Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance

Description

This collection of essays dissects American plays, movies and other performance types that examine America and its history and culture. From Amerindian stage performances to AIDS and post-9/11 America, it displays the various and important ways theatre and performance studies have examined and conversed with American culture and history. Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction: America Defined and Refined....Pages 1-10 The Savage Other: “Indianizing” and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Culture....Pages 11-27 Defining Faith: Theatrical Reactions to Pro-Slavery Christianity in Antebellum America....Pages 29-45 Negotiating a New Identity: Irish Americans and the Variety Theatre in the 1860s....Pages 47-64 Drama and Cultural Pluralism in the America of Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors....Pages 65-80 Beneath the Horizon: Pipe Dreams, Identity, and Capital in Eugene O’Neill’s First Broadway Play....Pages 81-99 Vernacularizing Brecht: The Political Theatre of the New Deal....Pages 101-119 Let Freedom Ring: Mordecai Gorelik’s Politicized Stage Designs....Pages 121-138 Choreographing America: Redefining American Ballet in the Age of Consensus....Pages 139-155 Arthur Miller: In Memoriam....Pages 157-164 Menageries, Melting Pots, Movies: Tennessee on America....Pages 165-180 Facts on Trial: Documentary Theatre and Zoot Suit....Pages 181-198 “The Ground on Which I Stand is I, too, Am America”: African American Cycle Dramatists, Dramas, and the Voice of Inclusion....Pages 199-215 My Uncle Sam in Consumer Society: Len Jenkin and the Death of Death of a Salesman....Pages 217-232 From Paradise to Parasite: Information Theory, Noise, and Disequilibrium in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation....Pages 233-242 Not “Very Steven Spielberg”?: Angels in America on Film....Pages 243-255 Reflections in a Pool: Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses and Post-9/11 New York City....Pages 257-269 An American Echo: Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play and James Scruggs’s Disposable Men....Pages 271-290 Back Matter....Pages 291-303