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Identifying an apprehension about the nature and constitution of urbanism in North American plays, Westgate examines how cities like New York City and Los Angeles became focal points for identity politics and social justice at the end of the twentieth century, and how urban crises inform the dramaturgy of contemporary playwrights.

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Introduction: A Rhetoric of Sociospatial Drama PART I: ELEMENTS OF URBANISM ´Against the Law in this City´: Public Space in New York City ´City, Bad Place´: Architecture & Disorientation in New York City PART II: ITERATIONS OF URBANISM ´Livin´ in a Paradise´: Suburbanism in Los Angeles ´Does it Explode?´: Ghettoization & Rioting in New York City & Los Angeles ´Part of the City´: Enclaves & Exiles in Los Angeles

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"J. Chris Westgate´s important new book explores a rich critical intersection between dramatic writing and the representation of modern urban life. Setting a deft reading of a range of North American drama of the 1980s and 1990s into the context of contemporary urbanism, Westgate inventively elaborates a series of rich dialectics, not only between the representation of New York and Los Angeles, but between writing and place, initiation and transgression, the scene onstage and the scenic pressure of emerging forms of urban life. Westgate frames an imaginative dialogue between the signal plays of the period - Tony Kushner and José Rivera, Richard Greenberg and Sally Clark, Sam Shepard and Eduardo Machado, Djanet Sears and Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang and Cherríe Moraga - searchingly illuminating the plays and the crises of identity, home, and justice they engage." - W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University"This book ranges across disciplinary boundaries and invites scholars to rethink the role of space and the city in contemporary theatre. An engaging new work." - Heather Nathans, Professor and Associate Director of Theatre, University of Maryland

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J. Chris Westgate is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics at California State University, Fullerton, USA.

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