Theatre Arts

The first collection of original critical material on Martin McDonagh, one of the most celebrated young playwrights of the last decade. Credited with reinvigorating contemporary Irish drama, his dark, despairing comedies have been performed extensively both on Broadway and in the West End, culminating in an Olivier Award for the The Pillowman and an Academy Award for his short film Six Shooter. Richard Rankin Russell brings together a variety of theoretical perspectives - from globalization to the gothic - to survey McDonagh's plays in unprecedented critical depth. Specially commissioned essays cover topics such as identity politics, the shadow of violence and the role of Catholicism in the work of this most precocious of contemporary dramatists.

Tracy Letts, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his epic, caustic Oklahoma family drama August: Osage County, has shifted gears with this entertaining comedy set in a donut shop. A love letter to the city where he has lived for more than twenty years, Letts describes his new work as “an exploration of the Chicago storefront experience.”

“It is a meditation on Chicago’s old soul . . . a witty, seductive, live-wire and greatly entertaining dark comedy that you just don’t want to end.” (Chicago Tribune)

(State University of New York Press, 2003) What is special, distinct, modern about modernity? In How the World Became a Stage, William Egginton argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective and proposes replacing the vocabulary of subjectivity with the concepts of presence and theatricality. Following a Heideggerian injunctive to search for the roots of epochal change not in philosophies so much as in basic skills and practices, he describes the spatiality of modernity on the basis of a close historical analysis of the practices of spectacle from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, paying particular attention to stage practices in France and Spain. He recounts how the space in which the world is disclosed changed from the full, magically charged space of presence to the empty, fungible, and theatrical space of the stage. (Back Cover)

(Yale University Press, 2009.) Robinson explores more than two hundred years of plays, styles, and stagings of American theater. Mapping the changing cultural landscape from the late eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first, he explores how theater has—and has not—changed and offers close readings of plays by O’Neill, Stein, Wilder, Miller, and Albee, as well as by important but perhaps lesser known dramatists such as Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, and many others. Robinson reads each work in an ambitiously interdisciplinary context, linking advances in theater to developments in American literature, dance, and visual art.

The author is particularly attentive to the continuities in American drama, and expertly teases out recurring themes, such as the significance of visuality. He avoids neatly categorizing nineteenth- and twentieth-century plays and depicts a theater more restive and mercurial than has been recognized before.