Face stage fright and self-doubt with new courage! The experience of awe has rarely been considered by psychologists, but this extraordinary book makes up for that neglect. Frightful Stages explores all the shades of that strange emotion from reverence to terror. At its heart, awe is the condition of human suffering in situations that require you to act in all the senses of that deceptively simple word, whether on stage or off, whether in the presence of many or alone. Frightful Stages provides a multifaceted view of the semiotics of awe. It deals with its manifestations in film, on stage, in poetry, in ordinary lives as well as in the more extraordinary ones, including Bessie Smith, Carl Van Vechten, Barbra Streisand, Federico Fellini, Thomas Merton, and John Ashbery. This unprecedented book delineates the experience of awe in moments of stage fright, performance anxiety, and everyday interpersonal relations. Frightful Stages takes place on and off stage, before the curtain and behind, in the audience and on the screen. It explores the mysterious experience of awe in a multitude of contexts, including: Thomas Merton's psychoanalytic showdown with Gregory Zilboorg the chronic tensions between Apollonian reason and Dionysian instinct in myth, psychoanalysis, creation, and performance the ill-fated encounter between the greatest of all blues singers and a brilliant, self-loathing literary critic the moment of awe in experiential psychotherapy as seen by both the analyst and client the differences and similarities between stage fright and social phobia the intricate interrelationships between pernicious envy, emotional awkwardness, and fear a personal diary chronicling one man's crisis of panic, anguish, and self-doubt the complexities of feeling, offering, and accepting reverence in the psychotherapeutic relationship Frightful Stages gives clinicians and lay readers a variety of approaches from the analytic to the unanalytic, from the psychodynamic to the humanistic. It will appeal to a diverse audience, including therapists, clients, social theorists, cultural anthropologists, performers, and writers. Additionally, this book is intended to help artists deal with creative blocks, therapists cope with their own terrors, and all helping professionals understand bizarre phenomena.

Face stage fright and self-doubt with new courage! The experience of awe has rarely been considered by psychologists, but this extraordinary book makes up for that neglect. Frightful Stages explores all the shades of that strange emotion from reverence to terror. At its heart, awe is the condition of human suffering in situations that require you to act in all the senses of that deceptively simple word, whether on stage or off, whether in the presence of many or alone. Frightful Stages provides a multifaceted view of the semiotics of awe. It deals with its manifestations in film, on stage, in poetry, in ordinary lives as well as in the more extraordinary ones, including Bessie Smith, Carl Van Vechten, Barbra Streisand, Federico Fellini, Thomas Merton, and John Ashbery. This unprecedented book delineates the experience of awe in moments of stage fright, performance anxiety, and everyday interpersonal relations. Frightful Stages takes place on and off stage, before the curtain and behind, in the audience and on the screen. It explores the mysterious experience of awe in a multitude of contexts, including: Thomas Merton's psychoanalytic showdown with Gregory Zilboorg the chronic tensions between Apollonian reason and Dionysian instinct in myth, psychoanalysis, creation, and performance the ill-fated encounter between the greatest of all blues singers and a brilliant, self-loathing literary critic the moment of awe in experiential psychotherapy as seen by both the analyst and client the differences and similarities between stage fright and social phobia the intricate interrelationships between pernicious envy, emotional awkwardness, and fear a personal diary chronicling one man's crisis of panic, anguish, and self-doubt the complexities of feeling, offering, and accepting reverence in the psychotherapeutic relationship Frightful Stages gives clinicians and lay readers a variety of approaches from the analytic to the unanalytic, from the psychodynamic to the humanistic. It will appeal to a diverse audience, including therapists, clients, social theorists, cultural anthropologists, performers, and writers. Additionally, this book is intended to help artists deal with creative blocks, therapists cope with their own terrors, and all helping professionals understand bizarre phenomena.

In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class’s time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.

British theatre of the past fifty years has been brilliant, varied, and controversial, encompassing invigorating indigenous drama, politically didactic writing, the formation of such institutions as the National Theatre, the exporting of musicals worldwide from the West End, and much more. This entertaining and authoritative book is the first comprehensive account of British theatre in this period. Dominic Shellard moves chronologically through the half-century, discussing important plays, performers, directors, playwrights, critics, censors, and agents as well as the social, political, and financial developments that influenced the theatre world. Drawing on previously unseen material (such as the Kenneth Tynan archives), first-hand testimony, and detailed research, Shellard tackles several long-held assumptions about drama of the period. He questions the dominance of Look Back in Anger in the 1950s, arguing that much of the theatre of the ten years prior to its premiere in 1956 was vibrant and worthwhile. He suggests that theatre criticism, theatre producers, and such institutions as the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company have played key roles in the evolution of recent drama. And he takes a fresh look at the work of Terence Rattigan, Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, Alan Ayckbourn, Timberlake Wertenbaker, and other significant playwrights of the modern era. The book will be a valuable resource not only for students of theatre history but also for any theatre enthusiast.