Staging Whiteness

In Staging Whiteness, Mary Brewer offers close textual readings of plays by American and British 20th century playwrights—both canonical and some that fall outside the mainstream—looking at how whiteness as an identity is created onstage, and how this has changed historically. With clarity and persuasion, Brewer argues that configurations of whiteness are dispersed and reflected through discourses that range from theory to literature and common social language, and that discursive performances of whiteness are a crucial feature of everyday social interactions.

Includes discussions of:
G.B. Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion
W. Somerset Maugham’s The Explorer
W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6
Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape
Langston Hughes’ Mulatto
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town
Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes
Bridget Boland’s The Cockpit
T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party
John Osborne’s The Entertainer
Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire
Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge
Edward Albee’s The American Dream
Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman
David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones
Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White
Edward Bond’s Early Morning
John Arden’s and Margarette D’Arcy’s The Island of the Mighty
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine
Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play
Philip Osment’s This Island’s Mine
Michael Ellis’ Chameleon
David Hare’s The Absence of War