Full Description
This collection of essays seeks to present articles that examine the early ventures of the 1960s and 1970s in the progressive theatre of identity with a new contemporary view considering the intersection of race, gender, ethnicity, economic class, and sexual orientation.
In 1964, Edward Albee and his producers, Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder, produced Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy, and Dutchman by Amiri Baraka (then, Leroi Jones), and by 1968, had produced the seminal gay drama, The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley. No other major American playwright of this period (including Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, or William Inge) produced the plays of their junior colleagues with a specific focus on difference and diversity. For most scholars, these productions and Albee's involvement in them are a somewhat obscure footnote in theatre history. But they remain important for their early support of diverse voices. Even as Albee's career was skyrocketing, he and his producers had begun a producing project that began the seeds of diversity, equity, and inclusion in a decidedly anti-racist, decolonizing, and progressive move that still resonates powerfully today. While this book is not a hagiography, and does not intend to paint Albee as without his own critical failings in terms of diversity in his own work and that of others, this volume of theatre history, dramatic literature, and performance essays takes a detailed, critical approach at Albee's engagement with other initiating plays, productions, producers, theatre companies, theatre artists, and performances in the US that pushed the dial toward difference and diversity in the late 1950s through the late 1970s, beginning the formations of new theatres of identity across the United States.
This volume will be of great intertest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies.
Contents
Introduction
PART I: Albee & LGBTQ Theatre & Performance, Ageism, and Latinx Drama
Chapter 1. The New Conservatory Theatre Story: Activist Action Moments in Progressive Theatres of Identity
Chapter 2. Reviving Medusa's Revenge, New York City's First Lesbian Theater Space
Chapter 3. "Different Rewards": Queer Gerontological Models in the Dramaturgy of Edward Albee, Terrence McNally, and Lanford Wilson
Chapter 4. The Making of an American Master Playwright: A History of Lanford Wilson's Home Free! and the Albee-Barr-Wilder Playwrights Unit
Chapter 5. Whatever happened to Grandma?: Women and Aging in Edward Albee's The Sandbox (1960) and The American Dream (1961)
Chapter 6. "I know this game, you're playing. I know it very well": Albee as Influence and Counterpoint to Crowley's The Boys in the Band
Chapter 7. Albee, Fornés, and the Next Generation of Grotesque Theater
PART II: Albee and the Emergence of African-American Theatre
Chapter 8. Staging Politics of the Black Blues Bodies: Edward Albee's The Death of Bessie Smith in Conversation with August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Chapter 9. Visited by a Phantom: Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse Encounter with Edward Albee
Chapter 10. The Emergence of Identity and Protest through the Rhetorical Genre of American Absurdism
Chapter 11. "I am an American Writer Too": James Baldwin as Emergent Playwright
Chapter 12. Lorraine Hansberry and Anti-Colonial Drama on the Broadway Stage
Chapter 13. Student as Citizen: Illuminating Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun with Albee's Plays of 1959
Chapter 14. As a Black Woman Speaks and Dances: Embracing Intersectionality in Richards' A Black Woman Speaks (1950) and Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1976)
