Gruesome Playground Injuries Animals Out Of Paper Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo

Rajiv Joseph is one of today’s most acclaimed young playwrights. The winner of numerous awards, including an NEA Award for Best Play and a Whiting Writers Award, he is an artist to watch. This volume gathers together for the first time his three major works to date. Included herein are his latest play, Gruesome Playground Injuries, which charts the intersection of two lives using scars, wounds, and calamity as the mile markers to explore why people hurt themselves to gain another’s love and the cumulative effect of such damage; Animals Out of Paper, a subtle, elegant, yet bracing examination of the artistic impulse and those in its thrall, which follows a world-famous origamist as she becomes the unwitting mentor to a troubled young prodigy, even as she must deal with her own loss of inspiration; and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a darkly comedic drama that looks on as the lives of two American soldiers, an Iraqi translator, and a tiger intersect on the streets of Baghdad.

THE STORY: Over the course of 30 years, the lives of Kayleen and Doug intersect at the most bizarre intervals, leading the two childhood friends to compare scars and the physical calamities that keep drawing them together.

"A singular astonishment." —John Lahr, The New Yorker One relationship. Infinite possibilities. In the beginning Marianne and Roland meet at a party. They go for a drink, or perhaps they don't. They fall madly in love and start dating, but eventually they break up. After a chance encounter in a supermarket they get back together, or maybe they run into each other and Marianne reveals that she's now engaged to someone else and that's that. Or perhaps Roland is engaged. Maybe they get married, or maybe their time together will be tragically short. Nick Payne's Constellations is a play about free will and friendship; it's also about quantum multiverse theory, love, and honey.

Performing Animality provides theoretical and creative interventions into the presence of the animal and ideas of animality in performance. Animals have always played a part in human performance practices. Maintaining a crucial role in many communities' cultural traditions, animal-human encounters have been key in the development of performance. Similarly, performance including both living animals and/or representations of animals provides the context for encounters in which issues of power, human subjectivity and otherness are explored. Crucially, however, the inclusion of animals in performance also offers an opportunity to investigate ethical and moral assumptions about human and non-human animals. This book offers a historical and theoretical exploration of animal presence in performance by looking at the concept of animality and how it has developed in theatre and performance practices from the eighteenth century to today. Furthermore, it points to shifts in political, cultural, and ethical animal-human relations emerging within the context of animality and performance.

This collection was written by educators who are engaging in multi- and interdisciplinary education and are led by curiosities encompassing the collaborative nature of cognitive and kinesthetic engagement and awareness. The chapters are designed as sources for inspiration, replication, and adaptation. They are a place to start or continue. Each chapter, in varying modalities, addresses interdisciplinary course development and implementation in institutions of higher education. The common themes that emerge in the collection include navigating administrative systems and solving the challenges encountered when crossing departments or colleges, whether it be regarding listing of courses or the intricacies of course load on each professor. Many chapters also provide detailed information on the nuts and bolts of the specific course or courses taught, including syllabi, lesson examples, and both formal and informal assessments implemented. Multiple case studies are included in this collection, with many chapters providing specific examples of students’ work. Contributors candidly offer discussions of failures and successes of their interdisciplinary collaborations, be it in course design, lesson planning or complications brought in by unforeseen pandemics. Most chapters end with a section entitled ‘Lessons learned’, where experiences from the field provide opportunities for growth and continued exploration. Readers can follow the book from cover to cover or dip in, finding the chapters that serve a particular project or teaching endeavour. The varying writing styles and topics are in direct relationship with the exact nature of the inspiration for this text. The over-arching themes of collaboration (diverse backgrounds, ideas, and skill sets, multidisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity) are the consistent touchstones that create a thematic self-guided journey of exploration through the book. The chapters offer readers guidance and encouragement to implement some of the approaches described, and inspiration to forge their own paths in the world of multi- and interdisciplinary teaching and research. The depth and breadth of collaborative possibilities are exciting, and the editors’ goal is to spark further experimentation. An excellent and practical resource for any educator hoping to teach his or her subject matter through an interdisciplinary approach and for all courses revolving around topics of pedagogy. The key audience will be graduate students, and teachers in all stages of education from primary to higher education.

This Companion surveys Asian American literature from the nineteenth century to the present day.

What is a suitable genre to describe the post-9/11 era mired in wars, violence, and unspeakable horror? What kind of literary expressions and techniques are appropriate to give voice to the prevalence of global anguish in the post-9/11 scenario? Is the Theatre of the Absurd a viable option for the expression of the incongruity of the unspeakable horror unleashed after 9/11? Is the term ‘absurd’ applicable to this era? If yes, in what terms is this applicable? This book tries to find answers to these questions and many more. It reflects on the epistemological shifts in the avant-garde tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd, its ongoing critical currency in contemporary history, and its changing contours in the post-9/11 plays of Rajiv Joseph, an emerging American dramatist. It establishes the continued relevance of the Theatre of the Absurd at the current juncture of human history.

Bringing together some of the best work from the 2016 Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore, this collection of essays presents the latest research in comparative drama, performance and dramatic textual analysis. A variety of approaches and formats—including twelve research papers, five book reviews and one transcript—cover topics ranging from Ancient Greece to 21st century America. A highlight is the keynote conversation featuring the great American playwright Tony Kushner.