New Writing and Theatre History: Introduction to the Special Section
Sierz defines "new writing pure" as being "often difficult, sometimes intractable, but it usually has something urgent to say about Britain today," in a way that challenges both form and content.[...]says Sierz, it is work that "stages a struggle around the question, what ki...
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| Published in: | Theatre history studies 2017, Vol.36 (1), p.115-128 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Sierz defines "new writing pure" as being "often difficult, sometimes intractable, but it usually has something urgent to say about Britain today," in a way that challenges both form and content.[...]says Sierz, it is work that "stages a struggle around the question, what kind of England do we want?[...]new writing programs reflect interest in youthful revival and radical critique through the development of new voices and new modes of wonder.Articles in TDR and Theatre Topics by Douglas Anderson, Rick DesRochers, and David Eshelman provide scholarly documentation and analysis about the project of producing new plays, focusing on the material systems and ideological formations that support the pathways for those newly written plays.8 The reflection and lament of playwrights about the shape of careers within American theatre since the 1970s also provide sources about new writing theatres in the United States, as seen in Roberta Levitow's representative and summative piece from 2002 in an American Theatre magazine special section on "The Future of New Work"9 With those sources now joined now by Todd London, Ben Pesner, and Zannie Giraud Voss's Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play (2009), a major book following up on the results of a pioneering survey of playwrights and artistic staff and explicating financial and ideological aspects of new play production, a space for scholarship about new plays as a category has taken shape in US theatre.London's contribution to this special section reflects on the boom in new American playwriting from the 1960s to 2016.Because of his simultaneously insider/outsider status as an arts critic, artistic director of a playwright advocacy organization, and academic who is consistently engaged with supporting, analyzing, and documenting the work of playwrights and the role of new writing in US theatre, London's observations provide a fitting coda to the studies in this section, as discussed below. |
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| ISSN: | 0733-2033 2166-9953 2166-9953 |