Overview

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Many of the American playwrights who dominated the 20th century are no longer with us: Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Neil Simon, August Wilson and Wendy Wasserstein. A new generation, whose careers began in this century, has emerged, and done so when the theatre itself, along with the society with which it engages, was changing. Capturing the cultural shifts of 21st-century America, Staging America explores the lives and works of 8 award-winning playwrights – including Ayad Akhtar, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Young Jean Lee and Quiara Alllegría Hudes – whose backgrounds reflect the social, religious, sexual and national diversity of American society. Each chapter is devoted to a single playwright and provides an overview of their career, a description and critical evaluation of their work, as well as a sense of their reception. Drawing on primary sources, including the playwrights’ own commentaries and notes, and contemporary reviews, Christopher Bigsby enters into a dialogue with plays which are as various as the individuals who generated them. An essential read for theatre scholars and students, Staging America is a sharp and landmark study of the contemporary American playwright.

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9781350200920

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Reviews

Bigsby's probing of the playwrights' diverse backgrounds reveals an interesting commonality: most expressed a sense of double identity, having grown up as Americans within the larger society yet also as outsider observers of that society. Well-chosen epigraphs head each chapter and point to crucial insights. The literary criticism is balanced by brief assessments of theater reviewers' responses ... Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. - CHOICE

[Bigsby's] writing is a breath of fresh air ... the kind of volume that one could recommend to any theatre lover, especially those with an interest in American drama and dramatists today. * British Theatre Guide * Christopher Bigsby's Staging America: Twenty-First Century Dramatists is a beautifully written book, one brimming with fresh critical insights. What is immediately obvious is his utter command of his material. The book will appeal to theatergoers and scholars interested American dramatists whose works define selected public issues of a nation as reflected through the private anxieties of its citizens ... Bigsby's book has the panoptic reach and cultural depth to make it one of the major coordinates in contemporary American drama scholarship, an area which he has helped re-think and remap over the years. * Modern Drama * Bigsby's probing of the playwrights' diverse backgrounds reveals an interesting commonality: most expressed a sense of double identity, having grown up as Americans within the larger society yet also as outsider observers of that society. Well-chosen epigraphs head each chapter and point to crucial insights. The literary criticism is balanced by brief assessments of theater reviewers' responses ... Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. * CHOICE *

Author Information

Christopher Bigsby is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. His works include Twenty-First Century American Playrights (2017), Arthur Miller 1962–2005 (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture (2006).

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