurydice reframes the traditional delusion of ill-fated like to concentration no longer at the bereaved musician yet on his lifeless bride—and on her fight with love past the grave.”—San Francisco Chronicle

This quantity is the 1st book of Sarah Ruhl, “a playwright with a different comedian voice, standpoint, and feel of theater” (Variety), who's quick leaving her mark at the American degree. within the award-winning fresh House—a play of unusual romance and unusual comedy—a maid who hates cleansing goals approximately growing the ideal funny story, whereas a physician who treats melanoma leaves his center inside of one in every of his sufferers. This quantity additionally comprises Eurydice, Ruhl’s reinvention of the tragic Greek story of affection and loss, including a 3rd play nonetheless to be named.

Sarah Ruhl acquired the celebrated Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 for her play The fresh residence, which has been produced at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, and Woolly sizeable Theatre corporation in Washington, DC. Her play Eurydice has been produced at Madison Repertory Theatre and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Contents:

The fresh House
Late: A Cowboy Song
Melancholy Play
Eurydice

By Robert Gottlieb

Every little thing approximately Sarah Bernhardt is attention-grabbing, from her imprecise beginning to her excellent career—redefining the very nature of her art—to her remarkable (and hugely public) romantic lifestyles to her indomitable spirit. good into her seventies, after the amputation of her leg, she used to be appearing lower than bombardment for squaddies in the course of international battle I, in addition to crisscrossing the USA on her 9th American tour.

Her kinfolk used to be additionally a resource of interest: the mummy she loved and who scorned her; her half-sisters, who died younger after lives of dissipation; and so much of all, her son, Maurice, whom she worshiped and raised as an aristocrat, within the sort applicable to his presumed father, the Belgian Prince de Ligne. just once did they quarrel—over the Dreyfus Affair. Maurice was once a right-wing snob; Sarah, consistently pleased with her Jewish historical past, was once a passionate Dreyfusard and Zolaist.

Though the Bernhardt literature is large, Gottlieb’s Sarah is the 1st English-language biography to seem in many years. Brilliantly, it tracks the trajectory in which an illegitimate—and scandalous—daughter of a courtesan reworked herself into the main well-known actress who ever lived, and right into a nationwide icon, an emblem of France.

By Paul R. Laird

In 2004, the unique Broadway creation of depraved earned 10 Tony nominations, together with most sensible musical. in accordance with the best-selling novel through Gregory Maguire, the exhibit keeps to run on Broadway and has traveling businesses through the usa and worldwide. In depraved: A Musical Biography, writer Paul Laird explores the construction of this well known Broadway musical via an exam of draft scripts, interviews with significant figures, and the learn of fundamental musical resources reminiscent of sketches, drafts, and accomplished musical scores.

Laird brings jointly a magnificent quantity of element at the production of depraved, together with a glance at Maguire's novel, in addition to the unique resource fabric, The Wizard of oz.. This quantity additionally bargains a historical past of the show's genesis besides examinations of the draft eventualities and scripts that show the show's improvement. Laird additionally explores Stephen Schwartz's lifestyles and paintings, offering an research of the composer and lyricist's paintings at the express via track drafts, sketches, and musical examples.

Laird additionally surveys the show's severe reception in long island and London, noting what number critics didn't relish its features or count on its nice good fortune. the bizarre nature of Wicked's story—dominated via robust lady leads—is additionally put within the context of Broadway heritage. a special investigate a profitable Broadway creation, depraved: A Musical Biography may be of curiosity to musicologists, theatre students, scholars, and basic readers alike.

By David A. Crespy, Edward Albee

By Mary Luckhurst, Jane Moody

Those fascinating essays discover facets of popularity, notoriety and transgression in quite a lot of performers and playwrights together with David Garrick, Oscar Wilde, Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier and Sarah Kane, studying the creative ways that those stars have negotiated status. The essays additionally examine the advanced relationships among discourses of superstar and questions of gender, spectatorship and the operation of cultural markets.

By Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides

In An Oresteia, the classicist Anne Carson combines 3 varied types of the tragedy of the home of Atreus ― A iskhylos' Agamemnon, Sophokles' Elektra and Euripides' Orestes. After the homicide of her daughter Iphigeneia by way of her husband, Agamemnon, Klytaimestra exacts a mother's revenge, murdering Agamemnon and his mistress, Kassandra. Displeased with Klytaimestra's activities, Apollo calls on her son, Orestes, to avenge his father's demise with the aid of his sister Elektra. finally, Orestes is pushed mad via the Furies for his bloody betrayal of family members. Condemned to loss of life through the folks of Argos, he and Elektra needs to justify their activities ― or flout society, justice and the gods.

Carson's translation combines modern language with the conventional buildings and rhetoric of Greek tragedy, establishing up this historic story of vengeance to a contemporary viewers and revealing the basic wit and morbidity of the unique performs.

By translation and notes by John Willett.

By Paul M. Allen

By Adrian Kear (auth.)

In the start of the twenty first century, eu theatre-makers have sought to contemplate the disastrous occasions of the twentieth century because the unfinished company of the modern. during this e-book, Kear argues that by way of pondering throughout the common sense of the development, modern functionality bargains an affective interrogation of 'the occasion' of the eu century.

By Arthur Miller

It took greater than fifty years for the fellow Who Had all of the good fortune to be preferred for what it really is: the 1st stirrings of a genius that will pass directly to blossom in such masterpieces as dying of a salesperson and The Crucible. Infused with the ethical malaise of the melancholy period, the drama facilities on David Beeves, a guy whose each problem to non-public luck turns out to fall apart sooner than him. yet his success basically serves to bare the tragedies of these round him in larger reduction, supplying proof of a capricious god or, worse, a godless, arbitrary universe. David's trip towards success turns into a nightmare of existential doubts, a determined grab for cause in a cosmos probably without any, and a fight that would take him to the threshold of insanity.