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9780809326990

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<p><br>Over the past five years the Southern Illinois University Press's Theater in the Americas <p><br>series, edited by Robert A. Schanke, has produced an array of manuscripts that explore some of <p><br>the most provocative and largely overlooked practitioners, organizations, and movements of the <p><br>modern theater tradition in the United States. Titles have included works on Sophie Treadwell, <p><br>the little theater movement, and Mordecai Gorelick; with this new study of John Howard <p><br>Lawson, the SIU Press series continues not only to preserve, but also to enhance, its inimitable <p><br>voice in the study of both modernity and theater within U.S. national culture. <p><br> This recent addition to the SIU Press series deftly situates the marginalized, half-hidden work <p><br>of communist playwright John Howard Lawson within a broader community of socially-aware, <p><br>politically-engaged creative artists. It also offers an astute look at the trials and tribulations of <p><br>the literary and artistic left in the years between the First World War and the Second World <p><br>War. In doing so, Messiah of the New Technique encourages not only the reconsideration of <p><br>Lawson's career and the cultural and political left of the interwar years but also the larger cultural <p><br>matrix of that historical moment (3). The potency of this much needed study is enriched <p><br>by Chambers's meticulous examination of Lawson's lived experiences, play scripts, letters, and <p><br>theoretical writings regarding 1920s and 1930s theater as material manifestations chronicling <p><br>one man's journey to define who he was and where he belonged in the world as he ventured <p><br>from 'artist-rebel' to 'political revolutionary' (204). From the start it is apparent that Chambers <p><br>is neither necessarily c

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Jonathan L. Chambers is an assistant professor and the graduate studies coordinator in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University. His articles have appeared in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Annual, Theatre Symposium, and Theatre History Studies. He is currently president of the American Theatre and Drama Society.

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