This comprehensive collection gathers critical essays on the major works of the foremost American and British playwrights of the 20th century, written by leading figures in drama/performance studies.

This collection of essays, originally published over the last forty years in the journal Modern Drama, explores the drama of four of the most influential European proponents of modernism in the European Drama: Ibsen, Strandberg, Pirandello and Beckett.

Fifty Modern and Contemporary and Dramatists is a critical introduction to the work of some of the most important and influential playwrights from the 1950s to the present day. The figures chosen are among the most widely studied by students of drama, theatre and literature and include such celebrated writers as: • Samuel Beckett • Caryl Churchill • Anna Deavere Smith • Jean Genet • Sarah Kane • Heiner Müller • Arthur Miller • Harold Pinter • Sam Shephard Each short essay is written by one of an international team of academic experts and offers a detailed analysis of the playwright’s key works and career. The introduction provides an historical and theatrical context to the volume, which provides an invaluable overview of modern and contemporary drama.

In the hands of the twentieth century's most innovative dramatists, characters have revealed their identities on stage in a variety of unconventional ways: they speak with electronic voices or engage in solipsistic monologues; they are lost in self-conscious third-person forms of communicating or are expressed simply as movement, sound, and decor. Missing Persons is a study of character and its representation on the modern stage. Within broad literary contexts, William E. Gruber addresses specific questions about the dramatis personae of the playwrights Gordon Craig, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and Maria Fornes. Among the questions Gruber considers are why mechanical actors or the abrupt dislocations of oriental acting styles meant so much to dramatists as different as Brecht and Craig; why figures in Beckett's late plays are so often flat, schematized, heraldic; and why such contemporary dramatists as Fornes and Bernhard share a profound fascination with the mechanics of theatrical representation - quoting, reciting, reproducing, or impersonating an absent text. The figures who move across these stages are frail, contradictory, occasionally mutilated, or even dismembered. They are grim reminders, says Gruber, that the individual's place in the world is not as secure or as central as we imagine it once was. "Yet character", Gruber argues, "remains for these authors a crucial element of drama, even if it is more fragile, more ghostly, more enigmatic than ever before". The study of character as a crucial component of drama has been neglected for much of this century. Missing Persons attempts to restore "character" to the current discourse by developing a vocabularyfor discussing it in plays in which conventional terms seem insufficient or irrelevant. Drawing on evidence from five dramatists whose work has long been considered antagonistic toward character - as the term has typically been understood - Gruber maintains that modern drama is never anticharacter even when it is most aggressively antirealist and suggests that "character" remains a defining ideal throughout the modern and postmodern period, especially among dramatists who seem deliberately to have forsaken it.

This anthology gathers some of Modern Drama's most distinguished pieces on America's four most important playwrights since Eugene O'Neill: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard. While Parker has chosen these authors "as representative of the main stream of American dramatic tradition," she does not offer a general overview of the plays or playwrights, nor any general orientation to aid the reader. These essays are written by scholars for serious students of American drama. The majority of the essays concentrate on a single play, and while they appeared decades ago, all were major articles in the field. Old but solid, they should still be of interest to students and scholars alike.

Playwright Tony Kushner is a voice of intellectualism, neo-socialism, gay activism and political outrage in an era when the political pendulum has swayed to the right. Through scalding humor, thought, and compassion, he explores political dynamics and the human condition in the modern era, shedding light on and giving hope for the direst of circumstances. His best known work, Angels in America, delves beneath the anti-gay rhetoric and political superficiality of the AIDS pandemic to true suffering and transformation. His political epic Homebody/Kabul engages the issue of terrorism and conflicting fundamental beliefs. In this book 11 scholars explore the works of Tony Kushner across his career. Several address Angels: one explores the presentation of homosexuality by Kushner compared to that of Tennessee Williams, who wrote in a less tolerant era; another places Angels in the contexts of Hegel's concept of freedom and the gay revolution; a third discusses the play in terms of queer theory and politics. Homebody/Kabul is examined in two essays, one analyzing media reaction, the other exploring cultural and economic differences, religious fundamentalism and the "West's luxurious predominance in the world." Other studies address relationships in Kushner's works to William Inge's 1950 play Come Back, Little Sheba; the plays of experimentalist Adrienne Kennedy; and fascist creep in the era of playwrights W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, among other topics.

Stephen Sondheim is an artist with many contradictory facets: he is an avant-garde composer and lyricist working in the populist art form, an apparently dry and acerbic critic who captures all the ambivalent pain of passion, an intellectual whose work contains some of the funniest bawdy lines on the Broadway stage. He has chosen to confront an audience that is usually looking for escapist literature with the very issues it has fled to the theatre to avoid. This collection of original essays takes particular pains to present Sondheim's diversity in a chronological plan that illustrates how each new work grew out of the previous one. Some of the topics covered are the evolution of Sondheim's female characters, who take us far beyond the usual sweet ingenues; the Roman farce antecedents of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the resemblances between Sondheim's chorus and the chorus in ancient Greek drama; Sondheim and the concept musical; and Sondheim's maturing philosophy. All students of the modern theatre and the modern musical will want to read this book.