University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Pages: 606
•
Trim: 6½ x 9¼
978-1-61147-947-8 • Hardback • July 2016 • $180.00 • (£138.00)
978-1-61147-948-5 • eBook • July 2016 • $171.00 • (£133.00)
Kevin Lane Dearinger is a teacher, actor, and author of The Bard in the Bluegrass: Two Hundred Years of Shakespearean Performance in Lexington, Kentucky (2007), Marie Prescott: “A Star of Some Brilliance” (2009), and the play Regarding Mrs. Carter, the “American Bernhardt.”
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Act One: Inciting Incident
Chapter One: “Not so delicate, my dear, as you think.”
Chapter Two: “I think I’ll stick it out.”
Chapter Three: “I am not trying to teach, but I want to suggest.”
Chapter Four: “Like the little boy with the ice-cream”
Chapter Five: “You must be happy just as you are, for you can’t be different.”
Chapter Six: “Invent me a language of love.”
Act Two: Rising Action
Chapter Seven: “Isn’t it an opportunity!”
Chapter Eight: “Certain temperaments of men”
Chapter Nine: “I shut myself up in my room& went to work.”
Chapter Ten: “Born differently”
Chapter Eleven: “The right to call the heart in his bosom his own”
Chapter Twelve: “To tell the Truth in the Theatre”
Chapter Thirteen: “Bully!”
Chapter Fourteen: “Sapho hangs about my neck!”
Act Three: Plot Reversal and Recognition
Chapter Fifteen: “I can do the biggest things in my power.”
Chapter Sixteen: “Somehow I can’t stop working.”
Chapter Seventeen: “Fool that I am, I write too much!”
Chapter Eighteen: “Naturalness is absolutely essential.”
Chapter Nineteen: “All the same I am ‘De-lighted’”
Chapter Twenty: “To take my work, but not myself seriously”
Chapter Twenty-One: “Realism is only simplicity and truth.”
Chapter Twenty-Two: “Only by directing things myself”
Chapter Twenty-Three: “Tired-er than ever!”
Chapter Twenty-Four: “But, if I can only do it well.”
Act Four: Catharsis
Chapter Twenty-Five: “My name on too many playbills.”
Chapter Twenty-Six: “My work must speak for itself.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven: “Happy to be as I am.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight: “To die in harness”
Denouement
Epilogue
Bibliography
Production Record
Index
About the Author
In Clyde Fitch and the American Theatre: An Olive in the Cocktail, Kevin Lane Dearinger meticulously details the life and works of a prolific dramatist whose name and plays are not currently known, but who was the first American to be taken seriously as a playwright…. [T]he information in this book is bounteous and the subject almost forgotten, so this book is a valuable record of a highly interesting figure in the American theatre.
— EDGE