The plays collected in this volume give artistic expression to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, especially at the level of individual lives forever altered. Besides telling the kinds of stories that the news media could not, these plays explore the deeply rooted problems plaguing New Orleans and illuminate many social, political, and environmental issues central to American life. The factual basis of these plays serves a documentary purpose, but, as drama, they personalize the events surrounding the storm, depicting unimaginable anguish, powerlessness, and displacement as well as courage, communal spirit, and activism.
The plays collected in this volume give artistic expression to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, especially at the level of individual lives forever altered. Besides telling the kinds of stories that the news media could not, these plays explore the deeply rooted problems plaguing New Orleans and illuminate many social, political, and environmental issues central to American life. The factual basis of these plays serves a documentary purpose, but, as drama, they personalize the events surrounding the storm, depicting unimaginable anguish, powerlessness, and displacement as well as courage, communal spirit, and activism.
In his original new study, Seth Graham analyzes a rich and forgotten vein of humor in an otherwise bleak environment. The late Soviet period (1961–1986) hardly seems fertile ground for humor, but...
In 2001, Victory Gardens Theater received the Tony Award for Regional Theatre and was hailed by the Wall Street Journal as "one of the country's most important playwrights' theaters." This...
Russia produced more notable dramas in the twentieth century than at any other time in its history, yet many of the plays from this period have been only sporadically available in English, and others have never been translated before. For each of these eight works, Timothy Langen and Justin Weir provide an insightful introduction to the literary, cultural, and political contexts in which the plays first appeared, considering the influence that various literary movements had on the development of Russian drama and exploring the effect of the increasingly politicized climate of the new Soviet state.
