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Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. By Peter L. Hays, with Kent Nicholson. Continuum Modern Theatre Guides. New York: Continuum, 2008; pp. 128. $16.95 paper.
Caryl Churchill's Top Girls. By Alicia Tycer. Continuum Modern Theatre Guides. New York: Continuum, 2008; pp. 144. $16.95 paper.
John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. By Aleks Sierz. Continuum Modern Theatre Guides. New York: Continuum, 2008; pp. 136. $16.95 paper.
Patrick Marber's Closer. By Graham Saunders. Continuum Modern Theatre Guides. New York: Continuum, 2008; pp. 128. $16.95 paper.
Continuum Publishing recently released a new series of companion volumes for modern and contemporary plays. Presenting an in-depth and digestible approach for either a literature class or a cast and director exploring a production, the Continuum Modern Theatre Guides provide a convenient "dramaturgy in a volume" approach to study. Currently, the guides are available for Death of a Salesman, Look Back in Anger, Closer, Top Girls, Fences, Oleanna, Waiting for Godot, Blasted, Arcadia, and Angels in America. For the purposes of reviewing this series, Continuum provided the following volumes for examination: Death of a Salesman, Top Girls, Look Back in Anger, and Closer. Featuring authors that come from a variety of scholarly backgrounds that include theatre, African American literature, and English, this high-quality series provides a valuable new resource for directors, teachers, and dramaturgs. These guides are thorough and well written, and they have the potential to serve a number of different purposes in the classroom or in production.
These texts are aimed at providing contextual information and assisting with the analysis of well-known and often-produced European and American plays. Each of the volumes includes chapters covering Background and Content, Analysis and Commentary, Production History, and Workshopping the Play. The Background and Content sections offer biographies of the playwrights and discuss the worlds in which the plays were written and originally performed in order to explore the social, historical, and political contexts for each play. The Death of a Salesman guide, for example, provides background information on the early interpretation of the play as a...