bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Balancing the Equation
Authors: Ruskin Phyllis , Lutterbie John
Published: April 2013

Tom Stoppard left work on his new play for two weeks in October 1981 to be playwright in residence at San Diego State University, the focal point of this experience being a production of Dogg' s Hamlet (retitled Mackoon' s HamletI ) and Cahoot's Macbeth. Supervising rehearsals, conducting a seminar in new plays, and holding numerous interviews provided a hectic schedule for Stoppard and a good opportunity for the students to learn how one playwright works and thinks. The following synopsis of his visit is based on a theme which continually surfaced in his work on the production, his discussions with young playwrights, interviews and lectures: balancing the equation.
Grotowski's Akropolis: A Retrospective View
Authors: Findlay Robert
Published: April 2013

It is impossible presently to estimate the value future theatre historians and critics will place on Jerzy Grotowski' s more recent experiments in such exotic areas as paratheatrics and theatre anthropology. Such experiments have broken drastically with traditional conceptions of Western theatre, and as a result there is presently no fully adequate vocabulary either to describe or to evaluate these works. Nonetheless, those who write in future about Grotowski will inevitably have to contend with his inherently difficult but strictly theatrical work with the Teatr Laboratorium. Such work developed, of course, in the period from the founding of the group in 1959 through the various transformations of Apocalypsis cum figuris during its thirteen years of performance (1968 to 1981). Clearly the most dominant and influential experiment'alist and theorist during the 1960s and early 1970s, Grotowski has been hailed by many of his contemporaries as the most significant twentieth-century theatrical figure since Stanislavsky. It remains to be seen whether such an estimate ultimately will be sustained, but it seems clear that Grotowski's prominence in the broad spectrum of twentieth-century theatrical history is assured.
A Little Country's Little Alphabet of Modern Man's Biggest Problems
Authors: Goetz-Stankiewicz Marketa
Published: April 2013

The following quotations, gathered mainly from the works of contemporary Czech and Slovak playwrights — many of the titles published in the underground series "Padlock Edition" ("Edice Petlice") — provide an aphoristic guide to some of the major concerns of people living under a totalitarian regime. The reader's combined amusement and disquiet are likely to increase with his realization that these concerns are by no means alien to those living in "democratic" societies throughout the contemporary world.
Censorship
Authors: Glowacki Janusz
Published: April 2013

In a handbook on psychiatry, I came across a description of something called the blank-page test. If an alcoholic in the last stages of delirium tremens is shown a blank sheet of paper, he starts reading it without any hesitation, enumerating all his own obsessions, suspicions, the names of imaginary enemies, murderers, and so on. This sounded so familiar to me that I decided to write about censorship.
Marek Nowakowski: Everyday Life under Communism
Authors: Libera Antoni
Published: April 2013

Marek Nowakowski, born in 1935, is one of the most popular writers in Poland. He began his writing career early: his first work, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1958; and he has published over twenty books since. Mainly a prose writer, Nowakowski has authored both short and long stories; he has written about 300 of these so far. His works carry significant dramatic power, a quality resulting in frequent adaptations for stage plays and film scripts. But Nowakowski also channels his dramatic talent and ambition directly into radio plays. He has written about twenty of these, most of them performed in West Germany. In all of his works, as a skilful observer of people's lives, a master portraitist of various national characters and situations, he presents the reality of contemporary Poland.
On Dramaturgic Agents and Krleza's Agential Structure: The Types as a Key Level
Authors: Suvin Darko
Published: April 2013

Fortunately, it is not my task here to present the large and much discussed (though not at all well—known in English) dramaturgic oeuvre of Miroslav Krleza (1893—1981), the dominant cultural, literary, and dramaturgic figure that bestrides twentieth—century Yugoslav literature as a giant out of Rabelais. I must commit two overlapping sins of omission if I am to speak at article—length about his plays: first, presuppose them as known, and discuss only one rarely treated but sufficiently significant aspect in a new light (an analysis which may contribute to dramaturgic theory in general); second, neglect most nuances and possible but not strictly mandatory branchings within my argument, such as a systematic distinction between Krleza' s rather differing phases.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

With this installment, the annual bibliography of modem drama studies enters its second decade. I shall exploit the occasion to make a renewed plea for assistance. In the past, such pleas have drawn little response: three volunteers, only one continuing (Professor J. Norman Wilkinson of Maine). The total job of checking a thousand periodicals and tracking down hundreds of books each year would surely be done more effectively by a team of specialists than by a single "six-million-card man," as a secretary once dubbed me. I shall be taking a one-year break from the labor; meanwhile, I would appreciate hearing from anyone willing to help. Specifically, I need a Harvard connection or two to handle Scandinavian and Eastern European material, and Romance-language scholars willing to search for relevant books published in Europe, South America, and Canada.
Analytics of Schizophrenia: A Deleuze-Guattarian Consideration of Buchner's Danton's Death and Weiss's MaratlSade
Authors: Kowsar Mohammad
Published: April 2013

A passing glance over Georg Buchner's Danton's Death and Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade would lure the eye's attention to shapes, images and colorations of a congeneric landscape. The French Revolution serves as the background for both plays, and the dramatization of the deaths of two exemplary figures of the period (Danton and Marat) reinforces, no doubt, the family resemblance between the two texts written so far apart in time (1835 and 1964 respectively). Both plays discuss the optimistic hopes of the early phase of the Revolution, record the ensuing climate of Terror, and note with irony the return to despotic rule. Madness, integral to Weiss's conception (the murder of Marat is a reenactment performed by the inmates of an insane asylum during the Napoleonic era), is also present in the hypertrophied visions of the various characters in Danton's Death. The melancholic tropics and ecstatic domains conjured by the imaginations of Danton and his associates induce a haunted atmosphere which approximates the state of frenzy kindled by the Marquis de Sade and the mental patients of Charenton. Finally, it appears that Buchner and Weiss have authored texts that integrate themes of social revolution and madness with a third component, equally important, that is to say human sexuality. Erotic values inform the texts in question, not as an aspect of human activity equal to any other series of considerations, but as a fundamental on tic counterpoint. In addition, the forms of sexuality delineated in the plays are uncompromisingly extreme, highly profane and militantly transgressive.
Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba: A Hermaphroditic Matriarchate
Authors: Knapp Bettina
Published: April 2013

The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), a tragedy in three acts by Federico Garcia Lorca (1898- 1936), concentrates, as the title promises, on a house, a symbolic image that may be viewed as the concretization of a psychic condition. It is within this structure that Bernarda Alba rules and seeks to maintain her matriarchate. With great skill and a marked economy of images, words, and actions, the playwright explores the means by which this archetypal, domineering, and domestic tyrant uses her absolute power to preserve the most regressive of traditional conventions. The tribal primitivism of those involved, Bernarda Alba's obsession with ecclesiastic forms rather than truly spiritual matters, her ferociously sanguinary thoughts and deeds - all are centered on the role and function of virginal chastity and marriage, and on the unconscious. Another component of the play has the same center: her daughters' rejection of her immaculately experienced (without blood or semen) sadomasochistic sexual views.
Aller a la mer
Authors: Cixous Helene
Published: April 2013

How, as women, can we go to the theatre without lending our complicity to the sadism directed against women, or being asked to assume, in the patriarchal family structure that the theatre reproduces ad infinitum, the position of victim?
Writing and Displacement: Women in Theatre
Authors: Feral Josette
Published: April 2013

Being a woman is not enough. It takes more than that to write in the feminine mode and therefore to write in a different way — a fact which is daily corroborated by the abundance of work written by women, on women's issues, or dealing with women, letters, short stories, novels, all the literature of recent years, in which the writing often remains basically unchanged, even when it is expressed in new forms of thought, new ways of using the spoken or written word. Women artists, women writers, women critics in the avant—garde, following new trends or movements with their own forms of writing, are still confined to the masculine mode unless they shatter traditional discourse. Of course there are exceptions — Helene Cixous, Monique Wittig, Sylvia Plath and Emma Santos, for example. But we still lack the critical tools for judging this "difference," let alone for thinking it, for determining how and when it operates, or even for knowing whether, in the present state of feminist criticism, it can decide which paths to follow. The quest for this difference implies the rejection of all normativity and an exploration of the possible orientations for a new kind of writing specific to women. Luce Irigaray, a French feminist writer and critic, is paving the way for work in this direction.
Language and Meaning in Megan Terry's 1970S "Musicals"
Authors: Klein Kathleen Gregory
Published: April 2013

American King's English for Queens is the most clearly articulated of Megan Terry's language plays of the 1970s, explicitly concerned with the ways in which the text and context of language mold thinking, seeing, and believing. In four full-length plays, Tommy Allen Show, Babes in the Bighouse, Brazil Fado and American King's English for Queens - all "musicals" performed at the Omaha Magic Theatre — although ostensibly savaging television, Middle American family life, marriage, sex, or prison, Terry challenges the perceptions molded by language itself and the cliches about language as a vehicle for communication. Whereas words seldom say what they mean, the reverse (that they mean what they say) is often true. What is conveyed between characters onstage, or between them and the audience, is seldom confined by either the connotative or denotative meanings of the words used; and yet these deliberately chosen words and phrases are capable of creating meaning for both speaker and auditor.
Screening the Camera's Eye: Black and White Confrontations of Technological Representation
Authors: Murray Timothy
Published: April 2013

This brief citation of "The Age of the World Picture" underscores the political seriousness and philosophical complexity of any consideration of modem drama and the media. Martin Heidegger's pioneering analyses of questions concerning technology leave us with the responsibility of acknowledging the ideological weight of our relation to technological machines of communication. Although academic discussion of the media may be thought trendy or still theoretically unrefined, exemplified by the media's own sustenance of raw humor and play, this discourse can never be innocent or naive. For it is grounded in what Heidegger depicts as the duofold fiber constituting the contemporary (technological) image as always both a structure of representation and a device or apparatus (tool and episteme) lending itself naturally to our struggles for power and authority. To speak of contemporary American drama in view of the technological image is to raise the specter of man bringing "into play his unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things." Conversely, to speak of the technological image in view of contemporary American drama is to unfold theatre's aesthetic and ideological garments of confrontational strategy and enactment. In regarding contemporary American drama, moreover, I find myself dwelling on how the complexity of technological confrontation is developed with particular care and concern by Black American theatre, by a play world suggesting that the marvelous technicolors of the media have yet to escape from their white against black fundamentals.
The Filmic Cut and "Switchback" in the Plays of Sam Shepard
Authors: Carroll Dennis
Published: April 2013

In Shepard criticism to date, attention has been given both to the film references within the plays and to the playwright's attitude to film as an American institution. As regards the former, there has been elucidation of the many allusions to films in both the plays and prose pieces: George Stambolian, for example, has pointed out Shepard's debt to John Huston in Mad Dog Blues (1971), and Florence Falk his debt to John Ford in The Tooth of Crime (1972). As regards the latter, Carol Rosen has drawn attention to Shepard's paradoxical attitude to film; she suggests that he seems strongly drawn to the "dream–machine identities" which people appear to derive from movie myths, but at the same time seems to realize the "self-destructive power" inherent in a merely passive absorption of them. In her article on Angel City (1976), she is mainly concerned with thematic analysis, but she tantalizingly suggests that: "The play does, in fact, have a structural logic, but it is a logic of film transplanted to the stage; the play jump-cuts from one image, one metaphor to the next, as if two films were being spliced together.”
Murderous Enactments: The Media's Presence in the Drama
Authors: Lamont Rosette
Published: April 2013

The turn of the century witnessed technology's coming of stage. Technological inventions became the subjects and the protagonists of modern drama. In Jean Cocteau's The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, the Tower itself, as a bold and controversial structure and a gigantic telegraph antenna, took center stage as the poet's lead actor in his surrealist comedy ballet. Guillaume Apollinaire's The Breasts of Tiresias, begun before and completed at the end of the First World War, foreshadowed our own genetic engineering and feminist movement while protesting France's declining birthrate. It also poked fun at the media coverage of the news, the tyranny of journalism, and the obtrusive presence of advertising billboards. In his Victor or Power to the Children, Roger Vitrac unfurled upon the stage the gigantic front page of a newspaper while dramatizing before this inner curtain some of the gory items of yellow journalism. However, the cartoon style of the performances stressed the comical aspects of the new developments and treated them with good-humored lightness and a certain amount of awe.
Film and Theatre: Some Revisionist Propositions
Authors: Dukore Bernard
Published: April 2013

For people like me who were born after 1927, when the generally acknowledged first "talkie," The Jazz Singer, opened, the sound film has been part of the world longer than they have and as much a part of their lives as the living theatre. Indeed, nowadays the living theatre is not a part of many people's lives. For them, plays are among the different types of productions they watch on television or see at the cinema. To millions, Shakespeare is what they read as homework and see, by courtesy of the BBC, on television. Performances of Gilbert and Sullivan also mean television to them. Usually, the public's perception of a non–televised stage play, if the public perceives it at all, is through its movie version. Like it or not, "it" — drama experienced not in a theatre auditorium, but in one's home or in a motion picture house — is a fact of contemporary life.
Book Reviews
Authors: Parker  , Krause David , Schlueter June
Published: April 2013

Margaret A. Van Antwerp And Sally Johns ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series: An Illustrated Chronicle, reviewed by R.B. Parker

Eugene Benson, J.M. Synge, reviewed by David Krause

Denis Calandra, New German Dramatists, reviewed by June Schlueter
Samuel Beckett's Media Plays
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: April 2013

In the criticism of literature, since Aristotle, practically no significant work has been done that does not include, or at least presuppose, a discussion of genres or types or modes, an analysis of the artistic universe into units compact enough to provide a basis for characterizing, differentiating and comparing particular phenomena. Even in the case of broad theoretical attempts to explain the artistic endeavor or the aesthetic experience as such, some basic notion of types is necessary in order to identify, in the first place, what the philosophical or political or psychological argument is meant to account for.
All That Fall as "a Play for Radio"
Authors: Van Laan Thomas
Published: April 2013

All That Fall, which was written in 1956 and first presented on the BBC Third Programme on January 13, 1957, was undertaken in response to an invitation from John Morris, the Controller of the Third Programme, to write a play for the BBC, and it was Beckett's first play written for radio. Beckett's statements about All That Fall and his efforts to limit theatrical presentation of it clearly indicate that in writing this radio text Beckett was quite conscious of the specific genre with which he was working. Despite his lack of experience as a practitioner in the medium, Beckett was not simply providing a new play to the BBC so that it might benefit from his rising fame, but genuinely attempting to create a play for radio. Beckett's view of All That Fall— a view that is borne out by the work itself — makes clear that interpretation of it must take into account its condition as a radio text, must see this condition as an essential aspect of its nature and meaning.
The Transformation of a Pinter Screenplay: Freedom and Calculators in The French Lieutenant's Woman
Authors: Knapp Shoshana
Published: April 2013

In 1980, more than ten years after John Fowles asked Karel Reisz to direct The French Lieutenant's Woman, the film was finally made, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. The writing of the script and the shooting of the film are described, by all sources, as an era of good feelings. Reisz speaks of Fowles with affection ("John was a sort of uncle to the project"), and of Pinter with awe ("He was an angel!"). Fowles likes the film "very much," and he does so with a full awareness of the way his novel has been condensed: "Harold's cut the book marvelously. Masses he wrote out of it" (Garis, p. 48). (It is rare to find a writer who tolerates, much less singles out for applause, the wayan adapter has shortened the original.) Pinter, who has always felt "substantial respect" for the novel, acknowledges "very valuable" talks with Fowles and "a very free and open working relationship" with Reisz, to whom he gives credit for the most remarked-upon aspect of the screenplay: the modem episodes about the making of the film within the film (Garis, pp. 52, 54). A photograph of the" 'French Lieutenant's' men" reveals three intent, friendly faces, three artists who labored, separately and together, to create a work they all admire.
The Basement: Harold Pinter on BBC-TV
Authors: Hudgins Christopher
Published: April 2013

In 1955, Harold Pinter wrote to a friend: "Of course I recognise forms and employ them, or, rather, go to meet them — a continuous voyage, and my seed within them, they expand or snap. There is no such thing as a static mode of expression. There is no form which does not take alteration with one artist's approach." Pinter's work does seem always to be stretching formal boundaries, expanding the possibilities of theater, radio, film, and, yes, even television. Admittedly, this stretching of formal boundaries occasionally has caused some confusion for critics and audiences. Such expansion of possibilities often springs from various genres influencing one another, violating audience expectations. Pinter's television plays are wonderful examples of cross-media fertilization, for he both brings to the television studio one of the most highly regarded theatrical talents of this century and takes back to the theater much of what he learns from writing scripts for the small screen.
Drama into Film: The Shaffer Situation
Authors: Gianakaris
Published: April 2013

Close observers of theatre hardly can be faulted for their curiosity, if not downright concern, when a significant work for the stage is adapted for the movie screen. Transplanting plays to film always has been chancy, with rather more misses than hits. One can point to exceptions, of course, such as movies made of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Tennessee Williams's Streetcar Named Desire, John Osborne's The Entertainer, Harold Pinter's Betrayal, Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, and a handful of others. But even in these instances, the acclaim typically is critical rather than popular in the commercial sense. While one lists successes such as these, one also must be conscious of the far greater number of disappointing movie adaptations made from hit dramas.
The Proletarian Carnival of Fo's Non si paga! Non si paga!
Authors: Walsh Martin
Published: April 2013

The Italian playwright Dario Fo has attracted attention recently from major theatre journals and from American and British audiences. He is recognized as a supremely talented comic performer, master of improvisation in the manner of the commedia dell' arte, and a dedicated if unorthodox political artist, head of an innovative theatre commune in his native Milan. Formal discussion of his theatre pieces as drama , however, has hardly begun. There are several reasons for this state of affairs: a) low-comic forms generally receive less critical attention than other kinds; b) much of Fo's work is deliberately topical, with few established texts; c) Fo's political "message" and the question of its effectiveness tend to monopolize attention.

This paper will attempt to make a clear-cut beginning in the direction of considering Fo' s pieces as drama. It will take one of his best-known works, Non si pogo! Non si pogo! (We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!) , I examine the particular way it works , establish its integrity as a play within the broad tradition of farcical comedy, and, it is hoped, demonstrate the continued relevance of traditional, popular forms for the politically committed theatre.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

The present annual bibliography follows the basic principles and limitations described in the June 1984 issue. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of dramatic literature and , to a lesser extent, of theatre history. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modem world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1899 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential theatre figures other than performers. Reviews, reprinted books, and unpublished theses are excluded. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to my Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism, 1966-1980: An International Bibliography, which is scheduled for publication by the University of Toronto Press next month.
Beckett's Three Dimensions: Narration, Dialogue, and the Role of the Reader in Play
Authors: Laughlin Karen
Published: April 2013

Actors, directors, and theorists alike have long acknowledged the formal subversiveness of Samuel Beckett's dramatic works. His plays deny closure, replace clear narrative development with extreme fragmentation and rigid patterning, and drastically limit the gestures and movement of the actor. Beckett's play Play is no exception; indeed, this work incorporates all of the above features. But perhaps the most significant challenge to the form of drama posed by this particular text emerges from Beckett's experimentation with dialogue and his related recourse to narration rather than to the on-stage enactment of many of the play's principal events.
Beckett's Catastrophe
Authors: Libera Antoni
Published: April 2013

The title of Samuel Beckett's recent play Catastrophe has a number of meanings. First and foremost, however, it retains its original ancient Greek sense, namely, "the final event of a dramatic action, especially of a tragedy." As the title of a play, then, "catastrophe" indicates not only that the symbolic theme of the play is a catastrophe, in any sense of the word , but also that the play itself is, as an independent work, a catastrophe, and hence, that it is but one element of a greater whole which is the tragedy.
Alexandre Dumas's Kean: An Adaptation by Jean-Paul Sartre
Authors: Luce Louise Fiber
Published: April 2013

On August 31, 1836, Alexandre Dumas brought to the Paris theatergoer Kean, a play based on the life of his contemporary, the celebrated British actor Edmund Kean. Just over a century later the title Kean would reappear in Paris. This time it would be on the playbill of the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Jean-Paul Sartre's adaptation of the Dumas text. The date is now November 14, 1953

Confronted by these two dates and texts, one asks what drew Sartre to this particular Dumas piece? Sartre had, after all , already established his genius for writing for the stage: Huis Clos, Le Diable el Ie bon Dieu and La PUlain respeclueuse had preceded Kean; Les Sequestres d' Allona would follow. Why would Sartre then (not unlike Camus, Brecht, and Faulkner, for that matter) submit to the constraints inherent in adaptations — to plots previously defined, to characters already playing out their lives?
The Politics of Theater: Play, Deceit, and Threat in Genet's The Blacks
Authors: Chaudhuri Una
Published: April 2013

Every premiere production of a Genet play - indeed, every instance of Genet's appearance on the literary or social scene - has been an occasion for heated controversy, scandal, even outrage. The first production of his fourth play, The Blacks, in 1959 was no exception. At once, the conservative critics were roused to express the kind of horror and rage that had seemed hysterical even in 1891, when its target was Ibsen's Ghosts. The Blacks, wrote Gabriel Marcel, is "the rejection, the spitting forth, the vomiting of everything that has constituted the honor and dignity of the Christian West.” Another critic compared watching the play to being "bashed on the head," adding, "Blasphemies faIl like huge turds on the altars of Faith and Fatherland.” Many saw Genet as an irresponsible iconoclast, "smashing true and false gods indifferently.”
The Family and Society in the Plays of Ionesco
Authors: Edney David
Published: April 2013

Ionesco is not in the first instance a social or political playwright, and he has expressed scorn for those who claim that the theatre must be political. Nevertheless, some of his plays, such as Rhinoceros and Machett , have obvious political implications, and his work as a whole does express a view of society and politics. His vision of society, however, is not based on a realistic sociological, economic or political analysis. He sees society in an abstract, absolute way stemming from the nature of man and the basic human reactions which originate largely in the family. The author's ideas on the family, then, and his particular experience of family life, some of which he has described in his autobiographical writings, are an important source for his social thought and shape the way he sees the world.
A Sense of Direction: The Author in Contemporary French Theater
Authors: Berkowitz Janice
Published: April 2013

The distinctive mark of France' s "nouveau theatre" or avant-garde of the fifties is, at first glance, the renown of its authors, a group whose lifeline to the properly literary as a written construct far outweighed any direct experience with the live stage. Although an occasional author would turn to full scenic involvement (Jean Anouilh continues to codirect his plays) or enter into limited association with like-minded directors (both Beckett and Genet did), the serious dramatic author who viewed lack of scenic experience as a shortcoming or liability was rare. Even proponents of theater as a global activity, such as author/actor/director Romain Weingarten or Roland Dubillard, identified primarily with their roles as text engenderers, using acting and directing as a means to ensure proper stagings of their plays.
Patriarchy, Sexuality and Oedipal Conflict in Buero Vallejo'sEl concierto de San Ovidio
Authors: Jordan Barry
Published: April 2013

Over ten years ago, in his edition of the play, Ricardo Domenech argued that Buero's El concierto de San Ovidio (1962) seemed to address a "double problem: that of man's exploitation by man and that of man's struggle for freedom," adding that this double problem was located and worked out "on a level which until then Buero Vallejo had not dealt with explicitly: that of the class struggle." In the following considerations I would like to examine very briefly the adequacy of Domenech's position, in particular its reliance on the notion of class struggle as the play's broad frame of reference, and mention in passing the historical context (the Spain of the early 1960s) which may have initially encouraged this view Also, using Domenech's argument as a point of departure, I want to explore in more detail other related forms and levels of struggle, which emerge from a reading of the play in terms of the discourses of patriarchy and sexuality, and which seem to hinge on the mechanism of Oedipal conflict. The latter, hitherto virtually ignored in Buero criticism, may be regarded, in my opinion, as an important site on which the play's imputed class matrix is mediated and worked out in the dramatic action.
Theater of Impotence: The One-Act Tragedy at the Turn of the Century
Authors: Finney Gail
Published: April 2013

Although the one-act play has enjoyed its florescence during the last hundred years, the roots of the genre go back much further. Precursors of the form may be found in the short, comic scenes produced by the medieval theater, particularly in Spain and England, and in the Shrovetide plays popular in Germany during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In its modem form the one-act play first appeared in seventeenth-century France, where it was cultivated by Moliere and others, and it proliferated in Germany during the following century. Yet throughout these years and even down through most of the nineteenth century, the one-act play was a subsidiary form. Its subject matter was rarely serious, and it was most often performed either as a "curtain raiser" or prelude to a longer play, as an intermezzo to entertain the audience while scenery and costumes were being changed, or as an afterplay, for example to cheer up viewers following a tragedy.
A Hermit Dramatized
Authors: Gentile Kathy
Published: April 2013

"[I]f a man chooses to live out four decades immured in a hut, in a state of poverty, filth, and isolation, he is in a sense not alone; for we are all that man. Examine him and we shall see ourselves —." James Saunders in Next Time I’ll Sing to You and Edward Bond in The Pope's Wedding do examine this pitiful specimen of humankind and, by implication, his relation to the rest of us, though their focus on a hermit as a central dramatic character is almost unprecedented in the history of English drama. Hermits have cropped up in major works of English poetry and fiction, such as the Solitary in Wordsworth's The Excursion and the hermit in Rasselas, but until 1962, no important dramatic work took as a theme the life of a hermit. Even Shakespeare, writing soon after the medieval age of hermits , saw little potential for them as dramatic characters, his one acting hermit working offstage in As You Like It to convert the remorseful Duke Frederick to a solitary religious life.
The Circle Closed: A Psychological Reading of The Glass Menagerie and The Two Character Play
Authors: Parker
Published: April 2013

On February 25, 1983, I was correcting galley proofs of a Twentieth Century Interpretations volume on The Glass Menagerie when it was announced over the radio that Tennessee Williams had died in a New York hotel, bizarrely choking on a plastic bottle-top while under the influence of barbiturates. I A spate of eulogies followed. Walter Kerr called him "the greatest American playwright. Period."; and Marlon Brando affirmed more personally that Tennessee Williams "was a very brave man ... he never lied or flunked. He told the truth as best he perceived it, and never turned away from things that beset or frightened him.” I sadly added a last item to the chronology at the back of my anthology.
History and Other Spectres in Arthur Miller's The Crucible
Authors: Miller Budick
Published: April 2013

In his Defense of Historical Literature, David Levin has argued that Arthur Miller's The Crucible fails to achieve artistic profundity because of Miller's inability to project seventeenth-century sensibilities and thus to sympathize with them. The play, in Levin's view, and in the views of many other critics as well, is not seriously historical and, therefore, not seriously literary or political. "Mr. Miller's pedagogical intention," writes Levin, "leads him into historical and, I believe, aesthetic error. . .. Since Mr. Miller calls the play an attack on black-or-white thinking, it is unfonunate that the play itself aligns a group of heroes against a group of villains." Levin concludes his discussion with the observation that "stupid or vicious men's errors can be appalling; but the lesson would be even more appalling if one realized that intelligent men, who tried to be fair and saw the dangers in some of their methods, reached the same conclusions and enforced the same penalties.” Miller's Crucible, it would seem, fails to reach the social, historical, and (therefore) moral depth of a great work of an, because it cannot imaginatively conjure the world that it pretends to describe.
Past, Present, and Future Converged: The Place of More Stately Mansions in the Eugene O'Neill Canon
Authors: Selmon Michael
Published: April 2013

Walter Kerr, reviewing the 1967 Quintero production of More Stately Mansions, likened the O'Neill play to an apartment building he had seen in his childhood. The building had been halfway completed when the Great Depression permanently halted construction, and the barren frame stood for years before final demolition. Mansions, Kerr wrote, was like that building: at "the point at which the master plan was meant to meet and be filled by believable, tangible, domesticated creatures ... the play, being unfinished, fell apart." Still, unlike many critics, Kerr could justify the production: "In the same way that an important playwright's very earliest works are mounted out of curiosity about, and respect for , a career as a whole, an aborted major play may very well be studied — and indeed respected — for what it has to tell us about a man's mind, his habits of work (while the work was only in progress), his unrealized intentions. ,, ' And so, Kerr concluded, he would remember the play "as I remember my desolate building — not with contempt but with regret and a kind of longing."
Twentieth$ndash;Century Plays Using Classical Mythic Themes: A Checklist
Authors: Smith Susan Harris
Published: April 2013

While the relation between classical mythological and modem drama has been amply documented in books and articles, no substantial checklist of plays has been available. The only previous attempt, George E. Bush's and Jeanne R. Welcher's "A Check List of Modem Plays Based on Classical Mythic Themes" (Bulietin of the New York Public Library, 73 [1969], 525– 530), cites a mere 107 plays. The present list cites over 740. It embraces not only the clear-cut examples of "modernized myths" (the Electra plays of Hofmannsthal, Giraudoux, and Braun), but also plays that make important or indirect use of classical myths (O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Eliot's The Cocktail Party, and Orton's The Erpingham Camp), some idiosyncratic translations (Yeats's version of the Oedipus trilogy), and a few opera librettos, musicals, films, and radio scripts. The checklist is as comprehensive as I could make it, but I would welcome whatever additions and emendations that might be suggested.
Book Reviews
Authors: Hiedemann Robert , Zilllacus Class , Akademi Abo , Zangrilli Franco , Gale Steven , Harty John , Knapp Bettina , Sanders Leslie , Wilson Ann , Parker Brian , Walther Ingborg
Published: April 2013

Lenora Champagne, French Theatre Experiment since 1968, reviewed by Robert E. Hiedemann

Morris Beja, S.E. Gontarski And Pierre Astler eds., Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, reviewed by Clas Zilllacus, Abo Akademi

Marlo B. Mignone, Eduardo De Filippo, reviewed by Franco Zangrilli

Guido Almansi And Simon Henderson, Harold Pinter, reviewed by Steven H. Gale

Richard Corballjs, Stoppard: The Mystery and the Clockwork, reviewed by John Harty

Bernard F. Dukore, American Dramatists 1918–1945, reviewed by Bettina L. Knapp

Genevltve Fabre, Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre, reviewed by Leslie Sanders

Ron Mottram, Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard, reviewed by Ann Wilson

Richard Perkyns ed., Major Plays of the Canadian Drama, 1934-1984, reviewed by Brian Parker

Richard Plant ed., The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Drama, Volume I , reviewed by Brian Parker

Jerry Wasserman ed., Modern Canadian Plays, reviewed by Brian Parker

Richard W. Blevins, Frallz Xaver Kroetz: The Emergence afa Political Playwright, reviewed by Ingborg Walther
The Path from Inferno to the Chamber Plays: Easter and Swedenborg
Authors: Mitchell Stephen
Published: April 2013

Response to the 1901 Swedish premiere of Easter, Strindberg's modern passion play, was sharply critical. Tor Hedberg, for example, complained: "The entire [play] is superficial and sentimental and concludes in a childish moral. ... Those who are edified by such may be so, but for my part, I decline.” Yet despite this strong negative reaction, the play has been staged many times in the past eighty years, a fact which surely reflects the delight of audiences in seeing a drama in which Strindberg has, as Walter Johnson says, made the "interpretation of the Easter message believably human and comfortingly warm.” Clearly, the resolution of the various moral and economic dilemmas faced by the members of the guilt-ridden Heyst family provides the play with a satisfying conclusion and an overall structure which underscores the play's concern with basic Christological tenets. Especially prominent among these concerns is what Strindberg, in reference to Easter, later calls satisfactio vicaria, the soteriological concept which is present in much of Strindberg's post-Inferno production.
Wesker and Utopia in the Sixties
Authors: Zimmermann Heinz
Published: April 2013

Arnold Wesker's fIrst period of writing for the tbeatre, which closes with the play The Friends (1970), falls in the era of the legendary renewal of English drama in the late fifties and sixties. The social situation to which this drama responded has been repeatedly analysed. Samuel Beckett's existentialist confrontation with the loss of all metaphysical meaning, and the impossibility of continuing to live with this truth , finds a less cerebral and more emotional equivalent in John Osborne's dramatic revolt, which on the surface is aimed at an English, political and social situation devoid of perspectives and ideals. The Labour Party's unimaginative and pragmatic policy of reforms, its integration into the establishment once it had taken over the government, and its sacrifice of socialist ideals for the practical realization of the Welfare State — as well as the latter's bureaucratic excesses — generated not only a highly dissatisfied New Left, but also the New Drama.
"Everything Out but the Faces": Beckett's Reshaping of What Where for Television
Authors: Fehsenfeld Martha
Published: April 2013

[…}it is certainly interesting and probably valuable to examine with some care and in detail the evolution of this play, written originally in French; translated by Elmar and Jonas Tophoven into German as Was Wo; staged in 1983 by Alan Schneider as part of an evening of three plays; and finally directed by the author in a completely revised form for German television in Stuttgart in the summer of 1985.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

The present annual bibliography follows the basic principles and limitations described in the June 1984 issue. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of dramatic literature and, to a lesser extent, of theatre history. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modern world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1899 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential theatre figures other than performers. Reviews, reprinted books, and unpublished theses are excluded.
Ways of Waiting in Waiting for Godot
Authors: Calderwood James
Published: April 2013

The perfect title of a literary work, one might expect, would be, as it is in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a synecdoche, a particularly meaningful part from which the reader could infer the whole. With that in mind, I'd like to trace out some of the implications of Beckett's title. But first let me note a general curiosity about the titles of plays , one that Beckett exacerbates to paradox in his paradoxical work: the simple fact that as compared to those of poems and novels the titles of plays appear in a different mode from the play itself. They are written, not spoken, whereas poems and their titles are both written. A reader first looks into Keats's words "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" before he looks into the words of the poem that appears below it. The one leads naturally into the other, so naturally, indeed, that many titles of poems are simply the first phrases or lines of the poems themselves, as in Keats's "I Stood Tip–Toe. " In this case the title is a synecdoche in fact as well as in figure, an actual part of the poem that stands for the whole and exists both outside and inside it. Such a title is not a verbal microcosm or illuminating abbreviation of the whole but merely a tautology serving as an identifying tag.
Earning Liberties: Travesties And The Importance of Being Earnest
Authors: Sammells Neil
Published: April 2013

David Rod has argued in Modern Drama that critics of Stoppard's Travesties have paid insufficient attention to the views on art and politics of Henry Carr, the minor consular official who regales us with his version of life as it most certainly was not in Zurich during the Great War. Carr, Rod insists, rejects the various idealisms of Tristan Tzara, James Joyce and Lenin to present an independent position of his own, founded upon a practical consideration of what art has been and what it has accomplished; Carr contributes tellingly to the debate as Stoppard creates a balance "among the four opposing aesthetic viewpoints presented in the play, a balance that does not tip in Carr's favor even though his memory controls most of the events in the play.” Rod is right to suggest that Stoppard does not allow anyone of his antagonists to win the debate, but his remarks do less than justice to the complexity of Travesties. As important as what is said is how it is said; Rod's notion of a "balance" among the opposing viewpoints does not locate the real centre of Stoppard's dramatic strategies, which is the form of the play itself. It is the paramount achievement of Travesties that it addresses itself to the debate about the nature of art not by means of a spokesman (whether Carr or anyone else) but by its own method of procedure.
Memories of The Sea in Shepard's Illinois
Authors: Callens Johan
Published: April 2013

Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, and beachbecause they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight. But the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country's edge - an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless.
Inverted Chronology in Sam Shepard's La Turista
Authors: Whiting Charles
Published: April 2013

Shortly after the first performances of Sam Shepard's La Turista in New York City in March 1967, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote an article praising the "superlative interest," the "aggressive brilliance," "violent energy," and "imaginative strength" of this "dazzling production." She described it as "a storm of feeling and experience" and "his most ambitious play so far." 1 It was in fact Shepard's first two-act play and also the first of his plays that was substantially re-written. Persuaded by the director, Jacques Levy, Shepard produced an entirely new second act while La Turista was already in rehearsal.
Sam Shepard and Super-Realism
Authors: Zinman Toby Silverman
Published: April 2013

On the surface, the cool, dispassionate precision of a super-realist painting would not seem to have much in common with the high-energy heat of a Shepard play. But the term "super-realist" (or "hyperrealist") has crept into discussions of contemporary drama, especially Sam Shepard's plays of the past few years (from Curse of the Starving Class on). The term "super-realist" is also frequently applied to the new style of acting Shepard's plays seem to have required and which now can be seen in many Off-Broadway productions.
Conflicting Signs of Violence In Augusto Baal's Torquemada
Authors: Albuquerque Severino João
Published: April 2013

Severino João Albuquerque The political views of Augusto Boal, Latin America's foremost theorist of the theatre, have brought him much tribulation personally as well as professionally. A dramatist in his own right, Boal saw most of his plays banned. from the presses and the stage by the intolerant censorship which stifled Brazilian art following the 1964 coup. After much personal harassment over the years, Boal was finally arrested without charges by the military in 1971, kept in confinement for several months, and only following intense pressure from noted foreign playwrights such as Arthur Miller, was he released from prison and forced into exile, first in Argentina, and then Peru and other Latin American countries, until his return to Brazil following the 1978 loosening of the military rule.