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The study of American cultures from an interdisciplinary perspective. Examines significant aspects of U.S. institutions, policy, media and cultural expressions by drawing on a wide range of resources from the social sciences and humanities.
Featured | Performance and Protest: Theatre, Politics, and Activism in America
Theatre critic Lyn Gadner described theatre as "a form of activism – and activism as a form of theatre – [which] has long been with us, from the activities and the performances of the Actresses’ Franchise League, which supported the women’s suffrage movement, through the protest theatre of 1960s and 1970s with companies such as San Francisco Mime Troupe, Bread & Puppet, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s The Living Theatre."
This research guide will help you explore the symbiotic relationship between performance and protest, inviting you to discover resources on activist theatre and theatre-makers throughout the brief history of America.
[Image of Credit: Allen Weeks/NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/theater/systemic-racism-theater.html]
Theatre and Protest by Call Number: PN2193.P65 S53 2017ISBN: 9781137443090Publication Date: 2017-07-27How does protest engage with theatre? What does theatre have to gain from protest? Theatre and protest are often closely interlinked in the contemporary cultural and political landscape, and the line between protest and performance is often difficult to draw. Yet this relationship is also beset with doubts about theatre's capacity to intervene in the social world. This fresh and insightful text thinks through the intersections and tensions between theatre and protest. Exploring the cross-fertilization of international theatre and protest across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Lara Shalson illuminates how and why these two are mutually influencing and enriching forms.
Political and Protest Theatre After 9/11 by Call Number: PN2266.5 .P75 2012ISBN: 9780415895514Publication Date: 2011-12-22This collection documents and examines political and protest theatre produced between the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and Obama's election in 2008 by British and American artists responding to their own governments' actions and policies during this time. The plays take up topics such as the ongoing wars on terror, Blair's support of U.S. policies, the flawed intelligence that led to the Iraq war, and illegal detentions and torture at Abu Ghraib. The authors argue that engaged artists faced a radically different sociopolitical context for their work after 9/11 compared to earlier social protest movements and new forms of theatre, and different emotional strategies were necessary to meet the challenges. The subtitle Patriotic Dissent suggests the double stance of many artists-- influenced by patriotic expressions of national solidarity, yet critical of the ways that patriotic language was put to use against others. The articles represent a broad range of theatre: Broadway musicals, documentary theatre, adaptations of classical theatre, new plays by British playwrights, street performances and installations, and musical concerts. The contributors' case studies evaluate the effectiveness of important instances of political theatre and protest from this decade, arguing for the significance, relevance, and continuing necessity for evolving forms of political theatre today.
Vietnam Protest Theatre by Call Number: PN1650.V53 A48 1996ISBN: 0253330327Publication Date: 1996-05-22". . . a thoughtful and important treatment of the international tensions of the period as they were embodied in theatre practice. It is the only book of its kind on the subject, and a valuable source of production information." --Theatre Journal " . . . an excellent discussion of the aesthetics of theater." --Choice The escalation of the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s unleashed worldwide protest. Playwrights grappled with the complexities of post-imperialist politics and with the problems of creating effective political theatre in the television age. The ephemeral theatre these writers created, today little-known and rarely studied, provides an important window on a complex moment in culture and history.
Restaging the Sixties by Call Number: PN2266.5 .R47 2006ISBN: 9780472069545Publication Date: 2006-12-19In the volatile period of the late sixties and early seventies, several theater groups came to prominence in the United States, informing and shaping activist theater as we know it today. Restaging the Sixties examines the artistry, politics, and legacies of eight radical collectives: the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, At the Foot of the Mountain, the Free Southern Theater, and Bread and Puppet Theater. Each of the specially commissioned essays is from a leading theater artist, critic, or scholar. The essays follow a three-part structure that first provides a historical overview of each group's work, then an exploration of the group's significant contributions to political theater, and finally, the legacy of those contributions. The volume explores how creations such as the Living Theatre's Paradise Now and the Performance Group's Dionysus in 69 overlapped with political interests that, in the late 1960s, highlighted the notion of social collectives as a radical alternative to mainstream society. Situating theatrical practice within this socio-political context, the book considers how radical theaters sought to redefine the relationship between theater and political activism, and how, as a result, they challenged the foundations of theater itself. James M. Harding is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington University. His other books include Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance. Cindy Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies, Hofstra University. "A useful introduction to an eclectic period of experimental theater, providing portraits of the major political theaters and engaging with new vigor many of the era's familiar aesthetic and ideological concerns. The writers offer a provocative history of theater's attraction to (and occasional anxiety over) activism." --Marc Robinson, Yale University
The Theater Is in the Street by Call Number: PN3209 .M37 2004ISBN: 1558494588Publication Date: 2004-10-01During the 1960s, the SNCC Freedom Singers, The Living Theatre, the Diggers, the Art Workers Coalition, and the Guerrilla Art Action Group fused art and politics by staging unexpected and uninvited performances in public spaces. Through their activism and the response it provoked, art, theater, and politics began to converge and assume a new visibility in everyday life. While their specific political visions varied, these groups shared the impulse to stage performances and actions publicly?"in the streets"?eschewing museums, theaters, and other conventional halls of culture. Bradford D. Martin offers detailed portraits of each of these groups and examines why they embraced public performance as a vehicle to express and advance their politics. At a time when the New Left and the counterculture were on the rise, these artists reflected the decade?s political and cultural radicalism and helped to define a new aesthetic. Civil rights activists mobilized singing in the struggle for desegregation, introducing a vibrant musical form into the public space. The Living Theatre culminated an arduous quest to mesh artistic and political goals, leading audiences from theaters into the streets to begin the "beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution." The Diggers playfully engaged San Francisco?s counterculture in politics with their carnivalesque public actions. The Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Action Art Group sought to disrupt the conventional art world, mounting protests in and around New York City museums. By questioning the values and assumptions that separated art from politics, these groups not only established public performance as a legitimate aesthetic but also provided a new creative vocabulary for future generations of artists. Their continued involvement with the women?s liberation movement, rural communes, and political street theater into the 1970s and beyond challenges the popular myth that activists disengaged from politics after the 1960s.
The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939-1966 by ISBN: 9783030121877Publication Date: 2019-04-04This book argues that African American theatre in the twentieth century represented a cultural front of the civil rights movement. Highlighting the frequently ignored decades of the 1940s and 1950s, Burrell documents a radical cohort of theatre artists who became critical players in the fight for civil rights both onstage and offstage, between the Popular Front and the Black Arts Movement periods. The Civil Rights Theatre Movement recovers knowledge of little-known groups like the Negro Playwrights Company and reconsiders Broadway hits including Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, showing how theatre artists staged radically innovative performances that protested Jim Crow and U.S. imperialism amidst a repressive Cold War atmosphere. By conceiving of class and gender as intertwining aspects of racism, this book reveals how civil rights theatre artists challenged audiences to reimagine the fundamental character of American democracy.
New Deal Theater by Call Number: PS338.P6 S23 2007ISBN: 9781403978011Publication Date: 2008-07-03New Deal Theater recovers a much ignored model of political theater for cultural criticism.While considered to be less radical in its aesthetics and politics than its celebrated Weimar and Soviet cousins, it nonetheless proved to be highly effective in asserting cultural critique. In this regard it offers a vital alternative to the dominant modernist paradigm developed in Europe. Rather than radicalizing content and form, New Deal theater insisted that the political had to be made commensurable with the language of a mass audience steeped in consumer culture.The resulting vernacular praxis emphasized empathy over alienation, verisimilitude over abstraction. By examining the cultural vectors that shaped this theater, Saal shows why it was more successful on the American stage than its European counterpart and develops a theory of vernacular political theater which can help us think of the political in art in other than modernist terms.
Theorizing Black Theatre by Call Number: PS338.N4 M45 2011ISBN: 9780786459377Publication Date: 2010-11-23The rich history of African-American theatre has often been overlooked, both in theoretical discourse and in practice. This volume seeks a critical engagement with black theatre artists and theorists of the twentieth century. It reveals a comprehensive view of the Art or Propaganda debate that dominated twentieth century African-American dramatic theory. Among others, this text addresses the writings of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Sidney Poitier, and August Wilson. Of particular note is the manner in which black theory collides or intersects with canonical theorists, including Aristotle, Keats, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, and O'Neill.
Staging a Cultural Paradigm by Call Number: PS338.P6 S73 2002ISBN: 9052019908Publication Date: 2002-11-08The conflict between the political and the personal, an opposition which pervades the whole of American Literature, informs the essays on twentieth-century American theater gathered in this volume. Prominent theater scholars from Europe and America address the cultural paradigm created by the clash of private needs with public expectations. The difficulty of reconciling the two has led many dramatists to turn to the complexities of intertextuality in order to express their rebellions and rejections of inherited cultural values and myths. Essays on Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Susan Glaspell, H.M. Koutoukas, Dolores Prida, or Suzan Lori-Parks (to name but a few of the dramatists discussed here) reflect the vibrancy of American drama and the depth of the interaction of the political with the personal.
The Political Stage by Call Number: PN2266 .G655ISBN: 9780195017458Publication Date: 1974-03-28Malcolm Goldstein's study of the depression theater deals with considerably more than the "political" stage. It discusses not only the tech-niques and ambitions of "agit-prop," the The-ater Union, and the Group Theater, but also the Federal and Mercury Theaters, the Theater Guild, and the works of playwrights-Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, and Lillian Hell-man-not directly identified with any political movement or ideology. The result is an in-formative survey of how the theater responded to the problems of depression and war.
American Political Plays by Call Number: PS627.P65 A44 2001ISBN: 0252070003Publication Date: 2001-10-19Richly deserving of wider exposure in the theater and the classroom, these sly, remarkable scripts touch on the forceful and salient issues of the 1990s, including the Gulf War, racial and sexual relations, crises unique to big cities, immigration and multiculturalism, art and censorship, revisionist history, academic freedom, and the transformation of the American presidency. The American Play by Suzan-Lori Parks features an Abraham Lincoln impersonator trapped in an outrageous, Beckett-like world, while Naomi Wallace's In the Heart of America centers on a Palestinian American from Atlanta who is caught up in the Persian Gulf conflict. Kokoro by Velina Hasu Houston chillingly depicts the stark predicament of a Japanese mother caught between two impossible worlds; Marisol by José Rivera reveals the dark fairytale life of a young Latin woman in a wartorn, apocalyptic New York. The Gift by Allan Havis confronts overwhelming moral ambiguity in the farcical realm of university politics, while Nixon's Nixon by Russell Lees offers an adroit treatment of the fascinating, tortured Nixon/Kissinger relationship. The collection closes with Mac Wellman's 7 Blowjobs, a wicked send-up of the compromise politics that determined the fate of the National Endowment for the Arts. Taken together, these seven plays present an eclectic web of social thought and imagination that are uniquely American, offering the reader a splendid, honest study of a rich society in search of itself.
American Political Plays after 9/11 by Call Number: PS627.P65 A437 2010ISBN: 9780809329540Publication Date: 2010-05-10American Political Plays after 9/11 is a diverse collection of bold, urgent, and provocative plays that respond to the highly charged, post 9/11 political landscape. Sparked by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and subsequently fueled by a series of controversial events--the Iraq war, the passing and enforcement of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and the revelation of torture and other scandals at the Abu Ghraib prison--American political theater is currently experiencing a surge in activity. The plays in this collection include The Guys by Anne Nelson, At the Vanishing Point by Naomi Iizuka, The Venus de Milo Is Armed by Kia Corthron, Back of the Throat by Yusseff El Guindi, Three Nights in Prague by Allan Havis, and Question 27, Question 28 by Chay Yew. The characters range from a New York City fire captain trying to respectfully memorialize eight of his lost comrades, to the citizens of a hog-killing Louisville neighborhood who poignantly exemplify the underside of the economic crisis, to an Arab American citizen being harshly (and possibly unfairly) interrogated by two officers as a "person of interest." Though not all of the plays deal explicitly with the Al Qaeda attacks, they collectively reveal themes of sorrow and anxiety, moral indignation, alarmist self-preservation, and economic and social insecurity stemming from the United States' fairly sudden shift from cold war superpower to vulnerable target. The lively introduction by Allan Havis includes a brief history of political theater in the United States, an extensive discussion about how theater communities responded to 9/11, and an informative analysis of the six plays in the book. A collection of dramatic material framed by this significant historical event, AmericanPolitical Plays after 9/11 will be indispensable for theater and cultural studies scholars and students.
The Political Plays of Langston Hughes by Call Number: PS3515.U269 A6 2000ISBN: 080932296XPublication Date: 2000-02-11Among the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is perhaps best remembered for the innovative use of jazz rhythms in his writing. While his poetry and essays received much public acclaim and scholarly attention, Hughes' dramas are relatively unknown. Only five of the sixty-three plays Hughes scripted alone or collaboratively have been published (in 1963). Published here, for the first time, are four of Hughes' most poignant, poetic, and political dramas, Scottsboro Limited, Harvest (also known as Blood on the Fields), Angelo Herndon Jones, and De Organizer. Each play reflects Hughes' remarkable professionalism as a playwright as well as his desire to dramatize the social history of the African American experience, especially in the context of the labor movements of the 1930s and their attempts to attract African American workers. Hughes himself counted prominent members of these leftist groups among his close friends and patrons; he formed a theater group with Whittaker Chambers, prompting an FBI investigation of Hughes and his writing in the 1930s. These plays, while easily read as idealistic propaganda pieces for the left, are nonetheless reflective of Hughes' other more influential and studied works. The first scholar to offer a systematic study of Hughes' plays, Susan Duffy provides an informed introduction as well as a detailed analysis of each of the four plays. Duffy also establishes that De Organizer, a collaboration with noted jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson (who also wrote its score) was indeed performed by the Labor Stage. By making these forgotten texts available, and by presenting them within a scholarly discussion of 1930s leftist political movements, Duffy seeks to spark a renewed interest in Langston Hughes as an American playwright and political figure.
Four Black Revolutionary Plays by Call Number: PS3552.A583 F6 1998ISBN: 0714530050Publication Date: 2000-07-01The sum total of three hundred years of contained fury, these four plays are powerful statements about the real meaning of white oppression of black people. in their militancy and anger, they perfectly express the mood and frustrations of black America.
Radical Acts by Call Number: PS3554.U25 R33 2008ISBN: 9781595584076Publication Date: 2008-09-16Best known for his acclaimed autobiographies of Paul Robeson and Lincoln Kirstein, and his provocative books about the gay rights movement, Duberman has also had a long involvement with the theatre. This volume brings four of his politically charged plays to a new generation.
Front Lines by Call Number: PS627.P65 F76 2009ISBN: 9781595584243Publication Date: 2009-06-02A pathbreaking collection of the most important, critically acclaimed plays by American women. Includes seven full scripts and accompanying materials providing both examples of the craft and an essential introduction to the politically inspired work of female dramatists. Amongst the works are The Exonerated by Jessica Blank, Nilajia Sun's No Child, Mrs Packard by Emily Mann and Cindy Cooper's Words of Choice. With a preface by distinguished playwright Shirley Lauro and an introduction by critic Alexis Greene, the collection also includes biographies and photos.
Still on the Corner and Other Postmodern Political Plays by Fred Newman by Call Number: PS3564.E91614 S7 1998ISBN: 0966247108Publication Date: 1998-03-01Written between 1986 and 1997 and produced at the Castillo Theatre in New York City, the plays in this collection represent the American political theatre of American philosopher, psychotherapist, playwright, and political activist Fred Newman.
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? by ISBN: 9781854599599Publication Date: Nov. 2006Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? is a 2006 political play with eight scenes by Caryl Churchill. It addresses the application of power by the United States mostly since the Vietnam war. Two men, Sam ("a country") and Jack/Guy ("a man"), are homosexual lovers. Their interaction is an elliptical, often fragmented political dialog. Sam is the aggressive one and Jack/Guy initially his enthusiastic follower, who, however, in the process of the play becomes more and more disenchanted. Sam is clearly identified as the American government that touts American hegemony and foreign intervention, and Jack is his lover, who becomes a disillusioned follower by the end.
Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat by Call Number: PR6068.A915 S54 2009ISBN: 9781408108710Publication Date: 2009-02-23Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat is an epic cycle of plays exploring the personal and political effect of war on modern life. The plays that make up Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat began life at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe as Ravenhill for Breakfast (produced by Paines Plough), winning a Fringe First award, and the Jack Tinker Spirit of the Fringe award. They form a collage of very different scenes, with each taking its title from a classic work. The plays were presented in April 2008 in various venues across London, from Notting Hill to a Victorian warehouse in Shoreditch, via Sloane Square and the South Bank. Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat was originally developed in association with the National Theatre Studio and Paines Plough, and was first produced as Ravenhill for Breakfast at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in August 2007 by Paines Plough, with the support of David Johnson.
- American Drama 1714-1915
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Contains more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Represented genres include plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues, and others.
- Black Drama
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Full text access to more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Includes detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
- North American Indian Drama
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256 full-text plays by 49 American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the 20th century. - North American Women's Drama
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A full-text database of plays written by women from the United States and Canada, primarily in the 20th century. - Asian American Drama
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Asian American Drama contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.
- Twentieth Century North American Drama
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Full text of more than 2,000 plays, including all types of U.S. and Canadian dramas. - Twentieth-Century Drama
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Collection of published plays throughout the English-speaking world - Drama OnlinePlaytexts, audio plays, scholarly text, and video, from across the history of the theater, ranging from Aeschylus to the present day.
- Theatre in Video
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Provides access to streaming video for theater education. Includes filmed stage performances, master classes, documentaries, and training material, in addition to playlists, video clips, and on-screen transcripts. - Theatre in Context Collection
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A database of full-text reference works in theatre, drama, and related fields, including links to full-text plays - Play Index
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Indexes classic and historical plays, along with the works of contemporary playwrights. Includes new editions and translations, as well as descriptive annotations to summarize the plot and indicate musical requirements.
- Archive of Americana
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Historic American publications, books, broadsides, ephemera, newspapers, dating from as early as 1535 through the 20th Century.
- America's Historical Newspapers
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Digital archive of American newspapers published between 1690 and 1922, representing every state in the U.S.
- America: History & Life
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Bibliographic database focusing on the history and life of the United States and Canada, indexing more than 1,800 journals published, dissertations and reviews.
