The Body of an American

Author: Dan O'Brien
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1783195908
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 75

Book Description
Mogadishu, 1993. Paul is a Canadian photojournalist who is about to take a picture that will win him the Pulitzer Prize. Princeton, the present day, Dan is an American writer who is struggling to finish his play about ghosts. Both men live worlds apart but a chance encounter over the airwaves sparks an extraordinary friendship that sees them journey from some of the most dangerous places on earth to the depths of the human soul.Flying from Kabul to the Canadian High Arctic, The Body of an American sees two actors jump between more than thirty roles in an exhilarating new form of documentary drama. It urgently places these two men’s battles – both public and private –against a backdrop of some of the world’s most iconic images of war. The Body of an American is the recipient of the 2013 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History. It also received the PEN Center USA Award for Drama and the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and premiered at Portland Center Stage in 2012, directed by Bill Rauch. The play was the recipient of the McKnight National Residency & Commission from the Playwrights’ Center, as well as a Sundance Institute Time Warner Storytelling Fellowship and a TCG Future Collaborations Grant. For further information and resources on this play, visit the Edward M Kennedy website: http://kennedyprize.columbia.edu/winners/2013/obrien/

Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children

Author: Peter Thomson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521597746
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
This is the first comprehensive study of Brecht's Mother Courage. Peter Thomson locates the sources of the play in Brecht's own experience and heritage, and provides a detailed account of Brecht's own production with the newly formed Berliner Ensemble in 1949. Thomson then explores how the play has been transmitted in the English-speaking theatre from Joan Littlewood's production with the Theatre Workshop Company in 1956 to the Royal National Theatre, with Diana Rigg as Mother Courage, in 1995. The book also examines such influential interpretations as those by William Gaskill, Judi Dench, and Glenda Jackson in the English theatre, and by Herbert Balu and Richard Schechner in America. Seminal productions in France and the Germanies are also discussed. A final chapter highlights the new urgency of the text in light of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and closes with an account of a triumphant staging in Uganda.

Mother Courage and Her Children

Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802130822
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
Widely considered one of the great dramatic creations of the modem stage, Mother Courage and Her Children is Bertolt Brecht s most passionate and profound statement against war. Set in the seventeenth century, the play follows Anna Fierling ( Mother Courage ), an itinerant trader, as she pulls her wagon of wares and her children through the blood and carnage of Europe s religious wars. Battered by hardships, brutality, and the degradation and death of her children, she ultimately finds herself alone with the one thing in which she truly believes her ramshackle wagon with its tattered flag and freight of boots and brandy. Fitting herself in its harness, the old woman manages, with the last of her strength, to drag it onward to the next battle. In the enduring figure of Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht has created one of the most extraordinary characters in literature."

Mother Courage and Her Children

Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
Anna Fierling tries to hold her family together during the Thirty Years War.

Modern European Tragedy

Author: Annamaria Cascetta
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783081619
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, and has been expressed theatrically since the time of the ancient Greeks. However, it was in the Europe of the twentieth century – one of the most violent periods of human history – that the tragic form significantly developed. ‘Modern European Tragedy’ examines the consciousness of this era, drawing a picture of the development of the tragic through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding texts.

Far Away (Donmar Edition)

Author: Caryl Churchill
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848428737
Category : War and society
Languages : en
Pages : 64

Book Description
Caryl Churchill's dazzling play about a world sliding into chaos, in a new edition published alongside the play's revival at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in 2020.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Author: Martin McDonagh
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408173832
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
The Beauty Queen of Leenane tells the darkly comic tale of Maureen Folan, a plain and lonely woman in her early forties, and Mag her manipulative ageing mother whose interference in Maureen's first and potentially last loving relationship sets in motion a train of events that is as gothically funny as it is horrific.

War Primer

Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784782084
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 113

Book Description
A terrifying series of short poems by one of the world’s leading playwrights, set to images of World War II In this singular book written during World War Two, Bertolt Brecht presents a devastating visual and lyrical attack on war under modern capitalism. He takes photographs from newspapers and popular magazines, and adds short lapidary verses to each in a unique attempt to understand the truth of war using mass media. Pictures of catastrophic bombings, propaganda portraits of leading Nazis, scenes of unbearable tragedy on the battlefield — all these images contribute to an anthology of horror, from which Brecht’s perceptions are distilled in poems that are razor-sharp, angry and direct. The result is an outstanding literary memorial to World War Two and one of the most spontaneous, revealing and moving of Brecht’s works.

The Mother

Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802131607
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
Bertolt Brecht's play The Mother is freely adapted from Gorky's world-famous novel of the same name. Brecht tells the story of a working-class mother who is drawn into the struggle for a Bolshevik revolution; in the character of Pelagea Vlassova, the mother of the title, Brecht draws a richly human figure who emerges as the single entirely positive major hero in all of Brecht's dramatic works. This edition has an extensive introduction by the translator, Lee Baxandall, which gives a detailed history of the play and its first production. In addition, there are twenty-five pages of notes by Brecht himself.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 140816101X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
This Student Edition of Brecht's classic dramatisation of the conflict over possession of a child features an extensive introduction and commentary that includes a plot summary, discussion of the context, themes, characters, style and language as well as questions for further study and notes on words and phrases in the text. It is the perfect edition for students of theatre and literature. Brecht projects an ancient Chinese story onto a realistic setting in Soviet Georgia. In a theme that echoes the Judgment of Solomon, two women argue over the possession of a child; thanks to the unruly judge, Azdak (one of Brecht's most vivid creations) natural justice is done and the peasant Grusha keeps the child she loves, even though she is not its mother. Written in exile in the United States during the Second World War, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a politically-charged, much-revived and complex example of Brecht's epic theatre. This volume contains expert notes on the author's life and work, historical and political background to the play, photographs from stage productions and a glossary of difficult words and phrases. It features the acclaimed translation by James and Tania Stern with W. H. Auden.