Writing and the Modern Stage

Julia Jarcho is an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director with the company Minor Theater. She is Assistant Professor of English at New York University, where she teaches courses in modern drama, modernism, theater studies, critical theory and playwriting. New York productions include The Terrifying (2017), Every Angel is Brutal (2016), Nomads (2014), Grimly Handsome (OBIE Award for Best New American Play, 2013), Dreamless Land (2011) and American Treasure (2009). Her scholarly work has been published in Modern Drama and Critical Inquiry. Her plays have been published in a collection entitled Minor Theater (2016).

• Part I. Modernism's Negative Theatrics: 1. Introduction: negative theatrics; 2. 'Something stranger yet': theatrical distractions in Henry James and Gertrude Stein; 3. 'Gesture towards the universe': theater as utopia in Waiting for Godot; Part II. Beyond the Present: Playwrights at the Turn of the Millennium: 4. Introduction: staging writing today; 5. The promise of 'playwriting': Suzan-Lori Parks; 6. 'Small, fierce creatures': Mac Wellman's auratic theater.

'In short, the achievement of Jarcho's book is that it is not only a complex and challenging piece of scholarship that probes into the underappreciated potential of theatrical writing, but also serves as an invaluable model for scholars looking to renegotiate the place of theater both beyond and beside drama in the contemporary academy.' Chris Corbo, ASAP/Journal