Selected Operas And Plays

"When I see a thing it is not a play for me, but when I write something that somebody else can see then it is a play for me." —Gertrude Stein In the more than seventy-five plats Gertrude Stein wrote between 1913 and 1946, she envisioned a new dramaturgy, beginning with her pictorial conception of a play as a landscape. She drew into her plays the daily flow of life around her—including the natural world—and turned cities, villages, parts of the dramatic structure, and even her own friends into characters. She made punctuation and typography part of her compositional style and chose words for their joyful impact as sound andwordplay. For Strin, the writing process itself was always important in delevoping the "continuous present" at the heart of her work. Long out of print, Last Opera and Plays again makes available many of Stein's most important and most-produced works. As a special feature, it also included her thought-provoking essay "Plays," in which she reflects on the experience in the theater of seeing and hearing, and on emotion and time. "Now nearly a half century after her deathe," writes Bonnie Marranca in her introduction, "it is indisputable that Gertrude Stein is the great American modernist mind. No American author has been more influential for more generations of artists in the worlds of theater, dance, music, poetry, painting, and fiction."

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Eugene O'Neill - Clifford Odets - Left-wing theatre - Black drama - Thornton Wilder - Lillian Hellman - Luigi Pirandello - Arthur Miller.

Data gleaned from the 1982, 1985, and 1992 Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPAs) were used in this analysis of participation in opera and musical theater/operetta. Findings indicate that opera is the least popular of the fine arts, being the least frequented and the least selected as an activity respondents would like to attend more frequently. Opera attendees are more likely than other arts' attendee groups to attend all other fine arts activities, and show a significant interest in more types of music than any other arts attendee group. There is a strong relationship between early general arts education and adult opera attendance. Opera attendees are predominantly white, better educated, wealthier, and somewhat older than other art goers, but younger persons are attending in about the same proportions in 1992 as in 1982. More persons watch or listen to opera on the media than attend live performances. Findings of musical theater/operetta participation indicates that attendance of these forms of theater is second to attendance of art museums. Musical theater/operettas' primary appeal is live performance. Many more individuals indicated that they would attend musical theater performances if cost and accessibility were not issues. The report includes tables and appendices. (MM)