Description
Book SynopsisTheatremakers in the United States have long been drawn to madness as a source of dramatic spectacle. This book offers a dynamic account of stage musicals’ engagement with historically significant theories about mental distress, illness, disability, and human variance in the United States.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One. Madness in the Mind.
- “Make a Date with a Great Psychoanalyst…”: Gazing Inward in the Dual Golden Age
- “Make up your mind! Make up your mind!”: The Neurotic Interior and the Dynamic Unconscious in the 1940s and Beyond
Part Two. Madness in Society
- “There Are Heroes in the World…”:Psychiatric Activism, Antipsychiatry, and Political Consciousness
- “To Dream the Impossible Dream…”: Communities of Madness in the Musicals of the Long Sixties
- “Is That Just Disgusting?”: Filth, Madness, and the City in Sweeney Todd and Other Musicals
Part Three. Madness in the Brain
- “What a Lovely Cure!”: Staging the Interior in the New Age of Diagnostic Psychiatry
- “Sing a song of forgetting…”: Listening to the Unconscious in Next to Normal
Conclusion: Contemporary Visions of Madness as Depth Theatre
- Bibliography
