Enoch Brater

Phyllis Hartnoll

A Concise History (World of Art)

The Theatre

Perspectives on America's greatest living playwright that explore his longstanding commitment to forging a uniquely American theater Arthur Miller's America collects new writing by leading international critics and scholars that considers the dramatic world of icon, activist, and playwright Arthur Miller's theater as it reflects the changing moral equations of his time. Written on the occasion of Miller's 85th year, the original essays and interviews in Arthur Miller's America treat the breadth of Miller's work, including his early political writings for the campus newspaper at the University of Michigan, his famous work with John Huston, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe on The Misfits, and his signature plays like Death of a Salesman and All My Sons.

Theater and Culture in a Time of Change

Arthur Miller's America

No American playwright is more revered on the international stage than Arthur Miller. In Arthur Miller’s Global Theater—a fascinating collection of new essays by leading international critics and scholars—readers learn how and why audiences around the world have responded to the work of the late theatrical icon. With perspectives from diverse corners of the globe, from Israel to Japan to South Africa, this groundbreaking volume explores the challenges of translating one of the most American of American playwrights and details how disparate nations have adapted meaning in Miller’s most celebrated dramas. An original and engaging collection that will appeal to theater aficionados, scholars, students, and all those interested in Miller and his remarkable oeuvre, Arthur Miller’s Global Theater illustrates how dramas such as Death of a Salesman,The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge developed a vigorous dialogue with new audiences when they crossed linguistic and national borders. In these times when problems of censorship, repressive regimes, and international discord are increasingly in the news, Arthur Miller’s voice has never been more necessary as it continues to be heard and celebrated around the world. Enoch Brater is the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature at the University of Michigan. His other books include Arthur Miller: A Playwright’s Life and Works and Arthur Miller’s America.

Arthur Miller's Global Theater

In this rich and perceptive study of some of the most haunting fiction written in the late twentieth century, Beckett critic Enoch Brater continues his investigation of the tension between text and script, silence and associational sound. Brater argues with great learning that Beckett's fiction, like his radio plays, demands to be read aloud, since much of the emotional meaning lodges in its tonality. Here the rhythm of Beckett's "labouring heart" finds its performative voice as the reader, now turned listener, collaborates in the creation of a musical composition that must elucidate the stillness of the universe. The Drama in the Text is a book about reciting and recounting, about how we know and what we know when we read a lyrical "text" crafted in prose but sounding like something else instead. Brater ranges across all of Beckett's work, quoting from it liberally, and makes connections mainly with other writers, but also with details drawn from the whole Western cultural heritage. The only book that deals thoroughly with Beckett's complete late fiction, Brater's study opens to a wide literary audience the difficult and elliptical nature of Beckett's mature prose style. For those readers who find Beckett's late fiction "impossible to follow let alone describe", this book will be an authoritative and persuasive guide, providing recognition, insight, and accessibility.

Beckett's Late Fiction

The Drama in the Text

Beyond Minimalism explores Beckett's drama of the '70s and '80s, examining the ways in which play text and performance merge through the playwright's poetic idiom. Beginning with Not I and continuing through Catastrophe and What Where, Brater examines the plays not only as texts but also as theater pieces. Discussing the technical and aesthetic demands that productions like Footfalls and Rockaby make on actor, director, and spectator, Brater clarifies the essential relationship between Beckett's achievement in the context of the breakdown of genre, performance poetry, and the electronic intrusion of the recorded voice as a new theatrical convention. In the course of his analysis Brater demonstrates how Beckett's late style in the theater both continues and clarifies the dramatic lyricism that is the hallmark of earlier works such as Endgame and Waiting for Godot.

Beckett's Late Style in the Theater

Beyond Minimalism

Mark Edward

Mark Taylor-Batty

Stephen Farrier

In recent years drag performance has moved from the fringes to emerge as a mainstream phenomenon, showcased on TV shows in the US and the UK. Volume 1 offers a diverse range of critical engagements by drag performers, makers, scholars and writers reflecting on work from the UK, USA, Israel, Germany and Australia. Moving beyond discussions of gender theory, the essays consider contemporary drag performance practices, connecting them to the histories, communities and politics that produced them. Volume 2 examines how drag performance is a political, socio-cultural practice with a widespread lineage throughout the history of performance. It maps the multi-threaded contexts of contemporary practices while rooting them in their fabulous historical past and memory.

Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 1

Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers

Drawing on rich interdisciplinary research that has laced the emerging subject of drag studies as an academic discipline, this book examines how drag performance is a political, socio-cultural practice with a widespread lineage throughout the history of performance. This volume maps the multi-threaded contexts of contemporary practices while rooting them in their fabulous historical past and memory. The book examines drag histories and what drag does with history, how it enacts or tells stories about remembering and the past. Featuring work about the USA, UK and Ireland, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Barbados, this book allows the reader to engage with a range of archival research including camp and history; ethnicity and drag; queering ballet through drag; the connections between drag king and queen history; queering pantomime performance; drag and military veterans; Puerto Rican drag performers and historical film.

Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2

Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories

Eckart Voigts

Jeanette R. Malkin

Sarah Jane Ablett

The first of its kind, this companion to British-Jewish theatre brings a neglected dimension in the work of many prominent British theatre-makers to the fore. Its structure reflects the historical development of British-Jewish theatre from the 1950s onwards, beginning with an analysis of the first generation of writers that now forms the core of post-war British drama (including Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker) and moving on to significant thematic force-fields and faultlines such as the Holocaust, antisemitism and Israel/Palestine. The book also covers the new generation of British-Jewish playwrights, with a special emphasis on the contribution of women writers and the role of particular theatres in the development of British-Jewish theatre, as well as TV drama. Included in the book are fascinating interviews with a set of significant theatre practitioners working today, including Ryan Craig, Patrick Marber, John Nathan, Julia Pascal and Nicholas Hytner. The companion addresses, not only aesthetic and ideological concerns, but also recent transformations with regard to institutional contexts and frameworks of cultural policies.

A Companion to British-Jewish Theatre Since the 1950s

Professor of English and Theater Enoch Brater

Seventeen prominent critics reconsider the "modern" in drama

Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage

The Theatrical Gamut

Beckett is acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights and most innovative fiction writers of the twentieth century with an international appeal that bridges both general and more specialist readers. This collection of essays by renowned Beckett scholar Enoch Brater offers a delightfully original, playful and intriguing series of approaches to Beckett's drama, fiction and poetry. Beginning with a chapter entitled 'Things to Ponder While Waiting for Godot', each essay deftly illuminates aspects of Beckett's thinking and craft, making astute and often suprising discoveries along the way. In a series of beguiling discussions such as 'From Dada to Didi: Beckett and the Art of His Century', 'Beckett's Devious Interventions, or Fun with Cube Roots' and 'The Seated Figure on Beckett's Stage', Brater proves the perfect companion and commentator on Beckett's work, helping readers to approach it with fresh eyes and a renewed sense of the author's unique aesthetic.

The Falsetto of Reason

Ten Ways of Thinking About Samuel Beckett

Peter M. Boenisch

On the 20th anniversary of artistic director Thomas Ostermeier's time at Berlin's Schaubühne Theatre, this important study reflects on the contribution the theatre has made to contemporary theatre, not just in Germany, but around the world. Ostermeier has kept extending and refining the important notion of German Regietheater (directors' theatre) with the Schaubühne Theatre being its internationally famous birthplace under the previous artistic direction of Peter Stein. Through doing so, the work produced at the Schaubühne has transgressed established divides of text-based and devised theatre, and blurred the borders between theatre and dance. Combining scholarly reflection with interview material, this essential collection investigates how theatre has been reinvented by the Schaubühne under Ostermeier's tenure, bringing together international theatre scholars such as Erika Fischer-Lichte, Marvin Carlson, Jitka Goriaux Pelechova, Benjamin Fowler, Ramona Mosse and Sabine Huschka. This study also considers productions by some of Ostermeier's past and present collaborators, such as Katie Mitchell, Falk Richter and Sasha Waltz. This edition also includes the first English translation of Schaubühne's original manifesto “The Mission” (1999); a contribution from Ostermeier's long-term co-director Jens Hillje; a contribution from Hans-Thies Lehmann on Falk Richter; and an interview with Thomas Ostermeier by Clare Finburgh Delijani.

Enoch Brater

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