Author: Justin Maxwell Synopsis: The last passenger pigeon on earth, named Martha Washington, is desperately trying to save her species by building a Foucault-inspired outopia (a non-place.) Assisting Martha is a sperm whale named Charles Bronson, a whale so tough they named the toughest actor of all time after him. Their work is complicated by the arrival of Cotton Mather, a 300 hundred year old Puritan minister and witch burner extraordinaire, who has problems of his own. Cast Size: 2 Females, 2 Males

This anthology examines maternity in contemporary performance at the intersection of a wide range of topics from nationhood to mental health, queer parenting, embodied dramaturgy, cultural practice, and immigration. Across the breadth of these themes, we interrogate the cultural implications and politics of how we script, perform, receive, and define mothers, challenging many of the normalizing and patriarchal tropes associated with the mother-as-character. This book includes critical essays examining twenty-first century dramatic literature, first-hand ethnographic accounts of motherhood in practice, interviews, feminist manifestos, and artist reflections. In its deliberately curated variety, this collection seeks to resist homogeneity and offer instead a range of approaches to key questions: what versions of motherhood get staged, and why? And what do dramatic representations tell us about the role of mothers in our own fraught contemporary moment? This collection will be of great interest to those in academia who are teaching, researching, or studying in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, American Studies, and Feminist and Gender Studies.

To an unusual degree among writers, playwrights’ creations are not simply words on a page. Instead, a well-wrought play is an intricate machine that will be used by directors, actors, designers, and other creators to bring a fully staged, real-time performance into the world. The construction and maintenance of that machine is the playwright’s job, and it requires an array of complex, interconnected skills and techniques. Enter Justin Maxwell and The Playwright’s Toolbox, a stimulating and wide-ranging resource for both beginning and experienced dramatists. It brings together invigorating, provocative, and irreverent exercises contributed by nearly 60 leading English-language playwrights, covering all stages of the writing process. It offers an accessible roadmap for those who have never written a play before, while providing new angles and solutions for seasoned writers struggling with a particular challenge. Covered here is everything fromgenerating ideas and world-building, through dialogue and plotting, to revision and the last steps before releasing a play into the world, making this an endlessly useful guide to building better plays.

These short plays are a collection of the poetic and unexpected. They include unassigned dialog and scene order determined by the spinning of a wheel. A chorus of seahorses sings, a car and a store have relationship problems, and Van Gogh meditates on his own death. Each play offers a fundamentally different moral compass to guide away from loneliness and fear. It is this compass that sets the course through this lyrical and unique collection.Included works by Justin Maxwell are: "A Blinded Horse Dreams of Hippocampi," "Inspiration Point," "I'm in Al-Qaeda: a comedy of manners," "Whatsleeves," "Old MacDonald Dirge," "~6x3=SAFETY: a comedic list poem," "My Rich Temple," "Patience on the Way to Daylight: an Ars Poetica farce," and "Exhausted Paint: the Death of Van Gogh."

The Poetics of Science Fiction uniquely uses the science of linguistics to explore the literary universe of science fiction. Developing arguments about specific texts and movements throughout the twentieth-century, the book is a readable discussion of this most popular of genres. It also uses the extreme conditions offered by science fiction to develop new insights into the language of the literary context. The discussion ranges from a detailed investigation of new words and metaphors, to the exploration of new worlds, from pulp science fiction to the genre's literary masterpieces, its special effects and poetic expression. Speculations and extrapolations throughout the book engage the reader in thought-experiments and discussion points, with selected further reading making it a useful source book for classroom and seminar.

You may be the wealthiest colored woman in New Orleans, but you built this house on sand, lies and dead bodies.New Orleans, 1836. Following an era of French colonial rule and relative racial acceptance, Louisiana's 'free people of color' are prospering. Beatrice, a free woman of colour, has become one of the city's wealthiest women through her relationship with a rich white man. However, when her lover mysteriously dies, Beatrice imposes a six-month period of mourning on herself and her three daughters. But, as the summer heat intensifies, the foundations of freedom she has built for herself and their three unwed daughters begin to crumble. Society is changing, racial divides are growing and, as the members of the household turn on each other in their fight for survival, it could cost them everything. A bewitching new drama of desire, jealousy, murder and voodoo, The House That Will Not Stand received its world premiere at Berkeley Rep, US, in January 2014, and was subsequently produced at the Tricycle Theatre, London, on 9 October 2014.This edition features an introduction by Professor Ayanna Thompson, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.

A two act play set in the Victorian 19th century, first presented in 1985