In American Dramatists in the 21st Century: Opening Doors, Christopher Bigsby examines the careers of seven award-winning playwrights: David Adjmi, Julia Cho, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Will Eno, Martyna Majok, Dominique Morisseau and Anna Ziegler. In addition to covering all their plays, including several as yet unpublished, he notes their critical reception while drawing on their own commentary on their approach to writing and the business of developing a career. The writers studied come from a diverse range of racial, religious and immigrant backgrounds. Five of the seven are women. Together, they open doors on a changing theatre and a changing America, as ever concerned with identity, both personal and national. This is the third in a series of books which, together, have explored the work of twenty-four American playwrights who have emerged in the current century.
In his first novel, British scholar Christopher W.E. Bigsby provides a prequel to The Scarlet Letter, introducing readers to a younger Hester Prynne. He tells of her attempts to flee an oppressive marriage to Roger Chillingworth, her love affair with Arthur Dimmesdale, and her life in the New World. In the process, Bigsby condemns the obstacles and prejudices that strong, intelligent women faced in the 17th century, providing a powerful narrative reframing of a compelling literary character.
Many of the American playwrights who dominated the 20th century are no longer with us: Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Neil Simon, August Wilson and Wendy Wasserstein. A new generation, whose careers began in this century, has emerged, and done so when the theatre itself, along with the society with which it engages, was changing. Capturing the cultural shifts of 21st-century America, Staging America explores the lives and works of 8 award-winning playwrights – including Ayad Akhtar, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Young Jean Lee and Quiara Alllegría Hudes – whose backgrounds reflect the social, religious, sexual and national diversity of American society. Each chapter is devoted to a single playwright and provides an overview of their career, a description and critical evaluation of their work, as well as a sense of their reception. Drawing on primary sources, including the playwrights' own commentaries and notes, and contemporary reviews, Christopher Bigsby enters into a dialogue with plays which are as various as the individuals who generated them. An essential read for theatre scholars and students, Staging America is a sharp and landmark study of the contemporary American playwright.
In a small Southern town, a white man tries to prevent a lynching and finds himself branded by the mob --- and worse, finds himself sheltering the dead man's son. When the killers come around to finish the job, the two victims are forced to flee across the country in the hopes of escaping men with nothing but vengeance on their minds. Just one step behind the vigilantes a solitary lawman tracks the men as he wrestles with the choice to either turn the customary blind eye or to put a stop to the intolerable logic of racial hatred. As the point of view moves seamlessly between characters, Christopher Bigsby crafts what Booklist calls a "taut, poetic narrative that has all the hypnotic power of an incantation." Dark and gritty, Beautiful Dreamer traces the struggle between reluctant good and dedicated evil, where morality is a matter of life or death and the choices made have consequences as lasting as they are unexpected.
One of America's most powerful and original dramatists, August Wilson offered an alternative history of the twentieth century, as seen from the perspective of black Americans. He celebrated the lives of those seemingly pushed to the margins of national life, but who were simultaneously protagonists of their own drama and evidence of a vital and compelling community. Decade by decade, he told the story of a people with a distinctive history who forged their own future, aware of their roots in another time and place, but doing something more than just survive. Wilson deliberately addressed black America, but in doing so discovered an international audience. Alongside chapters addressing Wilson's life and career, and the wider context of his plays, this Companion dedicates individual chapters to each play in his ten-play cycle, which are ordered chronologically, demonstrating Wilson's notion of an unfolding history of the twentieth century.
WRITERS IN CONVERSATION compiles Christopher Bigsby's interviews with the world's greatest writers from a decade of the Arthur Miller Centre's International Literary Festival at the University of East Anglia. These often candid, in-depth, witty and illuminating exchanges shine a light on the craft and profession of the working writer today. Volume 4 features interviews with David Leavitt, Doris Lessing, Penelope Lively, David Lodge, Javier Marias, Blake Morrison, Toni Morrison, John Mortimer, Michael Ondaatje, Stephen Poliakoff, Irina Ratushinskaya, Salman Rushdie, Nawal El Saadawi, Jane Smiley, Alexander McCall Smith, Tom Stoppard, Graham Swift, Amy Tan, Colm Toibin, Claire Tomalin with Michael Frayn, Rose Tremain, Jane Urquhart, Peter Ustinov and Shirley Williams.
This is the second volume in Christopher Bigsby's critical history of the important American dramatists and theatrical movements in the twentieth-century. Volume 1 brought the story to 1940 and included the last plays of O'Neill. In two further volumes Dr Bigsby covers the period from 1940 onwards. In Volume 2 he steps aside from the strict chronological progression to consider at length and in detail the achievement of the three great playwrights who dominate the post-war scene and who have earned an international reputation: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee. All three brought to the Broadway Theatre (discussed separately in Volume 3) a strong degree of moral seriousness and aesthetic sensitivity. Dr Bigsby gives a full account of the early unpublished plays and the major works by each playwright, drawing on biographical detail and political background to illuminate his reading of the plays, which are illustrated by photographs of important productions.
Christopher Bigsby explores all of Arthur Miller's work, including plays, poetry, fiction and prose, in this comprehensive study. Using previously unpublished and unknown material, including conversations with Miller, Bigsby paints a compelling picture of how Miller's works were influenced by, and created in the light of, events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This is a meditation on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. It is also an exploration of the ways in which fiction and drama have attempted to approach a subject so resistant to the imagination. Beginning with W. G. Sebald, for whom memory and the Holocaust were the roots of a special fascination, Bigsby moves on to consider those writers Sebald himself valued, including Arthur Miller, Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Peter Weiss, and those whose lives crossed in the bleak world of the camps, in fact or fiction. The book offers a chain of memories. It sets witness against fiction, truth against wilful deceit. It asks the question who owns the Holocaust - those who died, those who survived to bear witness, those who appropriated its victims to shape their own necessities.
Completing the sequence begun with Hester, the prequel to Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, this free-standing historical novel returns Pearl to Norwich, and her tainted inheritance. Hester Prynne's daughter has returned to England to claim the inheritance and property from which her mother fled. Although a determined young woman of twenty, she is not prepared for the forces determined to withstand her claims.
A New Introduction to American Studies provides a coherent portrait of American history, literature, politics, culture and society, and also deals with some of the central themes and preoccupations of American life. It will provoke students into thinking about what it actually means to study a culture. Ideals such as the commitment to liberty, equality and material progress are fully examined and new light is shed on the sometimes contradictory ways in which these ideals have informed the nation's history and culture. For introductory undergraduate courses in American Studies, American History and American Literature.
This is the first of two volumes in which Christopher Bigsby offers extended critical readings of the work of the leading dramatists and theatre groups in twentieth-century America. In this century drama has emerged as one of the most exciting expressions of American creativity, and during the 1930s became a primary means of addressing the cultural, political and economic changes of the period. But it has received surprisingly little attention. This is a chronological and selective study related to American culture as a whole and providing a picture of a vigorous theatre in the process of discovering its own special strengths. Volume 1 begins with the companies who first broke away from the stifling world of melodrama and naturalism - the Provincetown and Washington Square Players. Christopher Bigsby describes the emergence of important individuals and companies throughout the period to 1940, giving extended critical accounts of some playwrights, particularly Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets. Thornton Wilder and Lillian Hellman, and distinguishing between the aims and policies of the various companies, including the Theatre Guild and the Group Theatre. The development of left-wing theatre from 1914 is separately discussed, followed by a chapter on the brief flowering of the Federal Theatre which popularised theatre for a mass audience via its successful Living Newspaper productions. A chapter on black drama includes works by and about black Americans during this period. Some of the important figures and productions are illustrated, and there are useful appendices listing performances by major theatre companies.
First published in 1985, C.W.E Bigsby examines the career and work of playwright David Mamet. Bigsby shows that Mamet is a fierce social critic, indicting an America corrupted at its core by myths of frontier individualism and competitive capitalism. Mamet has created plays whose bleak social vision and ironic metaphysics are redeemed, if at all, by the power of imagination. No American playwright before him has displayed the same sensitivity to language, detecting lyricism in the brutal incoherencies of every day speech and investing with meaning a contemporary aphasia. Few have offered dramatic metaphors of such startling and disturbing originality. Bigsby’s study is the first book to provide a thorough account of David Mamet’s life and career, as well as close analyses of individual plays.
In this, the third and final volume of his critical account of American drama in the twentieth century, Christopher Bigsby turns from the text-oriented drama of Williams, Miller and Albee (volume 2) in order to trace other, parallel theatrical developments of the post-war period, including contemporary groups and playwrights. Beyond Broadway denotes the geographical and spiritual challenges to prevailing standards which so fragmented the theatre of the 1960s in particular. Following his analysis of the Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway playwrights and theatres, Dr Bigsby separates the period into four main areas: performance theatre (including the Living Theatre and the Performance Group); the conjunction of dance, music and painting with drama in the 'theatre of images'; two successful contemporary playwrights, Sam Shepard and David Mamet; and finally the committed theatre exemplified in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Chicano, black and women's theatre.
First published in 1990, this book presents a discussion with Arthur Miller, in conversation with Christopher Bigsby. Miller talks openly and extensively about his own life and experiences, events and environments which provide material for his plays: his New York childhood, the Depression, the McCarthy witch-hunts. He discusses in depth both the technique of his writing and the moral and political questions which his plays address, and argues passionately for the importance of maintaining respect for human values in a world where they are so frequently transgressed. Interwoven with these conversations are contributions from actors, directors, designers, reviewers, and writers who have encountered Miller over the years – whether in person or through his plays – which attest to the universal and enduring importance of his work.
A fascinating exploration of ten contemporary American playwrights: John Guare (House of Blue Leaves), Tina Howe (Museum), Tony Kushner (Angels in America), Emily Mann (Anulla: An Autobiography), Richard Nelson (An American Comedy), Marsha Norman (The Secret Garden), David Rabe (In the Boom Boom Room), Paula Vogel (Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief), Wendy Wasserstein (The Sisters Rosenzweig), and Lanford Wilson (Talley's Folly).
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