Marianne McDonald brings together her training as a scholar of classical Greek with her vast experience in theatre and drama to help students of the classics and of theatre learn about the living performance tradition of Greek tragedy. The Living Art of Greek Tragedy is indispensable for anyone interested in performing Greek drama, and McDonald's engaging descriptions offer the necessary background to all those who desire to know more about the ancient world. With a chapter on each of the three major Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides), McDonald provides a balance of textual analysis, practical knowledge of the theatre, and an experienced look at the difficulties and accomplishments of theatrical performances. She shows how ancient Greek tragedy, long a part of the standard repertoire of theatre companies throughout the world, remains fresh and alive for contemporary audiences.

Marianne McDonald brings together her training as a scholar of classical Greek with her vast experience in theatre and drama to help students of the classics and of theatre learn about the living performance tradition of Greek tragedy. The Living Art of Greek Tragedy is indispensable for anyone interested in performing Greek drama, and McDonald's engaging descriptions offer the necessary background to all those who desire to know more about the ancient world. With a chapter on each of the three major Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides), McDonald provides a balance of textual analysis, practical knowledge of the theatre, and an experienced look at the difficulties and accomplishments of theatrical performances. She shows how ancient Greek tragedy, long a part of the standard repertoire of theatre companies throughout the world, remains fresh and alive for contemporary audiences.

An explanation of Greek theater as seen through its many depictions in classical art

According to Christian Meier, one of Germany's leading classicists, a Greek tragedy cannot be considered simply a work of art or a reflection of ancient modes of thought. He argues that it is essential to understand tragedy's interaction with the practiceof Greek democracy. In The Political Art of Greek Tragedy he focuses on the works of Aeschylus to examine the close relationship between drama and politics at the beginning of the great age of Greek tragedy. "Christian Meier has produced an outstanding new account of the politics of Athenian tragedy, interpreting political' broadly and illuminating Athenian religious ritual and theatrical experience by a systematic and subtle use of the comparative method."--Paul Cartledge, Clare College, Cambridge.

For years theater director Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient Greek tragedies for a wide range of at-risk people in society. His is the personal and deeply passionate story of a life devoted to reclaiming the timeless power of an ancient artistic tradition to comfort the afflicted. Doerries leads an innovative public health project—Theater of War—that produces ancient dramas for current and returned soldiers, people in recovery from alcohol and substance abuse, tornado and hurricane survivors, and more. Tracing a path that links the personal to the artistic to the social and back again, Doerries shows us how suffering and healing are part of a timeless process in which dialogue and empathy are inextricably linked. The originality and generosity of Doerries’s work is startling, and The Theater of War—wholly unsentimental, but intensely felt and emotionally engaging—is a humane, knowledgeable, and accessible book that will both inspire and enlighten.

Surviving Greek Tragedy is a history of the physical survival to the present day of the thirty-two extant tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Beginning with the first revival of the plays in the fourth century BC, it charts the course of their transmission down the centuries as they passed through the hands of actors, readers, scholars, schoolteachers, monks, publishers, translators and theatre directors. Over the course of this 2,400-year period, the plays were at different times performed, copied, quoted, emended, excerpted, analysed, taught, translated, censored, adapted, or merely left to moulder in a library, as each successive culture charged with their safe-keeping saw fit. In the last thirty years Greek tragedy has become the medium through which most people encounter the classical heritage, and in the book Garland gives extensive coverage to modern stagings of the plays all over the world, taking this fascinating story right up to the present. Fully illustrated with images from all the periods under discussion--from Greek vase paintings to Deborah Warner's production of Medea at the Queen's Theatre, London.