The Abbey and the Idea of a Theatre
Ben Levitas
The Irish national theatre movement developed in the ferment of cultural nationalism at the turn of the century, but it was not at all clear what form a national theatre should take: an ...
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The Abbey Theatre and the Irish State
Lauren Arrington
The aesthetic principles of education and representation that Yeats and Gregory set out at the founding of the Abbey Theatre enabled the directorate to cultivate a relationship with the ...
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African American Drama, 1910–45
Kathy A. Perkins
This essay traces the efforts of African American women to establish new voices in the American theater during the period from 1910 to 1945. It discusses the role of the Federal Theatre ...
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American Musical Theatre, 1870–1945
Thomas S. Hischak
This essay examines the history of musical theater in the United States during the period from 1870 to 1945. It explains that while The Black Crook from 1866 may be considered as the first ...
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Arthur Miller: A Radical Politics of the Soul
Jeffrey D. Mason
This essay examines the works of the American playwright Arthur Miller, who was considered a transitional figure in politically charged drama. It refers to the influence of the Great ...
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‘As We Must’: Growth and Diversification in Ireland’s Theatre Culture 1977–2000
Victor Merriman
By the 1970s, arts funding for theatre in Ireland had become concentrated in three organizations: the Abbey and the Gate in the Republic, the Lyric Theatre in Northern Ireland. Changes in ...
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Beckett at the Gate
Julie Bates
The place of Samuel Beckett in Irish theatre is anomalous. On the one hand, he is the inescapable figure, the writer cited by so many subsequent Irish playwrights as a touchstone for their ...
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Brian Friel and Field Day
Marilynn Richtarik
When Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea formed the Field Day Theatre Company to stage Friel’s Translations in 1980, they created a company arguably more conscious of its own symbolic value, ...
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Brian Friel and Tom Murphy: Forms of Exile
Anthony Roche
Irish theatre since 1960 has been dominated by the work of major playwrights, above all Brian Friel and Tom Murphy. The changing social context of Ireland in the early 1960s out of which ...
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Defining Performers and Performances
Nicholas Grene
One measure of a great performer is his or her capacity to define a major role for a generation. This chapter considers the acting styles and achievement of four such performers in some of ...
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Design and Direction to 1960
Paige Reynolds
Early Abbey staging and design was extremely simple, partly enforced by the limitations of their resources. Yeats’s ambitious experiments with the screens of Gordon Craig came to nothing. ...
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Directors and Designers since 1960
Ian Walsh
Although Irish theatre is often considered to be primarily a writer’s theatre, with its roots in a realist tradition, Irish theatre since 1960 has consistently challenged this definition ...
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Drama and the New Sexualities
Jordan Schildcrout
This essay examines the representation of new sexualities in American drama, beginning with attempts by Mae West, Lillian Hellman, and Tennessee Williams to represent queer experience in ...
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Drama since the 1990s: Memory, Story, Exile
Emilie Pine
Ireland in the early 1990s began to undergo social changes at an unprecedented rate. Friel and Murphy, the two playwrights who had established themselves as the leading figures in Irish ...
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Ethnicity and Postwar Drama
Jon D. Rossini
This essay examines possible directions in evaluating the recent performances of racialized ethnic identities in American drama from the mid 1960s. It focuses on Puerto Rican, Chicana/o, ...
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Eugene O’Neill
Steven F. Bloom
This essay focuses on the career of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill, from his early years as a maker of one-act naturalistic melodramas through the transition to his important ...
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Experimental Theatre: Beyond Illusion
Theodore Shank
This essay examines the history of the so-called experimental theatre in the United States. It argues that experimentation in the theatre concerns not merely words but also images and ...
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‘Feast and Celebration’: The Theatre Festival and Modern Irish Theatre
Patrick Lonergan
‘Festivalization’—the organization of theatre cultures around the moveable feast of the festival—is a defining feature of theatre culture in an age of globalization. The effects of this ...
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The Federal Theatre Project
Barry B. Witham
This essay examines the drama of the Federal Theatre Project in the United States during the 1930s. It suggests that accusations of Communist propaganda that eventually destroyed the ...
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Feminist Drama
Dorothy Chansky
This essay examines the history of the so-called feminist drama in the United States. It suggests that the feminist theatre is a form of protest theatre and highlights the spread of ...
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