Performing Arts

“A masterpiece . . . Trouble in Mind still contains astonishing power; it could have been written yesterday.” —Vulture

Ahead of its time, Trouble in Mind, written in 1955, follows the rehearsal process of an anti-lynching play preparing for its Broadway debut. When Wiletta, a Black actress and veteran of the stage, challenges the play’s stereotypical portrayal of the Black characters, unsettling biases come to the forefront and reveal the ways so-called progressive art can be used to uphold racist attitudes. Scheduled to open on Broadway in 1957, Childress objected to the requested changes in the script that would “sanitize” the play for mainstream audiences, and the production was canceled as a result. Childress’s final script is published here with an essay by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, editor of TCG Illuminations.

Corps de ballet literally means the "body" of the ballet company, and it refers to the group of dancers who are not principals. Another large group of dancers puts together portfolios of work, often across several dance companies. These categories of dancers typically don't have name recognition and yet comprise the majority of professional dancers today. The ways that they stitch together careers, through dedication, grit, and no small amount of skill – and the reasons they have for doing so without the promise of fame or fortune – are telling of broader trends that shape the precarious labor of professional dance, and creative careers more generally. In Passionate Work, dance hobbyist and sociologist, Ruth Horowitz captures their stories.

When creative labor is studied, it is often thought of in opposition to more conventional work, and the primary metric that distinguishes them is passion. Professional creatives are not working in the traditional sense because they are following their passion. By tracing the careers of such dancers, Horowitz troubles the binary understanding of passion and work. A career in dance requires both, and approaching her subjects through this lens allows her to explore their strategies for sustaining passion through the ups and downs of a career. Horowitz explores how dancers evaluate the rewards and challenges of a notoriously underpaid, and uncertain profession.

Horowitz considers major dimensions of a career in a performing art, documenting each stage in a dancer's life. Above all, she shines a light on the strategies used to achieve a sense of biographical continuity in a world often marked by discontinuity and rupture.

“Revelatory…As intimate and immediate as a whispered secret. Vogel’s play thrums with music, desire, and fear, and it’s shrewd about the ways in which America isn’t free, and about how art does and doesn’t transcend the perilous winds of history.” —New Yorker

“Superbly realized…Indecent, the powerful play by Paula Vogel, sheds an eye-opening light on a little-known time when theatrical history, Jewish culture, and the frank depiction of homosexuality intersected, with explosive results.” —New York Times

“Gorgeous. Illuminating and heartbreaking. Rich in sympathy and humor, Indecent has the scope of an epic but the intimacy of a chamber piece…It celebrates and illustrates the power of theater.” —Time Out New York

“A moving and fascinating play…A singular achievement… The historical perspective is vast and knowing…Has there ever been anything quite like Indecent, a play that touches—I mean deeply touches—so much rich emotion about history and the theater, anti-Semitism, homophobia, censorship, world wars, red-baiting, and oh, yes, joyful human passion?...An extraordinary play.” —Newsday

“Indecent is more than a play about forbidden love: It’s about theater as a life force.” —New York Post

When Sholem Asch wrote God of Vengeance in 1907, he didn’t imagine the height of controversy the play would eventually reach. Performing at first in Yiddish and German, the play’s subject matter wasn’t deemed contentious until it was produced in English, when the American audiences were scandalized by the onstage depiction of an amorous affair between two women. Paula Vogel’s newest work traces the trajectory of the show’s success through its tour in Europe to its abrupt and explosive demise on Broadway in 1923—including the arrest of the entire production’s cast and crew.

Paula Vogel is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of How I Learned to Drive. Her other plays include Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq, A Civil War Christmas, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and The Baltimore Waltz, among others. She has also had a distinguished career as a teacher and mentor to younger playwrights, first at Brown University and then at the Yale School of Drama.

As their lives begin to intertwine, their journey takes us through grand drawing rooms, bustling theatres and rowdy Southwark pubs, where the women fight inequality as well as each other. But with the final showdown approaching, only one can become the Lady Boxing Champion of the World. . .

This special edition of the international hit play Prima Facie features the definitive version of the award-winning script, together with colour photos and exclusive additional content, giving you a fascinating behind-the-scenes insight into the making of the production and the issues it explores.

In the play, Tessa is a young, brilliant barrister who has worked her way up from working-class origins to the top of her game: defending, cross-examining and winning. But when an unexpected event forces her to confront the patriarchal power of the law—where the burden of proof and morality diverge—she finds herself in a world where emotion and integrity are in conflict with the rules of the game.

After acclaimed productions in Australia and winning the Australian Writers’ Guild Award for Drama, Prima Facie received its European premiere in a sold-out run at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End in 2022 starring Jodie Comer in her West End debut. It was named Best New Play at both the 2023 Olivier and WhatsOnStage Awards. A filmed version, released in 2022, went on to become the highest-grossing event cinema release ever in the UK.

This edition, published alongside Prima Facie’s Broadway transfer in 2023, includes contributions from writer Suzie Miller, actor Jodie Comer, director Justin Martin, producer James Bierman and other key members of the creative team, letting you go deeper into the world of the play. There are also essays on the legal context and how the play has become a vehicle for change in attitudes towards the treatment of female victims of sexual assault.

Includes Revised Broadway version of Appropriate

Winner of three 2024 Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Play

A double-volume containing two astonishing breakout plays from one of the theatre's most exciting and provocative young writers.

In Appropriate, strained familial dynamics collide with a tense undercurrent of socio-political realities when the Lafayettes gather at a former plantation home to sift through the belongings of their deceased patriarch. An Octoroon is an audacious investigation of theatre and identity, wherein an old play gives way to a startlingly original piece.

Also includes the short play I Promise Never Again to Write Plays About Asians...

A new political party has swept into office, promising big changes to curb the impending climate crisis—changes that could put the nail in the coffin for a tiny carbon-economy town in the heart of Northern BC. When an elected representative who grew up in the town arrives to appease the residents, her urban idealism clashes with the hard-hitting realities faced by her family and childhood friends. How will pulling the plug on fossil-fuel dependency play out for this resilient northern community? And does it even matter when a forest fire is encroaching on the town’s borders?

Inspired by playwright Pedro Chamale's own experiences growing up in Chetwynd, BC, Peace Country is a poignant plea for dialogue in a time marked by profound division. Teetering between progress and preservation, this very human drama invites readers to contemplate the fate of communities standing on the precipice of ruin.

The experiences of a diverse range of progressive theater and performance makers in their own words

Curated stories from over 75 interviews and informal exchanges offer insight into the field and point out limitations due to discrimination and unequal opportunity for performance artists in the United States over the past 55 years. In this work, performers, often unknown beyond their immediate audience, articulate diverse influences. They also reflect on how artists are educated and supported, what content is deemed valuable and how it is brought to bear, as well as which audiences are welcome and whether cross-community exchange is encouraged. The book’s voices bring the reader from 1965 through the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. They point to more diverse and inclusive practices and give hope for the future of the art.

Hamlet (1601) is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. Inspired by Danish historian Saxo Grammatica’s legend of Amleth, which Shakespeare likely encountered in a retelling by French scholar Francois de Belleforest, Hamlet was written sometime between 1599 and 1601. Alongside Romeo and Juliet, it is one of Shakespeare’s most performed plays and has served as source material for countless film and television adaptations. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” For his wit and wordplay alone, William Shakespeare is often considered the greatest writer to ever work in the English language. Where he truly triumphs, however, is in his ability to portray complex human emotions, how these emotions contribute to relationships, and how these relationships interact with politics, culture, and religion. Hamlet is a story of things seen and unseen. Ghosts, assassins, shadowy plots, a play within a play, lengthy asides—its universe swirls with paranoia and fear, allowing us to enter the mind of its troubled protagonist. When the ghost of his father appears on the castle rampart, Danish prince Hamlet grows increasingly suspicious of his uncle Polonius’ role in the former king’s death. As his relationships with Ophelia, his lover, and Gertrude, his mother, begin to sour, Hamlet loses sight of his duties as a leader.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

“Until the Flood is an urgent moral inquest.” —Jesse Green, New York Times

In the gripping and revelatory Until the Flood, Dael Orlandersmith journeys into the heart and soul of modern-day America—confronting the powerful forces of history, race, and politics. Drawn from interviews following the shooting of a black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, Orlandersmith embodies the many faces of a community rallying for justice and a country still yearning for change.

Obie Award for Playwriting — Sanctuary City 

Two compelling, uncompromising plays about the immigrant experience by the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright of Cost of Living. With humor, grace, and an unsentimental eye, Martyna Majok explores the challenges immigrants face as they strive to carve out a place in a harsh and often indifferent America. 

In Ironbound, Darja, a Polish immigrant, negotiates the terms for her future at a rundown bus stop in New Jersey. Over the course of 20 years and three relationships, Darja’s initial search for love becomes eclipsed by her desire for security and survival. 

In Sanctuary City, two undocumented teenagers seek refuge in each other and make a pact to stake their claim in America together. But as their experiences and opportunities diverge, their bonds begin to fray, and each must make a difficult choice about what they are willing to sacrifice for their dreams.

Ellen McLaughlin returns with a new collection of adaptations and modern reimaginings of classic Greek tragedies. Drawing on works by Sophocles, Homer, Aeschylus and more, these plays breathe fresh life into timeless questions and conflicts that still feel startlingly relevant today: Can civilization survive humanity’s basest instincts? What do we do about the human compulsion toward violence? Are we irreversibly transformed by the trauma of war and political strife, or is there a chance we can recover a part of our former selves? This collection includes the plays Ajax in Iraq (from Sophocles), Kissing the Floor (Sophocles), Penelope (Homer), Mercury’s Footpath (Euripides), and The Oresteia (based on Aeschylus’ trilogy Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides).

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) overturned the dramatic conventions of his day and laid the groundwork for contemporary approaches to directing and acting. Now, for the first time, the full lyricism, humor, and pathos of his greatest plays are available to an English-speaking audience. Marina Brodskaya's new translations of Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard not only surpass in accuracy all previous translations, but also provide the first complete English text of the plays, restoring passages entirely omitted by her predecessors. This much-needed volume renders Chekhov in language that will move readers and theater audiences alike, making accessible his wordplay, unstated implications, and innovations. His characters' vulnerabilities, needs, and neuroses—their humanity—emerge through their genuine, self-absorbed conversations. The plays come to life as never before and will surprise readers with their vivacity, originality, and relevance.

A fascinating investigation of class, trauma, wealth, poverty, and the agonizing need to confront one's past. —BroadwayWorld

The lives of two women from very different worlds collide in the illusionary paradise of a Mexican resort. Sarah, a Canadian wedding guest, is a shot glass half empty. Adriana, a fastidious and vivacious hotel floor manager, finds solace in establishing order. At first glance, they’re simply animated, but looking closer reveals the anxieties they’re trying to hide. When their worlds collide, everything they’ve kept hidden comes into sharp focus.

A bilingual play in English and Spanish, each woman speaks in her own language and shares her unique experiences directly with the audience. Their vastly different realities are reflected in parallel, coming together to mirror and magnify a mutual pain. Through nuanced and surprisingly funny monologues, Quintana and Zelaya-Cervantes focus an attentive microscope on female strength and solidarity to stunning effect.

Ellida Wangel grew up loving the sea, but she eventually moved away and married a doctor instead of the sailor who originally stole her heart. This has put a strain on her relationship with her husband and his two daughters, from his previous marriage.

Ellida Wangel is the second wife of widower, Dr. Edvard Wangel. She is the stepmother to his daughters, Bolette and Hilde, who prefer to keep their distance. The family dynamic is often cold as the marriage is more about convenience than love. Ellida spent her formative years near the sea and has always yearned to return to it. But her life and responsibilities have kept her away. When a former lover reappears, he attempts to convince Ellida to leave her husband and travel abroad. She is forced to choose between the family she knows and the future she desires.

The Lady from the Sea examines the trappings of what appears to be a happy marriage. Despite a stable husband and two children, the wife is unfulfilled. She must look inside herself to discover what truly matters in her heart.

With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Lady from the Sea is both modern and readable.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Everyday Movies documents the twentieth-century rise of portable film projectors. It demonstrates that since World War II, the vast majority of movie-watching did not happen in the glow of the large screen but rather took place alongside the glitches, distortions, and clickety-clack of small machines that transformed home, classroom, museum, community, government, industrial, and military venues into sites of moving-image display. Reorienting the history of cinema away from the magic of the movie theater, Haidee Wasson illustrates the remarkable persistence and proliferation of devices that fundamentally rejected the sleek, highly professionalized film show. She foregrounds instead another kind of apparatus, one that was accessible, affordable, adaptable, easy to use, and crucially, programmable. Revealing rich archival discoveries, this book charts a compelling and original history of film that brings to light new technologies and diverse forms of media engagement that continue to shape contemporary life.

Since the inception of cinema in the late nineteenth century, filmmakers have employed a wide array of precursory aesthetic strategies in the conception and creation of their disparate works. The existence of these traditional antecedents have afforded filmmakers a diverse range of technical and artistic applications towards the construction of their cinematic narratives. Furthermore, the socio-political and cultural contexts in which films are conceived often inform the manner in which particular aesthetic sensibilities are selected and deployed. Unfortunately, many creative artists – and audiences – remain unfamiliar with Aesthetics as a practical discipline and how it might apply to their own creative and/or interpretive pursuits.

‘Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative’ provides a concise historical survey of Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline and applies several of its underlying principles to the examination of filmic storytelling. The book’s four chapters codify working definitions of the relevant terms and concepts, employing specific case studies to illustrate how certain aesthetic stratagems govern a film’s structural design and execution. By drawing connections between the technical/creative decisions filmmakers must make and more time-honoured traditions regarding the nature of art, the structures of storytelling and the import of visual imagery, ‘Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative’ helps recontextualize film within a wider sphere of artistic/intellectual endeavour. The book is a useful and much-needed addition to the pre-existing canon for students of visual storytelling and for general readers.

Tender, ruminative…Fugard has been anatomizing the evils of apartheid, and the troubling legacies it left behind, throughout his long and distinguished career.—Charles Isherwood, New York Times

A touching portrayal of compassion passed down through two generations in a racially torn continent, The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek centers around Nukain and Bokkie, an elderly African painter and his young protege. Inspired by the life of Nukain Mabuza, a self-taught artist who painted the boulders on the farm on which he worked, this play observes two differing experiences with racism, in the decades during and following apartheid, while ultimately illuminating the meaning of preserving the history of one’s own past.

The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek is another entry in Fugard's canon that sheds a light on the looming shadow of apartheid and its resulting dissolution of society and politics in South Africa.

While rehearsing Oedipus, turbulent relationships between actors threaten to sabotage the production. As tensions grow stronger and hidden truths emerge, reality begins to emulate Oedipus in staggering ways. Lucas’s topical and complex play is a remarkably funny, sharply articulated missive about tragedy in the contemporary world.

Craig Lucas is a playwright, screenwriter and director of both theater and film. His plays include Prelude to a Kiss, The Dying Gaul, The Singing Forest, Small Tragedy, Reckless, Blue Window, Prayer for My Enemy, God’s Heart and the books for the musicals The Light in the Piazza, An American in Paris and Amélie.

“The bitingly funny and fierce Gloria is one of the year’s best shows…Gloria is an adrenaline rush of a show, but it also makes you think. Let’s just say it hits the bull’s-eye.” —Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post

“Funny, blistering tragicomedy…along with a delightfully omnipresent, biting wit…You’ll be unsettled by Gloria, perhaps even haunted.” —Peter Marks, Washington Post

An ambitious group of editorial assistants at a prestigious Manhattan-based literary magazine are each chasing the same dream: a life as successful writers—and to get out of their cubicles before they turn thirty. When a regular day at the office suddenly becomes anything but, the stakes for who will get to tell the career-making story are higher than ever.

Winner of the 2015 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play

Winner of the 2015 Carol Bolt Award

Finalist for the 2016 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama

The Decameron meets I Know What You Did Last Summer in this suburban thriller in which ten teenagers flee a plague of their own making.

Concord Floral is a one-million-square-foot abandoned greenhouse and a refuge for neighborhood kids; a place all to themselves in which to dream, dare, and come of age. But hidden there is a secret no one wants to confront, and when two friends stumble upon it they set off an unstoppable chain of events, from shadows in parking lots to phone calls from the grave. It's time for the teens of Concord Floral to start talking.

The Thanksgiving Play

“Satire doesn’t get much richer… A takedown of white American mythology… The familiar, whitewashed story of Pilgrims and Native Americans chowing down together gets a delicious roasting.” —Jesse Green, New York Times

“Wryly funny… Deftly makes points that need making about representation and, to borrow a line from Hamilton, the crucial matter of ‘who tells your story.’” —Don Aucoin, Boston Globe

A group of well-intentioned white teaching artists scramble to create an ambitious “woke” Thanksgiving pageant. Despite their eager efforts to put on the most culturally sensitive show possible, it quickly becomes clear that even those with good intentions can be undone by their own blind spots.

What Would Crazy Horse Do?

“A nuanced portrait of reservation life… A scalding cauldron of race and resentment, poverty, and mental illness.” —Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star

“A timely meditation on the dangers of nationalism tinged with a sad irony as seen through the filter of a Native American lens.” —Alan Portner, Broadway World

Twins Calvin and Journey, the last two members of the Marahotah tribe, make a suicide pact to end the Marahotah when the grandfather who raised them dies. Then two white strangers knock on their door and the insular world of the twins is ripped wide open.

“Fabulous and bedraggled: a defiant and beautiful mess… Welcome to the world of Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, where carnage and camp coexist.” —Jesse Green, New York Times

In Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, Taylor Mac’s singular worldview intersects with William Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus. Set during the fall of the Roman Empire, Mac’s extraordinary play picks up where Shakespeare’s blood-soaked tale left off: the coup has ended, the country has been stolen by madmen, and there are casualties everywhere. Two lowly servants, Gary and Janice, are charged with cleaning up the bodies. It’s the year 400—but it feels like the end of the world.

By combining literary and dramatic narrative with eye-witness accounts of Sasquatch encounters culled from the internet, The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. reinvents as many versions of the Frankenstein author Mary Shelley as there are definitions of the word “Gothic.” In this work, a string of financial, maternal, and familial misfortunes causes Shelley—referred to in this production as Maery S.—to spawn a monstrous creative expression, which takes on its own life and violent history. Maery cannot help but fall  in love with her Monster, only to see it “collected” and imprisoned by charitable funding at a mandatory artists’ residency.

An ordinary Tuesday turns really, really weird when the sky over the school playground suddenly rips open. Pupils and teachers are sucked up to a parallel universe, whilst a new set of people start raining down from above. 'Us' and 'Them' must come together to work out what is going on, and how they can get things back to how they were.

Alison Carr's play Tuesday is funny and playful, with a little bit of sci-fi and a lot of big themes: friendship, family, identity, grief, responsibility – and what happens when an unexpected event literally turns the world upside-down.

Written specifically for young people, the play formed part of the 2020 and 2021 National Theatre Connections Festivals and was premiered by youth theatres across the UK. It offers opportunities for a large, flexible cast of any size, age and mix of genders.

This bilingual edition includes the original English play with a Welsh-language translation, Un Bore Mawrth, by playwright Daf James.

Un Bore Mawrth

''Wi 'di bod yn aros i rywbeth fel hyn ddigwydd. 'Wi'n synnu'i fod e 'di cymryd mor hir. Ma'r arwyddion 'di bod 'ma ers sbel.'

Dydd Mawrth digon cyffredin yw hi, ond yn sydyn mae'n troi'n ddiwrnod rhyfedd iawn pan mae'r awyr uwch ben yr ysgol yn rhwygo'n agored. Caiff disgyblion ac athrawon eu sugno i fyny i fydysawd cyfochrog wrth i garfan newydd o bobl arllwys i lawr oddi uchod. Rhaid i 'Ni' a 'Nhw' ddod ynghyd i ddeall beth sy'n digwydd ac i ddatrys sut i gael pethau'n ôl fel yr oedden nhw.

Mae'r ddrama wreiddiol hon gan Alison Carr, Tuesday, yn ddoniol ac yn chwareus, gyda phinsiad o ffugwyddoniaeth a thomen o themâu mawr: cyfeillgarwch, teulu, hunaniaeth, galar, cyfrifoldeb – a beth sy'n digwydd pan fydd digwyddiad annisgwyl yn llythrennol yn troi'r byd wyneb i waered.

Wedi'i hysgrifennu ar gyfer pobl ifanc, roedd y ddrama'n rhan o Ŵyl National Theatre Connections yn 2020 a 2021, a chafodd ei llwyfannu am y tro cyntaf gan theatrau ieuenctid ar draws y DU.

Mae'n cynnig cyfleoedd i gastiau mawr, hyblyg o unrhyw faint, oedran a rhywedd.

Mae Tuesday yn waith gosod ar fanyleb TGAU Drama CBAC. Yn y gyfrol ddwyieithog hon, fe welwch y ddrama wreiddiol Saesneg ynghyd â chyfieithiad Cymraeg y dramodydd Daf James, Un Bore Mawrth.

When the owner of a Sheffield scissor manufacturer dies, the future of the factory site falls into uncertainty. Can it be reborn as a fashionable music venue, converted into luxury apartments, or somehow reinvigorated so the old business can survive?

There's more than just money or bricks and mortar at stake. It's about knowing where you fit in the world – knowing that somewhere there's still a place for you.

Fresh, funny and heartfelt, Rock / Paper / Scissors are three intricately interwoven plays by Chris Bush about family, heritage and legacy. They were first performed simultaneously with the same cast moving between three theatres in Sheffield – the Crucible, the Lyceum and the Studio – as part of Sheffield Theatres' fiftieth birthday celebrations in 2022.

While the three plays can be enjoyed separately, they also offer a uniquely rewarding opportunity for any company looking to take on the challenge of staging them together.

Our most brilliant, fearless and creative women directors open the door on their craft, discussing their work in the theatre in intimate and illuminating detail.

Through a series of fascinating conversations with many of the leading talents working on British stages, Running the Room explores what it takes to succeed in the field, and how each director approaches the work in their own way.

Each interview focuses on a particular facet of the director's practice, examining not just the 'how' – how to talk to actors, how to create the right rehearsal environment, how to handle cuts and previews, how to work with a living playwright – but also the 'why': why certain approaches work better than others, why there's no 'right' way to direct a play, and why work in theatre anyway?

As this passionate, inspiring book shows, there are myriad ways to be a theatre director. For aspiring or current directors, it will give you the confidence to be uniquely yourself, develop your own approach, and create the work you want to make. For creatives in other disciplines, it will provide insight into directors' processes, along with examples of successful collaboration. And for anyone who loves theatre, this is an unparalleled first-hand account of how brilliant theatre is made – direct from those making it.

With contributions from:

Natalie Abrahami • Annabel Arden • Milli Bhatia • Carrie Cracknell • Tinuke Craig • Marianne Elliott • Nadia Fall • Yaël Farber • Vicky Featherstone • Jamie Fletcher • Sarah Frankcom • Emma Frankland • Rebecca Frecknall • Debbie Hannan • Tamara Harvey • Natalie Ibu • Ola Ince • Lynette Linton • Nancy Medina • Katie Mitchell • Rachel O'Riordan • Emma Rice • Indhu Rubasingham • Jenny Sealey

Dive into the fascinating world of movie make-up effects with this stunning illustrated oral history of the art form.

Masters of Make-Up Effects is a celebration of make-up artists and acclaimed make-up effects from the world of film and television. Authors Howard Berger and Marshall Julius have gleaned untold stories from the sets of cult classics (Planet of the Apes, An American Werewolf in London, The Thing), fan-favorite film and TV franchises (Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter and the MCU) and modern blockbusters like Dune to chart the fascinating evolution of an industry.

Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of behind-the-scenes photos, many of which have never before been seen in print or on social media, it showcases some of the most iconic make-up effects of all time, while revealing how they came to be in the artists' own words.

Featuring a foreword by Guillermo del Toro, an afterword by Seth MacFarlane, and contributions from more than 50 make-up effects legends, as well as iconic actors including Doug Jones, Robert Englund, James McAvoy and Doug Bradley, and directors Mick Garris and John Landis, Masters of Make-up Effects is the most complete book on movie make-up history ever assembled, and a must read for cinema fans everywhere.

“With a no-nonsense and blessedly candid approach, Bob Moss and Wendy Dann have written not only an indispensable practicum for the young director, but also a delightful refresher course for the working director. The authors encourage and challenge us to engage our theatrical imaginations for a lifetime of storytelling on a multitude of stages.” —Michael Mayer, Tony Award–Winning Director

By focusing on five fundamentals for staging a play—Story, Intention, Character, Space, and Theme—veteran theater directors Robert Moss and Wendy Dann help stage directors learn how to build their own practice and begin to master the daunting task of staging a story.

In How Plays Work, distinguished playwright David Edgar examines the mechanisms and techniques which dramatists throughout the ages have employed to structure their plays and to express their meaning.

Written for playwrights and playgoers alike, Edgar's analysis starts with the building blocks of whole plays—plot, character-creation, genre and structure—and moves on to scenes and devices. He shows how plays share a common architecture without which the uniqueness of their authors' vision would be invisible.

How Plays Work is both a masterclass for playwrights and playmakers and a fascinating guide to the anatomy of drama. In this revised edition, Edgar brings the book right up to date with analyses of many recent plays, as well as explorations of emerging genres and new innovations in playwriting practice.

After nearly a decade of the Trojan War, the women of Greece are growing restless. Led by the indomitable Penelope and the fierce Clytemnestra, a band of Grecian women defy the odds and bravely set sail for the shores of Troy, determined to end the conflict themselves. The journey is fraught with danger—bloodthirsty warriors, mythical beasts, and the capricious will of the gods. But these women are no mere bystanders in the tales of men. Get ready to embark on the greatest adventure that Homer and Virgil never told.

A radical retelling of the ancient Greco-Roman epics, Ransacking Troy is a bold and brilliant reimagining of the most famous war story of all time, where women take centre stage as the rightful heroes. In her signature revisionist style, award-winning playwright Erin Shields brings a refreshing feminist twist to this thrilling odyssey, confronting the habitual violence and disregard for women's lives that persist during times of war. A mythical tale for modern times, Ransacking Troy envisions what happens when women band together to build a better world.

The crown meets the criminals. Welcome to England.

Hal wasn't born to be king. Only now, it seems, he will be. His father longs for him to leave behind his friends in the taverns of Eastcheap, most notably the infamous John Falstaff. War is on the horizon. But will Hal ever come good?

Adapted by award-winning writer and director Robert Icke, Player Kings brings together two of Shakespeare's great history plays, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, in a visionary new version.

It opened at the Noël Coward Theatre, London, in 2024, before embarking on a UK tour. It was directed by Robert Icke, with a cast including Toheeb Jimoh, Richard Coyle and Ian McKellen as Falstaff.

In Corrosive Solace, Daniel O’Quinn argues that the loss of the American colonies instantiated a complex reorganization in sociability and politics in the British metropole that has had long-lasting effects on British national and imperial culture, which can be seen and analyzed within its performative repertoire. He examines how the analysis of feeling or affect can be deployed to address the inchoate causal relation between historical events and their mediation. In this sense, Corrosive Solace’s goals are twofold: first, to outline the methodologies necessary for dealing with the affective recognition of historical crisis; and second, to make the historically familiar strange again, and thus make visible key avenues for discussion that have remained dormant. Both of these objectives turn on recognition: How do we theorize the implicit affective recognition of crisis in a distant historical moment? And how do we recognize what we, in our present moment, cannot discern?

Corrosive Solace addresses this complex cultural reorientation by attending less to “new” cultural products than to the theoretical and historical problems posed by looking at the transformation of “old” plays and modes of performance. These “old” plays—Shakespeare, post-Restoration comedy and she-tragedy—were a vital plank of the cultural patrimony, so much of O’Quinn’s analysis lies in how tradition was recovered and redirected to meet urgent social and political needs. Across the arc of Corrosive Solace, he tracks how the loss of the American War forced Britons to refashion the repertoire of cultural signs and social dispositions that had subtended its first empire in the Atlantic world in a way more suited to its emergent empire in South Asia.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes includes Part One, Millennium Approaches and Part Two, Perestroika

“Glorious. A monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork…Details of specific catastrophes may have changed since this Reagan-era AIDS epic won the Pulitzer and the Tony, but the real cosmic and human obsessions—power, religion, sex, responsibility, the future of the world—are as perilous, yet as falling-down funny, as ever.” –Linda Winer, Newsday

"A vast, miraculous play... provocative, witty and deeply upsetting... a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama." - Frank Rich, New York Times

"A victory for theater, for the transforming power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty." - John Lahr, New Yorker

“An enormously impressive work of the imagination and intellect, a towering example of what theater stretched to its full potential can achieve.” -Philadelphia Inquirer

"Angels in America is the finest drama of our time, speaking to us of an entire era of life and death as no other play within memory. It ranks as nothing less than one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century." - John Heilpern, New York Observer

“Some playwrights want to change the world. Some want to revolutionize theater. Tony Kushner is that rarity of rarities: a writer who has the promise to do both.” -New York Times

This new edition of Tony Kushner's masterpiece is published with the author's recent changes and a new introduction in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of its original production. One of the most honored American plays in history, Angels in America was awarded two Tony Awards for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was made into an Emmy Award-winning HBO film directed by Mike Nichols. This two-part epic, subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," has received hundreds of performances worldwide in more than twenty-six languages.

This intimate and landmark series follows the Gabriel family of Rhinebeck, New York, through the momentous and divisive 2016 election year. While preparing meals in their kitchen, together they grapple in real time with issues of money, history, art, politics and family, as well as the fear of having been left behind.

“Pipeline confirms Dominique Morisseau’s reputation as a playwright of piercing eloquence.” —Ben Brantley, New York Times

With profound compassion and lyricism, Morisseau brings us a powerful play that delves into the urgent issue of the “school-to-prison” pipeline that ensnares people of color. Issues of class, race, parenting, and education in America are brought to the frontlines, as we are left to question the systematic structures that ultimately trap underserved communities.

Aleshea Harris turns theater into a monument, ephemeral but real, to ongoing pain. You can’t tear down a statue that never shows up outside.—Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker

This volume includes two dynamic plays from Aleshea Harris that confront the experience of being Black in America.

An explosive epic that examines the cyclical nature of violence, Is God Is follows twin sisters who undertake a dangerous journey to exact revenge upon their father at the behest of their dying mother.

What to Send Up When It Goes Down is a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-Blackness in America. It is a challenge to us all: to heal through expression, expulsion, and movement.

Rural Suffolk, 1759. As the country waits for Halley’s Comet, Sally Poppy is sentenced to hang for a heinous murder. When she claims to be pregnant, a jury of twelve matrons are taken from their housework to decide whether she’s telling the truth, or simply trying to escape the noose. With only midwife Lizzy Luke prepared to defend the girl, and a mob baying for blood outside, the matrons wrestle with their new authority, and the devil in their midst.

Trained in classical piano and Marxism and raised on jazz, gospel, pop, hip hop, and Black revolutionary politics, Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa Davis’s plays are marked by her stunning intimacy with the praxis of music alongside radical change. In Angela's Mixtape, time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift—for us, of course, and for Davis’s aunt, activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis reads Das Kapital and learns to drive stick and hack her own way toward inheriting her legacy. In The History of Light, Davis counterpoints the intertwining fates of two couples under racialized pressures a generation apart. Lush with the sound of the grand piano, The History of Light is a study in black and white, love and alienation. Underlying the political clarity and formal virtuosity of Davis’s writing are the unexpected crackles of a voice warming up, the crunchiness of missed notes. Because for an artist concerned, like Davis, with how we become who we are and might be, error is a necessary instrument—maybe the sounding weight.

Jenny and Sam—and their baby Phoebe—have recently moved into their new home. But something feels frightening and wrong. Very wrong. Over the baby monitor, at 2:22 every night, Jenny hears footsteps around her daughter's cot. Could the house be haunted?

When their friends Lauren and Ben come round for a housewarming dinner, they drink wine, relive their pasts, and argue about the existence of ghosts. They decide to stay up until 2:22, to discover the truth. Over one adrenaline-filled night—as the foxes scream outside—secrets will emerge and ghosts may appear…

Spine-chilling, funny and scary, Danny Robins' play 2:22 premiered at the Noël Coward Theatre in London's West End in August 2021, directed by Matthew Dunster, and starring Lily Allen, Julia Chan, Hadley Fraser and Jake Wood. It provides rich opportunities for any drama group wanting to make things go bump in the night—and their audiences scream.

Tessa is a young, brilliant barrister. She has worked her way up from working-class origins to the top of her game: defending, cross-examining and winning. But an unexpected event forces her to confront the patriarchal power of the law, where the burden of proof and morality diverge.

Prima Facie by Suzie Miller is an award-winning play for a solo actor, taking us deep into a world where emotion and integrity are in conflict with the rules of the game. After several acclaimed productions in Australia and winning the Australian Writers' Guild Award for Drama, the play received its European premiere at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End in April 2022. It was produced by Empire Street Productions, directed by Justin Martin, and starred Jodie Comer, the Emmy and Bafta Award-winning star of TV's Killing Eve, making her West End debut.

A poetic, heartbreaking story of intergenerational queer history in Lebanon, The Green Line weaves together civil war Beirut with a contemporary nightclub, following one family’s journey to discover their past.

In the present day, Rami, a twentysomething queer Lebanese Canadian, has returned to the Lebanese mountains to bury his father. To cope with the weight of his grief, Rami, carrying a necklace in the shape of a phoenix left to him by his father, finds himself in a queer Beirut nightclub, where he catches the attention of a powerful drag queen named Fifi, who just so happens to be dressed as a phoenix.

In 1978, in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War, Naseeb is attempting to get himself and his sister Mona out of Beirut and into the safety of the mountains. Mona, however, is secretly in love with her classmate, a woman named Yara, and refuses to leave the city. When Naseeb becomes swept up with the descending political culture of the war around him, he creates a rift between himself and Mona greater than the line that divides the country itself.

It’s Carlos and Marta’s twelfth wedding anniversary, yet while Marta yearns to tango, Carlos insists on the comfort of routine. As their story unfolds through a mosaic of memories, we see what began as a blissful courtship quickly descend into a pas de deux of possession, control, and resentment orchestrated by Carlos. But like a dancer ensnared in an unyielding abrazo, Marta must battle with herself to finally break free.

A story about many women told by many voices, Happy Anniversary is an unflinching portrayal of the insidious violence that can infiltrate relationships disguised as love. It sheds light on the silent battles waged at home, giving voice to the countless women who endure the painful dance of domestic abuse.

The story of a new style of art—and a new way of life—in postwar America: confessionalism.

What do midcentury “confessional” poets have in common with today’s reality TV stars? They share an inexplicable urge to make their lives an open book, and also a sense that this book can never be finished. Christopher Grobe argues that, in postwar America, artists like these forged a new way of being in the world. Identity became a kind of work—always ongoing, never complete—to be performed on the public stage.

The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and ’60s, performance art in the ’70s, theater in the ’80s, television in the ’90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed—with, around, and against the text of their lives.

A blend of cultural history, literary criticism, and performance theory, The Art of Confession explores iconic works of art and draws surprising connections among artists who may seem far apart, but who were influenced directly by one another. Studying extraordinary art alongside ordinary experiences of self-betrayal and -revelation, Christopher Grobe argues that a tradition of “confessional performance” unites poets with comedians, performance artists with social media users, reality TV stars with actors—and all of them with us. There is art, this book shows, in our most artless acts.

Argues that popular films perform a religious function in our culture

The first edition of Film as Religion was one of the first texts to develop a framework for the analysis of the religious function of films for audiences. Like more formal religious institutions, films can provide us with ways to view the world and the values to confront it. Lyden argues that the cultural influence of films is analogous to that of religions, so that films can be understood as representing a “religious” worldview in their own right.

Thoroughly updating his examples, Lyden examines a range of film genres and individual films, from The Godfather to The Hunger Games to Frozen, to show how film can function religiously.

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and music. This volume reveals another aspect of the work of this remarkable polymath, a pioneering analysis of the psychological underpinnings of what we now call the Radical Right and its use of the media to propagate its political and religious agenda.

The now-forgotten Martin Luther Thomas was an American fascist-style demagogue of the Christian right on the radio in the 1930s. During these years, Adorno was living in the United States and working with Paul Lazarsfeld on the social significance of radio. This book, Adorno’s penetrating analysis of Thomas’s rhetorical appeal and manipulative techniques, was written in English and is one of Adorno’s most accessible works. It is in four parts: “The Personal Element: Self-Characterization of the Agitator,” “Thomas’ Methods,” “The Religious Medium,”and “Ideological Bait.” The importance of the study is manifold: it includes a theory of fascism and anti-semitism, it provides a methodology for the cultural study of popular culture, and it offers broad reflections on comparative political life in America and Europe.

Implicit in the book is an innovative idea about the relation between psychological and sociological reality. Moreover, the study is germane to the contemporary reality of political and religious radio in the United States because it provides an analysis of rhetorical techniques that exploit potentials of psychological regression for authoritarian aims.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.