Author: David Tucker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474240186
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
Beckett's relationship with British theatre is complex and underexplored, yet his impact has been immense. Uniquely placing performance history at the centre of its analysis, this volume examines Samuel Beckett's drama as it has been staged in Great Britain, bringing to light a wide range of untold histories and in turn illuminating six decades of drama in Britain. Ranging from studies of the first English tour of Waiting for Godot in 1955 to Talawa's 2012 all-black co-production of the same play, Staging Samuel Beckett in Great Britain excavates a host of archival resources in order to historicize how Beckett's drama has interacted with specific theatres, directors and theatre cultures in the UK. It traces production histories of plays such as Krapp's Last Tape; presents Beckett's working relationships with the Royal Court, Riverside and West Yorkshire Playhouse, as well as with directors such as Peter Hall; looks at the history of Beckett's drama in Scotland and how the plays have been staged in London's West End. Production analyses are mapped onto political, economic and cultural contexts of Great Britain so that Beckett's drama resonates in new ways, through theatre practice, against the complex contexts of Great Britain's regions. With contributions from experts in the fields of both Beckett studies and UK drama, including S.E. Gontarski, David Pattie, Mark Taylor-Batty and Sos Eltis, the volume offers an exceptional and unique understanding of Beckett's reception on the UK stage and the impact of his drama within UK theatre practices. Together with its sister volume, Staging Samuel Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland it will prove a terrific resource for students, scholars and theatre practitioners.
Staging Beckett in Great Britain
Author: David Tucker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474240186
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
Beckett's relationship with British theatre is complex and underexplored, yet his impact has been immense. Uniquely placing performance history at the centre of its analysis, this volume examines Samuel Beckett's drama as it has been staged in Great Britain, bringing to light a wide range of untold histories and in turn illuminating six decades of drama in Britain. Ranging from studies of the first English tour of Waiting for Godot in 1955 to Talawa's 2012 all-black co-production of the same play, Staging Samuel Beckett in Great Britain excavates a host of archival resources in order to historicize how Beckett's drama has interacted with specific theatres, directors and theatre cultures in the UK. It traces production histories of plays such as Krapp's Last Tape; presents Beckett's working relationships with the Royal Court, Riverside and West Yorkshire Playhouse, as well as with directors such as Peter Hall; looks at the history of Beckett's drama in Scotland and how the plays have been staged in London's West End. Production analyses are mapped onto political, economic and cultural contexts of Great Britain so that Beckett's drama resonates in new ways, through theatre practice, against the complex contexts of Great Britain's regions. With contributions from experts in the fields of both Beckett studies and UK drama, including S.E. Gontarski, David Pattie, Mark Taylor-Batty and Sos Eltis, the volume offers an exceptional and unique understanding of Beckett's reception on the UK stage and the impact of his drama within UK theatre practices. Together with its sister volume, Staging Samuel Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland it will prove a terrific resource for students, scholars and theatre practitioners.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474240186
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
Beckett's relationship with British theatre is complex and underexplored, yet his impact has been immense. Uniquely placing performance history at the centre of its analysis, this volume examines Samuel Beckett's drama as it has been staged in Great Britain, bringing to light a wide range of untold histories and in turn illuminating six decades of drama in Britain. Ranging from studies of the first English tour of Waiting for Godot in 1955 to Talawa's 2012 all-black co-production of the same play, Staging Samuel Beckett in Great Britain excavates a host of archival resources in order to historicize how Beckett's drama has interacted with specific theatres, directors and theatre cultures in the UK. It traces production histories of plays such as Krapp's Last Tape; presents Beckett's working relationships with the Royal Court, Riverside and West Yorkshire Playhouse, as well as with directors such as Peter Hall; looks at the history of Beckett's drama in Scotland and how the plays have been staged in London's West End. Production analyses are mapped onto political, economic and cultural contexts of Great Britain so that Beckett's drama resonates in new ways, through theatre practice, against the complex contexts of Great Britain's regions. With contributions from experts in the fields of both Beckett studies and UK drama, including S.E. Gontarski, David Pattie, Mark Taylor-Batty and Sos Eltis, the volume offers an exceptional and unique understanding of Beckett's reception on the UK stage and the impact of his drama within UK theatre practices. Together with its sister volume, Staging Samuel Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland it will prove a terrific resource for students, scholars and theatre practitioners.
Staging Beckett in Great Britain
Author: David Tucker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474240194
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Book Description
Beckett's relationship with British theatre is complex and underexplored, yet his impact has been immense. Uniquely placing performance history at the centre of its analysis, this volume examines Samuel Beckett's drama as it has been staged in Great Britain, bringing to light a wide range of untold histories and in turn illuminating six decades of drama in Britain. Ranging from studies of the first English tour of Waiting for Godot in 1955 to Talawa's 2012 all-black co-production of the same play, Staging Samuel Beckett in Great Britain excavates a host of archival resources in order to historicize how Beckett's drama has interacted with specific theatres, directors and theatre cultures in the UK. It traces production histories of plays such as Krapp's Last Tape; presents Beckett's working relationships with the Royal Court, Riverside and West Yorkshire Playhouse, as well as with directors such as Peter Hall; looks at the history of Beckett's drama in Scotland and how the plays have been staged in London's West End. Production analyses are mapped onto political, economic and cultural contexts of Great Britain so that Beckett's drama resonates in new ways, through theatre practice, against the complex contexts of Great Britain's regions. With contributions from experts in the fields of both Beckett studies and UK drama, including S.E. Gontarski, David Pattie, Mark Taylor-Batty and Sos Eltis, the volume offers an exceptional and unique understanding of Beckett's reception on the UK stage and the impact of his drama within UK theatre practices. Together with its sister volume, Staging Samuel Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland it will prove a terrific resource for students, scholars and theatre practitioners.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474240194
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Book Description
Beckett's relationship with British theatre is complex and underexplored, yet his impact has been immense. Uniquely placing performance history at the centre of its analysis, this volume examines Samuel Beckett's drama as it has been staged in Great Britain, bringing to light a wide range of untold histories and in turn illuminating six decades of drama in Britain. Ranging from studies of the first English tour of Waiting for Godot in 1955 to Talawa's 2012 all-black co-production of the same play, Staging Samuel Beckett in Great Britain excavates a host of archival resources in order to historicize how Beckett's drama has interacted with specific theatres, directors and theatre cultures in the UK. It traces production histories of plays such as Krapp's Last Tape; presents Beckett's working relationships with the Royal Court, Riverside and West Yorkshire Playhouse, as well as with directors such as Peter Hall; looks at the history of Beckett's drama in Scotland and how the plays have been staged in London's West End. Production analyses are mapped onto political, economic and cultural contexts of Great Britain so that Beckett's drama resonates in new ways, through theatre practice, against the complex contexts of Great Britain's regions. With contributions from experts in the fields of both Beckett studies and UK drama, including S.E. Gontarski, David Pattie, Mark Taylor-Batty and Sos Eltis, the volume offers an exceptional and unique understanding of Beckett's reception on the UK stage and the impact of his drama within UK theatre practices. Together with its sister volume, Staging Samuel Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland it will prove a terrific resource for students, scholars and theatre practitioners.
Beckett's afterlives
Author: Jonathan Bignell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526153785
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s work across the world following the author’s death in 1989, Beckett’s afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts of adaptation, remediation and appropriation to reflect on Beckett’s own evolving approach to crossing genre boundaries and to analyse the ways in which contemporary artists across different media and diverse cultural contexts – including the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America – continue to engage with Beckett. The book offers fresh insights into how his work has kept inspiring both practitioners and audiences in the twenty-first century, operating through methodologies and approaches that aim to facilitate and establish the study of modern-day adaptations, not just of Beckett but other (multimedia) authors as well.
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526153785
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s work across the world following the author’s death in 1989, Beckett’s afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts of adaptation, remediation and appropriation to reflect on Beckett’s own evolving approach to crossing genre boundaries and to analyse the ways in which contemporary artists across different media and diverse cultural contexts – including the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America – continue to engage with Beckett. The book offers fresh insights into how his work has kept inspiring both practitioners and audiences in the twenty-first century, operating through methodologies and approaches that aim to facilitate and establish the study of modern-day adaptations, not just of Beckett but other (multimedia) authors as well.
Shakespeare and Beckett
Author: Claudia Olk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009084844
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
'The danger is in the neatness of identifications', Samuel Beckett famously stated, and, at first glance, no two authors could be further distant from one another than William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. This book addresses the vast intertextual network between the works of both writers and explores the resonant correspondences between them. It analyses where and how these resonances manifest themselves in their aesthetics, theatre, language and form. It traces convergences and inversions across both œuvres that resound beyond their conditions of production and possibility. Uncovering hitherto unexplored relations between the texts of an early modern and a late modern author, this study seeks to offer fresh readings of single passages and entire works, but it will also describe productive tensions and creative incongruences between them.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009084844
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
'The danger is in the neatness of identifications', Samuel Beckett famously stated, and, at first glance, no two authors could be further distant from one another than William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. This book addresses the vast intertextual network between the works of both writers and explores the resonant correspondences between them. It analyses where and how these resonances manifest themselves in their aesthetics, theatre, language and form. It traces convergences and inversions across both œuvres that resound beyond their conditions of production and possibility. Uncovering hitherto unexplored relations between the texts of an early modern and a late modern author, this study seeks to offer fresh readings of single passages and entire works, but it will also describe productive tensions and creative incongruences between them.
Beckett Matters
Author: S.E. Gontarski
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474414427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
Representing a profound engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett, this volume gathers the very best of Stan Gontarski's Beckett criticism on practical, theoretical and critical levels. Such a range suggests a multiplicity of approaches to a body of work itself multiple, produced by an artist who underwent any number of transformations and reinventions over his long writing career.a Many of the essays collected here explore Beckett's debt to his age, Beckett very much a product of a culture in transition, which change he would help foster. But much of Beckett's creative struggle was to find a new way, his own way.a Most of the essays that comprise this volume detail that struggle, toward a way we now call Beckettian.
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474414427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
Representing a profound engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett, this volume gathers the very best of Stan Gontarski's Beckett criticism on practical, theoretical and critical levels. Such a range suggests a multiplicity of approaches to a body of work itself multiple, produced by an artist who underwent any number of transformations and reinventions over his long writing career.a Many of the essays collected here explore Beckett's debt to his age, Beckett very much a product of a culture in transition, which change he would help foster. But much of Beckett's creative struggle was to find a new way, his own way.a Most of the essays that comprise this volume detail that struggle, toward a way we now call Beckettian.
Revisioning Beckett
Author: S. E. Gontarski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501337653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
Revisioning Beckett reassesses Beckett's career and literary output, particularly his engagement with what might be called decadent modernism. Gontarski approaches Beckett from multiple viewpoints: from his running afoul of the Irish Censorship of Publications Acts in the 1930s through the 1950s, his preoccupations to “find literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography,” his battles with the Lord Chamberlain in the mid-1950s over London stagings of his first two plays, and his close professional and personal associations with publishers who celebrated the work of the demimonde. Much of that term encompasses an opening to the fullness of human experience denied in previous centuries, and much of that has been sexual or decadent. As Gontarski shows, the aesthetics that emerges from such early career encounters and associations continues to inform Beckett's work and develops into experimental modes that upend literary models and middle-class values, an aesthetics that, furthermore, has inspired any number of visual artists to re-vision Beckett.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501337653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
Revisioning Beckett reassesses Beckett's career and literary output, particularly his engagement with what might be called decadent modernism. Gontarski approaches Beckett from multiple viewpoints: from his running afoul of the Irish Censorship of Publications Acts in the 1930s through the 1950s, his preoccupations to “find literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography,” his battles with the Lord Chamberlain in the mid-1950s over London stagings of his first two plays, and his close professional and personal associations with publishers who celebrated the work of the demimonde. Much of that term encompasses an opening to the fullness of human experience denied in previous centuries, and much of that has been sexual or decadent. As Gontarski shows, the aesthetics that emerges from such early career encounters and associations continues to inform Beckett's work and develops into experimental modes that upend literary models and middle-class values, an aesthetics that, furthermore, has inspired any number of visual artists to re-vision Beckett.
Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism
Author: Nick Wolterman
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031056507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Book Description
Samuel Beckett’s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides. Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett’s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism’s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett’s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars. For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett’s artistic ambitions—his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play—as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031056507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Book Description
Samuel Beckett’s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides. Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett’s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism’s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett’s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars. For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett’s artistic ambitions—his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play—as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.
Beckett's Creatures
Author: Joseph Anderton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474234550
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme – testimony, power, humour and survival – to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474234550
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme – testimony, power, humour and survival – to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.
Good Nights Out
Author: Aleks Sierz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350046221
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
London's West End is a global success story, staging phenomenal hit shows that have delighted millions of spectators and generated billions of pounds in revenue. In Good Nights Out, Aleks Sierz provides a thematic survey of such popular theatre shows that were enormous commercial successes over the past 75 years. He argues that these outstanding hits have a lot to say about the collective cultural, social and political attitudes and aspirations of the country, and about how our national identity - and theatre's role in creating it - has evolved over the decades. The book spans a range of work from almost forgotten plays, such as R. F. Delderfield's Worm's Eye View and Hugh Hastings's Seagulls Over Sorrento, to well-known mega-hits, such as The Mousetrap and The Phantom of the Opera. Such popular work has tended to be undervalued by some critics and commentators mainly because it has not been thought to be a suitable subject for inclusion in the canon of English Literature. By contrast, Sierz demonstrates that genres such as the British musical, light comedy, sex farce or murder mystery are worth appreciating not only for their intrinsic theatrical qualities, but also as examples of the dream life of the British people. The book challenges the idea that mega-hits are merely escapist entertainments and instead shows how they contribute to the creation of powerful myths about our national life. The analysis of such shows also points towards the possibility of creating an alternative history of postwar British theatre.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350046221
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
London's West End is a global success story, staging phenomenal hit shows that have delighted millions of spectators and generated billions of pounds in revenue. In Good Nights Out, Aleks Sierz provides a thematic survey of such popular theatre shows that were enormous commercial successes over the past 75 years. He argues that these outstanding hits have a lot to say about the collective cultural, social and political attitudes and aspirations of the country, and about how our national identity - and theatre's role in creating it - has evolved over the decades. The book spans a range of work from almost forgotten plays, such as R. F. Delderfield's Worm's Eye View and Hugh Hastings's Seagulls Over Sorrento, to well-known mega-hits, such as The Mousetrap and The Phantom of the Opera. Such popular work has tended to be undervalued by some critics and commentators mainly because it has not been thought to be a suitable subject for inclusion in the canon of English Literature. By contrast, Sierz demonstrates that genres such as the British musical, light comedy, sex farce or murder mystery are worth appreciating not only for their intrinsic theatrical qualities, but also as examples of the dream life of the British people. The book challenges the idea that mega-hits are merely escapist entertainments and instead shows how they contribute to the creation of powerful myths about our national life. The analysis of such shows also points towards the possibility of creating an alternative history of postwar British theatre.
Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett
Author: Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538928
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 397
Book Description
Evolutionary theory made its stage debut as early as the 1840s, reflecting a scientific advancement that was fast changing the world. Tracing this development in dozens of mainstream European and American plays, as well as in circus, vaudeville, pantomime, and "missing link" performances, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett reveals the deep, transformative entanglement among science, art, and culture in modern times. The stage proved to be no mere handmaiden to evolutionary science, though, often resisting and altering the ideas at its core. Many dramatists cast suspicion on the arguments of evolutionary theory and rejected its claims, even as they entertained its thrilling possibilities. Engaging directly with the relation of science and culture, this book considers the influence of not only Darwin but also Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, Wallace, Haeckel, de Vries, and other evolutionists on 150 years of theater. It shares significant new insights into the work of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilder, and Beckett, and writes female playwrights, such as Susan Glaspell and Elizabeth Baker, into the theatrical record, unpacking their dramatic explorations of biological determinism, gender essentialism, the maternal instinct, and the "cult of motherhood." It is likely that more people encountered evolution at the theater than through any other art form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Considering the liveliness and immediacy of the theater and its reliance on a diverse community of spectators and the power that entails, this book is a key text for grasping the extent of the public's adaptation to the new theory and the legacy of its representation on the perceived legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of scientific work.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538928
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 397
Book Description
Evolutionary theory made its stage debut as early as the 1840s, reflecting a scientific advancement that was fast changing the world. Tracing this development in dozens of mainstream European and American plays, as well as in circus, vaudeville, pantomime, and "missing link" performances, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett reveals the deep, transformative entanglement among science, art, and culture in modern times. The stage proved to be no mere handmaiden to evolutionary science, though, often resisting and altering the ideas at its core. Many dramatists cast suspicion on the arguments of evolutionary theory and rejected its claims, even as they entertained its thrilling possibilities. Engaging directly with the relation of science and culture, this book considers the influence of not only Darwin but also Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, Wallace, Haeckel, de Vries, and other evolutionists on 150 years of theater. It shares significant new insights into the work of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilder, and Beckett, and writes female playwrights, such as Susan Glaspell and Elizabeth Baker, into the theatrical record, unpacking their dramatic explorations of biological determinism, gender essentialism, the maternal instinct, and the "cult of motherhood." It is likely that more people encountered evolution at the theater than through any other art form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Considering the liveliness and immediacy of the theater and its reliance on a diverse community of spectators and the power that entails, this book is a key text for grasping the extent of the public's adaptation to the new theory and the legacy of its representation on the perceived legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of scientific work.