Sex and War on the American Stage: Lysistrata in performance by Emily Klein PDF

American diversifications of Aristophanes' enduring comedy Lysistrata have used laughter to critique intercourse, conflict, and feminism for almost a century. The play's "make love now not struggle" message and bawdy humor render it eternally attractive to school campuses, activist teams, and group theatres - rather a lot in order that none of Aristophanes' performs are played within the West as usually as Lysistrata.

Starting with the play's first mainstream construction within the U.S. in 1930, Emily B. Klein explores the various iterations of Lysistrata that experience graced the yankee degree, web page, and display because the nice melancholy. those contain the Federal Theatre's 1936 Negro Repertory creation, the 1955 motion picture musical the second one maximum intercourse and Spiderwoman Theater's overtly political Lysistrata Numbah!, in addition to Douglas Carter Beane's Broadway musical, Lysistrata Jones, Meg Wolitzer's The Uncoupling, and the overseas Lysistrata venture protests, which up-to-date the vintage within the modern context of the Iraq War.

Although Aristophanes' oeuvre has been the topic of a lot classical scholarship, Lysistrata has bought little consciousness from feminist theatre students or functionality theorists. In reaction, this publication maps present debates over Lysistrata's doubtful feminist underpinnings and makes use of functionality conception, cultural stories, and gender stories to enquire how new diversifications demonstrate the socio-political climates in their origins.