UW Drama Library Featured Books: Featured Books

Context, Synecdoche, Homonym, and Polyseme live in a house laden with clutter, but Etymology keeps bringing new deliveries for Context: a blank book, a conversation with the dentist, a key. Homonym and Polyseme sort and rearrange; they send what they can to the cloud (via helium balloon); occasionally they smuggle out old things, lost for years, and new things they know Context will never need. Synecdoche tries to hold it all together and sings. Meanwhile, Context wonders whether listening is work--if it is labor, if it matters, and if what matters (if it matters) can be retrieved from the ever-accumulating material of living. meronymy is a kaleidoscopic, audiovisual performance-portrait of the technologies, ancient and modern, by which we cling to what we might otherwise forget. With wry tenderness and formal dexterity, Jendrzejewski builds a space in which to reckon with memory, loss, intrusion, and overflow amidst the cacophonic practice of living in language together.

Available to readers for the first time, Aimé Césaire's three-act drama . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent--written during the Vichy regime in Martinique in 1943 and lost until 2008--dramatizes the Haitian Revolution and the rise and fall of Toussaint Louverture as its heroic leader. This bilingual English and French edition stands apart from Césaire's more widely known 1946 closet drama. Following the slave revolts that sparked the revolution, Louverture arrives as both prophet and poet, general and visionary. With striking dramatic technique, Césaire retells the revolution in poignant encounters between rebels and colonial forces, guided by a prophetic chorus and Louverture's steady ethical and political vision. In the last act, we reach the hero's betrayal, his imprisonment, and his last stand against the lures of compromise. Césaire's masterwork is a strikingly beautiful and brutal indictment of colonial cruelty and an unabashed celebration of Black rebellion and victory.

To an unusual degree among writers, playwrights' creations are not simply words on a page. Instead, a well-wrought play is an intricate machine that will be used by directors, actors, designers, and other creators to bring a fully staged, real-time performance into the world. The construction and maintenance of that machine is the playwright's job, and it requires an array of complex, interconnected skills and techniques. Enter Justin Maxwell and The Playwright's Toolbox, a stimulating and wide-ranging resource for both beginning and experienced dramatists. It brings together invigorating, provocative, and irreverent exercises contributed by nearly 60 leading English-language playwrights, covering all stages of the writing process. It offers an accessible roadmap for those who have never written a play before, while providing new angles and solutions for seasoned writers struggling with a particular challenge. Covered here is everything from generating ideas and world-building, through dialogue and plotting, to revision and the last steps before releasing a play into the world, making this an endlessly useful guide to building better plays.

 

A feast for the senses, this book brings fashion to life through touch, smell, sight, and sound What happens when a garment is preserved in a museum's archive and can no longer be worn? What do we lose when we protect fashion for study by future generations but relegate the movement of the fabrics, the feel of the stitching, and the sound of the skirts in motion to memory alone? Sleeping Beauties draws on primary research, conservation studies, and new technologies to reactivate designs in a museum's collection that must forever remain in a state of suspended animation. This immersive book uses a unique interactive design to convey the scents, sounds, textures, and motions of garments that can no longer directly interact with the body. Presenting creative interventions that enhance our sensory experience of each object, the magisterial publication features texts by fashion experts, conservators, and contemporary creators to provide further context for fashion connoisseurship. Reconnecting readers with exquisite designs from the 1600s to the present, this remarkable fashion history is vibrant, dynamic, and full of life.