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.
In this new edition of the widely-acclaimed Modern American Drama, Christopher Bigsby completes his survey of postwar and contemporary theatre and brings the reader up to 2000. While retaining the ...key elements of the first edition, including surveys of those major figures who have shaped postwar American drama, such as Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard, Bigsby also explores the most recent works and performances: these include plays by established dramatists such as Miller's The Ride down Mount Morgan and Albee's Three Tall Women, as well as works by relatively new playwrights Paula Vogel, Tony Kushner, and Terrence McNally among others. Bigsby also provides a new chapter, 'Beyond Broadway' and offers an analysis of how theatre has formed and influenced the millenial culture of America.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Crucible Bigsby, Christopher
Arthur Miller journal/The Arthur Miller journal,
04/2014, Letnik:
9, Številka:
1-2
Book Review, Journal Article
Odprti dostop
The young girl accusers perform a synchronised hysteria which has echoes of drama school exercises, as they contort their bodies and finally release their hair, all the same colour and length, and ...lash it around. The former deal in texts, the others in practicalities: ploughing on the Sabbath, milking cows, raising crops. Jack Ellis, as Deputy Governor Danforth, meanwhile, is a powerful foil to Proctor as he prides himself on his rational defence of the irrational, his confidence slowly eroded as Proctor's had been shattered, as virtue was offered up to a supposedly purging execution.
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