Selected for their political relevance to American life as well as their dramatic success, 11 plays, written over the past 80 years, comment on the "American Century." The plays were also selected for comparative purposes, so that works stemming from journalism or those dealing with issues such as race, gender, and ideology could be examined together. Works by Jon Robin Baitz, LeRoi Jones, Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Tony Kushner, Shirley Lauro, Emily Mann, Clifford Odets, and Marc Wolf are included. An inclusion that might be of particular interest is And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens... , a previously unpublished play by Tennessee Williams. Each play is prefaced with an explanatory introduction. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
(Applause Books). Warning: The plays of Political Stages do not make for a quiet evening of theatre. These are the plays which got audiences out of their seats, and sometimes out into the streets. Their words and ideas rumbled ominously down the marble hallways of legislatures and challenged, even threatened, and often changed, the thinking of millions. These are the plays which either lit or reflected the fires of those political controversies which blazed across the American Twentieth Century. Individually, each is a molotov cocktail tossed onto the stage, each a political movement encapsulated in dramatic form. Combined, they constitute both a conflagration and a record of American political and theatrical ideology. Never before, however, have they been collected in one explosive volume. In Political Stages, they have at last been preserved, ever ready to serve at the barricades of subsequent eras. Includes works by Tennessee Williams, Emily Mann, Clifford Odets, Langston Hughes, and others.
