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Mitchell Greenberg's in-depth study of the major 17th-century tragedies of Jean Racine confirms him as one of the most prominent and influential authors in France during this period. Greenberg points to Racine's use of the Oedipus myth to mobilize particular ideas about sexuality and order that speak to the establishment of the French absolutist state. He also focuses on the role of the body in Racine's work and the capacity for his productions to move audiences to tears as part of a particular set of affective theatrical techniques. Each of the seven chapters in the book is devoted to one or more tragedies as well as the ideas they inaugurate and explore: La Thébaïd, Andromaque, Britannicus, Bérénice, Bajazet, Mithridate, Iphigénie, Phèdre et Hippolyte, Esther and Athalie. This book is an invaluable addition to Racine scholarship as well as to the relationship of 17th-century French theatre to the politics of the period.
Harvey Young analyzes various forms of racialized performance in the United States over the past two centuries — from photographs of black captives in the 1850s to contemporary African American theatre — that exemplify what he conceptualizes as phenomenal blackness: a way to understand the black body as both a materiality and an abstraction. Rather than organized chronologically, each chapter deals with the problem of the black body around a particular medium. The first chapter is an extended discussion of phenomenal blackness and the questions it opens up around issues of experience, language, and memory. Chapter 2 focuses on early photographic representations of captive slaves taken by Joseph T. Zealy as well as the work of Richard Roberts and Walker Evans. Chapter 3 focuses on sports, in particular the public performance of boxing figures such as Tom Molineaux, Muhammad Ali, Jack Johnson, and Joe Louis. The fourth chapter looks at three plays by contemporary women performers and playwrights: Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus, Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape, and Dael Orlandersmith's Yellowman. The final chapter discusses the history of lynching in the United States as a form of public spectacle and the way this history is exhibited in institutions such as America's Black Holocaust Museum, founded by James Cameron, America's last living survivor of a lynching. [End Page 175]
First published in Italian, Stepping Stones provides a rich history of the work of Swedish acting teacher and director Ingemar Lindh, who passed away in 1997. Directly influenced by Étienne Decroux, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barba, Lindh led a 10-day workshop in Porsgrunn, Norway in 1981. The book came out of transcriptions from that workshop. In the first two chapters, "In Search of Research" and "Catching the Moment of Eternity," Lindh presents his thoughts on acting and lays out the basic building blocks of his approach as part of a workshop on collective improvisation. The third chapter includes two letters written by Lindh, giving an account of his artistic biography as well as his learning process throughout his pedagogical and artistic work. Chapter 4 is a 1986 interview with Lindh by Paolo Martini, founder and director of Studium Actoris in Norway. Finally, chapter 5 provides a detailed historical chronology of Lindh's Institutet för Scenkonst (1971-1996) by Magdalena Pietruska. Stepping Stones is a vital record of Ingemar Lindh's work as one of Europe's the most influential acting teachers in the latter half of the 20th century.
Chris Salter has written an expansive historical and...
