“One of the playwrights our country, and our language, has produced.” – Tony Kushner “Quirky, disturbing, and inexplicably beautiful theatrical poetry.” – Cary M. Mazer, Philadelphia City Paper “Congdon writes like a woman possessed.” – Nels Nelson, New York Daily News An immensely inventive and challenging writer, Constance Congdon is one of America’s finest playwrights, endowed with great compassion, keen insight and an unfailing comic sensibility. Throughout the plays in her first collection, she demonstrates a range rare in writers in any age, from a somber meditation on life in the postnuclear age (No Mercy) to madcap social satire (Losing Father’s Body), from an epic historical exploration of love and sexual identity (Casanova) to her most popular play to date (Tales of the Lost Formicans), acclaimed by William A. Henry III of Time magazine as “A travel guide to Middle America conducted by aliens from outer space… If not the best new play of recent years, surely the most imaginative.” Constance Congdon’s plays have been produced throughout the United States and abroad. She has received playwriting fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, and is the winner of Oppenheimer/Newsday, W. Alton Jones and L/ Arnold Weissberger awards. Congdon, an alumna of New Dramatists, currently teaches playwriting at Amherst College.

Though stage directing has traditionally been a male-dominated profession, the number of women directors in the United States has grown significantly in recent years. In this work, 35 contemporary women stage directors, with regional, national and international theater backgrounds, share their views on the creative process and the influences of gender on their artistic decision making. How does it feel to be defined as a woman director rather than simply a director? Does gender affect their authority? These questions and many others are explored in this study.

New Playwriting Strategies offers a fresh and dynamic approach to playwriting that will be welcomed by teachers and aspiring playwrights alike.

The Theater of Tony Kushner is a comprehensive portrait of the life and work of one of America's most important contemporary playwrights.

Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater. Second Edition covers theatrical practice and practitioners as well as the dramatic literature of the United States of America from 1930 to the present. The 90 years covered by this volume features the triumph of Broadway as the center of American drama from 1930 to the early 1960s through a Golden Age exemplified by the plays of Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge, Lorraine Hansberry, and Edward Albee, among others. The impact of the previous modernist era contributed greatly to this period of prodigious creativity on American stages. This volume will continue through an exploration of the decline of Broadway as the center of U.S. theater in the 1960s and the evolution of regional theaters, as well as fringe and university theaters that spawned a second Golden Age at the millennium that produced another – and significantly more diverse – generation of significant dramatists including such figures as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Maria Irené Fornes, Beth Henley, Terrence McNally, Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, and numerous others. The impact of the Great Depression and World War II profoundly influenced the development of the American stage, as did the conformist 1950s and the revolutionary 1960s on in to the complex times in which we currently live. Historical Dictionary of the Contemporary American Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 1.000 cross-referenced entries on plays, playwrights, directors, designers, actors, critics, producers, theaters, and terminology. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about American theater.

Gathers highlights from the season's ten best plays and information on plays produced in the United States