*STARRED REVIEW Best known as a mega award-winning playwright, Sarah Ruhl (44 Poems for You, 2020) is also a MacArthur “Genius,” Yale professor, poet, and author. Her memoir is an utter gift – no superlatives are enough; no review can communicate its resonating efficacy. Just after Ruhl...
Theater producer/critic/playwright Warren Hoffman (The Passing Game) insists that audiences have been "duped" into believing that the Broadway musical "is the most innocent of art forms when, in fact, it is one of America's most powerful, influential, and even at times polemical arts precisely because...
This is not your parents' (or your grandparents') Asian American theater. That I can even say that is proof of massive progress. What a difference a few decades makes ...
Vollmann (Imperial; Europe Central), who has tackled an astonishing array of subjects in fiction and nonfiction, here explores female beauty – its creation and consumption– with a spotlight on highly stylized traditional Japanese Noh theater. Because male actors wearing strictly codified masks perform all Noh roles, men,...
You could build major muscles benching both volumes, but think of it as beefing up your theater knowledge way beyond New York’s Broadway (it ain’t called ‘The Great White Way’ for nothin’!). For both the theater...
Yes, it’s pricey, but if you ever wanted a one-stop primer on Asian American theater, this is definitely it. Besides, I – yes, me, yours truly, don’t be so surprised! – get a very sweet nod...
Awake and Singing: Six Great American Jewish Plays (new edition), edited and with an introduction by Ellen Schiff
Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays, edited by Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnick, foreword by Theodore Bikel
Ask the random person...
The detailed, illustrated chapters on Kabuki, Bunraku, Nō, Kyōgen, and contemporary theater (with even a theater listings guide), make me wish this book was around when I was...
The Philip Kan Gotanda Chronicles
He captured early-20th-century Hawai‘i with his bittersweet tale of thwarted love in Ballad of Yachiyo. He was the first playwright to ever dramatize life immediately after...
This is one of those perfectly sized, well-designed books that add that something extra to an already enlightening reading experience. Perhaps the most powerful section of Uyehara’s slim volume is...
