Subject Area: Drama-Stage Production

Porgy, a Play about the Gullah Culture: A Neglected Masterpiece in the History of the American Theater

Phillips, George Harwood
2023 1-4955-1120-0 220 pages
"To declare that Porgy, a play that has received only limited attention from critics and scholars, is one of the great works of American musical theater may seem hyperbolic. The following chapters, however, will present evidence supporting that contention. The book begins with an overview of the history of the people who came to reside in what became known as South Carolina. Emphasis is given to the Gullah, an African-American community that emerged during slavery. The early life of Dubose Heyward, the author of the novella upon which the play is based, is examined in some detail because his knowledge of the Gullah people was crucial to the development of the characters in the play. A synopsis of the play follows, then a chapter on Rouben Mamoulian, the play's director. ...Chapters on the play's critical reception and its legacy conclude this study." -George Harwood Phillips ("Preface")

Staging Yeats in the Twenty-First Century: A Reception History

Lapisardi, Frederick S.
2006 0-7734-5570-1 432 pages
An avant garde playwright whose theories of stagecraft evolved through performance experience, W.B. Yeats left a complex body of dramatic materials. This book establishes dramaturgical criteria, based on the playwright’s own words, by which all productions of his plays might be judged. Then, through an analysis of Yeats’s plays in performance, it suggests how new stage productions might best engage audiences without violating either texts or theories. Based on fifty years of study and publication about Yeats’s stagecraft and on direct experience with the plays in production both in America and in Ireland, this study develops dramaturgical plans for new productions and shares with readers behind-the-scenes notes from the author’s American Yeats production and from the first three years of James W. Flannery’s International W.B. Yeats Theatre Festival at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Its basic premise turns on the belief that with new technology and with directors who accept the text as living theatre worthy of imaginative stage productions for a more general audience, rather than period pieces intended for an elite few, Yeats could finally emerge as a dramatist on a scale with Beckett, Strindberg, O’Neill and other major innovators of the modern stage.