Disability Theatre and Modern Drama Recasting Modernism

Brecht's silent Kattrin or the disability performance lessons of his Peachum; Tennessee Williams' limping Laura Wingfield; Samuel Beckett's blind Hamm and his legless parents - all attest to disability's critical place in modern drama. Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism explores how disability performance studies and disability theatre practice seek to provoke new debate about the place of disability in these works. The book traces the local and international processes and tensions at play in disability theatre, and offers a critical investigation of the challenges disability theatre aesthetics pose to mainstream and traditional practice and critique.

The book's first part surveys disability theatre's primary principles, critical terms, internal debates and key challenges to mainstream theatre practice. Exploring specific disability theatre productions of modern drama, it also suggests how disability has been re-imagined and embodied on stage. In the book's second part, leading disability studies scholars and disability theatre practitioners analyse and creatively re-imagine modern drama, demonstrating how disability aesthetics press practitioners and scholars to rethink these works in provocative ways.

Introduction
Part I: Critical Survey of Disability Theatre Aesthetics, Politics and Practices
1: What is Disability Theatre?
2: Critical Embodiment and Casting
3: Staging Inclusion
4: Inherited Plays and New Approaches
Part II: Critical Perspectives
5: "'Every Man his Specialty': Beckett, Disability, and Dependence” by Michael Davidson (University of California, San Diego, USA)
6: “Reclaiming the Ordinary Extraordinary Body: Or, The Importance of The Glass Menagerie for Literary Disability Studies” by Ann Fox (Davidson College, USA)
7: “Re-imagining Modern Drama: the Work of Lynn Manning” by Carrie Sandahl (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA)
8: “Access Aesthetics and Modern Drama: An Interview with Jenny Sealey on Graeae Theatre's Threepenny Opera and Blood Wedding”
9: “Shattering The Glass Menagerie” by Terry Galloway, Shane Grant, Ben Gunter and Carrie Sandahl (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA).
Endnotes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

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