Journal article
“Spirited Rebellion”: Theatre Workshop, the Living Theatre, and Bernard Shaw
Shaw, Vol.45(1), pp.14-37
06/03/2025
DOI: 10.5325/shaw.45.1.0014
Abstract
This article establishes that Bernard Shaw was a significant, long-term influence upon two of the best-known avant-garde theater companies of the twentieth century: Theatre Workshop and the Living Theatre. Although these two postwar collectives are best known for their collective creation practices and their progressive politics, the author shows how Shaw’s plays and his example set them on long, winding artistic paths that loop back toward GBS at unexpected junctures. More broadly, the author argues that the companies’ engagements with Shaw span the ostensible gaps among multiple modernisms, the avant-gardes, and popular culture—not to mention the rifts among factions of Anglophone theater’s political left. Studying Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War and the Living Theatre’s The Yellow Methuselah, the article places Shaw where he belongs in accounts of these highly influential radical collectives.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- “Spirited Rebellion”: Theatre Workshop, the Living Theatre, and Bernard Shaw
- Creators
- Jennifer Buckley
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Shaw, Vol.45(1), pp.14-37
- DOI
- 10.5325/shaw.45.1.0014
- ISSN
- 0741-5842
- eISSN
- 1529-1480
- Publisher
- Pennsylvania State University Press
- Number of pages
- 24
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 06/03/2025
- Academic Unit
- English; Theatre Arts
- Record Identifier
- 9984832090002771
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