Annette J. Saddik

Major publications include: Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, The Crazed, The Queer (Cambridge UP, 2015), which contextualizes Williams’ plays, particularly the late work, through what Saddik terms a "theatre of excess," seeking liberation through grotesque exaggeration, chaos, and ambivalent laughter; Contemporary American Drama (Edinburgh UP [U.K.] and Oxford UP [U.S.], 2007), an examination of the postmodern performance of American identity on the stage since World War II; The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams’ Later Plays (Associated University Presses/Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999), the first full-length study of Williams’ post-1961 career; and Tennessee Williams: The Traveling Companion and Other Plays (New Directions Publishing, 2008), a definitive edited collection of Williams' previously unpublished late plays.

Other publications include essays in journals such as Modern Drama and TDR: The Drama Review, as well as in critical anthologies, encyclopedias of theatre history, and theatre programmes for both U.S. and international productions. Saddik sits on the editorial boards of the The Tennessee Williams Annual Review and Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, and serves on the Lucille Lortel Awards voting committee.

In addition to 20th-/21st-century drama and performance, her specific research interests include the work of Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Sam Shepard; theories of the grotesque in theatre; queer and burlesque/neo-burlesque performance; European Cabaret, particularly the Cabaret/Kabarett culture of Weimar Germany; and “science plays” that deal with epistemological crosscurrents in physics and absurdist drama.

She is currently working on a new book on the ambiguous figure of the clown as a site of resistance and transformation in plays that reacted to systems of oppression on various continents during the second half of the twentieth century.