... no major mono- graph on either Suzan-Lori Parks or Wendy Wasserstein. Yet, as Alexis Soloski has pointed out, we live in a very good time for playwrights, and not just those of the O’Neill/Miller/Williams sort who emphasize plot and character. Rather, Soloski sees an explosion of creativity among...

...-a-day project, 365 Days/365 Plays. These were the alpha and omega of the year, as Wasserstein died in January and the first of the Parks plays opened in November. Could two playwrights have been more different? Wasser- stein succeeded in the mainstream as few American women have done...

... components of Jewish-American theater and repertoire. No entries are included on Cli√ord Odets or Elmer Rice since the emphasis is on the contemporary; eventually, Greenwood will have to get around to individual biocritical sourcebooks on many of the playwrights in- cluded here...

... notice- able shifts in the nature of books that publishers seem to want on their lists. First, studies of individual playwrights are no longer dominated by work on Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Second, and less encouraging, an increasing number of new...

... that have been emerging for some time. Scholars now are not leading the way but instead following the direction taken by contemporary playwrights themselves, particularly Tarell Alvin McCraney, Sarah Ruhl, and Jeremy O. Harris, whose Slave Play received more Tony nominations than any other play. What...

... and context are so patently mutually constitu- tive. Accordingly, I am arranging this chapter to reflect the centrality of cultural studies in considering drama. Sections titled “Plays” and “Playwrights” come first, but the latter part of the essay is a broad cat- egory I’m calling Performance...

... and the scholarship attendant upon it. i Theater History Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Crit- icism, ed. Robert L. McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige (Alabama), collects fresh approaches by a dozen knowledgeable and much-published senior scholars and a half-dozen...

..., Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Michigan). Wil- son undercuts simplistic notions of racially segregated theater history by highlighting Harlem (1929), a play cowritten by a white and a black playwright, and Lula Belle (1926), written by white authors Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur...

... for whom the publication of Bullins’s Four Dynamite Plays in 1972 was powerful stu V and required graduate school reading that the playwright was quick to question the tactics of the Black Arts movement as well. Sell not only moves through Bullins’s important work as a dramatist but examines his...

..., and Eugene O Neill s The Iceman Cometh, the biggest critical and popular successes of the season. 392 Drama i Reference Works and Anthologies Dana A. Williams s Contemporary African American Female Playwrights: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood) is a slender volume that the reader will want to use...

... an appearance in several of the year’s best studies, which address works by August Wil- son, Langston Hughes, O’Neill, David Henry Hwang, and Adrienne Kennedy as well as 19th-century anxieties about blacks, Mexicans, and Irish as racial “others.” i  Playwrights In John Guare’s Theatre: The Art...

... Drama of dista√ dramatists in this season of female playwrights remains to be seen. i Theater History Marvin McAllister’s White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Enter- tainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (No. Car...

... English trial of a single familiar subject seems quite different from the issue-bound plays examined here. But O’Connor makes the play relevant and contem- porary, as does playwright Moisés Kaufman when he continues his explorations of the form in The Laramie Project (2000). In both cases...

... is a significant contribution to the study of American drama. David A. Crespy’s Off-Off-Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater (Back Stage Books, 2003) begins with the producing team of Edward Albee, Rich- ard Barr, and Clinton Wilder...

... with reference to Shinn’s exclusion from a pro- posed Methuen anthology of American drama. Shinn’s play was blocked, first by Arthur Miller’s estate and then by David Mamet; the implica- tion seemed to be that including a “minor” playwright would diminish the others. Bottoms constructs an extremely...

...David K. Sauer © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 19 Drama David K. Sauer This year’s scholarship extends the emerging approach of contextualizing the study of playwrights in the larger culture. In contrast to the tendency of academe to continually subdivide into narrower...

...,” and the other studies fit more comfortably into the more traditional headings of theory, groupings of plays, and individual studies of playwrights. i  Drama as History The 2012 Outstanding Book Award winner from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education is Racial Innocence: Performing American...

... zeitgeist. This year most studies that survey multiple plays, productions, and playwrights examine them as deviations from con- ventional chronological structures. The variant constructions of time offer a new optic for studying groupings of plays from the earliest to the most contemporary. i Overview...

... from Contemporary African American Drama ( eatre Topics , iii [ ]: ) examines a strand of African American drama that is uniquely using stage directions as experimentalists have spo- radically tried to, connecting this group of playwrights consistently. ough both Ed Bullins and Suzan-Lori Parks...

... June Schlueter treats ‘‘Plays and Play- wrights: 1945–1970’’ (pp. 294–330) including Miller, Williams, Inge, Albee, Shepard, Kopit, Guare, Lanford Wilson, and others, and the rising star of Matthew Roudané shines in ‘‘Plays and Playwrights since 1970’’ (pp. 331–418), an excellent overview...