More Books

Written as part of the series Studies in Theatre History and Culture, Marvin Carlson’s new book, Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War offers a detailed theoretical analysis and historical account of the work of major German theatre directors from the late 1960s to 2008. Part 1 of the book, titled “The Old Masters,” begins with three chapters devoted to Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, and Claus Peymann respectively. Part 2, “The Successors,” focuses on the next major generation of directors emerging in the 1980s with three chapters focused on the work of Andrea Breth, Frank Castorf, and the director/design duo Christoph Marthaler, and Anna Viebrock. The final part of the book, “The Next Generation,” deals with three directors that have shaped the German theatre scene since the turn of the century: Michael Thalheimar, Thomas Ostermeier, and Stephan Puchner. Through this historically grounded study, Carlson provides a rich account of the aesthetic diversity of what has been termed in Germany as Regie theatre or director’s theatre, perhaps the most influential approach to theatre-making to have emerged in Germany in the past 40 years.

Changing the Subject provides a collection of essays tracing the history of theatre studies from the post–World War II period to the present day by reflecting on the work and career of Marvin Carlson as one of the most influential theatre scholars in the United States during this period. Beginning with a foreword by Paula Vogel and an introduction by the book’s editor Joseph Roach, the book contains 15 essays reflecting upon different aspects and moments in the field, written by Carlson’s former students, now established theatre scholars. Contributors to this anthology include Eszter Szalczer, Judith Milhous, Elinor Fuchs, David Savran, Xiaomei Chen, Gay Gibson Cima, Barry Daniels, Joel Berkowitz, Mark Fearnow, Doug Paterson, Iris Smith Fischer, Roger Herzel, Erin Hurley, and Maurya Wickstrom. Topics range from Strindberg’s modernity to 18th-century opera architecture to public executions as performance in what amounts to a casebook study on the various shifts in the field over the last 50 years, all the time acknowledging the vital role of Marvin Carlson as a scholar, teacher, and mentor on the development of theatre studies in the United States.

Sociology of Theatre and Performance comprises a collection of essays written by Maria Shevtsova, from 1983 to 2008, that analyze theatre and performance from a sociological perspective. The book is divided into four parts, each of which covers a wide breadth of theoretical and methodological concerns as well as specific case studies. Part 1 of the book, “Theoretical Issues,” provides an introduction to various sociological theories and their relation to theatre and performance. This section includes a discussion of the sociological approaches offered by Duvignaud, Gramsci, Saussure, and Bakhtin, among others. A final chapter is devoted to Bourdieu, with whom Shevtsova is particularly engaged in terms of understanding the relationship between theatre and society. Part 2, “The Problematics of Social Context,” addresses the issues of context and contextualization by focusing on intercultural theatre through the work of Brook, Barba, and Grotowski, as well as other instances of cross-cultural and globalized performance, including two Korean productions of Shakespeare. The third part of the book, “Performance and Performance Analysis,” centers around the question of methodology and sociocultural analysis. This part explores the problematics of methodology by looking at Robert Wilson’s productions of Ibsen, Peter Brook’s La Tragedie de Carmen, and the work of Russian director Valery Fokin. It also includes a wider discussion of the historical development of methodology within theatre and performance studies. The final part of the book, “Immigrant Theatre, Multiculturalism and Spectators” deals with the...