Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America: Artists, Activists, Cultural Critics [Paperback]

By casting designers as authors, cultural critics, activists, entrepreneurs, and global cartographers, Essin tells a story about scenic images on the page, stage, and beyond that helped American audiences see the everyday landscapes and exotic destinations from a modern perspective.Introduction: Design as Cultural History 1. The Designer as Author 2. The Designer as Cultural Critic 3. The Designer as Activist 4. The Designer as Entrepreneur 5. The Designer as Global Cartographer

The originality of this lucid study by Essin is how she places that aesthetic movement in a broader cultural context . . . Essin's research is thorough, her writing is engaging, and her insights are rewarding. Summing Up: Recommended. For all academic, general, and professional/practitioner audiences. - CHOICE

Christin Essin is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Theatre History at Vanderbilt University, USA.

Stage Designers in Early Twentieth Century America offers a bounty of new insights into the lives and artistry of the scenic designers who conceptualized, practiced, and promulgated the New Stagecraft. Christin Essin approaches their innovative work in the best possible way: within broader developments of material culture across the first half of the twentieth century. Discoursing with histories of the labor movement, mass production, consumerism, and imperialism, Essin elucidates the social complexities of this vital development in American theatre history. - James Peck, Department Chair and Associate Professor of Theatre, Muhlenberg College, USA, and editor, Theatre Topics

Christin Essin offers a new and valuable perspective on evolution of the designer's role in the modern American theatre. Adventurously conceived and meticulously researched, Essin's study draws on a wide range of archival sources to provide a much-needed historicization of the New Stagecraft movement. By emphasizing the dual status of designers as both artists and working profesl³I