Series Edited By Christopher Innes with Josh Beer and Simon Williams: Lives of the Theatre

No dramatist in the recent history of the American theatre has gained more celebrity than Sam Shepard. Exploring a career that includes fifty stage and screen plays, four books of nondramatic writings, and over a dozen appearances in feature films, this work traces Shepard's rise from an Off-Off Broadway renegade to a Hollywood leading man, and explores his evolution from counterculture to cultural icon. The study situates Shepard's career within the shifting production modes and economic contexts of the American entertainment industry, and views his popularity against the identity politics of postwar American culture. Through an analysis of his life, plays, and screen roles, this book investigates how Shepard's dramatic voice and film persona address issues of American consensus and community. The study argues that Shepard's popularity -- in an era of cultural diversification and dissent -- owes much to nationalism and nostalgia and begs important questions concerning American myths, media representations, and the construction of an American audience.

This work focuses on Marlowe's works as an index of the major transformation of Elizabethan theatrical practices. In the opening chapter, Cole reviews the unusually intriguing historical record of Marlowe's life outside the theatre. The body of the book addresses Marlowe's individual plays as experiments in extending and redefining the traditional concepts and techniques of tragic drama, and suggests how his contemporaries and followers made use of his innovations. Intended as an introduction to the subject, this book provides an insightful approach to Marlowe's work and the study of Elizabethan thought and theatre.

This fascinating introduction to the comedy of Menander is the work of two classical scholars, both of whom have worked extensively as theatre practitioners. This is the first book to consider the plays of Menander primarily as performance pieces and to uncover the dramatic technique of this widely admired comic writer, whose plays had all but disappeared until the 1950s. Looking at the theatrical context of Menandrian comedy in its widest sense, the book includes discussions of recent productions, the recovery of the texts, the treatment of women and slaves, the nature of Menander's comedy, and where it may have led within the European tradition. This book will be of interest to both students of theatre and classicists.

Gower Champion's career spanned the years during which American musical theatre was transformed from a crude popular entertainment into a sophisticated art form. As the director and choreographer of Hello, Dolly!, 42nd Street, and other Broadway musicals, he was central to that transformation. This book is the first extensive treatment of his life and contribution to dance and American musical theatre. The volume draws on the holdings of various special collections, is informed by careful analyses of Champion's scripts, and depends on information gathered through interviews with those who knew and worked with Champion throughout his legendary career.