About this item
Highlights
- This volume gathers sixty years of essays, speeches, and manifestos by the founding mother of the resident professional theatre movement.
- About the Author: Zelda Fichandler was a seminal figure in the regional theater movement, and led Arena Stage in Washington, DC, for forty-one years, producing more than four hundred shows and directing more than fifty for a company that helped spur the growth of professional theater around the country.
- 320 Pages
- Performing Arts, Theater
Description
About the Book
"Zelda Fichandler is one of the founding visionaries of the theatre movement in America. From the creation of Washington D.C.'s Arena Stage in 1950 with her husband Thomas, through her later stewardship of the acting training programs at both at NYU and Julliard, Zelda spent over sixty years speaking, writing and observing the rise and impact of the art of theatre in the U.S. She has relentlessly questioned the very field that she, as much as anyone, created. Her essays and speeches capture both the play of her own dazzling mind, and the aspirations and contradictions of the theater she pioneered. This first-ever collection of Zelda Fichandler's writings is edited by Todd London, who was personally chosen by Zelda to complete this book before she died"--Book Synopsis
This volume gathers sixty years of essays, speeches, and manifestos by the founding mother of the resident professional theatre movement.
As a founder and artistic director of the flagship Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and chair of New York University's Graduate Acting program, the late Zelda Fichandler changed the where and how of the American theatre.
The Long Revolution gathers Fichandler's most prescient writing about that movement, ranging over such topics as The Institution as Art-Work, the Profit in NonProfit, Race and a Deepening Aesthetic, and Creativity and the Public Mind. It also includes intimate portraits of artists with whom she frequently collaborated and director's notes from the major productions that defined her vision.
Celebrated as the defining architect and builder of the most sweeping transformation of twentieth-century American theatre, her brilliant writing reestablishes Fichandler as one of its most expansive and provocative thinkers.
Review Quotes
"Leaving this and future generations an extraordinary legacy, The Long Revolution: Sixty Years on the Frontlines of a New American Theater must be considered an essential and core addition to personal, professional, community, and college/university library American Theatre History/Biography collections." --Midwest Book Review
"Zelda lives on in me and in so many others. The chain effect of her amazing legacy will never be broken. She is and was a true American shero." --Danai Gurira
"Zelda essentially founded the regional theater movement that brought great theater to every corner of America. She slept, ate, and bled theater. She worshipped playwrights, promoted directors, and devoted her life to the development of young actors. Thank you, Zelda! If not for you, I would not be an actor. You made the world rich with stories, rich with heart." --Rainn Wilson
About the Author
Zelda Fichandler was a seminal figure in the regional theater movement, and led Arena Stage in Washington, DC, for forty-one years, producing more than four hundred shows and directing more than fifty for a company that helped spur the growth of professional theater around the country. She spent another twenty-five years training hundreds of actors as chair of NYU's Graduate Acting Program. She was a titan in the theater world, a visionary producer and teacher who was instrumental in seeding the American continent with the work of playwrights, directors, actors, and designers.
Todd London has been a leading figure in the U.S. nonprofit theater for more than thirty-five years. The first recipient of TCG's Visionary Leadership Award, his service has taken many forms: artistic director, educator, arts journalist and essayist, public speaker, theater historian, and advocate for artists. He is also an award-winning novelist.