Re-imagining Greek tragedy on the American stage / Helene P. Foley.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-361) and index.

Greek tragedy finds an American audience -- Setting the stage -- American theater makes Greek tragedy its own -- Making total theater in America: choreography and music -- Hellenic influences on the development of American modern dance -- American Gesamtkunste Werke -- Musical theater -- Visual choreography in Robert Wilson's Alcestis -- Democratizing Greek tragedy -- Antigone and politics in the nineteenth century: the Boston 1890 Antigone -- Performance groups in the 1960s-1970s: Brecht's Antigone by the living theatre -- The 1980s and beyond: Peter Sellars' Persians, Ajax and the Children of Heracles compared with other versions of Persians and Ajax -- Aeschylus' Prometheus bound in the U.S.: from the threat of apocalypse to communal reconciliation -- Re-envisioning the hero: American Oedipus -- Oedipus as scapegoat -- Plagues -- Theban cycles -- Decemberonstructing fatality -- Abandonment -- Re-imagining Medea as American other -- Setting the stage: nineteenth century Medea -- Medea as social critic from the mid-1930s-the late 1940s -- Medea as ethnic other from the 1970s-the present -- Medea's divided self: drag and cross dressed performances.

This book explores the emergence of Greek tragedy on the American stage from the nineteenth century to the present. Despite the gap separating the world of classical Greece from our own, Greek tragedy has provided a fertile source for some of the most innovative American theater. Helene P. Foley shows how plays like Oedipus Rex and Medea have resonated deeply with contemporary concerns and controversies-over war, slavery, race, the status of women, religion, identity, and immigration. Although Greek tragedy was often initially embraced for its melodramatic possibilities, by the twentieth centu.

English.

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