bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Speed-the-Plow and Speed the Plough: The Work of the Earth
Authors: Stafford Tony
Published: April 2013

David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow opened on Broadway in May of 1988 with a flourish of mass media attention and one million dollars in advanced ticket sales. This rare phenomenon for a straight play by an important American playwright is explained mostly by the fact that the rock star Madonna played the part of Karen. Almost every reviewer addressed the question of whether Madonna could or could not act and of why such a casting choice was made. lt tended to be a media event, attracting "the wrong kind of attention," and many reviews left little space for considering the implications of the play itself.
Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles , Corman Linda
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 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 Reviews, reprinted books, unpublished theses, and graduate-student periodicals are generally excluded.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 Carpenter's Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism 1966—1980: An International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press, 1986).
Silent Rage in Marie Laberge's L' Homme gris: The Mutism of Cri—Cri
Authors: Gargano Cara
Published: April 2013

Marie Laberge, one of Canada's new generation of theatre auteures, addresses the complexities of female rage within a patriarchical bourgeois social construct in her play, L' Homme gris (translated as Night by Rina Fraticelli). First performed in 1984, this play deals with possible expressions of female rage, the sad reality that this rage usually finds its outlet not in violence towards the persecutor but towards the female victim/self, and the need for women to break the cycle of self-destruction that rage perpetuates.
Der Straf-block: Performance and Execution in Barnes, Griffiths, and Wertenbaker
Authors: Inverson Marybeth
Published: April 2013

The "scaffold play" is with us once more. The scaffold play, which is identifiable by its theatricalization of the act of executing the condemned, has been, heretofore, mainly the province of Renaissance scholars. Such plays as, for example, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy do indeed, as Molly Smith suggests, dramatize the "coalescence of the theatrical and punitive modes." Their presence and incidence make sense in an age which treated execution as a public spectacle; furthennore, the conflation of stage and scaffold during this period has been attested to by literary critics and historians alike.
Arthur Miller's Circles of Responsibility: A View from the Bridge and Beyond
Authors: Costello Donald
Published: April 2013

Arthur Miller is a good enough critic to understand the differences between himself and the other two great American playwrights. And - like almost any artist — he finds his rivals lacking to the degree that they are not himself. Thus, Tennessee Williams is too narrow. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, taken by Miller to be representative of the problem with Williams, suffers from not being a Miller play. Miller wants the Tennessee Williams play to be a contest for power between Big Daddy and his son Brick. But Tennessee Williams mishandled that significant social theme so that "it gets deflected onto a question of personal neurosis. "Characteristically, Williams narrowed the important Millerian theme of "mendacity in social relations" to mere "mendacity of human relations." Williams was more than anyone else responsible for his era's "translation of current life into the war within the self ... The Greeks would not have done that. They were more like Arthur Miller than like Tennessee Williams. Those classic "great works are works of a man confronting his society," just as they should be. The greatness of Greek plays is that "They're social documents, not little piddling private conversations.” Miller approves of the fact that "Greek drama clearly conceived its right function as something far wider than a purely private examination of individuality."
Edmund Wilson: Playwrights, Farewell!
Authors: Reinitz Neale
Published: April 2013

In June 1950 Hume Cronyn, who was to play a major role in Edmund Wilson's play The Little Blue Light at the Brattle Theatre, dictated a four-page, single-spaced letter to Albert Marre, the director, with a number of explicit criticisms of the "dramatic structure." He liked the play, he said, but the symbols were obscure, the motivations were unclear, and the ending was manipulated. When the production went forward that August, Wilson followed it closely, resisting every cut that Cronyn had suggested. Wilson's intense interest in the performance echoed his personal involvement a generation earlier in his only other play to be staged professionally. In 1924 The Crime ill the Whistler Room was slipped into the repertory of the Provincetown Players through the efforts of Eugene O'Neill, with Wilson's wife, Mary Blair, one of O'Neill's favourite actresses, in the lead. Like The Little Blue Light, it has long since vanished from the stage.
Book Reviews
Authors: Jenkins Anthony , Gieri Manuela , Spahr Juliana , Zimmermann Heiner , Godard Barbara , Morrow Laura
Published: April 2013

Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: 1890—1990, reviewed by Anthony W. Jenkins

John Louis Digetani, ed., A Companion to Pirandello Studies, reviewed by Manuela Gieri

Jane Palatini Bowers, "They Watch Me as They Watch This": Gertrude Stein's Melodrama, reviewed by Juliana Spahr

Robert Wilcher, Understanding Arnold Wesker, reviewed by Heiner Zimmermann

Annie Brisset, Sociocritique de la traduction: Theatre et alterite au Quebec (1968-1988), reviewed by Barbara Godard

William W. Demastes, Beyond Naturalism: A New Realism in American Theatre, reviewed by Laura Morrow
The Devil and David Mamet: Sexual Perversity in Chicago as Homiletic Tragedy
Authors: Skeele David
Published: April 2013

It has frequently been noted that David Mamet is a moralist, a keen social critic who uses the groping inarticulations and dizzying verbal constructions of his characters to form a chorus of complaint against the spiritual emptiness at the core of America. What has less frequently been noted is that Mamet is sometimes very nearly a medieval moralist, using themes, structures, and characterizations that recall actual morality plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
"Through Soundproof Glass": The Prison of Self-Consciousness in The Glass Menagerie
Authors: Levy Eric
Published: April 2013

In his production notes introducing The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams refers to nostalgia as "the first condition of the play." This appraisal at first seems accurate, for the drama disposes the past in a series of receding planes by which the very notion of nostalgia is progressively deepened. From the perspective of Tom, the narrator and a chief character, the past when he started "to boil inside" with the urge to leave home becomes a haunting memory from which his present struggles vainly to flee. But the confining power of that past derives from his mother's nostalgic attachment to her own more distant past and the desperate need to exploit motherhood as a means of reviving "the legend of her youth".
Book Reviews
Authors: Gilbert John , Jenkins Anthony , Schuler Catherine , Krasner David
Published: April 2013

Jaques Body, Jean Giradoux, The Legend and the Secret, reviewed by John K. Gilbert

Katherine E. Kelly, Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at play, reviewed by Anthony Jenkins

Sharon Marie Carnicke, The Theatrical Instinct: Nikolai Evreinov and the Russian Theatre of the Early Twentieth Century, reviewed by Catherine Schuler

Tony Calabro, Bertolt Brecht's Art of Dissemblance, reviewed by David Krasner
How to Do Things with Salesmen: David Mamet's Speech-Act Play
Authors: Worster David
Published: April 2013

Stanley Fish once called Coriolanus Shakespeare's speech-act play, because it is "about speech acts [and] the rules of their performance. ... It is also about what the theory is about, language and its power." If Coriolanus is Shakespeare's speech-act play, then Glengarry Glen Ross is David Mamet's, for many of the same reasons. The ideological world of Mamet’s play is not the legal institution of Roman law, but rather the economic institution of American capitalism (mythologized as the American Dream), within which Mamet's characters are constituted as salesmen, pivotal figures in the economic world of business. The institution has already predetermined how the salesmen will define themselves, their relationships to each other and to their conditions of existence, and how they will employ language to compose those definitions.
"Dame Joan, Saint Christabel"
Authors: Stowell Sheila
Published: April 2013

Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan in 1923. His immediate impetus was the canonization of Joan of Arc on 16 May 1920, during a time of power politicking hard upon the horrors of the Great War. The irony of Joan's elevation five hundred years after her death amidst forces she would have opposed but had helped put into play was too great a temptation for Shaw to resist. On a domestic level, Shaw's wife, Charlotte, too insisted upon a role in the work's progress. In the face of her husband's initial resistance, she claimed to have strategically placed books on Joan around the house where Shaw was bound to see them, read them, and thus stimulated, embark upon the play she wanted him to write. Others have explained Shaw's attraction to the figure of Joan as part of a personal religious pilgrimage, one characterized by G.K. Chesterton as consisting, in the first instance, of Shaw "running away from a religion," and in the second of his "running after one.”
Learn to Play the Game: Learning and Teaching Strategies in Ann Jellicoe's The Knack
Authors: Snyder Laura
Published: April 2013

Ann Jellicoe's recent work on community plays leads us to re-examine her earlier productions at the Royal Court Theatre during the 1950s and 1960s. Her community plays involve large casts of both theatre professionals and community members, and are generally historical in nature. Often, the audience is involved as part of the cast. For example, during a crowd scene, the cast may encircle or enter into the audience, making the audience a part of the crowd. In a sense, the audience is asked to imaginatively participate in the historical moment of the play. In this way the audience learns about that history through experiencing it. With this in mind, if we turn new eyes to Jellicoe's previous works, such as The Knack, we may realize that learning through experience has been Ann Jellicoe's goal for her audience all along.
The Rise of Metadrama and the Fall of the
Authors: Loverod Marie
Published: April 2013

In 1963, Lionel Abel coined the term "metatheatre" to identify theatre that is self-reflexive. Metatheatre, or metadrama, as it is now more commonly referred to, uses the stage to explore theatricality and, very often, its relation to life. Discussions of metadrama subsequent to Abel's have elaborated the concept, identifying characteristic elements and the problems that are raised and addressed by this form of theatre.
Book Reviews
Authors: Cypress Sandra , Cummings Scott , Lindheim Ralph , Plunka Gene , Fischer Eileen , Manheim Michal , Spector Susan , Wilcox Leonard , Hays Peter , Copeland Nancy
Published: April 2013

Severino Jao Alburquerque, Violent Acts: A Study of Contemporary Latin American Theatre, reviewed by Sandra M. Cypress

David George, The Modern Brazilian Stage, reviewed by Scott T. Cummings

Andrew Donskov,Richard Sokolowski With Roman Weretelnyk And John Woodsworth, eds.,Slavic Drama. The Question of Innovation, reviewed by Ralph Lindheim

C.J. Gianakaris, Peter Schaffer, reviewed by Gene A. Plunka

J.W. Fenn, Levitating the Pentagon: Evolutions in the American Theatre of the Vietnam War Era, reviewed by Eileen Fischer

Doris Alexander, Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 1924—1933, reviewed by Michael Manheim

Brenda Murphy, Tennessee Williams & Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre, reviewed by Susan Spector

David Derose, Sam Shepard, reviewed by Leonard Wilcox

Gerald M. Berkowitz, American Drama of the Twentieth Century, reviewed by Peter L. Hays

C.W.E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, reviewed by Peter L. Hays

Andre Helbo, J. Dines Johansen, Patrice Pavis, Anne UbersfeldApproaching Theatre, reviewed by Nancy Copeland
North and South: Two Landscapes of Alan Bennett
Authors: Turner Daphne
Published: April 2013

"A writer is usually in two minds," said Alan Bennett in a lecture he gave on BBC television on December 26th 1 992. In his own work, two landscapes occur again and again, each claiming love and loyalty, each celebrated, each mocked, each with its self-satisfied prejudices, each with its own sadness, loneliness and its own version of being cast out of paradise, each with its characteristic languages and characteristic forms of comedy. The landscape of northern England is that of the working class. It is predominantly, to use Bennett's word, "naturalistic," and its comedy arises from accurate observation of speech and behaviour. The landscape of southern England is that of privilege, of the upper middle classes and aristocracy. It is a world with the money and leisure for grace and play, and its comedy comes from parody and the play of language and ideas. Neither wins his full assent. Bennett is in two minds about the North. It is limited and depressing, yet its trivia are honoured as real and the dull lives of its inhabitants are celebrated. He is also in two minds about the South. The southern landscape is seductive, but exclusive, unjust and deceptive. They are complementary as well as opposed, as they represent the different sides of the geographical, class and value lines along which England is split, seen by a writer who was born into the northern working class and who now lives as a member of the southern professional one. He has created in his plays a full picture of what "England" means and the complex state of his loves and loyalties to it. I shall deal first with the northern landscape, through an overview of the northern plays, especially of Enjoy (1980), and then with two versions of the southern: the first, affectionate and gently mocking, in Forty Years On (1969); the second, much more critical, in The Old Country (1978).
Supranational Civics: Poverty and the Politics of Representation in Brian Friel's The Freedom of the City
Authors: Jent William
Published: April 2013

Just as political analysis of Ireland — of any partitioned site — often minimizes the daunting sociological complexity of local conditions by reducing them to a conflict between one or another pair of supposedly monolithic national identities, dramatic analysis often reduces the thematic complexity of its subject matter to one or another pair of antithetic categories, and often with the same obfuscatory effect. Because Brian Friel's The Freedom of the City so deliberately dramatizes the processes by which national identities are forged (in both senses), the way those processes mediate power within the polarized terrain of Northern Ireland, and the tragic consequences for the Catholic underclasses, critics have commonly and not unreasonably approached the play with a mindset bounded by the binary terms of contending nationalisms. But the result, as I hope to demonstrate, is that the critical reception of the play to date reflects a systematic oversight that leads to a crucial misapprehension of the play's central concern. And this oversight is not without implications as well for the larger socio-political discourse within which the practice of dramatic criticism is inevitably situated, not because the thematic analysis of cultural artifacts provides useful footnotes for the political analysis of cultural conditions, but because they are ultimately the same undertaking.
"I Am Cast as a Monster": Shelley's Frankenstein and the Haunting of Howard Brenton's Bloody Poetry
Authors: Wagner Jennifer
Published: April 2013

As a Playwright's Note to the script of his 1984 play, Bloody Poetry, Howard Brenton quotes from Richard Holmes's biography of Percy Shelley: "Shelley's life seems more a haunting than a history." Taking his cue from that quotation, Brenton's rendering of the last years of that life is itself "more a haunting than a history" as well. Bloody Poetry is obsessed with the theme of the "haunting"; as Shelley himself remarks in the second act of Bloody Poetry, "Hasn't my life become a kind of haunting?" Leaving aside, however, the many ways in which Brenton shows us how this may be so, with past, present and future all reverberating significantly throughout this rendering of Shelley's life, I will explore in this essay the haunting of the text itself. For all the quotation of Percy Shelley's poetry throughout this script, the literary text that most remarkably shadows this text is not his verse, but his lover/wife 's novel Frankenstein (1816; published 1818).
Book Reviews
Authors: Oliver Roger
Published: April 2013

Susan Bassnett-McGuire, Luigi Pirandello, reviewed by Roger W. Oliver
The Dangerous Seductions of the Past: Ibsen's Counter-Discourse to Modernity
Authors: Johnston Brian
Published: April 2013

Ibsen adopted the theatre decisively as his medium under the aegis of Ole Bull's Norwegian (Norske) Theatre in Bergen. A fundraiser for this theater was held in 1851 in Christiania, and Ibsen wrote an enthusiastic verse Prologue for the occasion in which he proclaimed dramatic art would awaken the Norwegian people from the long winter's sleep in which it had forgotten its glorious Viking heritage. Viking life had itself been a poem "of sword and shield," which then was sublimated into the art of the skald and minstrel. But then an "awesome winter fell over the north," the noble skald fell silent, "dedicated to death like one bewitched who has forgotten the word with which he can find release from his enchantment." There remained a "harp of longing" within the people who could never be satisfied by alien customs and arts. A native art alone could interpret the longing of the people and its forgotten music, and this art would sing both about the past and the re-awakened life of the present.
Introduction
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: April 2013

Linda Hutcheon, in her introduction to the January 1995 issue of PMLA titled "Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition," notes the proliferation of generalist academic journals which have devoted issues to postcolonialism. I To her list, which includes Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Diacritics, and Yale French Studies, those interested in theatre now Can add Theatre Journal and this issue of Modern Drama. The sheer number of journals which have produced issues on postcolonialism rather obviously attests to the current vogue which this theoretical perspective enjoys within the academy. But, as Hutcheon reminds her readers, the fashionableness of postcolonial theory raises concern that this "represents another of the First World academy's covert colonizing strategies of domination over the cultural production of the Third World." Postcolonial theory may be fashionable, but its very fashionableness is problematic, generating intense debates among those interested in this scholarly area.
Book Reviews
Authors: Clum John , Pilkington Lionel , Hughes Alan , Parker Brian , Bak John , Norrish Peter , Krasner David , Malkin Jeanette
Published: April 2013

Amelia Howe Kritzer, The Plays of Caryl Churchill, reviewed by John M. Clum

Stephen Watt, Joyce, O'Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater, reviewed by Lionel Pilkington

Richard Foulks, ed., British Theatre in the 1890s: Essays on Drama and the Stage., reviewed by Alan Hughes

Philip C. Kolin, ed., Confronting Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire": Essays in Critical Pluralism, reviewed by Brian Parker

David Savran, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, reviewed by John S. Bak

Gene A. Plunka, The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking, reviewed by Peter Norrish

William Grange, Partnership in the German Theatre: Zuckmayer and Hilpert, 1925—1961, reviewed by David Krasner

Richard Arthur Firda, Peter Handke, reviewed by Jeanette A. Malkin
John Gay, Bertolt Brecht, and Postcolonial Antinationalisms
Authors: Dharwadker Aparna
Published: April 2013

The oppositional tension between postcolonial writing and dominant Western forms of textuality is a major concern in current postcolonial theory. The descriptive form of this argument, outlined in an influential recent study by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, maintains that "the act of writing texts of any kind in post-colonial areas is subject to the political, imaginative, and social control involved in the relationship between colonizer and colonized," and that such writing is therefore inescapably syncretic, regardless of the language of composition. In contrast, the ideological form of the argument presented by Stephen Slemon, for instance, regards all postcolonial literary writing as "a form of cultural criticism and cultural critique ... and an inherently dialectical intervention in the hegemonic production of cultural meaning.” This approach places particular emphasis on postcolonial texts that "write back" or "write against" canonical Western texts in which colonial cultures are presented "according to the dictates of anterior, canonical, and specifically European narrative patterns." Slemon describes such colonialist acts of cultural appropriation, as well as the postcolonial subversions of these acts, as essentially allegorical, because in both cases one signifying system is "read" in terms of another.
The Uses of Nostalgia: Drama, History, and Liminal Moments in South Africa
Authors: Kruger Loren
Published: April 2013

Timed to coincide with the first universal election and the official end of white minority rule in South Africa, the Market Theatre's revival of Sophiatown might have given pause to those who rushed to define the election as the liminal moment of all liminal moments: South Africa's final entry into a postcolonial era. Developed by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company (JATC) after the unrest of 1984/85 which made the townships "ungovernable" but did not dislodge the government, the play is set in 1950s Sophiatown, which, as the last mixed freehold suburb of Johannesburg, was a primary target for demolition by the architects of segregation. In encounters between a young Jewish woman and several Sophiatown denizens — writer, gangster. activist, landowner, and others of African and mixed descent — Sophiatown offered its audiences a glimpse of a somewhat integrated but hardly harmonious community. Performed in 1986 and again in 1994, the play revived what might be called the myth of Sophiatown. Part ghetto, part cultural bazaar, a meeting place of black radicals, bohemians of all colors, and organized and disorganized criminals, Sophiatown was an actual but thoroughly imaginary place that came to symbolize a fragile moment of racial tolerance and cultural diversity, crushed by the apartheid juggernaut and later buried under the weight of more militant times.
National Battles: Canadian Monumental Drama and the Investiture of History
Authors: Filewood Alan
Published: April 2013

English[-speaking] Canada is a nation by default, neither a political entity nor manifest national sentiment; more than a land but less than a country. Few would dispute that Quebec is a nation within a nation, but fewer might assert with confidence that Canada is therefore a nation surrounding a nation. The paradox in that formulation is the paradox of postcolonialism as it is manifest in Canadian experience. The prospect of an independent Quebec (and for that matter, the present reality of an independentiste Quebec) exposes "the rest of Canada" (as what used to be called "English Canada" is now commonly named in awkward but accurate journalistic practice) as a political arrangement wanting historical mission. (Canada: what was left when American republicanism transformed the larger part of colonized North America into ideology; the rest of Canada: what is left when Quebec repudiates the proposal that the rebellion of thirteen British colonies forced the condition of nationhood on the ones that were left.)
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Dutton Irene , Crozier Nancy
Published: April 2013

The basic principles and limitations described in the Summer 1984 issue remain the same, as does its primary objective. which 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 Becque and Buchner) and influential theatre figures other than perf011llers. Reviews, reprinted books, unpublished theses, and graduate-student periodicals are generally excluded. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to Charles Carpenter's Modem Drama Scholarship and Criticism I966-I980: All International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press, 1986).
Book Reviews
Authors: Leland  , Fischer Eileen , Cocalis Susan , Burkman Katherine , Clum John
Published: April 2013

Henrik Ibsen, Catiline and the Burial Mound, reviewed by C.W. Leland

W.B. Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, reviewed by Eileen Fischer

Henry J. Schmidt, How Dramas End: Essays on the German Sturm und Drang, Büchner, Hauptmann, and Fleisser, reviewed by Susan L. Cocalis

Ruby Cohn, Retreats From Realism in Recent English Drama, reviewed by Katherine F. Burkman

Samuel L. Leiter, From Stanislavski to Barrault: Representative Directors of the European Stage, reviewed by John M. Clum
Why Doesn't the Chinese Nora Leave Her Husband?: Women's Emancipation in Post-1949 Chinese Drama
Authors: Tung Constantine
Published: April 2013

The drama of the People's Republic of China often differs drastically from the pre-1949 drama in its treatment of many shared social issues. One major social concern of the earlier drama, a new theatre which was born during the iconoclastic May 4th era in the second decade of this century, was women's emancipation: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House was perhaps the most widely known foreign play in pre-1949 China. Nora,the play's heroine, was a model of women's struggle for emancipation. Hu Shi (1891-1962), a leader of China's political liberalism and an advocate of China's total Westernization, wrote an historically significant one-act play, "The Great Event in Life" (Zhongshen dashi, 1919), noticeably influenced by A Doll's House. Although it lacks the theatrical intensity of Ibsen's play, its heroine Tian Yamei stands as the first modern Chinese dramatic heroine who defies the wishes of her parents and absconds with the man she loves. Tian Yamei is an Ibsenite Nora.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: The Uneasy Marriage of Success and Idealism
Authors: Price Marian
Published: April 2013

In the psychological study of literature, it is assumed that a work of imaginative writing is always, to some extent, autobiographical; works of art, like dreams, are seen as enacting the author's psychological states, internal conflicts, and current concerns. Like the people in dreams, the various characters in a story or play can resemble significant others in the author's life, but each of them may also stand for the author's self. The principal characters in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — Brick and Maggie — can be interpreted as representations of Tennessee Williams himself. In their evolution from their first appearance in a short story through the original and Broadway versions of the play, Tennessee Williams has symbolically worked through a turning point in his own life as an artist — namely, the point at which he could choose either to shape his play according to his and others' ideas of a big hit, or to become paralyzed as a writer by the weight of forbidden truths that he lacked courage to bring to light in his art. In this psychobiographical reading, Skipper stands for the suppressed truths, Brick is the artist immobilized by guilt, and Maggie represents the impulse toward artistic survival at any cost. In allegorical shorthand, Maggie is Success and Brick is Idealism.
Self-Consuming Artifacts: Power, Performance and the Body in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer
Authors: Sofer Andrew
Published: April 2013

Suddenly Last Summer is unique in the Williams canon in that its protagonist is literally and figuratively absent. The poet Sebastian Venable dies before the action takes place; he is at once a blank text, like the empty pages of the notebook his mother Violet brandishes in triumphant fury as proof of his inability to write his last Poem of Summer, and a palimpsest "awesome in his ambiguity." Images of Sebastian repeat and refract until the play becomes a dizzying hall of mirrors: Cousin George appears sporting Sebastian's wardrobe, Catharine wears a suit Sebastian bought for her, and Doctor Cuckrowicz wears all white, just as Sebastian did on his dying day. No Williams play is more haunted by the body, its directives and disguises; yet in no other play is the body in question so elusive.
The Paradox of Memory: Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken and Fin-de-siecle Psychotherapy
Authors: Gerland Oliver
Published: April 2013

Contrary to Johnston, I believe that psychoanalysis can tell us something about the "dramatic-theatric structure" of Ibsen's dramatic texts, and without reference to a putative unconscious. An unusual moment in the second act of When We Dead Awaken (1899) provides my point of departure
Playing with Time: James Reaney's The Donnellys as Spatial Form Drama
Authors: Grandy Karen
Published: April 2013

In his 1945 essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" Joseph Frank observes the way in which the modernist poetry of Eliot and Pound "undermine[s] the inherent consecutiveness of language, frustrating the reader's normal expectation of a sequence and forcing him to perceive the elements of the poem as juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time.” A reader, or spectator, of James Reaney's Donnelly trilogy' might experience a similar frustration if she comes to the work with "normal" sequential expectations. The scenes in the trilogy, like Pound's poetry, do not unroll in time, but are, indeed literally, juxtaposed in space. Ivo Vidan explains that "spatial form in fiction is achieved either through a network of recurring motifs ... or through a pattern of forward-and-backward moving in time that plays against the chronological order of events." The Donnellys, clearly, has both of these structural elements, as well as others, to be described through this paper, which lead me to label it a spatial form drama. I am particularly interested, however, in the idea of a dramatist playing with the patterns of time. In Time in Greek Tragedy, Jacqueline de Romilly states that "there is no tragedy that does not deal with time." Reaney employs some interesting strategies in his dealings with time in the trilogy and it is these which I mean to highlight in the following pages.
Re-Casting the Phaedra Syndrome: Myth and Morality in Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale
Authors: Winston Joe
Published: April 2013

In a recently published study, Albert S. Gerard examines what he calls "the Phaedra syndrome" in four major theatrical texts: Hippolytos by Euripides; Phaedra by Seneca; Lope de Vega's EI Castigo sin Venganza; and Phedre by Racine. The subtitle of his book The Phaedra Syndrome: Of Shame and Guilt in Drama indicates the nature of the preoccupations of his inquiry; not only is it an analysis which contrasts the way that several imponant playwrights have presented the character of Phaedra but, more interestingly, it is an investigation into how their treatment of her relates to the moral and intellectual climate of their times.
A Developmental Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's "Camino Real"
Authors: Parker Brain
Published: April 2013

Tennessee Williams wrote compulsively, typing at great speed, then revising with pencil on the many working carbons he made for each draft. For over forty years he spent five to six hours at his typewriter every morning, no matter where he was, partly as therapy — he said only his writing saved him from a mental breakdown like that of his sister. Rose — but also as the one consistency in his otherwise anarchic life. He worked by the intuitive "feel" of a scene rather than from a plan or outline, constantly fidgeting with small changes of wording but, more characteristically, rewriting in larger units of who1e scenes or acts.
Book Reviews
Authors: Howard Patricia , King Kimball , Locatelli Carla , Krasner Daivd , Demastes William , Dicenzo Maria , Brown Erlla , Jenkins Anthony , Haxo Paul , Baker-White Robert , Burkman Katherine , Lingard John , Fischer Eileen , Carnicke Marie , Berkowitz Gerald , Aston Elaine , Watson Charles , Filewood Alan , Pilkington Lionel , O'Malley Lurana Donnels , Neglia Erminio
Published: April 2013

Enoch Brater, ed., The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage, reviewed by Patricia Howard

Louis Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946, reviewed by Kimball King

Lois Oppenheimer, ed., Directing Beckett, reviewed by Carla Locatelli

Peter Thomson and Glendyr, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, reviewed by David Krasner

Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, reviewed by William W. Demastes

John Bull, Stage Right: Crisis and Recovery in British Contemporary Mainstream Theatre, reviewed by Maria Dicenzo

Gene A. Plunka, ed., Antonin Artaud and the Modern Theater, reviewed by Erella Brown

Charles Duff, The Lost Summer: The Heyday of the West End Theatre, reviewed by Anthony Jenkins

Carol Homden, The Plays of David Hare, reviewed by Anthony Jenkins

Jonathan Wake, ed., John Arden and Margaretra D'Arcy: A Casebook, reviewed by Paul Haxo

Susan Hollis Merritt, Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter, reviewed by Robert Baker-White

Martin S. Regal, Harold Pinter: A Question of Timing, reviewed by Katherine H. Burkman

Egil Tönkvist, Ibsen: A Doll's House, reviewed by John Lingard

Richard Gilman, Chekhov's Plays: An Opening into Eternity, reviewed by Eileen Fischer

Edward Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, reviewed by Sharon Marie Carnicke

Joel Pfister, Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill and The Politics of Psychological Discourse, reviewed by Gerald M. Berkowitz

Linda Ben-Zvi, ed., Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction, reviewed by Elaine Aston

Rebecca Luttrell Briley, You Can Go Home Again: The Focus on Family in the Works of Horton Foote, reviewed by Charles S. Watson

Neil Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown: George Luscombe and Toronto Workshop Productions, reviewed by Alan Filewood

Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness, reviewed by Lionel Pilkington

Spencer Golub, The Recurrence of Fate: Theatre and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia, reviewed by Lurana Donnels O'Malley

Robert Lima, Dark Prisms: Occultism in Hispanic Drama, reviewed by Erminio G. Neglia
Oleanna: David Mamet's Power Play
Authors: Ryan Steven
Published: April 2013

Although playwright David Mamet has stated that he began working on Oleanna before Anita Hill's testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas made sexual harassment in the workplace a topic of conversation in the early 1990s, there is no doubt that the play's timeliness was used to boost ticket sales. The play's promotional mailout, for example, announced that ticket buyers could "be among the first to take a seat — and take a side — at Oleanna." Even Playbill's cover helped polarize responses by featuring, for the first time in the magazine's history, two different covers for the production. One cover depicts a bespectacled man seated on a chair with a bullseye emblazoned on his chest, while the second cover pictures a female in exactly the same position.
Almost "Better to Be Nobody": Feminist Subjectivity, the Thatcher Years, and Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Grace of Mary Traverse
Authors: Ritchie Martha
Published: April 2013

As a preface to The Grace of Mary Traverse, Timberlake Wertenbaker includes a quotation from George Steiner's In Bluebeard's Castle stating that although the "definition of culture in the age of the gas-oven, of the arctic camps, of napalm ... may belong solely to the past history of hope ... [w]e must keep in focus its hideous novelty or renovation," Written during Wertenbaker's 1985 stint as resident writer at London's Royal Court Theatre, The Grace of Mary Traverse focuses on culture through the young, well-bred Mary and her quest for knowledge and experience in late-eighteenth-century London. However, Wertenbaker cautions in an author's note that Mary Traverse is not a historical play and that the eighteenth-century setting is a metaphor for contemporary times. Of the contemporary issues Wertenbaker's work addresses, feminist themes often stand out. In fact, along with Mmy Traverse, plays such as Case to Answer (1980), New Anatomies (1981), Inside Out (1982), and The Love of the Nightingale (1988) feature female characters whose articulation of sexual desire, resistance to patriarchy, and/or transgression of conventional gender boundaries demonstrate this playwright's interest in staging feminist subjectivities. Wertenbaker's concern with the "definition of culture" in The Grace of Mary Traverse strongly links this play's feminist subjectivities to British culture and politics in 1985.
Workers' Theatre and the "War of Position" in the 1930s
Authors: Miller Jim
Published: April 2013

As Paul Sporn argues in "Working-Class Theatre on the Auto picket Line," the "generally conservative aesthetic and political attitudes that have prevailed in the United States since the end of World War II [have] compounded the problem" of scholars seeking to rediscover and comment on little-known theatre. Indeed all three of the anthologies from which I drew to research this paper are out of print. By failing to preserve and make available the documents of the workers' theatre movement, much of academia is complicitous in the erasure of the history of working people in America.
Crommelynck and Meyerhold: Two Geniuses Meet on the Stage
Authors: Piette Alain
Published: April 2013

On April 25, 1922, Crommelynck's The Magnanimous Cuckold opened at the Actors' Theater in Moscow, directed by Meyerhold. Although the initial response to the production was far from unanimous, most of the critics and theater professionals, such as Mayakovsky, Gvozdiev, and Tretiakov, ultimately agreed that Meyerhold's staging of Crommelynck's play was both exceptional and revolutionary in all respects. "I can't remember when or indeed if I ever saw such a pure rendition of the agony and torture of the almost physiological suffering caused by jealousy," wrote the critic P. Markov, Meyerhold saw in the production of Crommelynck's play both the manifesto of his constructivist theories on the theater and the laboratory in which to test their validity and feasibility onstage.
Of Melons, Heads, and Blood: Psychosexual Fascism in
Authors: Nuetzel Eric
Published: April 2013

Griselda Gambaro's Bad Blood is a complex and disturbing play. It probes the link between sexism and fascism in dramatic form. The playwright stuns the audience with a cruel theatre of trauma, assaulting the viewer with images of sadistic psychosexuality and malignant misogyny. Sandra Cypess has noted that Garnbaro's early theatrical work (The Walls, The Blunder, The Siamese Twins, and The Camp) communicates "by means of gestures, movements, noises, and the use of inanimate objects that function with a dramatic vitality" and that the "manipulation of space, sounds, objects, gestures, and actions creates a hostile environment in which both the character and the spectator feel threatened and tormented by objects as well as people." These observations apply equally to Bad Blood. My aim is to elucidate the multiple ways in which Gambaro depicts psychosexual fascism in this drama of family life.
Blow the Witches Out: Gender Construction and the Subversion of Nationalism in Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan and On Baile's Strand
Authors: Harris Susan
Published: April 2013

The response to the 1903 production of J.M. Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen and the riots that attended the 1907 Abbey production of The Playboy of the Western World demonstrated to Yeats that Irish national drama, as defined by nationalist journalists and activists such as Arthur Griffith and Maud Gonne, was defined not only by its stance on national independence but by its construction of gender. Audiences were unwilling to accept Synge's violation of the nationalist rules of gender decorum, insisting that the play could not be a true representation of Ireland because "Irish women would never sleep under the same roof with a young man without a chaperon, nor admire a murderer, nor use a word like 'shift.” For the "patriotic journalism" against which Yeats fulminated in his defense of Synge, acceptable political content included the reproduction of predetermined gender roles.
Mourning and the Body: Heiner Milller's Fathers and The Foundling Son
Authors: Malkin Jeanette
Published: April 2013

Heiner Müllier, who died at the end of December 1995, was Germany's most acclaimed and controversial contemporary playwright. Before the political unification of 1989, he held the anomalous position of a writer, thinker, and practitioner of theatre who was at home, and extolled, in both East and West. Pre-1989 Müllier, occupied, as he put it, that chasm between the "two German capitals Berlin," whose "shared and not shared history" he saw — and portrayed as — "piled up by the latest earthquake as a borderline between two continents.” As in much of Müllier's writing (and directing), Walter Benjamin's "piled up" ruins of history became the image that connected the memories of a catastrophic past to the failures and repressions of the present. And as in much of his writing (and directing), Müllier used a postmodem theatre aesthetic to recover the repressions and betrayals of Western (and especially German) history. In his quasi-autobiographical play The Foundling, that ruinous past returns as highly concentrated layers of memory — as an act of mourning by a "foundling" son self-exiled from East to West Berlin. Centered on the broken body of the stepfather figure, and on the historical ideologies that tortured and disciplined it, The Foundling is a bitter elegy to the terrors of German history as translated into the flesh of its victims/perpetrators.
Storey's "Snare of Doubling"
Authors: Margaroni Maria
Published: April 2013

Over the last ten years, any reviews of David Storey's novels and plays read more like obituaries for a deceased talented author than critical discussions of specific works. The reviews of Storey's latest play, Stages (performed at the RNT's Cottesloe, November 1992 — February 1993), were, interestingly enough, no exceptions to the rule. Quoting Malcolm Pittock in his review of Present Times (Storey's latest novel to date, 1985), the majority of reviewers contented themselves to reproduce (cynically or lamentingly) the writer's "tale of decline: repetition with insufficient variation," as Pittock puts it.
Introduction
Authors: Blostein David , Feral Josette
Published: April 2013

Among the current academic journals dedicated to drama and theatre, our own has probably been the one most associated with a bias favouring text over performance. Yet, as any reader of Modern Drama must be aware, there has been a growing proportion of articles that deal with the embodiment of dramatic texts in specific stagings, and that reflect increasing interest, in recent years, in identifying where and when drama actually achieves its form: in the playwright's words? the actors' bodies and voices? the director's mise-en-scene? In 1995, two major international conferences were held in Canada to deal with those questions, and though they went about it in significantly different ways, both produced stimulating papers dealing with the relationship of staging to text in the creation of dramatic form - which is why, following a suggestion by Christopher Innes, we title this special edition "Form and Performance."
The Lake of Seduction: Body, Acting, and Voice in Helene Cixous's Portrait de Dora
Authors: Brown Erella
Published: April 2013

In Portrait de Dora (1976), Helene Cixous explores the possibility of feminine theater by rewriting Freud 's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria for stage performance. Anticipating her Nom d' Oedipe (1978), Portrait takes as a pretext the myth of Oedipus, which underlies Freud's analysis of the case history, as central to both psychoanalysis and classical drama. Indeed, Portrait de Dora along with her Nom d' Oedipe are innovative attempts to define feminist performance by placing psychoanalysis and classical drama under the scrutiny of the theatrical. By locating Freud's case-history within theater,' Cixous underscores the theatricality of psychoanalytical discourse as the "talking cure," using voice, gestures, staging, ritual, and myth, in order to scrutinize the relationship between the semiotics of symptoms as the "acting out" of the hysteric body and the Symbolic order that authorizes its meaning. Moreover, as Sharon Willis observes, Cixous's Portrait puts into question the theatrical frame itself, and the body staged within it, thereby becoming "exemplary of the critical operations of certain feminist performance practice[s]." Cixous, who takes hysteria as a key to both feminine sexuality and performance, stages Freud's failure with Dora as a disfunctional dramatic operation by depicting his insistence on reading his paternal Oedipal model into Dora's hysteria as ineffective in regard to the real performative throbbing of the hysteric stage. By confronting thereupon the symbolic order of the Oedipal stage with the imaginary theater of pain and seduction that the hysteric's body displays, Cixous challenges the phallocratic origins and prejudices of both classical theater and psychoanalysis. Indeed, if, as Jacqueline Rose observes, Dora's case opens "a dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism," then Cixous's Portrait not only places this dialogue within a theatrical space, it enlarges the dialogical frame by introducing also the question of the relationship between feminism and theater.
Blotting and the Line of Beauty: On Performances by Botho Strauss and Peter Handke
Authors: Nordman Alfred
Published: April 2013

The performance of a text or the staging of a play is often and easily imagined as the representation, in another medium, of its content or meaning. On stage can be shown what the script merely says; the rehearsal process and the production itself thus appear as means towards the end of communicating to the audience what an author has set down on paper. When this picture of what goes on in performance is extended to dance or the realization of musical scores, the notion of "representation" proves too narrow, and performances are, therefore, often said to "express" a feeling, content, or intention.
What does Chaos Theory have to do with Art?
Authors: Wilcox Dean
Published: April 2013

At first glance the title of this essay may cause you to ask yourself the same question: "What does chaos theory have to do with art?" Or, more importantly, what does it have to do with performance analysis? Certainly, these are fair questions which will be addressed within the body of this paper. I must begin by stating that I am neither a mathematician nor a scientist, and that the mathematics involved in the evaluation of chaotic systems (although relatively simple) tend to make my head spin. I am not interested in drawing scientific conclusions from theatrical practice, but in employing the philosophical ramifications of the systematic study of chaos to allow a unique perspective on the modern theatre.