Beat Drama

Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac Gregory Corso Lawrence Ferlinghetti Diane Di Prima and many others. Yet all of these authors as well as other less well-known Beat figures also wrote plays-and these together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre-shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came after them from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes to the many vanguard performance artists of the seventies. <br/><br/>This volume the first of its kind gathers essays about the exciting work in drama and performance by and about the Beat Generation ranging from the well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac Ginsberg and Burroughs to the Afro-Beats+? - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) Bob Kaufman and others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the performance space itself.