bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Tragic Vision of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm
Authors: Van Laan Thomas
Published: April 2013

Rosmersholm has a readily perceptible line of action that takes Rosmer and Rebecca step by step toward going ‘‘the same way that Beata went’’ (398/547, 436/582),1 although we may not be sure how some of these individual steps work precisely. Early on, Rosmer still cannot walk on the bridge from which his wife Beata threw herself into the mill-race, and he is not eager to tell Kroll about his changed views on social, political, and religious matters, but he insists that he is entirely at ease concerning Beata’s death and Kroll’s hostile reaction. His tranquillity is shattered during Act Two by the new information about Beata that Kroll and Mortensgard provide and by Rebecca’s shocking response to his proposal of marriage. Rosmer, as he emphatically insists to Rebecca, is now overcome with guilt and convinced that he will never be able to fulfil his dream of creating an ideal social and political order in the land by ennobling all those capable of intellectual and spiritual growth. Kroll’s probing of Rebecca’s age and origins in Act Three shatters her sense of well-being as well. This apparently makes her more responsive to Rosmer’s suffering, for she promises to restore him to his happy state of innocence and then confesses that he should feel no guilt for Beata’s suicide because it was she who caused it by luring Beata into it. Rather than having its intended effect, Rebecca’s confession destroys Rosmer’s dream and puts both him and her in deep despair. In an attempt to free himself from despair, Rosmer demands proof from Rebecca of her love for him and faith in him and of his having fulfilled his dream at least to the extent of ennobling her. This proof is her going to her death in the mill-race, and when she agrees to do it, he decides to join her.

But what are we to make of this line of action? How are we to get to the bottom of it?
Afterword: Ibsen, Beckett, and Uncertainty
Authors: Durbach Errol
Published: April 2013

2006 links Ibsen and Beckett, coincidentally, by accidents of death and birth, ‘‘things dying’’ and ‘‘things new-born’’ held in unlikely fusion by our subliminal need to celebrate significant centenaries or by our habitual scholarly inclination to find significance in the serendipitous. How do we accommodate the crashing gears of nineteenth-century realism to the postmodern world of the absurd or read the nothingness at the core of Ibsen’s many onions in the context of the nothing-to-be-done that defines the experience of postmodern sensibility? It is the assumption of this journal, as Alan Ackerman has indicated in his ‘‘Prompter’s Box’’ preface, that Ibsen defines ‘‘the historical moment that makes modern drama modern’’ — that he is, as Martin Esslin argued at the Ibsen sesquicentennial, ‘‘one of the principal creators and well-springs of the whole modern movement in drama,’’ organically linked even to dramatists like Beckett, whose anti-illusionist techniques seem to deny any indebtedness to Ibsen’s dramatic paternity. The link, Esslin suggested, is not technical but thematic, an existential vision fundamental to the subject matter of modernity: ‘‘the problem of Being, the nature of the self, with the question of what an individual means when he uses the pronoun I. How can the self be defined? Can one even speak of a consistent entity corresponding to an individual’s self?’’. The drift of Esslin’s argument is that Krapp’s Last Tape is a modernist emanation from the central preoccupation of Peer Gynt and that the image of the onion, with its core of nothingness, expands outwards from Ibsen to incorporate the existential quandary of Beckett’s entire oeuvre.
Book Reviews
Authors: Bails Jane , Jurs-Munby Karen , Aston Elain , Wood Nicholas , Mathews
Published: April 2013

Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, reviewed by Sara Jane Bailes

David Barnett, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre, reviewed by Karen Jurs-Munby

Dimple Godiwala, Queer Mythologies: The Original Stageplays of Pam Gems, reviewed by Elaine Aston

Jinnie Schiele, Off-Centre Stages: Fringe Theatre at the Open Space and the Round House 1968–1983, reviewed by Nicholas Wood

James Moran, Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre, reviewed by P.J. Mathews
A Krapp Chronology
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2013

I begin my chronology with the creation of Krapp's Last Tape. In 1958, Beckett's translation of Fin de partie was scheduled to premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in London, but, some seventy-five minutes long, it was considered too short to play alone. The theatre's artistic director, George Devine, wished to couple it with A Resounding Tinkle by N.F. Simpson. Beckett, however, preferred to try to compose something himself. At about that time – December, 1957 – Beckett heard Patrick Magee reading from Molloy on the radio, and the musical writer was enchanted by the soft, whispering voice of the Irish actor. In January 1958, Beckett went to the BBC office in Paris to hear Magee more clearly on tape, and in February, he began to write what he at first called the Magee Monologue. Six drafts and three weeks later Beckett sent Krapp's Last Tape to George Devine in London.
The Prompter's Box: Birthdays and Beckett's Bony Ghost
Authors: Ackerman Alan
Published: April 2013

The celebration of birthdays, the marking of anniversaries, has become conventional in academic journals and associations. As Errol Durbach wrote in his afterword to the last issue of Modern Drama (49.3), a special issue to mark the centennial of Ibsen's death, “2006 links Ibsen and Beckett, coincidentally, by accidents of death and birth—‘things dying’ and ‘things new-born’ held in unlikely fusion by our subliminal need to celebrate significant centenaries or by our habitual scholarly inclination to find significance in the serendipitous.” To honour Beckett's centennial, Modern Drama, in conjunction with the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto, sponsored a Distinguished Lectures series, featuring talks by S.E. Gontarski, Enoch Brater, and Herbert Blau, all of which appear as articles in this special issue. But it is worth reflecting on our need to “celebrate significant centenaries” – to ask what makes them “significant,” to consider what Beckett in particular has to teach us about this curious habit, and to look specifically at how his dramatization of the habitual study of an author on his birthday can inform our own critical practice.
Reinventing Beckett
Authors: Gontarski
Published: April 2013

Samuel Beckett's creative life (and personal life, for that matter) was marked by a series of transformations and reinventions. In the process of remaking himself, over and again, from donnish academic to avant-garde poet, from Joycean acolyte to post-Joycean minimalist, from humanist to post-humanist, perhaps, most certainly from poet to novelist to playwright to theatre director, Beckett was simultaneously reinventing every literary genre he turned his attention to. In the midst of remaking narrative in the wake of World War II, for example, he began simultaneously the reinvention of theatre, writing the ground-breaking (but still unproduced) Eleutheria between Molloy and Malone meurt [Malone Dies] and En attendant Godot [Waiting for Godot] between Malone meurt and L'Innommable [The Unnamable]. Almost as soon as he began to experience some recognition, most notably in the theatre, however, he began to recoil from it as well, as if it represented a threat, the desired attention he had struggled so hard to achieve barbed with threats to his art (and even perhaps to his self-image). Enthusiastic about his anti-boulevard play Eleutheria and eager for its publication and performance, for example, he quickly repudiated it, withdrawing it from scheduled publication after the staging of Godot, finding it in later years impossible to translate even for his long-time publisher, Barney Rosset, refusing again to have it published,at least in his lifetime, and finally, if fundamentally by proxy, prohibiting any staging, apparently in perpetuity. It was, however, a play central to Beckett's theatrical reinvention as it, almost literally, swept the stage clear of both boulevard and naturalistic debris and so bared the stage for what would become, in English, Waiting for Godot. British critic and staunch Beckett advocate Harold Hobson may have privileged Beckett's second full-length play in the following description, but his comments are equally apposite to Eleutheria, the restriction to “the English theatre” excepted.
Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett
Authors: Blau Herbert
Published: April 2013

Years ago I published a book called Blooded Thought, the title of which came out of a line by the poet Wallace Stevens: ‘‘An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.’’1 Actually, some of that blood rushed to the head when I was first directing Beckett’s plays – in San Francisco, more than half a century ago – and would often speak to the actors in a Beckettian way, my words inseparable from his words, as a way of thinking through or by means of what it is that he thought. I’ve written several essays in the past in which I thought thus, and there are passages here in which I’ll be doing the same. If, then, I sometimes indicate quotations and sometimes (or mostly)don’t – though I think you’ll know when he’s speaking – it’s because I’m trying to convey, in the moment, what he thought, as I think it. I should say that one of the things confirmed by Beckett every time I read him is that it’s precisely where thought escapes me, at the selvage or circuitous limit of thought, that it may, tautologically, turn back upon itself, which is what keeps it going, to be thought all over again – this time, to begin with, in even more personal terms.
Talk about Landscapes: What There Is to Recognize
Authors: Brater Enoch
Published: April 2013

Early on in the second act of Waiting for Godot, Estragon, a dog-eared Beckett bum who claims to have once been a poet (“Isn't that obvious?”[9]), expresses considerable dismay at the un-“inspiring prospects” of what can only be described as a minimalist's scène à faire: “Recognize! What is there to recognize? All my lousy life I've crawled about in the mud! And you talk to me about scenery! (Looking wildly about him.) Look at this muckheap! … You and your landscapes!” (39). Though the intrepid Vladimir urges him to “calm” himself by staying the course, critics of the play have, by and large, come round to Gogo's assessment of his unenviable situation in this empty performance space. “A country road. A tree. Evening,” the famous stage direction that sets the outdoor scene on a spare platform never dressed quite the same way before (3), would give even a visionary director like Peter Brook more than a moment's pause (as it did so, indeed; witness his landmark productions of King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company, each in its own way an energetic response to the new Godot scenography, the former with a menacing touch of Endgame in the air). In Beckett's play, there's a tree, of course, with – lest we forget – its well-placed leaves added surreptitiously by a conscientious stagehand during the interval separating the not quite equally paced two acts. There's a bit more to it than that, too: a mound, a pair (or two) of shoes that don't quite fit; a radish, black; a supply of turnips; and one never-to-be-forgotten carrot that turns out to taste, well, like a carrot. Yet in comparison to Ibsen, one would have to admit, there's not a lot here to write home about. “The only thing I'm sure of,” the playwright said of his players, reduced as they are to such a decrepit stage reality, “is that they’re wearing bowler hats” (qtd. in Brater, Why Beckett 62).
Book Reviews
Authors: Griffith  , Wellwarth George , Kuhn George Ross Ridge , Ganz Arthur , Ruhl Klaus
Published: April 2013

Winifred L. Dusenbury, The Theme Of Loneliness In Modern American Drama, reviewed by E. E. Grffith

Bertolt Brecht, Seven Plays, reviewed by George Wellwarth

MLaurence Kitchin, Mid-Century Drama, reviewed by George Ross Ridge

Martin Esslin, The Theatre Of The Absurd, , reviewed by Reinhard Kuhn

David E. Jones, The Plays Of T. S. Eliot, reviewed by Arthur Ganz

Walter Hinck, Die Dramaturgie Des Spli.Ten Brecht, , reviewed by Klaus Ruhl
The Tragic Commitment: Some Notes on Arthur Miller
Authors: McAnany Emile
Published: April 2013

ARTHUR MILLER has created at least three images for the American public. To the vast audience of mass communications, he has been variously identified with Marxism, Marilyn or misfits. To the theater minded person, his name evokes the memory of a play about a salesman. To a much smaller audience of interested readers, he is distinguished by a significant body of dramatic theory and critical comment on contemporary serious drama. It is precisely in this third capacity that he has made some of his most important contributions to the tradition of the American theater.
Transcending Naturalism
Authors: Hays
Published: April 2013

THE WORK of the younger British playwrights, which is now beginning to be seen in this country, generates a feeling of excitement. A handful of new plays and a new group of writers seem to add up to something of a theatrical renaissance. With the recent decades of the American theater in mind, I should like to examine some of the characteristics of this new trend.
Myth As Tragic Structure In Desire Under The Elms
Authors: Racey Edgar
Published: April 2013

IT IS CUSTOMARY to point to the underlying Oedipal theme of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elmsand to link this play with Mourning Becomes Electra as evidence of his consuming interest in the Oedipus theme, both as myth and complex. The use of myth, or classical source, in Electra is obvious, for O'Neill takes great pains to insure that no one misses the elaborate series of correspondences that his trilogy effects. Less elaborate, but equally effective, is his reliance on the Hippolytus of Euripides (and, perhaps, on Racine's treatment of the theme) in Desire Under the Elms.
Judges In The Plays Of Albert Camus
Authors: Reed Peter
Published: April 2013

DURING THE LAST DECADE, appreciation of Albert Camus has grown not only because of his skill as a literary artist but also because of his insight as an examiner of our times. Much has been written about the political and ethical content of Camus' novels and essays, but while his plays have been examined for such well-known philosophical concepts as "the Absurd" and "Revolt," little attention has been paid to their social commentary.

Camus was intensely concerned with the administration of justice and the legal systems in society. For example, his hatred of capital punishment is emphasized in La Peste, Reflexions sur la Peine Cap itale, Le Myth de Sisyphe, CEtranger, La Chute, and some of his shorter essays. But evidence of his interest in law and justice also abounds in his plays. Consequently, judges receive much attention, and it is with these I shall concern myself. Though not all of those I shall mention are judges in the legal meaning of the word, most of them are in the sense that human lives depend upon their judgments.
Ionesco and the Mechanisms of Language
Authors: Knowles Dorthy
Published: April 2013

MONSIEUR EUGENE IONESCO, whose university studies were those of a philologist, is obviously aware of the theory of language which makes of it a form of social behaviour and not a means of communicating ideas, or feelings. He does not choose as his starting point a group of characters as good dramatists are expected to do, calling upon dramatic language to perform its traditional function of recounting the action and elaborating the theme. Not for him, characters accredited with an inner life, of which words are a projection in an outward direction; of his plays language, the matter of language, verbal matter, is the stuff and substance. The resulting air of unreality, of behaviourist automatism, is intended to be the same as that produced by a language lesson heard on a gramophone. The process of equating a word in one language with a word in another, without taking any account of the real significance of the word, a process with which Ionesco as a language teacher was familiar, had, as he said himself in 1958, produced on him the impression of language separated from reality, and existing for its own purposes. The impression was confirmed by his study of a manual of English conversation, with its grotesque phrases. By painstakingly copying out lists of "useful" expressions from the manual, he relearned, he says, a number of general truths, e.g., that the ceiling is overhead and the floor underfoot, etc.; but these statements sounded completely absurd. He learned from the same manual that Mr. and Mrs. Smith lived in a London suburb and so ate an evening meal of fish, potatoes, and lettuce, and, that Mr. and Mrs. Martin carne from Manchester and had a little girl named Alice. He was however very surprised that they had to tell each other these things!
The Critical Reception Of American Drama in Sweden
Authors: Steene Brigitta
Published: April 2013

To THE SWEDISH CRITICS American drama is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Earlier American dramatists are totally unknown in Sweden, dramatists like James A. Heme, Bronson Howard, and Steele Mackaye who took their dramatic themes from the Civil War, or turned their work into liberal attacks on current social problems. When American dramatic products finally gained ground "in Sweden, it was not these early, often awkward but honest dramatic attempts that became associated with American theater but rather those elegant, superficially realistic, or melodramatic plays that announced Belasco's era on Broadway.
Chekhov's Morality Of Work
Authors: Freedman Morris
Published: April 2013

ONE LINE in The Cherry Orchard holds the play's essence. Lyubov is talking with Petya, the pedantic tutor of her drowned son. "My boy was drowned here," she says to him and weeps. "Pity me, my dear kind fellow." ''You know I feel for you with all my heart," Petya replies stiffly. Her tears stopping, looking up, discontent, Lyubov chides him: "But that should have been said differently, so differently." Petya has spoiled the scene. Like an actor-director, Lyubov steps out of the action to criticize her partner. "But that should have been said differently, so differently." She is also troubled about his appearance. "You must do something with your beard to make it grow somehow," she laughs. "You look so funny." She is dramatically mercurial. She moves without pause from acting in tragedy to critical detachment.
Poetry And Politics: The Verse Drama Of Auden And Isherwood
Authors: Gerstenberger Donna
Published: April 2013

The Experiments of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood with the verse play are centered in the nineteen-thirties and, in every instance, reveal the political and social preoccupation of the times. Their experiments cannot, however, be dismissed merely as the products of a Leftist political bias, now outdated by the conversions of their creators to more conservative positions. In spite of Richard Hoggart's rather typical judgment that the importance of these dramas "in the history of the modem theatre is negligible," the Auden-Isherwood plays are of interest in their own right in the development of modern verse drama, because in them there is an attempt to convey wholly modem content in the most immediately relevant terms. The fact that these dramatic experiments often resulted in uncontrolled extremes or in a failure to rise above the chaotic mass of contemporary experience they sought to express makes their contrast with conventional verse drama even more marked than would have been the case in less outspoken forms. The failures of Auden and Isherwood are not subtle approach
"Nannie's Night Out"
Authors: Ayling Ronald
Published: April 2013

SEAN O'CASEY is surely wise in preferring "Kathleen Listens In" to "Nannie's Night Out," though it is an exaggeration for him to declare to Robert Hogan that the latter play is "rather negligible" as drama. Compared to such imaginative essays in the one-act form as "Time To Go" and "Hall of Healing," however, it is not difficult to see why the author is perhaps overcritical of his earlier effort. My purpose here is to examine "Nannie's Night Out" in more detail than Dr. Hogan could do in his recent article, showing in particular the playas a link between O'Casey's earlier and his later plays.
The Influence Of Melodrama On The Early Plays Of Sean O'Casey
Authors: Ritchie Harry
Published: April 2013

WHEN SEAN O'CASEY'S first volumes of autobiography began to appear in the late 1930's, many critics were surprised to see how much space O'Casey devoted to his early contact with nineteenth century melodrama, particularly the plays of Dion Boucicault. This was just about the last place critics of O'Casey's drama would have looked to discover possible influences on his early work. Not only was melodrama considered beneath critical contempt, but O'Casey had already been assigned another set of influences, influences far more acceptable to contemporary literary tastes.
Existentialism in T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion
Authors: Palmer Richard
Published: April 2013

EXISTENTIALISM furnishes a valuable key to the meaning of The Family Reunion for four reasons: (1) The underlying mood of the play is Angst, that is, existential anxiety. (2) The fundamental ontological assumptions in the play are essentially the same as those asserted by the important existentialist thinkers, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, and even Sartre. (3) The structure of values presupposed by the play is basically existentialist. (4) Harry's situation and the pattern of his action in the play, too, are basically existentialist; indeed, Harry is the very model of the Existentialists' hero, an authentic, questing self in a world of inauthenticity.
Notable Books In English And French On Contemporary French Drama: 1957-1960
Authors: White Kenneth
Published: April 2013

---
Book Reviews
Authors: Lewis John , Buckley Jerome , Kepler Henery , Unterecker John , Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

John D. Hurrell, Two Modern American Tragedies, reviewed by John S. Lewis

Margery M. Morgan, A Drama Of Political Man: A Study In The Plays Of Harley Granville Barker, reviewed by Jerome H. Buckley

Michel Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, reviewed by Henery Kepler

W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, reviewed by John Unterecker

Edwin Wilson ed., Shaw on Shakespeare, reviewed by Charles A. Carpenter, Jr.
Strindberg 1951-1962: A Bibliography
Authors: Bryer Jackson
Published: April 2013

This LISTING is designed to be a supplement to and expansion of Esther H. Rapp's excellent bibliography, "Strindberg's Reception in England and America," Scandinavian Studies, XXIII (February, 1951), 1-22; XXIII (May, 1951), 49-59; XXIII (August, 1951), 109-137. It adds post-1950 material which Miss Rapp does not cover and also appends new sections in an attempt to present a more complete coverage of Strindberg studies during the last decade.
Naturalism in Transition: Strindberg's "Cynical" Tragedy, The Bond(1892)
Authors: Madsen Børge
Published: April 2013

STRINDBERG'S SO-CALLED NATURAUSTIC DRAMAS of the late 1880's and early 1890's can only be tenned naturalistic with certain important qualifications. If The Father (1887) is naturalistic, its naturalism is the kind of "grandiose art" of which Strindberg found examples in Emile Zola's play Therese Raquin (1873) and the novel Germinal (1885). By grandiose naturalism Strindberg meant in this context a powerful, elemental art strongly colored by the temperament of the author, an art which does not refrain from an occasional heightening or exaggeration of reality for dramatic effect. Of this type of naturalism both Therese Raquin and The Father contain several examples. One need only recall in Zola's play the drastic scene in which Madame Raquin, rendered hysterical with rage, discovers the crime of the guilty lovers Therese and Laurent, and in Strindberg's violent drama the climactic episode where the Captain throws the burning lamp at his wife Laura, after he has been informed that he has only been a breadwinner and a means for her to conceive the child. Again Miss Julie (1888), Strindberg's most completely naturalistic play, is not in all respects genuinely naturalistic.
The Dramatic Quality Of Strindberg's Novels
Authors: Borland Harold
Published: April 2013

AMONG THE NUMBER of Strindberg's collected works is a dramatization of Hemsoborna (The People of Hemso).This galumphing rustic comedy in four acts—which relies for its laughter chiefly on lewdness and liquor, and ends merrily after the dull son of the house who is marrying a maid for love has ousted the sharp farm hand who has married a widow for money—is scarcely recognizable as an adaptation of the novel of the same name. Stock figures of fun like the midwife, the woman three times widowed, the customs official, and the peddling merchant make their heavy contribution to the mirth; the leading characters, Carlsson, Widow Flod, and Pastor Nordstrom, scarcely rise above caricature. What life there is in the play is achieved by the irritatingly rapid sequence of scenes. Oddly enough the funniest scenes in the novel—the marriage ceremony to the accompaniment of popping beer bottles and the pastor's unseasonable speech at the wedding feast—find no place in the comedy. Naturally the later tragic development which gives substance and completeness to the novel is absent.
A Restless Pilgrim: Strindberg In The Inferno
Authors: Milton John
Published: April 2013

FROM The Inferno, written in 1896-97, are usually culled those details which support the notion that Strindberg suffered some kind of mental illness, and also those autobiographical incidents which help to explain or interpret the subject matter of the difficult plays, notably To Damascus, which followed the Inferno experience. Strindberg wrote no plays between The Bond (1893) and To Damascus (1898), and it is during this period of dramatic inactivity that his concerns turned away from naturalism and toward expressionism. It is a relatively simple matter to say that the mental illness forced Strindberg's thoughts inward, so far inward that much of his subsequent production was highly personal and private, almost to the point of obscurity. However, there seem to be reasons for reducing the importance of the insanity (if, indeed, there was an actual insanity) and for looking into the techniques of The Inferno in order to determine that Strindberg knew fairly well what he was doing and that he was undergoing a process of change considered quite normal among sensitive artists.
Visions of A Transfigured Humanity: Strindberg and Lenormand
Authors: White Kenneth
Published: April 2013

DEFINITION OF THE BOUNDARIES separating "sickness" and "health," in appraising theatrical creativity, is obviously perilous. Many of Strindberg's plays exemplify this difficulty. A rather characteristic American view of Strindberg was phrased by John Gassner in his semi-ironic verdict, "[The United States] ... is the Bernard McFadden of nations, and• Strindberg is definitely not healthy."

Today, this categorical conclusion appears untenable. Qualification and explanation of Strindberg's "maladies" are needed. One of the most provocative early summaries of the basic soundness underlying the Apocalyptic prophecies dramatized by Strindberg was offered by Henri-Rene Lenormand, the French playwright of the 1920's and 1930's. Throughout his entire career, Lenormand freely admitted his artistic debt to Strindberg.
Strindberg: The Real and the Surreal
Authors: Durkore Bernard
Published: April 2013

WHEN TWO OF AMEmCA's better drama critics discuss the same play in apparently contradictory terms, one is puzzled{..}These opposing evaluations suggest the possibility that the answer may lie somewhere between the two extremes, incorporating elements of each viewpoint. Actually, the comments are not as contradictory as they first appear to be.
Wagnerism in Strindberg's The Road to Damascus
Authors: Vincentia Sister
Published: April 2013

Strindberg, speaking here as The Stranger in The Road to Damascus, Part III, describes defensively his creative process. Rarely, however, has he identified the sources of this shattered material. My efforts, then, to establish Richard Wagner as one of them must be directed chiefly to internal evidence; his recorded references to Wagner yield only a baffling ambivalence. The ambivalence, of course, does not surprise us. Whatever the climate of Strindberg's changing, frequently stormy moods, he passionately articulated the feelings and thoughts they induced, sweeping aside the subsequent inconsistencies. What concerns us, therefore, in an investigation of his references to Wagner is not their shifting quality but their record of his sustained awareness of Wagner's inescapable presence as a powerful aesthetic force.
The Road To Damascus, Part One: A Skeptic's Everyman
Authors: Scanlan David
Published: April 2013

AUGUST STRINDBERG was continually and intensely alive. "I was born without an epidermis," he was fond of remarking. Unlike most mortals, he was incapable of a life which features one or two "highlights" separated by long stretches of more or less drowsy routine. Everything that happened to him was a crisis: even his hangovers seemed to have been festivals of guilt and repentance. None of the ordinary, or extraordinary, human problems were simple for Strindberg, and especially not the problem of God. It is no wonder, then, that The Road to Damascus, a trilogy which grew out of the strenuous religious experiences of his Inferno period, presents such a strange and intricate blend of skepticism and faith. Although at the end of the trilogy the leading character (the autobiographical Stranger) enters a monastery, he does so in a bewildered and resigned way, and not in a spirit of climactic conviction. He does not seem to be much nearer religious conviction than he is at the end of Part One as he stands hesitatingly at the door of a small Gothic church.
The Logic of A Dream Play
Authors: Sprinchorn Evert
Published: April 2013

STUNDBERG'S Dream Play is customarily lauded for its originality, the power of its dialogue and the beauty of its verse, the opportunity it offers to peer into the strange mind of its creator, and for the welcome contrast its compassionate mood offers to the hysteria of Strindberg's other plays. But those who begin by citing its virtues almost invariably conclude that technical innovations and stage tricks are no substitute for thought and meaning; that subjectivity results in artistic chaos; that verses of such beauty require a more imposing setting; and that, when all is said and done, bursting chrysanthemums are no substitute for the verbal fireworks of Strindberg's sex battles. In a word, A Dream Play is technically original, historically important, but utterly incoherent.
Book Reviews
Authors: Watt David , Striff Erin , Colin Philip , Jenckes Norma , Hurley Erin , Argay Mireia , White Lee , Solga Kim , Dobson Jill
Published: April 2013

Ian Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman, A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics, reviewed by David Watt

Elain Aston, Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory, reviewed by Erin Striff

James Fisher, Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays, reviewed by Philip C. Kolin

Stephen Bottoms, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee, reviewed by Norma Jenckes

Philip C. Kolin, Understanding Adrienne Kennedy, reviewed by Erin Hurley

Varun Begley, Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism, reviewed by Mireia Aragay

Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama, Vol. 2: 1933–1952, reviewed by Lee White

James M. Harding and John Rouse, ed., Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance, reviewed by Kim Solga

Joe Kelleher, Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion, reviewed by Julia Dobson,
Staging The Merchant of Venice in Cork: The Concretization of a Shakespearean Play for a New Society
Authors: Fitzpatrick Lisa
Published: April 2013

In summer 2005, the Irish theatre company Corcadorca presented The Merchant of Venice as part of a multinational project called ‘‘Relocations.’’ The production was a site-specific, promenade performance that travelled through Cork city centre late at night. It had a multinational cast in the speaking roles and a multiethnic community cast drawn from the local population, who marshalled the audience, processed, and heckled the Jewish characters from within the spectatorial space. The performance aimed to challenge the audience to confront their response to Ireland’s recent history of immigration and the country’s increasingly multilingual and multiracial population. This essay explores the concretization in performance of the fictional dramatic world of the play and focuses on specific devices used by the company to realize their interpretation of the work.
The Ideal City: Heterotopia or Panopticon? On Joseph Brodsky’s Play Marbles and Its Fictional Spaces
Authors: Meerzon Yana
Published: April 2013

In 1972, Joseph Brodsky, the renowned Russian poet expatriate, the Nobel Prize winner, the Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College, began his exilic ‘‘quest for significance,’’ since the democratic state, the place of his e´migre´ inhabitant (America), provided him with ‘‘the physical safety but render[ed] him socially insignificant. And the lack of significance is what no writer, exile or not, can take’’ (Brodsky, ‘‘Condition’’ 4). For Brodsky, this quest was a welcome one. He understood exile as a lesson in humility that teaches one existential essentials and puts one’s journey ‘‘into the longest possible perspective’’ (5). For Brodsky, exile became a pursuit in creativity, a spiritual and aesthetic expedition, and a condition that generated new energy and ideas. Brodsky’s expulsion became a creative paradigm rather than a state of constant suffering, disorientation, and displacement. It caused an expansion of his artistic interests when the Russian poet not only willingly embraced his forced bilingualism but also found it stimulating to think, to write, and to teach in English. Moreover, the exilic condition necessitated his investigation of the forms of writing that he had regarded as ‘‘foreign’’ when living at home. Thus his life in distant lands made Brodsky not only write in a new language but also explore the artistic challenges of composing prose and drama not poetry. These other venues became Brodsky’s new creative territories, the manifestation of his adaptability and hybridization, the creolization if not of his everyday then of his artistic tongue. Accordingly, this article discusses Joseph Brodsky’s play Marbles (1982) and argues that the play offers a representation of the Platonic city – a modern version of the ideal metropolis, based on the tendencies of geopathology and nostalgia, and the crossroads of exilic narratives registered within cityscapes from the period of the Enlightenment on. It becomes an exilic writer’s projection not only of his past experience with the state but also of his understanding of how his adopted country, a model democracy, is, in fact, treating its citizens.
Is Nothing to Be Done?
Authors: Erickson Jon
Published: April 2013

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a play about basic striving for meaning in a world in which meaning is not forthcoming. The desire for meaning is, at the same time, a desire to understand one’s suffering and a desire for justice. Reading Beckett ‘‘politically’’ means at once attempting to understand where the political impulse – the impulse towards justice – comes from in human life and at the same time demonstrating, through facing the frustration of meaning and a sense of justice, the limits of politics as an overarching explanatory force. The political philosopher Judith Shklar’s question about how one distinguishes between ‘‘misfortune’’ and ‘‘injustice’’ guides this essay’s considerations about tragedy, comedy, absurdity, and our attempts to make sense of suffering and death.
Selective Affinities: British Playwrights at Work
Authors: Reinelt Janelle
Published: April 2013

This essay characterizes a community of playwrights working in Britain across generational lines, and emphasizes the need to complicate customary distinctions between political (older) and politically sceptical (younger) writers, arguing that writers are connected through their responses to the discrete historical moments they experience and through a British writing culture that allows for mutual support. The current situation is seen as fluid and eclectic, containing space for a range of theatrical writing.
Blasted ’s Hysteria: Rape, Realism, and the Thresholds of the Visible
Authors: Solga Kim
Published: April 2013

A curious blind spot remains in the critical response to Sarah Kane’s Blasted : the rape of Cate by Ian. In a play famous for its onstage violence, why is this rape, one of its pivotal moments of brutality, left unstaged? My article seeks to worry this lacuna by exploring the theoretical and historical dimensions of the ‘‘missing’’ in Kane’s play. I argue that Kane’s representation of Cate’s rape as missing signals both her engagement with the history of rape’s representation – an elusive, evasive history rather than an outrageous, in-yer-face one – as well as a deft understanding of how the ‘‘missing’’ operates as realism’s menace, the ghost of what realist representations must garrison away in order to instantiate their truth-claims. I frame my reading of Kane’s critique of both genre and history by exploring how Blasted charges us, as contemporary spectators of realism, to recognize the schism between knowledge and the eye, the limits of our powers of sight.
‘‘Form Follows Function’’: Meaning and Politics in Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies
Authors: Sierz A;eks
Published: April 2013

This article shows how Crimp, in his 2005 trilogy of short playlets, both constructs meaning and explores the difficulties of constructing meaning. The article analyses the form and content of Fewer Emergencies in two contexts: what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls ‘‘postdramatic’’ theatre and what Frank Furedi calls the ‘‘culture of fear.’’ Crucially, both of these considerations feed into another, more important question: in what is sometimes seen as a ‘‘post-radical’’ or ‘‘post-human’’ world, what exactly are the politics of Fewer Emergencies? The article shows how Crimp’s trilogy is radical in both its form and its content, but that this radicalism is achieved at a cost.
Bringing the Global Home: The Commitment of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker
Authors: Amich Candice
Published: April 2013

Caryl Churchill’s play The Skriker explores the ravages and intoxications of globalization. Through the shape-shifting character of the Skriker, who commands space and time in a manner that recalls the fluidity of multinational capital, Churchill examines the relationship between time–space compression and the fragmented subjectivities of two young women, Josie and Lily. In this essay, I argue that, through the play’s formal exploration of the decentring forces of postmodern life, Churchill is able to demystify her subjects’ relations to the flows of multinational capital and, in doing so, to recover the affect that the pressure of time–space compression threatens to exhaust.
Roy Williams: Representing Multicultural Britain in Fallout
Authors: Derbyshire Harry
Published: April 2013

This article considers how Roy Williams’s 2003 play, which dramatises a black-on-black killing and the flawed police investigation which follows, represents contemporary British society, particularly in relation to the vexed question of multiculturalism. Some have described Fallout as limited and bleak, reinforcing stereotypes of black experience and identity. By contrast, this article demonstrates that the play, through its analysis of both a conflicted police service and the societal divisions that push black youths towards criminality, draws attention to the underlying systemic causes of inner city violence and makes a constructive and valuable contribution to ongoing public debate.
Towards a Post-millennial Mainstream? Documents of the Times
Authors: Innes Christopher
Published: April 2013

This essay considers David Hare’s Stuff Happens, Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Max Stafford-Clark and Robin Soans’s Talking to Terrorists as examples of a recent turn (or return) to documentary theatre in recent British drama.
Thomas Wolfe: Dramatist
Authors: McElderry
Published: April 2013

THE GREAT COMMERCIAL SUCCESS of Ketti Frings' play Look Homeward, Angel is a reminder that Wolfe's novel is not entirely composed of lyrical variations on the theme: “Oh lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again." Unsatisfactory as the play is, in comparison to the novel, it does emphasize the dramatic conflicts between Eliza, Old Man Gant, their bickering brood, and the boarders at My Old Kentucky Home. We recall that when Wolfe went to Harvard in 1920, his primary goal was George Pierce Baker's 47 Workshop. For about three years, Baker took him seriously as a potential dramatist, even writing to Wolfe's mother in 1923 that her son's career justified her financial help because of his talent for drama.1 Except for Wolfe's unwillingness to revise the overlong script, Welcome to Our City would probably have been produced by the New York Theatre Guild in 1924 or 1925. Wolfe's later career as a novelist led most readers to think of his ambition to write plays as a youthful blunder, a pathetic miscalculation of his •abilities. His failure in drama, however, was relative, not absolute, and the training he got in trying dramatic forms contributed more than has been realized to the success of such scenes as the death of Ben, the quarrels between Bascom Hawke and his wife, Monk Webber's meeting with Esther Jack, and the famous party at her house.
Mallarméan Antecedents of the Avant-Garde Theater
Authors: Evans Calvin
Published: April 2013

ANY THEATRICAL OR OTHERWISE ARTISTIC ACI1VITY that forcefully reminds man of the void that fringes society may be termed avantgarde. In this sense, Pascal, the dramatist, would have been the avant-garde leader of his time. It is precisely this preoccupation with the stripping away of social layers that has provided the substance of crisis in the theater for the last eighty years. To this extent one may differentiate between avant-garde and mere. innovation. Under the latter heading one may place such departures from classicism as ula comedie larmoyante," "Ie drame bourgeois," Hernani, the melodrama of the Revolution, the social drama of the mid 1800'S, etc., but the disillusionment with not only theatrical form but with its emotional and sociological content as well dates from Symbolism. Until the 1880'S, the French theater was quite satisfied to deal with social themes. The playwright styles himself as both a deplorer and healer of social ills. The only evolution in the theater to which one may point during these long decades was the increase in the degree of dramatic intensity that playwrights such as Becque and Augier brought to these problems. Even Mallarme evinces admiration for Becque's La Parisienne. But the exaggerated social consciousness of the thesis play tended to seal off the theater from its poetic sources. The dramatic presentation of injustices and abuses, though capable of moving the spectator, did so by making a concerted and rational appeal to the intellect. An important part of the dramatic experience was the spectator's "engagement" to tacitly condemn the wrongs he saw perpetrated on the stage against the victims of social vices. Briefly, the French theater just prior to the advent of Symbolism had become cloyingly didactic, calling for greater intellectual than emotional involvement_ The Symbolists rejected didacticism as well as the facile emotionalism generated by the problems which it studied.
John Osborne's Backward Half-Way Look
Authors: Huss Roy
Published: April 2013

Look Back in Anger is truly a disturbing play. It does not disconcert, however, because, as critics like Mary McCarthy have argued, it brings to the theater a fresh and long-needed challenge to ossified social ideas. No matter how influential Osborne's role has been in staking out a path of social protest for other dramatists and novelists to follow, in this, his first play, he rails to give a dramatic context to such themes. In fact, the situation in which the play's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, is involved not only fails to motivate or support this character's social iconoclasms but weakens their validity by revealing his energies to be annoyingly infantile and psychologically aberrant. This is a more immediate source of uneasiness than Osborne's seemingly relentless war on conservatism and Philistinism.
Shaw Improves Shaw
Authors: Dukore Bernard
Published: April 2013

CHARLES H. SHATTUCK'S COMPARISON of the 1893 and the 1898 editions of Bernard Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses—the first textual study of any of Shaw's plays—reveals the prodigious growth of Shaw's dramatic powers within these few years. As new editions of his plays were published, he quietly made revisions which, Professor Shattuck recognizes, were "pervasive, detailed, and sometimes drastic." The differences between early editions of early Shaw plays and the texts in the Standard Edition or reprints therefrom, are occasionally enormous. An example of this is his one-act play How He Lied to Her Husband, which he wrote in 1904 as a curtain raiser for Arnold Daly's American production of Man of Destiny.
Job In Anderson's Winterset
Authors: Pearce Howard
Published: April 2013

MAXWELL ANDERSON'S Winterset has a certain unity which has often been denied the play. Once we view this drama through its most pervasive parallel, the Book of job, the unity becomes apparent.

Job, the hitherto unnoticed element, is an aid toward a grasp of the playas a unified totality, providing a dominant theme and resulting in a new perspective.

This unity will be found by viewing the theme not as "justice" or "love," but as the overpowering of vengeance by love, as the rejection of a lesser for a greater good. At any rate there is an interplay, and a movement from one to the other, of the two themes, justice and love. The Sacco-Vanzetti parallel points up this relationship. Scene iii of Act I moves from the puerile romanticism of an anonymous girl's seduction to an equally youthful, particularized verbal battle of cops and radicals to the ethereal first love of Mio and Miriamne and finally to the horrible, mysterious murder of Shadow. Here we have love-justice-Iove-justice developed in one scene, but the two kinds of love and the two kinds of justice are antipodal: the first two are common, worldly, particular; the last two are universal. So in this scene there is almost the admission that the play sets out to universalize the contemporary themes of romantic love and social injustice. The theme of justice has already been established in Act I: Trock has been released from prison after serving the sentence of justice, and Garth is struggling with himself to overcome his personal defeat which arose from injustice. In Scene iii the themes of love and justice are juxtaposed, and Mio reveals that the bitterness of his search for justice precludes love: he cries, "Enduring love, oh gods and worms, what mockery!" And the plot becomes twisted up in the conflict of love against justice, until it is untangled by the conquest of love.
Yeats and the Theater: A Selected Bibliography
Authors: Gerstenberger Donna
Published: April 2013

YEATS'S INTEREST IN DRAMA spanned the whole of his productive career and manifested itself in varied forms, such as practical participation in the creation of the Abbey Theatre and the founding of the national theater movement in Ireland, production of extensive prose work on dramatic theory and criticism, collaboration with other playwrights, composing the English versions of two Greek plays, dramatic exploration of the world of Irish folklore and of the traditional Japanese Noh theater, and, most important, creation of a considerable body of original and experimental drama in verse and prose.