Books: Land/Scape/Theater

Land/Scape/Theater proposes landscape as a necessary paradigm for understanding modern theater’s increasingly spatialized aesthetic as well as its engagement with the cultural meanings of place and space. Embracing subjects as diverse as the “landscape dramaturgy” of Suzan-Lori Parks, Artaud’s trip to the Sierra Madre,Gertrude Stein’s landscape theory and practice, Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s “border subjects,” and Bayreuth and Disneyland as cultic sites, Land/Scape/Theater draws on a broad range of theory, dramatic texts, and performance. All aspects of modern theater, these essays suggest, including the bedrock Aristotelian constituents of plot and character, have a landscape dimension that often goes unrecognized. With its broad theoretical range and cross-disciplinary reach, Land/Scape/Theater will interest theater theorists and practitioners and cultural studies specialists, including historians of landscape. Theater students, scholars, teachers, directors, designers, and actors will find here a new framework and a new vocabulary for understanding both theater and the larger culture.