Recently the author has been including in her undergraduate seminars Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre" (1758), the most provocative essay on the arts ever written. It is about the unintended effects of theater--which, for Rousseau, stands in for all of the arts--on an audience. The essay is an impassioned rebuttal to…

Endeavors to make students aware of similarities between today's movie culture and the theater of the 18th century; parallels between a traditional drama and a movie script; and Schiller's understanding of the sublime. (36 references) (Author/CK)

The (CBS Radio) Columbia Workshop, formed in 1936, encouraged the writing and production of creative, non-traditional radio drama such as Archibald MacLeish's verse play "The Fall of the City," which aired on April 11, 1937. MacLeish considered radio the ideal medium for poetry because it offers only aural stimuli without competition…

The novel "The Women's Room," by Marilyn French, deserves an audience both because of the timely feminist issues it addresses and because of its formal experimentation with points of view. An interpretive theatre version of the story was performed twice in 1982-83, using a script adapted from the novel, and a modified chamber theatre…

Focusing on the experience of one of seven working groups at a theater-for-development workshop in Zimbabwe, this report details the process followed by many groups, and reveals some of the major learnings, dilemmas, contradictions, strengths, and limiting factors found in a practical village-based theater-for-development process. A brief…

Presents a lesson plan constructed around materials found in the User's Guide to the Federal Project. The Federal Theater Project produced radical and populist plays during the Great Depression before being de-funded by a conservative Congress. The lessons include activities and discussion built around the original plays. (MJP)