Experimental O'Neill compiles in a single volume six of Eugene O'Neill's early plays: The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, and what are often referred to as “The S.S. Glencairn Plays,” four related one-acts. With extensive companion essays and critical analysis, this indispensable volume brings together some of O'Neill's often overlooked and still highly controversial works. Exploring themes of race, capitalism, and isolation, these plays use a mix of...
The Marks Brothers may well have been the most remarkable theatrical family in Canadian history. A phenomenon on the vaudeville circuit, the seven brothers left the farm and took to the boards and the footlights throughout the latter part of the 19th century and into the 1920s. The brothers from Christie Lake, near Perth in Eastern Ontario, played to an estimated eight million Canadians, as well as to sizeable audiences in the United States. Their road shows, largely melodramas and comedy, kept...
An insightful study of how identity is mobilized in and for war in the face of homegrown terrorism. [b][/b]“You are either with us, or against us” is the refrain that captures the spirit of the global war on terror. Images of the “them” implied in this war cry—distinct foreign “others”—inundate Americans on hit television shows, Hollywood blockbusters, and nightly news. However, in this book, Piotr Szpunar tells the story of a fuzzier image: the homegrown terrorist, a foe that blends into the...
A MASTERFUL BOOK ABOUT BREATHING LIFE INTO ART AND ART INTO LIFE “Stephen Nachmanovitch’s The Art of Is is a philosophical meditation on living, living fully, living in the present. To the author, an improvisation is a co-creation that arises out of listening and mutual attentiveness, out of a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. It is a product of the nervous system, bigger than the brain and bigger than the body; it is a once-in-a-lifetime encounter,...
<P>Anna Halprin is one of the most important innovators in the history of modern dance, performance art, and post-modern dance. Moving Toward Life brings together for the first time her essays, interviews, manifestos, and teaching materials, along with over 100 illustrations, providing a rich account of the work that radicalized an entire generation of performers.</P><P>Since the late 1950s, Halprin has been at the forefront of experiments in dance, from...
The editor of this lively assortment of reviews, interviews and other critical deliberations on contemporary Canadian drama has gathered material from books, theatre and scholarly journals; from major daily newspapers in Canada and abroad; from critics, academics, journalists and playwrights. This new edition includes commentary on forty-three English-language plays written during the last fifty years, and a comprehensive index.
Lowell is no average teenager—and his grandfather, Hardy, is no conventional role model. Hardy may once have owned the abandoned orchard at the heart of town where they spend time trespassing and discussing ethics as if it were nothing more than a game. When inspector Milton shows up to investigate a murder, Lowell’s truths are put to the ultimate test.
Arguably the first North American play, this edition includes the original French script of Marc Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France, two twentieth-century English translations, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, and an extensive historical and critical introduction by Jerry Wasserman.
In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his silent, vacant father’s bodily needs while hopelessly trying to reach him with monologues and settle misunderstandings. In Act 2, in an eerie reversal of roles, Alex visits Claude in the same ward, similarly finding disconsolate irony where he had looked for forgiveness.
Where the Blood Mixes is meant to expose the shadows below the surface of the author’s First Nations heritage, and to celebrate its survivors. Though torn down years ago, the memories of their Residential School still live deep inside the hearts of those who spent their childhoods there. For some, like Floyd, the legacy of that trauma has been passed down through families for generations. But what is the greater story, what lies untold beneath Floyd’s alcoholism, under the...