The links below are potentially useful references for Contemporary World Theatre.

Along with general interest, the following links are designed to be helpful research material for your various writing projects.

When we separated by gender, find out what everybody said.

The theme of this class is colliding cultures, so it is critical that we come to basic understanding of what we mean by the word "culture." Here's an excellent site that demonstrates that the word culture should not be taken for granted.

If you like Theat145 Contemporary World Theatre, then Dra362: Script Analysis might be the perfect course for you. The course has a complete web site, including a message board, and the overall structure of the course is similar to what you are experiencing in Theat145.

Here's help for when you instinctively know a particular image is being used in a symbolic way, but you're not quite sure what the full implications of the symbol happen to be. We will spend a lot of time in this class discussing symbolism, so here's a great research tool to get to know. This is by no means as comprehensive a research tool as Cirlot's A Dictionary of Symbols, but it's a good place to start.

This site is actually a "handbook" for an entire course centered around Sam Shepard.

An interesting discussion about the director of Harvard's Loeb Drama Center's production.

A sensational site, including reviews, books, events, and even a
short play by David Hwang called, Trying to Find Chinatown.

 A very solid bibliography on Japanese-American issues.

A review of the Yangtze Repertory Theater's production of David Hwang's The Sound of a Voice (November 23, 1996).

 A speech given by David Hawang at M.I.T.

A Seattle Times article about Philip Gotanda, who you know as the writer of The Wash.

 Interesting in general, and some great insights re: The Piano Lesson.

David Henry Hwang tells us that he modeled The Sound of a Voice "after the movies based on Japanese ghost stories, like the stories Lafcadio Hearn collectd" (Between Worlds, p. 93). Interested in sampling one of these stories?

About as exciting as watching paint dry, but absolutely essential if you care at all about proper footnote form for electronic citations.

The character Song from M. Butterfly is a Peking Opera Singer. This well designed site (in English and with stunning visuals), will give you a great feel for what their productions look like.

M. Butterfly takes place in Beijing, and involves an opera singer. Opera has a long tradition in this area. Here's a chance to learn more about the famous Beijing Opera.

Reading Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery sheds some interesting light of The Ik.

Here are 15 photographs from Colin Turnbull's The Mountain Peoplee of many of the actual people dramatized in The Ik.

A Dorothea Lange photograph of a poster instructing Japanese-Americans to report to internment camps.

Several of the photographs at this site depict the internment camp experience. To capture the spirit of the camps, Lange created images that frequently juxtapose signs of human courage and dignity with physical evidence of the indignities of incarceration. Not surprisingly, many of Lange's photographs were censored by the federal government, itself conflicted by the existence of the camps.

The play The Ik is adapted by Colin Higgins and Dennis Cannan from the book The Mountain People by Colin Turnbull. Here's a chance to see the cover of the book and read excerpts from this fascinating anthropological study.

Production Photographs of plays I have directed at W.S.U.