Hillary Miller’s Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York offers a fascinating and comprehensive exploration of how the city’s financial crisis shaped theater and performance practices in this turbulent decade and beyond.
New York City’s performing arts community suffered greatly from a severe reduction in grants in the mid-1970s. A scholar and playwright, Miller skillfully synthesizes economics, urban planning, tourism, and immigration to create a map of the interconnected urban landscape and to contextualize the struggle for resources. She reviews how numerous theater professionals, including Ellen Stewart of La MaMa E.T.C. and Julie Bovasso, Vinnette Carroll, and Joseph Papp of The Public Theater, developed innovative responses to survive the crisis.
Winner, 2006 The American Lawyer Lifetime Achievement AwardOn his thirty-ninth birthday in 1966, Alexander Polikoff, a volunteer ACLU attorney and partner in a Chicago law firm, met some...
The plan was to transform Block 37 - an area of "urban commercial blight" - into a glittering tower that would not only be architecturally worth of its neighbors, but would also throw off millions of tax and rental dollars annually. Here's the Deal is the intricately told tale of how that plan failed, leaving the city of Chicago with 2 million empty square feet of office space and a pocket book $200 million dollars lighter.
