The Antitheatrical Prejudice is essential reading today when theatricality, antitheatricality, and performativity are once again provocative issues playing out across contemporary culture and the arts. The original edition was published in 1981. The new edition includes a Foreword by Joseph Roach, the distinguished theatre historian and stage director, and professor emeritus, Dept. of English, Yale University. He is the author of The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting and Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance.

NOW UPDATED TO INCLUDE DISCUSSION OF HER LATEST MUSIC-THEATRE WORK  

This expanded edition of Conversations with Meredith Monk offers a fascinating portrait of the internationally renowned composer, performer, director, and filmmaker, from her early years to the present.  

The five long conversations that comprise the volume part of PAJ’s “Performance Ideas” series generate invaluable insights into artistic process, the human voice, interrelationships of time, space, and music, and the complexity of artistic legacies. 

What is a “contemporary” work? How does an artwork retain its integrity of form over time? In these deeply engaging conversations, Monk speaks in great detail on her creation of music-theatre works, operas, and films, reflecting on the large-cast theatrical works and the more recent poetically distilled, abstract pieces.  

In her preface to the new edition, Bonnie Marranca writes: “Now, against the background of life in extremis, it is evident that Monk had already acknowledged both the always unknown future and the resilience of human beings.”