Böcker i Studies in Theatre History & Culture-serien

Archives and analyses Black feminist stand-up comedy in the United States over the past sixty years. Looking closely at the work of Jackie 'Moms' Mabley, Mo'Nique, Wanda Sykes, Sasheer Zamata, Sam Jay, and others, this book shows how Black feminist comedy and the laughter it ignites are vital components of feminist, queer, and anti-racist protest.

Traces the theatrical repertoire of a small group of white Anglo-American actresses as they reshaped the meanings of girlhood in Britain, North America, and the British West Indies during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Musicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion.

In the transition to a postcommunist world in Eastern Europe, "alternative theatre" found ways to grapple with political chaos, corruption, and aggressive implementation of a market economy. Three decades later, this volume is the first comprehensive examination of alternative theatre in ten former communist countries.

Argues that American variety theatre, a precursor to vaudeville, was a crucial battleground for anti-Irish anxieties, as it appealed to both the fears and the fantasies that accompanied the rapid economic and social changes of the Gilded Age.

The American Progressive Era is generally regarded as a dynamic period of political reform and social activism. In this volume, editors bring together scholars in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatre studies to examine the burst of diverse performance venues and styles of the time, revealing how they shaped national narratives surrounding immigration and urban life.

What does it mean, this book asks, to translate a Jazz Age blockbuster from book to film or stage? What adjustments are necessary and what is lost? Bethany Wood examines three well-known stories that debuted as women's magazine serials and traces how each of these narratives traveled across publishing, theatre, and film through adaptation.

Between the world wars, several labour colleges sprouted up across the US. These schools, funded by unions, sought to provide members with adult education while also indoctrinating them into the cause. As Mary McAvoy reveals, a big part of that learning experience centered on the schools' drama programs.

More than a chronicle, America in the Round is a critical history that reveals how far Washington D.C.'s Arena Stage could go with its budget and racially liberal politics, and how Arena both disputed and duplicated systems of power.

In this remarkable feat of historical research, Odai Johnson pieces together the surviving fragments of the story of the first professional theatre troupe based in the British North American colonies. In doing so, he tells the story of how colonial elites came to decide they would no longer style themselves British gentlemen, but instead American citizens.