bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Incoherent Self in Contemporary Comedy
Authors: Winston Mathew
Published: April 2013

Through the many changes in sensibility, culture, and literary practice during. the past two thousand years, comedy has normally been inhabited by low characters, some clever and some foolish, who move through various confusions to a happy ending, often in marriage and a communal feast of social reconciliation and self-affirmation. Past societies found these characters "low" because they were not the gods, monarchs, and noble warriors of tragedy, and some of the prejudice that equates socio-economic class with status in the presumed hierarchy of nature still lingers. Beyond that, comic characters are low because they lack spiritual aspiration and are concerned with their material well-being, with cash, comfort, food, and sex. They are also low in their indecorous behavior, and perhaps in so far as they entertain us by their wit or folly rather than enlighten us by their wisdom or ennoble us by their grandeur. But however "low" they may be, comic characters repeatedly assert their right to be happy and to impose themselves on the world around them.
Deconstruction As Devil' s Advocacy: A Shavian Alternative
Authors: Dietrich Richard
Published: April 2013

The contention in this essay is that while Bernard Shaw could not be called a deconstructionist, at least nothing a Derridean would so call, nevertheless there is deconstructive activity of a significant kind and degree in his work, worthy of investigation for its own sake. In the Shavian quality of devil' s advocacy to be found within such activity may also lie a clue to the future of deconstruction, one, in fact, already adumbrated in the accounts of such critics as Christopher Norris and Jonathan Cullers.
The Woman and Greek Myth: Bond's Theatre of History
Authors: Bulman James
Published: April 2013

Edward Bond believes that mythology always serves an unjust society. It codifies and promulgates the values of a repressive culture — in his terms synonymous with capitalist culture. "Capitalism," he writes in an essay called "A Rational Theatre," "does not want to know what we are but merely how we may be manipulated. To this end it creates a mythology about men and their societies. This mythology is its culture.” And what are these myths? In another essay Bond lists them: "the world is a jungle, men are animals, some men are more animal than others, all men are born to sin or with the need to be violent, only the hard prosper, most men wish to be led, happily others are born to be their leaders, and all this is either chosen by god or ordained by evolution.” Bond thinks that such myths are irrational, and furthennore, that they license irrational behavior. It is the obligation of a rational theatre, therefore, to demystify and revise these myths. "Theatre," he argues, "must talk of the causes of human misery and the sources of human strength. It must make clear how and why the culture of capitalism is a nihilism. And because the understanding of history is contamiriated with mythology it must rewrite it to make sense of the future.”
Musicality and Meaning in the Dialogue of Saint's Day
Authors: Goodall Jane
Published: April 2013

The criticism most frequently levelled against John Whiting's plays by those who have judged them in performance is that they lack coherent meaning. Complaints of wilful obscurity abounded in reviews of the original productions of Marching Song and The Devils but these complaints were not as heated or pervasive as in reactions to the earlier play Saint's Day when it won the Arts Theatre play competition in 1951. "Maxwell Anderson and Strindberg in consort could not be more portentous," wrote Philip Hope-Wallace, "We sit stunned, anxious to catch on if possible.”
"Dreams Against the Cold": Characterization in Kroetz's Help Wanted
Authors: Cummings Scott
Published: April 2013

As interest in Franz Xaver Kroetz spreads and more productions of his plays are mounted in North America, increasing numbers of American actors will confront a challenge for which their training does not fully prepare them. Kroetz's characters are deceptively realistic. Like so many others from Zola to Albee, they inhabit a world that mirrors, poetically or photographically, that of their audience. They behave in a manner that is, in Chekhov's words, "just as complex and yet just as simple as in life." Their much heralded ordinariness — with few exceptions they are unassuming middle–class working people — reinforces their naturalism, but they are somehow more than real. Rather than a deep psychology or an inescapable past, Kroetz endows his characters with a self-consciousness triggered by their immediate situation. They scrutinize themselves constantly, as if from the outside, and this imposes on them a duality of character which makes an actor's close identification with his role a reductive approach. Kroetz's recent play, Help Wanted, both in its structure and its ostensible subject matter, clarifies this method of characterization and suggests his ultimate concerns as a playwright.
Perspectives on Modern Verse Drama
Authors: Gerstenberger Donna
Published: April 2013

INTEREST IN DRAMA has been perennial among poets in every century, although since the eighteenth century there has been an increasing separation between the interests of the stage and the interests of a living poetic art. The results of this separation have been particularly evident in the verse theater, while the theater for prose has maintained an element of sensitivity to current life and art which has long been lost to the poetic drama. It is not until the twentieth century that a group of verse playwrights have attempted to revitalize verse drama for the English-speaking stage by bringing to it the same standards of artistic coherence insisted upon in other fields of creative endeavor. In modem art this artistic coherence has expressed itself in a search for a living form; for a meaningful relationship between content, structure, and language. The conception of verse drama as a formal experience was what had been lost as a result of the increasingly rigid separation on the stage of the domain of poetry and the world of real and vital concerns.
BjøRnstjerne BjøRnson's Beyond Human Power And Kaj Munk's The Word
Authors: Madsen Børge Gedsø
Published: April 2013

IT IS A WIDELY KNOWN FACT that in his play The Word Kaj Munk refers directly to Bjørnson's drama Beyond Human Power (that is to say Over Evne, Første Stykke). The student of theology, Johannes Borgen, in The Word is assailed by religious doubts after reading Beyond Human Power. One evening he attends a performance of the play with his fiancée Agathe. When they leave the theater, Agathe saves the preoccupied Johannes from being run over by a car but is herself killed. Johannes later tries to resurrect her but fails. The strain is too much for him and he loses his reason. This much is common knowledge. It is likely, however, that a more intimate connection than this exists between The Word and Beyond Human Power. Both plays pose the question: may the Christian faith, under exceptional circumstances, be strong enough to work miracles? Bjørnson answers this question in the negative, Munk in the affirmative. Thus it is possible to regard Kaj Munk's modern “miracle play” as an anti-naturalistic reply to the implied statement in Bjørnson's naturalistic drama that men are restricted by the operation of ineluctable laws of nature, that miracles are beyond human power.
Strindberg And The Danse Macabre
Authors: Johnson Walter
Published: April 2013

WHILE STRINDBERG REMAINED as fascinated as ever by his own time after his Inferno years of 1894 to 1897, he became more intensely interested than ever before in the late Middle Ages as well. That two-fold interest helped lead to many developments, among them his creation of new dramatic techniques through (1) the extension of his superb realistic-naturalistic technical practices of the pre-Inferno period, (2) the transformation of medieval dramatic ideas and devices into techniques that became highly Strindbergian, and (3) the addition of modern technical elements that were essentially his own. All three matters, taken together, are frequently and loosely' spoken of as expressionistic by most scholars and critics.
Wedekind in Retrospect
Authors: Hill Claude
Published: April 2013

ONE OF THE STRANGEST and most controversial figures of modern German literature is Frank Wedekind whose influence did not reach its peak until his death in 1918 and whose name, after a decade of inflated fame, seems all but forgotten today. And yet, Wedekind's lonely contribution to the history of modern drama at the turn of the century is incalculable in its effect upon generations of younger writers, especially the leading activists of the expressionistic movement, and some of their heirs like Bert Brecht and Friedrich Dürrenmatt in our time. Violently attacked during most of his life, outrageously hampered by the imperial censorship of the last German Kaiser, torn to pieces by most literary historians until World War I, blindly worshipped by a determined group of world reformers after the revolution of 1918, Wedekind is only now, forty years after his death, coming into proper focus. After most of his works had been banned during the Nazi regime, a few attempts to revive his plays on the German stage after 1945 met with failure, and no new Wedekind boom is likely to occur ever again. The task that remains is to appraise the dramatist's historical contribution to modern literature in the light of the last three decades of the century.
Justice: Galsworthy's Dramatic Tragedy
Authors: Bache William
Published: April 2013

WRITIEN IN THE SAME YEAR, 1909, John Galsworthy's “Some Platitudes Concerning Drama” and Justice may be said to function as complements; and the article may conveniently be used to elucidate the play:
The Autumn Garden: Mechanics And Dialectics
Authors: Felheim Marvin
Published: April 2013

Probably no play of the American theater (and I am including that feeble adaptation The Wisteria Trees) is more completely Chekhovian than Lillian Hellman's recent and most charming original drama, The Autumn Garden. Although the piece was only mildly successful when presented during the 1950-1951 season on Broadway, to the discerning (and here I quote Alan Downer) it is “Miss Hellman's most original play.”
O'Neill: The Power Of Daring
Authors: Chaitin Norman
Published: April 2013

THE PLACE was a wide, bare, dimly-lit rehearsal hall on the fifth floor of the old Theatre Guild building. The year was 1953. There was a platfonu, a small reading desk facing several rising rows of seats, and Lawrence Langner was speaking: “I can now see Gene entering through that door,” he said, and pointed at a narrow lateral door, “walking shyly and sitting in the back of this hall as rehearsals were being started for....”
The Worth Of Ah, Wilderness!
Authors: Adler Jacob
Published: April 2013

THE CRITICAL FATE of O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! has been, to say the least of it, peculiar. Nowadays we look with horror at the intentional fallacy; yet we have scrutinized O'Neill's statements about Ah, Wilderness! and derived attitudes therefrom. At present a writer's life is considered almost an irrelevancy; yet Ah, Wilderness! has been attacked because O'Neill's adolescence was obviously never like that. Nowadays we are enjoined to look, at all costs, at the work itself; yet we have turned back to O'Neill's earlier works, and, finding Ah, Wilderness! to be very different, we have, according to our biases, either smiled with relief at the mellowness and simplicity or winced in pain at what seemed sentimental, superficial, and false.
Notes on Eugene O'Neill in Japan
Authors: Frenz Horst
Published: April 2013

Although translations of Eugene O'Neill's plays existed in Japan before 1924, none of his plays was performed on the Japanese stage until that year. It was through the Tsukiji Little Theater that the American playwright found a first hearing before a Japanese audience, and, between 1924 and 1929, six of his plays became part of the Tsukiji repertoire. The first Japanese production of any O'Neill play, Beyond the Horizon, took place in October, 1924. The Emperor Jones followed in March, 1925; The Long Voyage Home and Before Breakfast in February, 1927;Ile in February and again in May, 1927; and The Hairy Ape in May, 1929.
Milestones of Moscow's Past Theater Season
Authors: Markov Pavel
Published: April 2013

DRAWING THE A'ITENTION of theater-lovers the world over, the Chekhov jubilee, that highlight of the past theatrical season, could not but influence the Soviet stage as a whole and Moscow's theaters in particular. The latter undertook to stage plays by Chekhov that were never before produced on the Moscow stage. Half-forgotten plays, such as The Wood Goblin and Platonov, which had rarely seen the footlights, were brought out of the archives and produced by theaters noted for their fine taste and excellent stage directing, i.e., by the Vakhtangov and Mossoviet Theaters. And still they did not contribute anything especially new to the understanding of Chekhov the playwright, nor did they shatter the opinions long formed about them. Indeed, nothing special could be expected of them, since having rejected Platonov and developed The Wood Goblin into Uncle Vanya Chekhov thus pronounced severe judgment on them. Of course, both Platonov and particularly The Wood Goblin have points highlighting the author's lyricism and keen psychological observation, but these plays were only a presage of Chekhov's great future. The theaters had to exert considerable effort to overcome both plays' definite dramatic shortcomings. It is clear, therefore, that their productions can merely be regarded in the light of a historical and literary experiment. Only two roles, performed by the talented Serafima Birman and Rostislav Plyatt, were at the level generally demanded of Chekhov's plays. There is nothing surprising about this, since the parts they played in The Wood Goblin were akin to those that were later featured in Uncle Vanya.
A Masque Of Reason And J B.: Two Treatments Of The Book Of Job
Authors: Stock Ely
Published: April 2013

IN THE CHAOTIC MID-TWENTiEnr CENTURY it is not surprising that two poets who have been most aware of man's seemingly isolated position in the universe turned to the Book of Job for inspiration. A Masque of Reason, a one act play in verse by Robert Frost, published in 1945, and Archibald MacLeish's J. B., a verse drama of eleven scenes, published and produced on Broadway in 1956, have more in common than their common Old Testament source, but, at the same time are unmistakeably different from each other.

The Book of Job, written by an anonymous poet in the early half of the fifth century B.C. in Babylon, can be divided into two sections from the point of view of structure. Chapters one and two and chapters thirty-eight through forty-two present the familiar story of the patient Job. All of the dramatic action takes place in these chapters. The middle chapters of the book (chapters three to thirty-eight) contain the argument of the Book in the form of a long-sustained dialogue between Job and his comforters. The middle chapters are philosophical in nature and contain some of the most .beautiful and moving poetry in the Old Testament, but they are not conceived in dramatic terms. It is to the credit of MacLeish and Frost as playwrights that they have leaned more heavily on the opening and closing chapters of the Book of Job as sources for their works than on the middle chapters, but because of this, they have sacrificed some of the poetic possibilities which such a rich source might afford.
The Dramatic Achievement of T. S. Eliot
Authors: Knieger Bernard
Published: April 2013

IF WE ANALYZE those elements which his five completed plays have in common, then we shall have a sense of T. S. Eliot's development as a dramatist as well as a fair estimation of his achievement. The most significant element which these dramas have in common is the similar nature of the climax of each. The turning point of all five plays consists in the gaining of knowledge by the protagonist about the nature of his moral struggle, but in no case is this knowledge attained dramatically, that is, through struggle and conflict.
Baby Doll And The Ponder Heart
Authors: Dusenbury Winfred
Published: April 2013

IN THE SUMMER OF 1955 Tennessee Williams submitted the movie script for Baby Doll to Elia Kazan, who had been urging the playwright to make a film of two early one-acts: 27 Wag01l8 Full of Cotton (1945), and The Long Stay Cut Short or The U1l8atisfactory Supper (1946). Although the plots of the two short plays are obviously incorporated into Baby Doll, the publisher's note which points out that the script is "quite different from the two short plays," is accurate. The similarities are basically those of plot; the differences, those of setting, of the character of Baby Doll, and of her situation.
Book Reviews
Authors: King Walter , Bastuji Jaqueline , Crafton Allen
Published: April 2013

John Gassner, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Theatre at the Crossroads, reviewed by Walter N. King

Andre Frank, Georges Pitoeff, reviewed by Jaqueline Bastuji

M.W. Steinberg, Holt-Dryden ed.,Aspects of Modern Drama, reviewed by Henry W. Knepler

Martin Dauwen Zabel, The Art of Ruth Draper, reviewed by Allen Crafton
Theater in Recent English Theater
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2013

Anathema to the naturalistic stage, theater in the English theater of the second half of the twentieth century exults in its own variety. Its principal structure, the play within the play, occupied the Renaissance stage, was whittled down to parody in the eighteenth century, and has reclaimed important areas of modern drama. Critics with their literary bias synonymize "theater in the theater" and "play within the play," but some recent English playwrights refuse to be bound by such strictures; along with many plays within plays, we find several ventures into popular theater in the theater, as well as elitist self-reflexive plays.
Book Reviews
Authors: Adler Thomas
Published: April 2013

Austin Quigley, The Modern Stage and Other Worlds, reviewed by Thomas P. Adler
Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Caprenter 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, unpublished theses, and graduate-student periodicals are generally excluded. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to my Modem Drama Scholarship and Criticism 1966-1980: An International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press). The present installment, for example, includes over 250 entries dating from 1966 to 1980 - a great many of them garnered from the sumptuous volumes of Romanische Bibliographie, edited by Gustav Ineichen.
Red Noses and Saint Joan
Authors: Dukore Bernard
Published: April 2013

Obviously, a writer may be influenced by another writer whom he admires: Pinter by Beckett, say. Also obviously, a particular play may be influenced by one or more particular works that the author admires: Candida by A Doll's House and The Lady from the Sea, for example. A play may also derive from a work the author detests: Brecht's Baal in conscious reaction to Hanns Johst's Der Einsame, for instance. More difficult to document, usually, is the latter type of indebtedness when the author is unaware of it.
Maurice Browne and the Chicago Little Theatre
Authors: Lock Charles
Published: April 2013

The recent revival of interest in Eugene O'Neill has a certain polemical, even ideological bias: the revival has occasioned very little research into or argument about O'Neill's sources and influences because it depends on the assumption of O'Neill as initiator, as the origin of American drama. A sampling of two scholarly books from the 1950s and one from the 1980s should indicate sufficiently the manner in which O'Neill has been deprived of his ancestry.
The Play of the Misbegotten
Authors: Ready Robert
Published: April 2013

O'Neill's dramas often imitate their own existence as theater, as actions people put on for themselves or others. The climactic music and dance of The Moon of the Caribbees, the emperor costume of Brutus Jones, the compelling but awkward masks of The Great God Brown, the infamous production demands of Lazarus Laughed, the Aeschylean presence that hovers around Mourning Becomes Electra, the safety of recovered roles in Harry Hope's bar, the posture and self-parody of Can Melody: O'Neill's audiences and readers experience many forms of theatrical self-consciousness in the plays. The production of meaning in O'Neill can unfold for us in those moments when his theater illuminates itself and OUf awareness of its own representational status . This element of his dramaturgy comes into particularly clear focus in A Moon for the Misbegotten. "More than any other of his late plays," Timo Tiusanen states, .. this drama ... seems to presuppose a theatre production." The last work O'Neill was able to finish, A Moon for the Misbegollen seems to gather a life's work for the theater into a final synthesis of life with theater.
Bertolt Brecht's The Exception and the Rule. It Doesn't Say What It Says It Says
Authors: Brown Russelle
Published: April 2013

Bertolt Brecht's short didactic play The Exception and the Rule (Die Ausnahme und die Regel, 1930-31) was neither published nor performed in Weimar Germany (first performances, Palestine 1938, Paris 1950, Dusseldorf (959). But it was the first didactic play Brecht published after the war, and he recommended it for performance. Now it has become "by far the best-known and most performed Lehrstuck (didactic play) of Brecht today," according to Jan Knopf. This study approaches the play not as an illustration of Epic Drama or as a document in Marxist thought of the thirties, but in the way a naive spectator or reader might, testing the final statement or lesson of the play against the actions of the three main characters as demonstrated by the previous action.
Švejk's Stage Figure: Illustration, Design, and the Representation of Character
Authors: Quinn Michael
Published: April 2013

Stage figure is the Prague School term for the material signifier of theatrical acting, a human body or puppet made over for aesthetic perception. Stage figures usually correlate with single characters of particular plays, though this conventional practice has been interestingly violated in any number of plays featuring "mistaken identities." According to the Prague School model of the acting sign, as initiated by Otakar Zich, the stage figure stands in an intermediate, technical relation to the actor and the incorporeal dramatic character who resides in the consciousness of the perceiving audience
"Des Petits Ebranlements Capillaires…”: The Art of Michel Vinaver
Authors: Lamont Rosette
Published: April 2013

Although Vinaver will not align himself with any movement, he has been embraced by the Leftist intelligentsia ever since Roger Planchon directed his play, Les Coreens. at the Theatre de la Comedie in Lyons (1955). Until very recently, Vinaver was perceived as the in-house author of Theatre Populaire. a member of the Barthes-Dort team which advocated a "Brechtian cure'" for French theatre. He himself says in no uncertain terms: "I never felt I was a Brechtian, although I had and still have a great admiration for Brecht the writer, and Brecht the director. In the second half of the fifties and the sixties, I found myself outside any existing movement in the theatre."

Vinaver may practice the "V Effect," but in his case the V stands resolutely for Vinaver rather than Veifremdung.
Weiss's Marat/Sade and its Three Main Performance Versions
Authors: Suvin Darko
Published: April 2013

This paper discusses aspects of three important productions of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade: West Berlin in April 1964 (Schiller-Theater, directed by Konrad Swinarski), the Royal Shakespeare Company in London and New York, respectively August 1964 and December 1965 (Aldwych and Martin Beck Theatres, directed by Peter Brook), and the East German premiere at Rostock in March 1965 (VoIkstheater, directed by Hanns Anselm Perten). A comparative approach to these three productions gains a certain significance from the playwright'S collaboration with all of them, although to a different degree in each case,
J.M. Synge's Forms of Romance
Authors: Gibbs
Published: April 2013

Attempts to define the generic characteristics of Synge's works commonly produce a list of kinds reminiscent of that in Polonius's enthusiastic commendation of the Players in Hamlet, as "the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical , historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral". In his foreword to E.H. Mikhail's 1975 bibliography of Synge criticism, Robin Skelton provides a succinct summary of the seemingly contradictory and certainly widely differing classifications of Synge: "he has been viewed [Skelton writes] as primarily a satirist, as essentially a romantic, as a thoroughgoing realist, and as the most subtle of symbolists." Synge's work does indeed offer a banquet of kinds. We can locate in this profusion, as in the individual items of language, "fully flavoured as a nut or apple," in accordance with Synge's well-known recipe, part of the reason for that sense of creative opulence which the plays convey. In this discussion of romantic ingredients of Synge's work, it is not intended to establish generic hierarchies or to underestimate the importance of other ingredients — farcical, ironic, grotesque, naturalistic, symbolic — to which critical study has been directed. I prefer to think of romance in the case of Synge (as in the late plays of Shakespeare) as providing a commodious vessel in which heterogeneity can flourish as the norm, and would suggest that the concept of dramatic romance perhaps provides one way of resolving the problem of genre in Synge. The main purpose of this essay is to examine some patterns of romantic idea and motif in Synge's work and to indicate their bearing on narrative structure in the plays.
Adoption in Endgame
Authors: Lawley Paul
Published: April 2013

The terminal world of Beckett's Endgame, with its "corpsed" aspect outside the stage—refuge and its barbed play inside, sustains life solely, it seems, by reason of its ruler's procrastination. "Enough, it's time it ended, in the refuge too," proclaims Hamm at the outset. "And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to … to end". His hesitation is a problem not least because of "that hatred of nature as process (birth and copulation and death) which runs through the whole play." For if Hamm's hesitation necessitates a prolongation of life in the refuge, the processes of nature, in one form or another, are surely unavoidable.
Dominance and Anguish: The Teacher—Student Relationship in the Plays of David Mamet
Authors: Hubert—Leibler Pascale
Published: April 2013

Although at first sight Mamet's urban microcosm — inhabited by rugged, unsophisticated, often inarticulate men — and the school world would seem to be poles apart, relationships of the teacher—student type appear in most of his plays. A Life in the Theatre, Squirrels, and American Buffalo for instance, are built around a master—disciple paradigm; the protagonist of Mr. Happiness is presented as an expert in psychology who dispenses guidance and words of wisdom to his eager listeners. In Lakeboat, young ordinary seaman Dale elicits a "teaching reflex" from several of the older crewmen, who take it upon themselves to teach him his job and initiate him into adult life (see scenes 10 and 21). The importance of the pedagogical relationship is also reflected thematically by the frequent occurrence of words like "learn," "show," "teach," "know," "lesson," or "school." Some details make direct references to institutionalized education: for instance, we learn that Dale is a college student and that he may go on to teach English; Joan in Sexual Perversity in Chicago is a kindergarten teacher.
Book Reviews
Authors: Dukore Bernard , Kalb Jonathan , Kraft Eugene , Gontarski
Published: April 2013

Charles A. Carpenter, Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism 1966-1980: An International Bibliography., reviewed by Bernard F. Dukore

Alan Warren Friedman, Charles Rossman and Dina Sherzer, eds., Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, reviewed by Jonathan Kalb

Ruby Cohn, ed., Beckett: Waiting for Godot, reviewed by Jonathan Kalb

Richard Allen Cave, New British Drama in Performance on the London Stage, reviewed by Eugene Kraft

Odette Aslan, Roger Blin and Twentieth Century Playwrights, reviewed by S.E. Gontarski
State of the Art: Alternative Theater in the GDR
Authors: Simpson Patricia Anne
Published: April 2013

History and historical figures have always been legitimate topics for the GDR theater. Since the 1980s, GDR dramatists have begun to draw from history and myth as subjects for their plays with new perspectives. They now represent the Nazi past without the fear and trepidation of their colleagues in the West; and they bring the rehabilitated Pruss ian past to life with surprising canniness and irreverence (Claus Hammel's Die Preussen kammen [The Prussians are Coming]). This type of work demonstrates a sometimes laudable historical, social, and political consciousness while keeping within the expressed purpose of GDR theater — to edify each member of the audience and produce a better citizen.
Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang
Authors: Wilcher Robert
Published: April 2013

In the last several years, theatre journals have given an unusual amount of attention to the politics of theatre, Modern Drama among them.' It would seem that theatre scholarship has once more turned some of its best energy to thinking about what ideologies embedded in content and detennined by form tell us about our political selves. At its simpilist, recent scholarship is providing a forum for the way in which theatre can join other disciplines in scrutinizing its received traditions and understandings with the objective of showing how theatre, in talking about itself (although, one hopes, not to itself), can reconfigure itself and its society. Hayden White's words seem apt here: "every discourse is always as much about discourse itself as it is about the objects that make up its subject matter."
Theatre in Crisis
Authors: Gottlieb Vera
Published: April 2013

On 4 December 1988 a conference on Theatre in Crisis was held at University of London Goldsmiths' College. The conference was convened by Vera Gottlieb, Nesta Jones, and Simon Trussler from the Drama Department of Goldsmiths' College in association with New Theatre Quarterly.
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 Btichner and Becque) and influential theatre figures other than performers. Reviews, reprinted books, unpublished theses, and graduate-student periodicals are generally excluded. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to my Modem Drama Scholarship and Criticism I966-1980: An International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press, 1986).
Tom Stoppard Journalist: through the Stage Door
Authors: Kelly Katherine
Published: April 2013

At the age of seventeen, Tom Stoppard left school to join the Western Daily Press as a reporter, feature writer, humorous columnist and reviewer of plays and films. The move was to be decisive for his future as a playwright. Not only would his apprenticeship encourage the young Stoppard to develop and cultivate a prose style but it would introduce him to actors at the Old Vic and lesser provincial theatres where he gradually learned the practical business of stagecraft by observing a multitude of plays succeed and fail before live audiences. He entered the news profession hoping eventually to lead a dangerfilled life as a foreign correspondent, a dream at which he later poked fun: "I wanted to be Noel Barber on the Daily Mail or Sefton Delmer on the Daily Express — that kind of big-name, roving reporter. Noel Barber actually got shot in the head in Budapest, which put him slightly ahead of Delmer as far as I was concerned." But he instead developed the journalist's habit of researching a story that would survive as the cornerstone of his playwriting method. As he explained to Ronald Hayman in 1974, reading gave him something to write about. As a journalist, one "[Rlead[sl the works of Norman Mailer in fourteen days in order to write an article of 1200 words." With some important exceptions, Stoppard still finds his material for plays as he would for news stories, largely outside of his personal life and frequently in the works of other writers.
Book Reviews
Authors: Fisher James , Hinden Michael , Black Stephen , Dowling John
Published: April 2013

Robert Russell, Russian Drama of the Revolutionary Period, reviewed by James Fisher

Konstantln Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theater, 1905-1932, reviewed by James Fisher

Ronald H. Wainscoti, Staging O'Neill: The Experimental Years. 1920-1934, reviewed by Michael Hinden

Laurin Porter, The Banished Prince: Time. Memory. and Ritual in the Late Plays of Eugene O'Neill, reviewed by Stephen A. Black

Martha T. Halsey And Phyllis Zatlln, eds., The Contemporary Spanish Theater: A Collection of Critical Essays, reviewed by John Dowling
Images of Women in Shepard's Theatre
Authors: Whiting Charles
Published: April 2013

Sam Shepard, despite all the recognition he has received, has never been celebrated for his characterizations of women. The most sustained and eloquent attack on the playwright's attitudes was made by the director and critic Florence Falk in 1981. "In general, women [in Shepard's plays] are a straggling group of camp followers, and men treat these 'bitches,' 'broads,' and 'stupid fucking cuots' as recalcitrant and dangerous possessions." I More gently, the actress Joyce Aaron ended a brief article in the same year with the exclamation, "I wish he'd write a play for women! '" Perhaps if Ms. Falk and Ms. Aaron were writing today, after the appearance of Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind, and the film Far North , they might make some change in their judgements, because it is evident now that Shepard's younger women have become distinctly more prominent in his recent work, and this realization leads us to a new and more favorable perspective on the women in all the earlier plays.
Feminizing the Frontier Myth: Marsha Nonnan's The Holdup
Authors: Wattenberg Richard
Published: April 2013

Mainstream theatre in the United States has undergone a number of transfonnations in the past decade. Not the least is the acceptance of woman to the playwriting elite. Plays by Beth Henley, Marsha Nonnan, Tina Howe, and Wendy Wasserstein have all had successful Broadway runs, and Henley, Norman, and Wasserstein have been honored with Pulitzer Prizes. These successes suggest the opening of the "establishment" to new and diverse voices. While some feminist critics view this "opening up" as a co-optation , it may indicate a shift in mainstream cultural attitudes. Whether or not such a shift has actually occurred is debatable; nevertheless, these new woman playwrights touch on themes close to the hearts of traditionalists. For instance, in The Holdup (I98(}-3), Marsha Nonnan confronts the frontier West - long the focus of a male-centered mythology. While admitting that this play was not a typical "Nonnan play," that it has more fantasy than substance, and that it was not intended "to substantiate Western mythology" (all facts that might explain why some critics responded negatively to it), Nonnan also claimed that in The Holdup "there are serious things to be said about stories and how they operate on our minds." Indeed, the structure of this play's "story" suggests a transfonn.tion of the frontier myth.
Saint Isobel: David Hare's The Secret Rapture as Christian Allegory
Authors: Golomb Liorah Ann
Published: April 2013

In his latest play, The Secret Rapture, David Hare has given us a central character, Isobel, who is distinctly not of the world. Even her name, a variant of Elizabeth, has as one of its meanings "consecrated to God.,,' Dramatically, Hare took a great risk in centering his play on [sobel. She is weak, pliable and abused (a stark contrast to Hare's usual headstrong women such as Susan in Plenty or Peggy in A Map of the World), yet in order for the climax to have any impact, we must feel that something has been accomplished by her destruction, not that she has been one oflife' s doormats who deserves w hat she gets. If Isobel were merely a good woman who could not exist in a corrupt world the necessary sense of loss at her death might not be evoked, but Hare has raised her to the level of saint and martyr. Her death has a purging effect on the other characters, so that while there is loss there is also hope .
Drama and the Dialogic Imagination: The Heidi Chronicles and Fefu and Her Friends
Authors: Keyssar Helene
Published: April 2013

I first came to know the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin in the mid–seventies. [ Increasingly hailed as one of the most daring and profound philosopher–critics of the twentieth century, Baklnin was difficult to read but easy to admire. Indeed, as striking as has been the growing interest in Balchtin's ideas has been the range of people whose interest he has aroused — feminists and nonfeminists, Marxists and anti–Marxists. modernists and postmodernists. social scientists, linguists, psychologists, literary critics and philosophers. Few seemed to notice that they were in strange company. The only people blatantly missing in the crowd were others like me — drama critics and practitioners of theatre.
The Music of The Cherry Orchard: Repetitions in the Russian Text
Authors: Anderson Greta
Published: April 2013

Kay Unruh Des Roches has recently demonstrated how an analysis of the verbal repetitions in the original text of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea contributes to a specific understanding of the play which a close study of its English . translations would not be able to yield. Her essay suggests that all plays in translation "need a criticism based on a detailed description of untranslatable elements in the original text," a criticism which would be as relevant to the theater as to the classroom. Chekhov's major plays certainly merit such an approach, not only because they are so popular in both settings, but because, even in translation, their verbal repetitions (and acoustic repetitions) are such a significant part of our experience of them. Here, a reading of the Russian text of The Cherry Orchard will reveal the original shape and sound of its repetitions and probe the meanings inhering in their arrangement. As in Ibsen's play, the repetitions in Chekhov create local patterns which telescope into the play's larger thematic structure. By understanding the play in terms of musical structures, we can appreciate in greater detail the measured grace and good humor with which the playwright has his characters conduct themselves together, in the face of an uncertain future. Attention to structural rhythms tends toward a reading of the play more in accord with Chekhov's designation of the playas a comedy than do most interpretations, particularly those which focus on its closing moments. Of the final snapped string, one critic has written, "to interpret that sound is to interpret the play": this essay will explicate the rhythmic framework in which that note sounds.
Bakhtin's Chronotope: Time and Space in A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions
Authors: Porter Laurin
Published: April 2013

In "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," the third essay of The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin defmes chronotope as "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships ... in literature." The term, whlch literally means time-space, is used in physics and was introduced in conjunction with Einstein's theory of relativity. Bakhtin adapts it to his own purposes, using it almost (but not entirely, he insists) as a metaphor to express the inseparability of time and space (time as the fourth dimension of space). "In the literary artistic chronotope." Bakhtin writes, "time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope."
Order Within Fragmentation: Postmodemism and the Stroke Victim's World
Authors: Kelley Margot Anne
Published: April 2013

Describing American novels ofthe 1960s and '70S, Richard Ohmann maintained that many of the works which have been canonized tell "one story," a narrative of illness that "transform(s) deep social contradictions into a dynamic of personal crisis, a sense of there being no comfortable place in the world for the private self." His assessment seems especially applicable to a variety of "disability plays" published in the late 1970s, works that attempt to offer models for retaining personal freedom despite the confining strictures of social authority. Arthur Kapil's play Wings, written for radio in 1976 and revised for the stage in 1978, is one in a group of works focussing overtly upon illness, death and dying. Indeed, many of Kopit's contemporaries used long-term disease or disability as metaphors for living and as situations in which new ars moriendi and ars vivendi could be wrought. Like them, Kopit stresses the need for communication to alleviate the pain that isolation creates for patients.
Metaphor and Community in The Lady from the Sea: Remitting Impediments through the Marriage of Skewed Minds
Authors: Barr Richard
Published: April 2013

Though he sometimes seems an enemy of society, Henrik Ibsen may well be its best friend among the early modernists. Throughout his career he maintains a profoundly social conception of the self and many of his stylistic and thematic innovations stem directly from developments in his understanding of the ways society and selfhood can, and must, be reconciled. Indeed, even his best known and most rebellious individualists advance the reconciliation process, though their contributions are not always clear. or even conscious, and Ibsen is thus sometimes misunderstood as an antisocial sociologist who rejects communal life and embraces solitude as the only forum for self-realization.' While a Nora or Stockmann may espouse radical individualism, their strident speeches are always qualified by ironies which present isolation as a means, not an end. Humans may indeed need to "stand alone" to escape a sterile society, but they will be left standing if they do not then pursue more fertile social forums. For as the plays repeatedly stress, self-realization requires social cures for social ills. Limiting institutions must be replaced by liberating alternatives, disabling social bondage must give way to enabling communal bonds because, in Ibsen's penetratingly paradoxical view, solitary selfhood is ultimately a contradiction in terms.
Galsworthy's Realism: A Revaluation
Authors: Borreca Art
Published: April 2013

The early twentieth-century image of John Galsworthy as a great author seems odd from our historical vantage point. He appears to be unworthy of the voluminous criticism, biographies, and memoirs his life and work inspired. His positive reputation among Edwardian critics was in fact erratic: it surged with the publication of The Man of Property and with the openings of The Silver Box, Strife, and Justice, but even admiring critics acknowledged that these plays far surpassed the bulk of his work, while his detractors found all his work too . conservative aesthetically. On the whole, the critical image of Galsworthy following his death was that of a good man but a superficial artist.. But there was always another image at play in the relationship between Galsworthy and his audience — one that magnified the goodness of the man. Galsworthy enjoyed an enormous popular reputation, which derived as much from his true humanitarianism as from his novels and plays, and which bestowed upon him the stature of a man smiling down upon society, paradoxically placid and scowling, an expression of deep moral anger and absolute impartiality on his face. It was this image that inspired volumes about him, and that proliferated a sense of his work's worthiness. And it is this image that has made it difficult to evaluate his work judiciously.
The Failure of Technology in The Glass Menagerie
Authors: Reynolds James
Published: April 2013

Laura's fragile collection of glass animals gives Tennessee Williams's play its name and a central symbol with both an esthetic and a personal focus. But the play is punctuated with another set of references, an array of ordinary products of twentieth-century technology, that expands its significance beyond the personal even as it illuminates the narrow lives of its protagonists.
Contested Narratives on and off the Kathakali Dance-Drama Stage
Authors: Zarrilli Phillip
Published: April 2013

Folklorist Richard Bauman noted long ago that traditions of performance like Kerala, India's kathakali dance-drama, have always stood available to participants and spectators "as a set of conventional expectations and associations" which can be "manipulated in innovative ways, by fashioning novel performances outside the conventional system, or working various transfonnations and adaptations which tum performance into something else" A system of cultural performance such as kathakali is, like the concept of culture itself, not a set of fixed conventions and attributes, but rather, a dynamic system of human action constantly in an ongoing process of negotiation.
Reading(,) Theatre(,) Techniques: Responding to the Influence of Asian Theatre in the Work of Ariane Mnouchkine
Authors: Kiernander Adrian
Published: April 2013

It is one of the intriguing coincidences of twentieth-century European theatre history that in 1970 when Ariane Mnouchkine and her company, the Theatre du Soleil, were looking for a permanent home during rehearsals for their production 1789, the place they found quite by accident was in the Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris — where Antonin Artaud had seen his first performance of Balinese theatre 40 years before.

This otherwise insignificant coincidence has symbolic significance because Artaud's frrst exposure to non-Western theatre forms was highly influential on his developing vision of a revitalised Western theatre. That vision in its turn has generated a new tradition of Western theatre practice which looks towards the stylised forms of Asian theatre as a way of breaking out of television-style naturalism. The most prominent exponent of this theatre tradition in France has been Ariane Mnouchkine, who freely acknowledges her debt to Artaud and quotes his maxim, "The theatre IS oriental."
L'Oeil Ecoute: The Impact of Traditional Japanese Theatre on Postwar Western Performance
Authors: Johnson Martha
Published: April 2013

When the Portuguese Jesuit Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549 and made for Europeans the startling discovery that the Japanese were civilized and intelligent, he planted the seed of Western interest in things Japanese. Indeed, the ensuing trade between Japan and Europe gradually pried Europeans away from an unctuous attachment to their own aesthetic standards as superior, and opened the way to an appreciation of Japanese art which at times has reached passionate proportions.