Download Free Erwin Piscator And The American Theatre Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Erwin Piscator And The American Theatre and write the review.

As the centennial of his birth approaches, a revaluation of Erwin Piscator's influence on the theatre of the western world seems due. Although he was the first to do political qua epic theatre, it was his pupil Brecht who received all the attention. During the Hitler years Piscator spent almost 13 years (1939-1951) in the United States where he founded and directed the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research and had among his students Beatrice Arthur, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Judith Malina, Walther Matthau, Tony Randall, to name only a few. The question is raised whether his alleged influence can be felt in contemporary American theatre, particularly with regard to playwrights such as A. Miller, R.P. Warren, Th. Wilder, and Tennessee Williams.
Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages? In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.
This 1977 text was the first full study of Erwin Piscator, the German theatrical producer who was prominent in the 1920s and worked after 1945 with the writers Hochhuth, Kipphardt and Weiss. Professor Innes sketches the background of Dadaism and Expressionism from which Piscator came, and points out the differences between Piscator and the other experimenters of his time. He also gives a vivid description of Piscator's technical innovations, the modern means of communication such as film, the illumination of the stage from below and 'the treadmill', a flat moving band along which the characters walked. These turned drama into a multi-media event. Professor Innes uses Piscator's career as a focus to describe theatrical developments in the twentieth century and to discuss the role of the author, the director, and the actor in drama, the purpose of the theatre, and the involvement of the audience.
'The Political Theatre' is among the most important documents of the modern stage. It tells of the foundation and flowering in Weimar Germany of a new form of theatre - epic theatre - designed to bring on to the stage the real political issues of the time, and to do so with all the aids that modern technology could supply.
Piscator founded the Workshop after emigrating to New York, having collaborated with Brecht to create "epic theatre" in Germany. The Piscator Notebook documents the author Malina's intensive and idiosyncratic training at Piscator's school.
"This new and updated Guide, with over 2,700 cross-referenced entries, covers all aspects of the American theatre from its earliest history to the present. Entries include people, venues and companies scattered through the U.S., plays and musicals, and theatrical phenomena. Additionally, there are some 100 topical entries covering theatre in major U.S. cities and such disparate subjects as Asian American theatre, Chicano theatre, censorship, Filipino American theatre, one-person performances, performance art, and puppetry. Highly illustrated, the Guide is supplemented with a historical survey as introduction, a bibliography of major sources published since the first edition, and a biographical index covering over 3,200 individuals mentioned in the text."--BOOK JACKET.
This colorful account of Bertolt Brecht's move from Germany to America during the Hitler era explores his activities as a Hollywood writer, a playwright determined to conquer Broadway, a political commentator and activist, a social observer, and an exile in an alien land. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Volume three of a unique three-volume history covering all aspects of American theatre.
Volume Two begins in the post-Civil War period and traces the development of American theater up to 1945. It discusses the role of vaudeville, European influences, the rise of the Little Theater movement, changing audiences, modernism, the Federal Theater movement, major actors and the rise of the star system, and the achievements of notable playwrights. This volume places American theater in its social, economic, and political context.