A new generation of playwrights, whose careers began in this century, has emerged, and done so when American theatre and society was changing. Capturing the cultural shifts of 21st-century America, ...Staging America explores the lives and works of 8 award-winning playwrights – including Ayad Akhtar, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Young Jean Lee and Quiara Alllegría Hudes – whose backgrounds reflect the social, religious, sexual and national diversity of American society. Each chapter is devoted to a single playwright and provides an overview of their career, a description and critical evaluation of their work, as well as a sense of their reception.
Christopher Bigsby explores the entirety of Arthur Miller's work, including plays, poetry, fiction and films, in this comprehensive and stimulating study. Drawing on interviews conducted over the ...last twenty years, on unique rehearsal material and research archives, he paints a compelling picture of how Miller's works were influenced by and created in the light of events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is an enjoyable insight into a great playwright that will interest both theatregoers and students of modern drama.
This is a meditation on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. It is also an exploration of the ways in which fiction ...and drama have attempted to approach a subject so resistant to the imagination. Beginning with W. G. Sebald, for whom memory and the Holocaust were the roots of a special fascination, Bigsby moves on to consider those writers Sebald himself valued, including Arthur Miller, Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Peter Weiss, and those whose lives crossed in the bleak world of the camps, in fact or fiction. The book offers a chain of memories. It sets witness against fiction, truth against wilful deceit. It asks the question who owns the Holocaust - those who died, those who survived to bear witness, those who appropriated its victims to shape their own necessities.
A New Introduction to American Studies provides a coherent portrait of American history, literature, politics, culture and society, and also deals with some of the central themes and preoccupations ...of American life. It will provoke students into thinking about what it actually means to study a culture.
Ideals such as the commitment to liberty, equality and material progress are fully examined and new light is shed on the sometimes contradictory ways in which these ideals have informed the nation's history and culture.
For introductory undergraduate courses in American Studies, American History and American Literature.
Following Arthur Miller's death in February 2005, newspapers were filled with tributes to the man regarded by many as the greatest playwright of the twentieth century. This book contains reflections ...on him from over seventy writers, actors, directors and friends, with 'Arthur Miller Remembers' - an interview with the writer, held in 1995.
Christopher Bigsby explores the works and influences of ten contemporary American playwrights: John Guare (House of Blue Leaves), Tina Howe (Museum and Approaching Zanzibar), Pulitzer Prize and Tony ...award winner Tony Kushner (Angels in America), Emily Mann (Anulla: An Autobiography and Having Our Say), Richard Nelson (An American Comedy), Marsha Norman (The Secret Garden), David Rabe (In the Boom Boom Room), Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel (Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief), Wendy Wasserstein (The Sisters Rosenzweig), and Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson (Talley's Folly). Bigsby examines, in some detail, the developing careers of some of America's most fascinating and original dramatic talent. In addition to well-known works, Bigsby discusses some of the latest plays to reach the stage. This lively and accessible book, by one of the leading writers on American theatre, will be of interest to students, scholars and general theatre-goers alike.
No Villain Bigsby, Christopher
The Arthur Miller journal,
10/2016, Letnik:
11, Številka:
2
Journal Article
The tensions between father and sons power this play, as they would Death of a Salesman. The family are trapped in this room (the action otherwise moving only to the failing family company), and that ...sense of psychological claustrophobia is heightened at the Old Red Lion Theatre where the audience is similarly cramped. If the Miller Estate had done likewise there would have been no reimagining of A View from the Bridge, no staging of his screenplay The Hook, and now no production of the play that would ensure that Arthur Miller would one day be able to address an audience across the world, even in a small pub theater in which it is as well to time visits to the toilet with discretion.
Neil Labute Bigsby, Christopher
2007, c2007., 2007-12-13
eBook
Neil LaBute - playwright, screenwriter, director and author of short stories - is one of the most exciting new talents in theatre and film. In the first full-length study of LaBute's work, ...Christopher Bigsby examines how he explores the cruelties, self-concern and manipulative powers of individuals who inhabit a seemingly uncommunal world.
Reflections on the late Arthur Miller from over seventy writers, actors, directors and friends, with 'Arthur Miller Remembers', an interview with the writer from 1995.Following his death in February ...2005, newspapers were filled with tributes to the man regarded by many as the greatest playwright of the twentieth century. Published as a celebration and commemoration of his life, Part I of Remembering Arthur Miller is a collection of over seventy specially commissioned pieces from writers, actors, directors and friends, providing personal, critical and professional commentary on the man who gave the theatre such timeless classics as All my Sons, A View from the Bridge, The Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible. Contributors read like a Who's Who of theatre, film and literature: Edward Albee, Alan Ayckbourn, Brian Cox, Richard Eyre, Joseph Fiennes, Nadine Gordimer, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Mitchell, Harold Pinter, Vanessa Redgrave and Tom Stoppard, to name but a few.Part II, 'Arthur Miller Remembers', is an in-depth and wide-ranging interview conducted with Miller in 1995. Bigsby's expertise and Miller's candour produce a wonderfully insightful commentary and analysis both of Miller's life and the life of twentieth century America. It covers Miller's upbringing in Harlem, the Depression, marriage to Marilyn Monroe, post-war America, being sentenced to prison by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, and his presidency of the writer's organisation, PEN International. The discourse also provides a commentary on and analysis of his many plays andMiller's reflections on the Amercian theatre.
