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  3. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama

Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama offers a forum for the exploration of aspects of theater and drama in a cultural and social context. Inclusive by design, the series accommodates leading work in areas ranging from the study of drama as literature to theater histories and to readings of more popular forms. With a general emphasis on the American stage, Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama provides a crossroads at which historical, theoretical, literary, and biographical approaches meet and combine, promoting imaginative research in theater and drama from a variety of new perspectives.

  • General Editors: Don B. Wilmeth, Brown University, Rhode Island

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8 results in Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama

The Theatre of Sam Shepard
  • States of Crisis
  • Stephen J. Bottoms
  • Published online:
    01 June 2011
    Print publication:
    13 January 1998
  • This comprehensive analysis traces Sam Shepard's career from his experimental one-act plays of the 1960s to the 1994 play Simpatico. Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind are all examined in depth. Concentrating on his playwriting, this book charts Shepard's various developments and shifts of direction, and the changing contexts in which his work appeared. Engaging, informative, and insightful, The Theatre of Sam Shepard is the definitive source on the works of this innovative and original writer.

African American Theatre
  • An Historical and Critical Analysis
  • Samuel A. Hay
  • Published online:
    20 January 2010
    Print publication:
    25 February 1994
  • The book traces the history of African American theatre from its beginnings to the present. It analyses the types of plays written for this theatre, identifies the perennial problems faced by theatre artists and producing companies, and makes bold, innovative proposals for the theatre's healthy survival. The book draws on a considerable body of information that is carefully assembled in a lively accessible language. Professor Hay suggests that this theatre has been not only the cultural repository for African American life and history but also the forum where important ideas and aspirations of a people have been advanced and argued. The book presents a coherent and detailed scrutiny of the major stages of the development of African American theatre.

American Drama
  • The Bastard Art
  • Susan Harris Smith
  • Published online:
    10 November 2009
    Print publication:
    28 January 1997
  • In this book, Susan Harris Smith looks at the many often conflicting cultural and academic reasons for the neglect and dismissal of American drama as a legitimate literary form. Covering a wide range of topics such as theatrical performance, the rise of nationalist feeling, the creation of academic disciplines, and the development of sociology, Smith's study is a contentious and revisionist historical inquiry into the troubled cultural and canonical status of American drama, both as a literary genre and as a mirror of American society.

The Theatre in America during the Revolution
  • Jared Brown
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    24 November 1995
  • This is a comprehensive attempt to assemble all that is known of theatre at the time of America's political birth. Because many plays performed during the Revolution were overrun with partisan politics, they were not always aesthetically enticing; yet this was one of the only historical eras in which the theatre was used by both sides to help achieve military and political objectives. Whether moralistic or satirical, the plays of the revolution offer unique insights into the sympathies and fears of both loyal and dissident parties, and so serve as a telling document of a socially turbulent age. Brown's extensive research coheres into an invaluable theatrical and historical chronicle which should prove a useful resource for those working in the field.

Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre
  • Bodies, Voices, Words
  • Julia A. Walker
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    30 June 2005
  • Although often dismissed as a minor offshoot of the better-known German movement, expressionism on the American stage represents a critical phase in the development of American dramatic modernism. Situating expressionism within the context of early twentieth-century American culture, Walker demonstrates how playwrights who wrote in this mode were responding both to new communications technologies and to the perceived threat they posed to the embodied act of meaning. At a time when mute bodies gesticulated on the silver screen, ghostly voices emanated from tin horns, and inked words stamped out the personality of the hand that composed them, expressionist playwrights began to represent these new cultural experiences by disarticulating the theatrical languages of bodies, voices and words. In doing so, they not only innovated a new dramatic form, but redefined playwriting from a theatrical craft to a literary art form, heralding the birth of American dramatic modernism.

Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic
  • Jeffrey H. Richards
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 October 2005
  • Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic investigates the way in which theatre both reflects and shapes the question of identity in post-revolutionary American culture. In this 2005 book Richards examines a variety of phenomena connected to the stage, including closet Revolutionary political plays, British drama on American boards, American-authored stage plays, and poetry and fiction by early Republican writers. American theatre is viewed by Richards as a transatlantic hybrid in which British theatrical traditions in writing and acting provide material and templates by which Americans see and express themselves and their relationship to others. Through intensive analyses of plays both inside and outside of the early American 'canon', this book confronts matters of political, ethnic and cultural identity by moving from play text to theatrical context and from historical event to audience demography.

Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century
  • John H. Houchin
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    26 June 2003
  • John Houchin explores the impact of censorship in twentieth-century American theatre, arguing that theatrical censorship coincided with significant challenges to religious, political and cultural systems. The study provides a summary of theatre censorship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and analyses key episodes from 1900 to 2000. These include attempts to censure Olga Nethersole for her production of Sappho in 1901 and the theatre riots of 1913 that greeted the Abbey Theatre's production of Playboy of the Western World. Houchin explores the efforts to suppress plays in the 1920s that dealt with transgressive sexual material and investigates Congress' politically motivated assaults on plays and actors during the 1930s and 1940s. He investigates the impact of racial violence, political assassinations and the Vietnam War on the trajectory of theatre in the 1960s and concludes by examining the response to gay activist plays such as Angels in America.

Theatre, Society and the Nation
  • Staging American Identities
  • S. E. Wilmer
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    23 September 2002
  • Theatre has often served as a touchstone for moments of political change or national definition and as a way of exploring cultural and ethnic identity. In this book Steve Wilmer selects key historical moments in American history and examines how the theatre, in formal and informal settings, responded to these events. The book moves from the Colonial fight for independence, through Native American struggles, the Socialist Worker play, the Civil Rights Movement, and up to works of the last decade, including Tony Kushner's Angels in America. In addition to examining theatrical events and play texts, Wilmer also considers audience reception and critical response.