THE HISTORY FINAL

Regional Theatre

1) Theatre whose subject matter is specific to a particular geographic region. 2) Theatres situated outside major theatrical centers.

Split Britches

A lesbian theatre company that is known for its drag performances and satirical use of classical literature.

Amiri Baraka

A prolific and provocative dramatist, who has well over thirty plays in his credit. Before him, black protest drama had been solely realistic; by infusing allegory and lyricism into his vivid depictions of racially torn America, he changed the shape of this protest drama and inspired a whole school of writing.

Suzan-Lori Parks

African American playwright whose works dealt with issues of racism and feminism and have been produced in regional alternative theatre. Wrote topdog/underdog and the America Play.

Alan Schneider

American director who had the reputation that was based on his productions of plays by Beckett, Albee, and Pinter. He was especially known for productions that carefully illuminated these enigmatic texts.

George C. Wolfe

American playwright and director of theatre and film.

Theatre of the Oppressed

Boal became internationally known for his theatrical work of this, which became a manifesto for revolutionary and socially conscious theatre. Boal attacked traditional theatrical approaches, arguing that they were used for the oppression of audiences.

Theatre de Complicite

British theatre company was founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel arden, and Marcello Magni.

Off-off-Broadway

Center for experimentation in New York theatre that developed when off-broadway became commercialized in the 1960's. Off-off-broadway is dedicated to introducing and showcasing new talent, experimenting with new styles of production, and avoiding the limitations of commercial theatre.

Bob Fosse

Choreographer turned director. Directed Sweet Charity and Pippin.

Peter Hall

English director who served as the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, established his early reputation with productions of Beckett's and Pinter's works.

Edward Bond

English playwright

Arthur Miller

Focuses on failure, guilt, responsibility for one's own actions, and the effects of society on the individual. He tried to make us examine our own lives. He wrote Death of a Salesman.

Angry young men

Group of antiestablishment English playwrights of the 1950s who dealt with the dissolving British empire, class conflict, and political disillusionment.

Joseph Papp

He was an off-Broadway producer who had a strong impact on American theatre.

Kathikali

In southwestern India, a form of dance drama presented by torchlight, dealing with clashes of good and evil.

Dario Fo

Italian playwright known for his satirical political comedies, which attack capitalist institutions and are reminiscent of Aristophanes.

Anne Bogart

Known for her collaborative works, which use highly vocal physical techniques. She has also worked at a number of regional theatres and from 1989-1991 was the artistic director of the Trinity Repertory Company, a regional theatre which was founded in 1964. She is the co-artistic director of the Saratoga International Theatre Institute. She frequently conceives and directs the theatrical pieces she stages. She is well-known for viewpoints, her theoretical approach to acting.

Off-Broadway

Movement developed in the late 1940s as a reaction to Broadway commercialism; its primary goal was to provide an outlet for experimental and innovative works, unhindered by commercial considerations. Off-Broadway theatre spaces are small (usually holding about 200 spectators), and many have thrust or arena stages. Many American actors and directors began their careers off-Broadway.

Ed Bullins

Playwright that was introduced by the Lafayette Theatre.

Athol Fugard

South African playwright who had a concern for political and social equality. He was white and he collaborated with black actors.

Poor theatre

Term coined by Jerzy Grotowski to describe his ideal of theatre stripped to its barest essentials. According to Grotowski, the lavish sets, lights, and costumes usually associated with theatre reflect only base, materialistic values and must be eliminated.

Documentary drama

Term encompassing different types of twentieth-century drama that presented material in the fashion of journalism or reporting. Living newspaper drama of the 1930s used signs and slide projections to deal with broad social problems; other documentary dramas use a more realistic approach.

Martha Clarke

The tradition of performance art as a form influenced by movement and dance is best seen in the work of this leading performance artist.

Open Theatre

a branch off of living theatre.

Jose Quintero

a director who established his reputation as the leading interpreter of Eugene O'neill at the circle in the square. Off-Broadway.

Karen Finley

artist of performance art who once denied funding by the national endowment for the arts for a controversial presentation.

Harold Pinter

became the leading English-language absurdist playwright. In his dramas, he feels no need to explain why something happens or who a character is; existence within the world of the play is sufficient.

Jerzy Grotowski

concept of poor theatre which he developed while working with his Polish Laboratory Theatre, was an attempt to answer the endlessly debated question, what is theatre? Only two essentials for the theatre, the audience and the actor.

Antonin Artaud

created theory of theatre of cruelty

Robert Wilson

creates often huge, extremely long epic productions, which revolve around intensely theatrical images and are frequently accompanies by music in operatic style.

Peter Brook

director who distinguished himself first with shakespeare and traditional material, but then became increasingly experimental. one of his bold productions, influenced by the theories of Artaud and others, was Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss, which was set in an insane asylum at the time of the french revolution.

Sarah Kane

english playwright. Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, paint and torture - both physical and psychological- and death.

Luis Valdez

founded El Teatro Campesino, to support a strike that farmworkers had organized in Delano. He described El Teatro Campesino as "somewhere between Brecht and Cantinflas"

Performance Group

founded in 1968 by Richard schechner. The company was known for its environmental stagings.

Ariane Mnouchkine

founded the avant-garde Theatre du Soleil in Paris, since then she has become one of the most widely admired directors in Europe.

Roger Blin

french actor and director notable for staging samuel beckett's waiting for godot

Caryl Churchill

her work is characterized by a unique fluidity of structure. She often mixes chronological and anachronistic events. She also double-casts roles in many of her plays, and she reverses gender roles, forcing audiences to explore generally accepted sexual sterotypes .She wrote Cloud Nine.

Josef Svoboda

his work centers on the concept of kinetics. He believed that because a play exists only in performance, its setting must be dynamic, changing throughout the performance according to the demands of the text.

Paula Vogel

is known for dramas that focus on dysfunctional families, domestic violence, and gender issues.

El Teatro Campesino

it became the prototype for other groups, such as Teatro de la Gente, founded in 1967; and Teatro de la Esperanza.

Jean Paul Sartre

one of the frenchmen who articulated a philosophy called existentialism. he wrote existentialist plays.

Eugene Ionesco

one of the most productive of the playwrights who have been grouped together as absurdists. he often turned his characters into caricatures and pushed dramatic action to the point of the ridiculous. The language of his plays frequently seems nonsensical since he was particularly concerned with the futility of communication.

Mabou Mines

organized in 1970, originally under the artistic direction of Lee Breuer, and is well known for staging the plays of Samuel Beckett. This company has a highly visual style and has developed many theatre pieces using imagery and techniques from popular culture, including cartoons.

Peter Handke

playwright and political activist.

Peter Weiss

playwright for documentary drama.

Tennessee Williams

playwright of streetcar named desire. a common theme that ran through his works is the plight of society's outcasts, outsiders trapped in a hostile environment. Selective Realism.

Joshua Sobol

the most internationally recognized Israeli dramatist. In the 1980s he served as an artistic director with the Municipal Theatre in Haifa, frequently combining Israeli and Palestinian actors in controversial productions.

Mei Lanfang

the most renowned modern performer of Peking opera, preserved and expanded its traditions. He was acclaimed throughout the world for his portrayal of female characters and was one of the first Asian theatre artists to influence the development of western theatre.

Lorraine Hansberry

wrote A Raisin in the Sun which is considered by many critics to have been a turning point in American theatre.

Environmental Theatre

A type of theatre production in which the total environment- the stage space and the audience arrangement- is emphasized. A form of environmental theatre came to the forefront in experimental theatre of the 1960s. Among its aims are elimination of the distinction between audience space and acting space, a more flexible approach to interactions between performers and audience, and substitution of a multiple focus for the traditional single focus.

Performance art

Alternative form of theatre. Performance art often uses elements of the visual arts, dance, and popular entertainment in unique configurations. Also, personal, individual, autobiographical presentations.

Peter Sellars

American Director. He used classical texts to comment on contemporary political and social issues.

Stephen Sondheim

American composer and lyricist known for more than half-century of contributions to musical theatre.

Neil Simon

American playwright, screenwriter and author. He has written more than thirty plays.

Marsha Norman

American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist.

Wendy Wasserstein

American playwright. Feminist.

Theatre of Cruelty

Antonin Artaud's visionary concept of theatre based on magic and ritual, which would liberate deep, violent, erotic impulses. he wanted to reveal the cruelty which he saw as existing beneath all human action - the pervasiveness of evil and violent sexuality.

Julie Taymor

Director of The Lion King, as well as the designer of the masks and puppets. She is a designer, an adapter of literature for the stage, and a director, is well known for her avant-garde puppet techniques, borrowed from Asian theatres.

Happenings

Form of theatrical event that was developed out of experimentation by certain American abstract artists in the 1960s. happenings are nonliterary, replacing the script with a scenario which provides for chance occurrences, and are performed (often only once) in such places as parks and street corners.

Richard Schechner

Founded The Performance Group in 1968. After it disbanded in 1980, he remained a significant theorist, educator, and practitioner. He commented on gender stereotypes by casting women as men and men as women.

Edward Albee

His early work had an affinity with the absurdist writers of Europe, but he also practiced his own brand of selective realism and has often ventured into symbolism. His plays mixed realism with mysticism and symbolism, creating a certain obliqueness and obscurity that puzzled some critics and audience members and pleased others.

August Wilson

Major american dramatist of the twentieth century. He evokes the african american experience at various times in history through richly poetic texts. Half black, half white. Wrote Fences. He argued that in order to know who you are now, you must know who you were in the past.

Wole Soyinka

Nigerian playwright who spent most of his life in exile as a result of political oppression and his unwillingness to remain silent in the face of totalitarianism.

Augusto Boal

One of the most renowned theatre artists of the era was the Brazilian playwright, director, and a theorist. He created works about historical figures, theatrical and revolutionary. He came up with the Theatre of Opressed which became a manifesto for revolutionary and socially conscious theatre. He attacked traditional theatrical approaches, arguing that they were used for the oppression of audiences.

Al-Kasaba Theatre

Originally founded in Jerusalem in 1979 but now located in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. In 2001, it staged Alive from Palestine: Stories behind the Headlines, which consists of a series of monologues dealing with the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israel.

The Wooster Group

Out of Performance Group grew this group. It gained international renown in the 1980s, is noted for "deconstructing" well-known texts- that is, taking them apart and commenting on them- in performance pieces hat tackle controversial social issues.

Theatre of the Absurd

Term first used by Martin Esslin to describe the works of certain playwrights of the 1950s and 1960s who expressed a similar point of view regarding the absurdity of the human condition. In theatre of the absurd, rational language is debased and replaced by cliches and trite or irrelevant remarks. Realistic psychological motivation is replaced by automatic behavior which is often absurdly inappropriate to the situation. Although the subject matter is serious, the tone of these plays is usually comic and ironic.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

The leading figure in the trend of the emergence of British composers and lyricists, who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita with the lyricist Tim Rice. He also wrote the immensely popular Cats (1982), The Phantom of the Opera (1987), and Sunset Boulevard (1993).

Anna Deavere Smith

The most prominent African American performance artist in the United States. Best known for her series of one-woman works.Her two best-known works focus on racial explosions.

Charles Ludlam

a complete theatre artist, functioning at various points in his career as a playwright, actor, director, and designer. The goal of his work, ironically, was to poke fun at the theatre, its representation of gender, and its portrayal of gays.

Postmodernist style

a cool, ironic affect; the overt pastiche of work from the past; the insouciant mixture of high and low styles. It questions the position of power in art and the idea of an accepted "canon" of classics; postmodernists also ask why certain artists and certain groups should have held positions of power and privilege throughout theatre history. It's a mix between abstraction with realism.

Peter Stein

a critically acclaimed German theatre and opera director who established himself at the Schaubunne am Lehniner Platz, a company that he brought to the forefront of German theatre.

Jean Genet

a french novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist.

Black Arts movement

a group of politcally motivated black poets, artists, dramatists, musicians, and writers who emerged in the wake of the black power movement. It was established in 1965 when Baraka opened the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem

David Henry Hwang

a playwright who came to prominence in the 1980s. He wrote several plays but his famous one was Madame Butterfly.

Concept musicals

a production is built around an idea rather than a story.

Rabindranath Tagore

a prominent philosopher and social reformer. He was a playwright. he writes realistic comedy and satire. in his later works, they include song, mime, dance, and lyrical verse and are tinged with mysticism.

New York Public Theatre

a series of theatre spaces in a converted library. It is noted for casting roles without regard to race.

Kitchen sink drama

a term coined to describe a british cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose protagonists usually could be described as angry young men who were disillusioned with modern society.

Adrienne Kennedy

african playwright who wrote Funnyhouse of a Negro. She proved herself to be a master at placing characters in true-to-life settings and used dialogue to make accurate observations about life.

Lanford Wilson

american playwright. he was produced off-broadway.

Maria Irene Fornes

among the avant-garde dramatists who began the off-off-broadway movement. She is a playwright whose plays are unconventional in structure, dialogue, and staging. They are fundamentally symbolic and often include both brutality and slapstick humor.

Steppenwolf Theatre

an alternative theatre in Chicago. It was organized in 1976 and has brought many productions to new york.

Jerome Robbins

an american choreographer, director, dancer, and theatre producer who worked in classical ballet on broadway.

Living Theatre

an american theatre company founded in 1947 and based in new york city. it is the oldest experimental theatre group in the united states.

Ellen Stewart

an influential off-off-broadway figure who is of Cajun extraction- began as a fashion and millinery designer. She founded Cafe La Mama also known as the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, in 1961 and has been instrumental in introducing new playwrights and directors.

Sam Shepard

dramas adroitly blend images of the American west, pop motifs, science fiction, and other elements of popular and youth culture, is one of the most inventive American playwrights. His characters are storytellers, and his plays feature long monologues.

Samuel Beckett

most renowned of the absurdist playwrights. His dramas deal with the dullness of routine, the futility of human actions, and the inability of humans to communicate; and the plots, language, and characters themselves seem absurd. He wrote Waiting for Godot.

Ontological-Hysteric Theatre

one of three alternative theatres that came to prominence in the 1970s-80s and remain active today. It takes a daring, experimental approach both to the classics and to contemporary theatre pieces. They often deconstruct a text from the past, or put together a collage or montage of bits and pieces of theatre, film and movement to create an original piece.

Guthrie Theatre

opened a facility with three playhouses- including one that retains its signature thrust configuration- in 2006. The new theatre, situated on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis was designed by the world-renowned architect Jean Nouvel. This theatre became known for developing a strong permanent acting ensemble and for controversial stagings of historic plays.

Chicano theatre

originated primarily in the west and southwest, came to prominence during the time of the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Other plays about the Chicano experienced followed. One of the most notable was Roosters in which cockfighting is a metaphor used to explore Chicano concerns and family conflicts.

John Osborne

playwright who was in the group of antiestablishment playwrights known collectively as the angry young men who dealt with the dissolving British empire, class conflict, and political disillusionment.

David Mamet

playwright whose plays have naturalistic language and settings and down-and-out characters whose struggles are clearly recognizable, but they do not provide the clear-cut exposition or dramatic resolutions of traditional realism.

Tadeusz Kantor

polish painter, assemblage artist, set designer, and theatre director. He is renowned for his revolutionary theatrical performances in poland and abroad.