description: In The Plot of the Future, Dragan Klaic charts the many ways in which European and American playwrights have imagined the future in their dramatic works. Klaic argues that both idealized and nightmarish assessments of the future - utopias and dystopias - form a thematic corpus in modern drama, replete with their own conventionalized concerns and predictive scenarios.The study begins by tracing the idea of the utopia as it has developed in Greek, Judaic, and Christian ideology and classical dramatic traditions, showing how the idea of a "dystopia" came to dominate in twentieth-century European and American plays. The author pays special attention to Central and Eastern European playwrights (Brusiov, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Capek, Rosewicz, Havel), but also demonstrates how the apocalyptic prophecy figures in the Western European and American plays of Kaiser, Artaud, Kopt, Shepard, Beckett, Weiss, Tardieu, Stoppard, Bond, Brenton, and others. These dystopian plays, argues Klaic, appear in a variety of genres and employ different authorial strategies, but are linked by their combative, polemical impulses.The Plot of the Future's forward-looking topic, previously unexamined in the dramatic sphere, maintains its relevance in an age of increasing technological advancement. It will interest teachers and students of modern drama with its timely perspective on European theater and will also appeal to those in the social sciences who study utopian theories.
language: English
title: The Plot of the Future: Utopia and Dystopia in Modern Drama
titlecomplete: The Plot of the Future: Utopia and Dystopia in Modern Drama (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance)
ratings_count: 2
publisher: University of Michigan Press