bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Clay and Clara: Baraka's Dutchman, Kennedy's The Owl Answers, and the Black Arts Movement
Authors: Lofgren Lotta
Published: April 2013

1964 was a watershed year in the history of drama: Amiri Baraka (still LeRoi Jones) won an Obie for best American play with Dutchman, an explosive and overtly political play that calls for a violent response to racism and oppression. Baraka's play, because of its refusal to bow to hegemony, was instrumental in giving not only African-Americans but subsequently feminist playwrights of the late 1960s and eventually a broad range of silent minorities a new voice. Few plays have so clearly defined a new movement for its followers, a movement Baraka and Larry Neal dubbed The Black Arts Movement.
Book Reviews
Authors: McKinnie Michael , Hurley Erin , Reinelt Janelle , Crehan Helena , Tait Peta , Defraeye Piet , Eisen Kurt , Bank Rosemarie , Jones Jennifer , Shackelford D. Dean , Frieze James
Published: April 2013

Alan Filewood, Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre. Textual Studies in Canada, reviewed by Michael McKinnie,

Michael Tremblay, Twelve Opening Acts, reviewed by Erin Hurley

Marc Maufort and Franca Bellarsi, eds., Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium, reviewed by Janelle Reinelt

Peta Tait, ed., Body Shawls: Australian Viewings of Live Performance, reviewed by Helena Crehan

Helen Grehan, Mapping Cultural Identity in Contemporary Australian Performance, reviewed by Peta Tait

Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People, reviewed by Piet Defraeye

S.E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities, reviewed by Kurt Eisen

David BEasley, McKee Rankin and the Heyday of American Theater, reviewed by Rosemarie K. Bank

J. Ellen Gainor, Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater. Culture, and Politics, 1915-48, reviewed by Jennifer Jones

Brena Murphy, O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night, reviewed by Kurt Eisen

Philip C. Kolin, ed., The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams, reviewed by D. Dean Shackelford

Susan Letzler Cole, Playwrights in Rehearsal: The Seduction of Company, reviewed by James Frieze
Theatre and Space: A Historiographic Preamble
Authors: Kobialka Michal
Published: April 2013

This essay begins with a statement that, to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben in Infancy and History, every conception of theatre (mental/physical, imaginary/ real, produced/producing, material/social, immediate/mediated, and so on) is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of space (mental/physical, imaginary/real, produced/producing, material/social, immediate/mediated, and so on) that is implicit in it and that conditions it? To continue this thought, since theatre is first and foremost a particular experience of space, no new theatre should be possible without taking into account this particular experience of layered spatiality. In its assumption, as I wish to suggest, this statement is much closer to Henri Lefebvre's production of space, wherein power relations are embedded, than to Gaston Bachelard's poetics of space reflecting the impact of human psyche and imagination on a geometrical form.
Video and Stage Space: Some European Perspectives
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: April 2013

The utilization of moving pictures in live performances dates almost from the beginning of the filmic medium itself, but at the end of the twentieth century the rapidly evolving world of digital technology has provided a seemingly almost limitless range of possible interrelationships and interactions between the live body of traditional theatre and performance and the reproduced body of film and digital technology. Just as this work has radically altered (and continues to alter) the concept of the performing body itself, so it has radically altered (and continues to alter) the concept of the space in which that body operates. In the lead essay to the special issue of Theatre Journal devoted to "Theatre and Technology" Johannes Birringer looked to contemporary experimental work in dance, suggesting how the use of technology, especially digital technology, was opening new possibilities for the seeing and the experiencing of this form. "In the 1990s," he proposed, "working digitally and being digital evoke a new futurism of virtual performance possibilities; its new technological catchword is 'interactivity’". Diana Theodores has coined the term "technography" to refer to this major new development in dance, reinforcing the mutually informing new interrelationships of technology and choreography.
"Are There Places Anymore?" Performing the Indian Subcontinent in Britain
Authors: Bhatia Nandi
Published: April 2013

In an age when deterritorialization is seen as the dominant condition of a globally interconnected world, the complex cultural relationships of post-colonial migrants to their homelands — both those they left behind and the ones they currently inhabit — remain a matter of much critical discussion.
Book Reviews
Authors: Sinfield Alan , Goldie Terry , Whyman Rose , Blood Melanie , Carney Sean , Gorman Sarah
Published: April 2013

David Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater, reviewed by Alan Sinfield

Michael Mangan, Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Peformance, reviewed by Terry Goldie

Peta Tait, Performing Emotions: Gender, Bodies, Spaces, in Chekhov's Drama and Stanislavski's Theatre, reviewed by Rose Whyman

Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography , Hull-House Domesticity, reviewed by Melanie Blood

Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich, Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, reviewed by Sean Carney

Sonja Kuftinec, Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater, reviewed by Sarah Gorman
Introduction
Authors: Dolan Jill
Published: April 2013

The concept of utopia has been a prime political force in various moments of world history, perhaps especially in the United States in the 1960s. Marxist intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch theorized the potential of art practices to model a social utopia through the workings of a creative, often dissident, imagination, one that fantasized the world as it might be to motivate resistance to the world as it is.
Wonder in the Heart of Empire: Deborah Warner's Medea and The Angel Project
Authors: Wickstrom Maurya
Published: April 2013

The word Empire is everywhere lately, in both scholarly and journalistic attempts to bring critical thought to bear on the Bush administration's global objectives, especially since 9/11. The central claim by Hardt and Negri, who have written a ground-breaking theorization of the subject, is that Empire is not a continuation of older forms of capitalist imperialisms and modernisms. but is a definitively new form of political, social, and productive organization, one for which there is absolutely no outside position, one that is corporeal, cellular, and biological in the reach of its power effects, and therefore called by Hardt and Negri "biopower"
BLACKOUT: Utopian Technologies in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro
Authors: Hurley Erin
Published: April 2013

In the second-to-last episode of Funnyhouse of a Negro, Adrienne Kennedy asks for the impossible. The oxymoronic effect of "a dark brightness" lies outside the realm of the technically possible. What combinations of lights, gels. and focus techniques might create "a dark brightness"? The requirement of "brightness" eliminates the possibility of "dark." This example is not the first time in her 1964 one-act that Kennedy requires the practically impossible. In her play, bald heads drop from the sky, black ravens fly around stage, walls appear out of nowhere and then characters walk through them. This is not to say that creative theatre professionals can't or won't come up with practical. elegant solutions to these staging problems. Indeed, Kennedy's impossible stage directions incite creative solutions, unique, unanticipated renderings of her imagined play in the material theatre. Nor is it to imply that the central work of theatre is to follow a playwright's stage directions as closely as possible. Creative solutions to impossible requirements include both "faithful" and "unfaithful" renderings. Rather, these impossible requirements highlight an impulse that lies at the core of theatrical representation: the impulse to substantiate or render the ideal. In the possibility that subtends that impulse is, I think, a utopic sensibility — a sense that something different or better could come out of current conditions.
Death and Desire, Apocalypse and Utopia: Feminist Gestus and the Utopian Performative in the Plays of Naomi Wallace
Authors: Baley Shannon
Published: April 2013

In the final scene of Naomi Wallace's Depression-era play The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek (1998), the two youngest characters — Dalton Chance, the fifteen-year-old protagonist, and Pace Creagan, the seventeen-year-old young woman whose presence literally and figuratively haunts the play — engage in a highly erotic sex scene without touching. This scene, like the prologue, bookends the play in a kind of "no-space," which is neither the place of memory (the "when" of the majority of Trestle) nor the present moment, as indicated by Wallace's opaque stage direction: "{Dalton] is ill a place that is both the past and the present at the same time".
Urban Bush Women: Finding Shelter in the Utopian Ensemble
Authors: Gonzalez Anita
Published: April 2013

Urban Bush Women are an African-American women's dance ensemble that have repeatedly sought the utopian ensemble — a collective that forms alliances through community rather than through the notion of the hero — in their performance of African diaspora experiences. The Urban Bush Women collectively create an idealized space, realized in their dances by physical contact between the performers' bodies. The company, founded by lawole Willa Jo Zollar, began presenting work in 1984 and has continued to develop an extensive and evocative dance repertory. At times overtly political, the dances embody the black female experience in a way that "invites critical interpretive readings largely because of the way in which aesthetic and political agendas are intertwined". While recent articles about the Urban Bush Women discuss the political nuances of their work, the repeated use of the collective ensemble is a unique feature of the company's dance style that merits further discussion.
Choreographies of Resistance: Latinalo Queer Dance and the Utopian Performative
Authors: Rivera-Servera Ramon
Published: April 2013

As a migrant to the United States from Puerto Rico in the early 1990s, I learned to articulate my sexuality and my political identity at the dance club. Within the erotic realm of clubs like Heaven, Carpe Diem, Club Marcella's, and The Avenue Pub, I embodied my position as a queer Latino. Dancing queerly with my friends — marking my own latinidad through rhythmic phrasings that allowed me to feel and to own the music, and approaching strangers bodily within the comfort of a shared social space — allowed me to experience communities of pleasure. The club, like the theatre, is one of the places where I renew myself, where I am able to witness, in almost religious reverence, the most immediate and affective manifestations of vibrant communities in motion.
Book Reviews
Authors: Carlson Marvin , Farfan Penny , Shaughnessy Nicola , Ferris Lesley , Werry Margaret , Gross Robert
Published: April 2013

Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, Theatricality, reviewed by Marvin Carlson

Jennifer Jones, Medea's Daughters: Forming and Performing the Woman Who Kills, reviewed by Penny Farfan

Sarah Bay-Cheng, Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's Avant-Garde Theater, reviewed by Nicola Shaughnessy

Lynn C. Miller, Jacqueline Taylor, and Heather Carver, eds.,Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women's Autobiography, reviewed by Lesley Ferris

Ian Watson, Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate, reviewed by Margaret Werry

Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, reviewed by Robert F. Gross
Telling a Spatial History of the Columbian Exposition of 1893
Authors: Bank Rosemary
Published: April 2013

Although there are as many ways to write spatial discourse as there are scholars to do the writing, spatial historiography (as I understand it) involves a spatial critique of epistemology and ideology. The ideological critique centers on enfranchisement, chiefly opening the record in terms of race, class, and gender, but also opening it to other areas of hi story (to include popular theatre, museum studies, or anthropology in a theatre history, for example). The ideological move is sometimes made, however, without mounting an epistemological critique of the temporal (by which is meant linear, causal, and progressive) arrangement of the historical record, an ideological change of the players, as it were, without an accompanying g epistemological change in the rules of the game. Theatre historical studies adds the further problems of real versus simulated, of present and represented, of true and false, of. aesthetic timespace and actual timespace, and a host of other issues arising from the nature of performance.
Misrecognition and Antimodernism in the Grove Plays of the Bohemian Club
Authors: Harries Martin
Published: April 2013

Almost every summer since 1902, at great expense of time, labor, and money, the Bohemian Club has produced a play in its redwood grove north of San Francisco. Members of the Club give a single performance of these so-called Grove plays — complete with new text and music composed for the occasion, full orchestral accompaniment, and elaborate costumes and sets — before an exclusive audience of other members and their guests.2 The Grove plays feature themes ranging the historical, prehistorical, natural- historical, and counterhistorical gamut, from the story of Robin Hood to tales of cavemen to a story of spiders to the defeat of Mammon by Bohemia. In these plays and other annual theatrical rituals, the men of the Bohemian Club industriously misrecognize themselves and the sources of their own power. In the Grove plays, indeed, one can see an awkward embodiment of the production of the aesthetic as a response to the open secret that capital has reduced almost everything to the universal equivalent.
Traumatizing Romanticism in Brian Friel's Faith Healer
Authors: Wyse Bruce
Published: April 2013

One vast and rich, not to mention conspicuous, field of intertextuality that has not been seriously engaged in explications of Faith Healer is that contested canonical construct and contradictory discursive formation called Romanticism, and in particular English Romanticism. English Romanticism, at least as a historically delineated rather than a transhistorical movement. seems to stand at several removes from Friel's play, mediated by more recent and national textual instances. Nevertheless, even in the absence of any outright allusion, the portrayal of the faith healer's troublesome and awesome power, his intra-psychic strife, his transformation of others, and his visionary preparation for death can be approached as displaced variations on several motifs, concerns, and ideas of English Romanticism.
Seeking "The Mercy of Fathers": Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom and the Tragedy of Irish Patriarchy
Authors: Meche Jude
Published: April 2013

As a poet, novelist, and playwright, Sebastian Barry has established his reputation, in recent years, as one of Ireland's young literary stars. Particularly through his efforts for the stage and through his 1995 breakout play, The Steward of Christendom, Barry finds himself today compared to and associated with that host of Irish playwrights — including Brian Friel, Fr;nk McGUinness, Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, and Martin McDonagh — who have revitalized Irish theatre in the last few decades. Barry also shares a common goal with these playwrights: restaging Ireland.
Irish Theatre: Conditions of Criticism
Authors: Fricker Karen , Singleton Brian
Published: April 2013

It is apposite that this collection of essays about (and of) Irish theatre criticism is appearing in the pages of a theatre journal published in Canada, for it was a work of Canadian theatre scholarship that inspired the conference at which these papers were first presented. In the titular essay of Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada, Toronto critic Robert Wallace places the practice of contemporary, mainstream theatre criticism in Canada in the larger context of Canadian society and cultural politics, exposing the implicit ideologies behind a critical practice that he judges to be far too determined by individual taste and a "common sense" approach. An honest and functional critical practice must start with an acknowledgement that ''judgment is relative and evaluation is political", argues Wallace, quoting John Leonard's call for a "Canadian theatre criticism that is partisan, subjective and interested - as it is now - but explicitly so," a criticism, Wallace continues, that "recognizes its symbiotic connection to Canadian theatre".
The Critical "Gap of the North": Nationalism, National Theatre, and the North
Authors: Phelan Mark
Published: April 2013

Theatre history is suffused by an immanent sense of loss. for it is forever haunted by the spectral presence of past performance as the liveness of theatre can never be recuperated or represented, but remains absent and ineffable, beyond the positivist purview of its written wor(l)d. Nevertheless, for theatre historians, reviews and criticism are never merely material ephemera that recall the lost evanescence of live performance, but vital artefacts that assist their imperfect efforts to empirically and imaginatively reconstruct the theatrical past. Certainly, my own research on the Ulster Literary Theatre (ULT), a much-neglected dramatic movement. is largely dependent on such traces of the theatrical event, especially as many of the ULT's texts were never published. Indeed, fifty years ago, a historian researching the same subject reflected that all that remained of some plays was "a fugitive line in the memory of the players" (see Kennedy). Often, reviews are the only historical residue that remains of their work and they provide tantalising textual traces of plots, performances, scenography, action, and responses to plays that would otherwise have disappeared completely. Of course, whilst theatre scholars, in particular, must always be wary of wholly positivist approaches to the theatrical past, reviews do remind us of another crucial fact: that performances, and their reception, are always local phenomena, and with regards to this, they can partially help us map the local contours of the "human geographies" that affect and inflect the production and reception of theatre.
"The Laughter Will Come of Itself. The Tears Are Inevitable": Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism
Authors: Lonergan Patrick
Published: April 2013

At the 2003 annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, a special panel discussed the works of Martin McDonagh. The event was-well attended, and the papers presented in it were of the highest quality, yet there was an umnistakable sense of frustration and weariness in the debate that ensued — one participant even proposed that, owing to the impossibility of gaining agreement on the quality, authenticity, or importance of McDonagh's work, no further discussion of it should take place until his oeuvre had developed sufficiently to allow for greater critical consensus.
Wordmadeflesh: Writing the Body in Irish Theatre
Authors: Sweeney Bernadette
Published: April 2013

In performance practice, when the word is made flesh it is made to matter, it is made material in the performance moment. As Peggy Phelan argues in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, "In moving from the grammar of words to the grammar of the body, one moves from the realm of metaphor to the realm of metonymy. [...] In performance, the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of 'presence". In critical practice, when the flesh is made word, it is recorded by a language outside of itself. W. B. Worthen, in Theorizing Practice, writes, "[A]ll writing about performance must face its own impossibility: the event is gone, the records are always partial and suspect, and the only thing we know is that nothing we say happened actually took place in precisely that way". This anxiety about capturing the live, doing it justice, recording it accurately, illustrates the troubled relationship between the flesh and the word in performance that extends beyond the "faithful" rendering of a play text to a "faithful" response to that performed rendering.
Listening Differently: The Croon Collaboration
Authors: Gilson-Ellis Jools
Published: April 2013

Early in 2002 the National Sculpture Factory (NSF) and Meridian Theatre Company in Cork initiated a cross-disciplinary collaboration between the writer-director Johnny Hanrahan (artistic director of Meridian) and the visual artist-sculptor Daphne Wright. Hanrahan had selected Wright as an artist with whom he would like to collaborate. Wright was subsequently invited to participate, and accepted. Mary McCarthy (then director of the NSF) suggested inviting Jools Gilson-Ellis to engage in a critical reflection on the project. This was agreed, and Gilson-Ellis was invited to work on the project, and also accepted. In March/April 2002, the NSF applied for two awards from the Ans Council: a Commissions Award to allow Daphne Wright to develop a collaboration with Johnny Hanrahan, and a Critical Reflection Award to allow Jools Gilson-Ellis to write about the work. Both awards were granted. Hanrahan and Wright began tlleir collaboration in the spring of 2002, and Gilson-Ellis joined them in the summer of the same year. The initial context and starting point for the collaboration between Hanrahan and Wright was the city as a "universal concept idea" and Cork City in particular.
Bernard Shaw’s Weekly Supplément
Authors: Ownes Craig
Published: April 2013

These words, which Shaw penned in 1906 as part of “The Author’s Apology” in place of a preface to his selected critical essays titled Dramatic Opinions and Essays and, twenty-five years later, to his three-volume collected essays Our Theatres in the Nineties, suggest the focus of my project: to explore Shaw’s construction of his own public expertise on theatre in his reviews for Saturday Review, published weekly from January 1895 to May 1898. His performance is at times subtle, elegant, and understated – a journalistic performance akin to the theatrical ones he most admired. At other times, however, Shaw’s rhetoric upstages his subtlety as he descends to pedantry and browbeating. Shaw himself suggests this very contrast by characterizing his project as part “siege” and part “throw[ing]” his adversaries “into the moat.” The patient waiting game of the siege is punctuated by brutal shows of force. Further, in playing the besieger and the thrower-into-moats, Shaw imagines himself simultaneously within and outside authority. After all, the besiegers are not usually the ones who do the throwing into the moats; the defenders are.
Infernal Sound Cues: Aural Geographies and the Politics of Noise
Authors: Meszaros Beth
Published: April 2013

Every time Hamlet dies, “the world,” as Shakespearian scholar Wes Folkerth puts it, “fills up again with sound […] To hear, Hamlet tells us with his final breath, is what it is to be alive”. While that sentiment would be rightly and hotly contested by the Deaf community, it strikes those of us who can hear and who have no experience of Deaf culture as axiomatic. In his study of the “sonic landscapes” of Robert Ashley, Arthur J. Sabatini valorizes sound as “ultimately, the more dominant phenomenon in the context of the theatre experience […]”. One need not go this far, however, to advance the claim that despite the tyranny of the gaze in the society of the spectacle, the materiality of the ear, as acoustic agent, is still maintained by the language of the theatre: actors still audition, and the space of an auditorium is inhabited by an audience that listens as much as watches.
Book Reviews
Authors: Morash Chris , Holdsworth Nadine , Bhatia Nandi , Roach Joseph , Grossman Elwira , Eisen Kurt , Baker-White Robert , Krasner David , Sofer Andrew
Published: April 2013

Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland, reviewed by Chris Morash

Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, reviewed by Nadine Holdsworth

Gabriele Griffin, Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain, reviewed by Nandi Bhatia

Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order, reviewed by Joseph Roach

Wlodzimierz Staniewski with Alison Hodge, Hidden Territories: The Theatre of Gardzienice, reviewed by Elwira M. Grossman

Barry B. Witham., The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study, reviewed by Kurt Eisen,

Konstantinos Blatanis, Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama, reviewed by Robert Baker-White

Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical, reviewed by David Krasner

Philip C. Kolin, ed., The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, reviewed by Andrew Sofer
Polemic as Parting Advice:The “Argument” of The Cherry Orchard
Authors: Reid John Mckellor
Published: April 2013

Since this was Gorky’s “moment” – the triumphant première of The Lower Depths in 1902 had heralded the arrival of the new man demanded by the new century – so there may be a hint of ideologically induced deafness about the fledgling playwright’s dismissal of his dying mentor’s play. The “new” was Gorky: he was, as Nemierovich-Danchenko put it in his review of the first draft of Summerfolk, the “great poet, to whose works practically the whole world is listening at the moment” (Marsh 29). But would that settle any question about the kind of “argument” Gorky expected – was there really “nothing new”? There has always been something of a riddle about The Cherry Orchard: its subtle, musical shifts in mood and genre were very new, and puzzling. The familiar human cargo of a comedy with an estate setting, feckless aristocrats, alienated underlings, the rising bourgeois entrepreneur, and the philosophising radical student, seemed to define a recognisable range of class relations in this dramaturgy-of-types comedy. Or was it, as some audiences and actors felt, a tragedy? How could you end a play with the death of old Firs and still insist that your play was a comedy? The audiences wept. The actors wept. Chekhov’s insistence on “comedy” as the generic home of his play had, as usual, complex determinants. But, as I want to argue, one neglected set of determinants was that this play may have been (sotto voce) parting advice to a friend: a friend who possibly represented the future, the “new man” so noisily prophesied in Gorky’s works.
“A Hole in the Paper Sky”: Psycho-Scenographic Rifts in Pirandello’s Henry IV
Authors: Gillette Kyle
Published: April 2013

Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV has received much critical attention for its complex treatment of madness, illusion, history, memory, and existential angst. Considering Pirandello’s biographical facts related to the psychological decline of his wife Antonietta Portulano, whose paranoid delusions formed an alternative version of her husband’s identity, many have looked to categories of mental illness to understand Henry’s situation. Rudolph Binion sees Henry’s story “as an example of emotional arrest which dates from his traumatic fall”; Eric Bentley reads the protagonist’s behavior as psychopathology; Alan Roland and Gino Rizzo diagnose Henry with “wounded narcissism […] masochism, and deprivation”; Thomas Bishop writes that “Henry’s story reads like a case history of amnesia compounded with schizophrenia”
“¡Silencio, he dicho!” Space, Language, and Characterization as Agents of Social Protest in Lorca’s Rural Tragedies
Authors: Blum Bilha
Published: April 2013

“The art of our time,” said Susan Sontag, “is noisy with appeals for silence”. Although originally meant as an assessment of the cultural function of modern art, Sontag’s juxtaposition of such antithetical terms as “noise” and “silence” places the work of art at a stylistic and thematic crossroads where the explicit and the implicit, the visible and the invisible, text and subtext or, indeed, what is said, shown, or done (and therefore “noisy”) and what is not, can meet and interact. Each one of these levels constitutes an integral part of the work of art and, as such, it equally affects the construction of its meaning, in perfect accordance with the artist’s intentionality. The additional task of the noisy elements, however, functioning as “appeals for silence,” is to raise the addressee’s awareness of those elements that were silenced, tacitly granting them primacy while foregrounding their position as the thematic core of the work. That is, from Sontag’s angle, it would seem that in modern art, meaning is generated not only by a work of art’s explicit components but also by those very elements the artist deliberately excluded precisely because he or she considers them highly important and meaningful. Choosing to silence whatever social or behavioural issues are silenced by cultural norms, taboos, and conventions, the artist can thus intentionally point to them and underscore their importance. With this strategy, commonly used by nineteenth-century artists such as Courbet, Ibsen, Zola, or Balzac in works informed by the “slice-of-life” principle of representation, a critical and even subversive attitude toward reality develops, while those features of society the artist wishes to criticize, remain explicit, visible, or, in Sontag’s words, “noisy.”
Other Transnationals: An Introductory Essay
Authors: Haiping Yan
Published: April 2013

“We are living through a revolution where everyone has a stake and no one has total control”. So says the narrator in the PBS series, The Commanding Heights, based on Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw’s influential book on world economy of the twentieth-first century. This revolution, described in the book through a Keynesian-inflected discourse, is called “globalization,” featuring the free flow of the capital that is redrawing the human geographies of the world
Performing the “Filipino” at the Crossroads: Filipino Bands in Five-Star Hotels Throughout Asia
Authors: Ng Stephanie
Published: April 2013

I arrived at the Concorde Hotel at about 8:50 p.m. on a Friday evening. The Concorde Hotel is a high-class business hotel, located on busy Jalan Sultan Ismail in downtown Kuala Lumpur. Across from The Concorde Hotel is Shangri-La Hotel, a five-star establishment belonging to an international chain. Jalan Sultan Ismail and its adjacent streets are home to several of the largest business hotels in the city, such as Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Equatorial Hotel, Mutiara Hotel, Renaissance Hotel, and New World Hotel. These hotels cater to the needs of the business district of Kuala Lumpur and provide accommodation to tourists and business travelers from within the country and abroad. While this area is generally very crowded each evening because of the many nightspots located there, traffic virtually slows to a crawl on Friday and Saturday nights, and people have to wait in line to get into many of the more popular clubs and restaurants. Malaysia’s only Hard Rock Café, the haunt of expatriates, travelers from the west, and the Kuala Lumpur elite, is located at the Concorde Hotel. Here one can savor western food and rock music.
Melancholia of Freedom: Humour and Nostalgia among Indians in South Africa
Authors: Hansen Thomas Blom
Published: April 2013

As I began fieldwork in Chatsworth, a large, formerly Indian township outside of Durban in South Africa in 1998, I was immediately struck by two features of everyday life there. The first was a pervasive sense of loss and displacement in the face of the new freedoms afforded by the country’s tense but gentle transition to democracy in 1994. While the new era and its new possibilities were celebrated by some, including many well-educated people of Indian origin, the predominant feelings among the ordinary working class Indians in the township, colloquially known as charous [literally “burnt man” in Afrikaans] were those of loss and bewilderment. The oft-repeated saying – “[B]efore we were not white enough, now we are not black enough” – summed up this sentiment.
I Think Only Our Kisses Really Translated
Authors: Fulbeck Kip
Published: April 2013

In Honolulu, I do a book reading at Barnes & Noble. Seven people are in the audience and I’ve brought five of them with me. The bookstore staff says this is quite normal, and blames the lack of audience on a negative local perception of Asians from the continental U.S. They tell me if I were Asian from Asia, or Caucasian from the mainland – then I’d get an audience.
“Always in the Likeness”: The Virtual Presences of Helmut Kajzar’s Gwiazda in the Lothe Lachmann Theatre
Authors: Kwapisz Katarzyna
Published: April 2013

In the 1970s, Helmut Kajzar formulated his manifesto, in which he defined theatre as “a place in between – such as stairs, a hallway, such as the Earth” (Manifest); yet, he never stopped asking where theatre begins and where it ends (Teatr Meta-codzienny).1 Nearly thirty years later, the participants of the International Theatre Festival, Dialog, were trying to answer, “What can the theatre offer […] in the time of the expeditious development of audiovisual arts? Does the theatre try to compete with the tools of contemporary pop-culture […] how does it use them?” (“Dialog”). After he had written his manifesto for Teatr Metacodzienno_ci [the Theatre of Meta-everydayness], Kajzar bought one of the first tape recorders available in Poland and, delighted with the new opportunities, treated it as an element of his theatre. Over the years, technological inventions have become not only tools or instruments in theatre but the meaningful elements of the theatrical space; similarly, digital transmission not only has enabled theatre to stage events, now, using solutions familiar from television or film but also poses basic questions as to the status of materiality and presence in theatre. Trying not to compete with the tools of contemporary electronic culture but rather to use them, theatre has developed various hybrids, extending the range of its already multiform configurations with multimedia performance. Equipped with technology much more advanced than Kajzar’s tape recorder and questing after the body as “the primary means of theatrical display” (Kunst, “Impossible”), the Videoteatr “Poza” [Lothe Lachmann Theatre] actively pursues one of the lines of inquiry into this marriage of diverse forms.
Book Reviews
Authors: LoMonaco Martha , Watson Ian , Owens Craig , Brask  , Harvie Jen , D'Cruz Glenn , Grace Jeff
Published: April 2013

Brenda Murphy, The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity, reviewed by Martha S. LoMonaco,

Julia A. Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words, reviewed by Martha S. LoMonaco

Jonathan Pitches, Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting, reviewed by Ian Watson

John Pilling, A Samuel Beckett Chronology, reviewed by Craig N. Owens

Mary Luckhurst, Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre, reviewed by P.K. Brask

Baz Kershaw, Since 1895. Vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of British Theatre, reviewed by Jen Harvie

L.M. Bogad, Electoral Guerilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, reviewed by Glenn D’Cruz

Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947, reviewed by Jeff D. Grace
Theoria Negativa: Making Sense of Boal’s Reading of Aristotle
Authors: Dwyer Paul
Published: April 2013

Judging by the proliferation of recent works by and about Augusto Boal, as well as the number of course readers and critical anthologies in which his work is excerpted, his place in the canon of modern theatre theory seems assured.1 This critical consensus might almost seem too cosy given that Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques are usually regarded as a means to help effect progressive, perhaps radical social change. Thus, Douglas Paterson and Mark Weinberg (in an interview with Boal) puzzle over the fact that “people in established critical circles have not come after you. We would think there would be a ground-swell of resistance, because by taking on the Aristotelian structure, you are critiquing one of the fundamental grounds of the way western theatre is practiced” (“We Are All Theater” 18). Of course, the short answer to this puzzle is that it is no puzzle at all: Boal’s celebrated critique of Aristotle is itself firmly grounded in a theoretical position that is familiar to many “established” and supportive critics as having been staked out by Brecht a good fifty years earlier.
A “Revolutionary Outrage”: The Importance of Being Earnest as Social Criticism
Authors: Lalonde Jeremy
Published: April 2013

I propose that The Importance of Being Earnest allows for two readings: one can assume the role of the narrator of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (Wilde) or that of Lady Bracknell. Both readings have their limits and privilege the performance either of class or of sexuality in the play.
Stage as Hyperspace: Theatricality of Stoppard
Authors: Chung Moonyoung
Published: April 2013

Most of Tom Stoppard’s critics have tried to assess his greatness in terms of his conserving and developing the tradition of British high comedy. Thus, his Arcadia (1993) has been largely acknowledged as the best of high comedy, with “a quality of high Englishness” (Kelly, Introduction 17). In fact, as a major British playwright, he has experimented with dramatic strategies to lure his audience into a series of critical engagements with British politics and culture. As for his politics, critics have argued that he is not a radical but a conservative. This study, however, will argue that he is revolutionary and subversive b y pointing out how he has taken a l ine of f light f rom being a “molar” major writer. It can be argued that Stoppard, a Czech Jew, writes, as Deleuze puts it, “like a foreigner in [his] own language” (Deleuze and Parnet 4), with a political purpose of deterritorializing the dominant Oedipal system, like Kafka, who was admired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a great minor writer (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka). The Czech-born English playwright has left some clues in his plays as to how they may be read as a form of minor literature whose main characteristic is political (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 18). Especially his play Arcadia, which is in the form of a seemingly traditional high comedy, shows how to “minorate” this traditional form of major literature (Deleuze, “One Less Manifesto” 243). Thus, as Deleuze tries to do with Shakespeare, this reading will subject Stoppard, who is considered a major contemporary writer, to “a minor author treatment” in order to rediscover his potential for becoming minor (243). In other words, it will extract his development or process of becoming in antithesis to the major tradition in order to recover the active force of the minority in Stoppard.
The Circle Game: Gender, Time, and “Revolution” in Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia
Authors: Barker Roberta
Published: April 2013

These words sound a rather surprising note when the ill-fated Natalie Herzen speaks them in the opening moments of Shipwreck, the second play in Tom Stoppard’s 2002 trilogy The Coast of Utopia. After all, as members of the nineteenth- century Russian intelligentsia, Stoppard’s main characters are men committed to social change. At the end of the trilogy’s final play, Alexander Herzen sums up the meaning of their quest by maintaining that “history has no culmination! There is always as much in front as behind […] We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us. But that is our dignity as human beings” (Stoppard, Salvage 118). Natalie’s earlier question stands in stark contrast to this vision: while Herzen sees human existence as dominated by the struggle to advance through history, his wife sees it as haunted by cycles of repetition in which “certain moments […] keep having their turn again.”
“Seek for Something New”: Mothers, Change, and Creativity in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change
Authors: Stevenson Catherine
Published: April 2013

Despite striking differences in subject matter and dramatic form, each of these works probes the connections between mothers and children; each arguably is a kind of meditation on the meaning of the death of Kushner’s own mother, Sylvia Deutscher Kushner. Angels, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change, however, do not sentimentalize the mother–child relationship nor do they identify mother figures with some unalterable biological ground of being. Instead, “mothers” in these dramas perform actions that disrupt the status quo and the fixity of identity: they shift location, stir up change, and even multiply into doubles and triples, whose personalities and ideas sometimes mirror, sometimes contradict, each other. Thus mothers and their relationships to the next generation of children serve as important loci for dramatizing the operation of the dialectic.
Polymorphous Playboys: Irish–Caribbean Shadow Dancing
Authors: Gough Kathleen
Published: April 2013

On the Twelfth of July, 2003, I took an unusually empty train from Dublin to Belfast to attend one of the biggest and most contentious Orange Parades in Northern Ireland’s Loyalist Marching Season.1 That day, I stood among the crowds on the sidewalks who were waving their Union Jack flags while wearing Union Jack jester hats, watching the Orangemen parade down the street. In order to not draw attention to myself or appear as a cynical cultural tourist, I opted to forgo taking photographs that day and instead collected newspapers and other ephemera from the event. That evening’s edition of the Belfast Telegraph held two remarkably contrasting images on its front page. Above the headline, which read, “Sunshine Greets Twelfth Marchers,” were two circular images, in opposite corners, previewing articles inside the paper. The image in the top right-hand corner showed members of various Orange Order lodges marching in their bowler hats and orange sashes, but it was the image in the opposite corner that drew my attention. In this image – rendered as a watercolor painting – a single boat on blue water and underneath a cloudless sky – was flagged with the message “Nine Hours to Paradise: A Holiday to the Caribbean.” While this is hardly an unusual representation of the Caribbean, which is packaged for tourists who wish to get away from their lived reality and spend a vacation in a land often considered outside of time, I found its placement in this particular edition of the Belfast Telegraph to be more than a bit ironic.
Book Reviews
Authors: Garner, Jr. Stanton , Singleton Brian , Wilson Ann , Emeljanow Victor , Kuppers Petra , Robb David , Fuentes Marcela , Johnston Kristy , Moller Lorraine
Published: April 2013

Benjamin Bennett All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater, reviewed by Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Neil Blackadder, Performing Opposition: Modern Theater And The Scandalized Audience, reviewed by Brian Singleton

Penny Farfan, Women, Modernism, And Performance, reviewed by Ann Wilson

John Mccormick, in Collaboration With Clodagh Mccormick And John Phillips, The Victorian Marionette Theatre, reviewed by Victor Emeljanow

Vicky Ann Cremona, Peter Eversmann, Hans Van Maanen, Willmar Sauter, And John Tulloch, eds., Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames, reviewed by Richard Fotheringham

Nicolas Whybrow, Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin And Berlin, reviewed by Petra Kuppers

Ralf E. Remshardt, Staging The Savage God: The Grotesque In Performance, reviewed by David Robb

Daniel M. Goldstein, The Spectacular City: Violence And Performance In Urban Bolivia, reviewed by Marcela A. Fuentes

Richard Boon And Jane Plastow, eds., Theatre And Empowerment: Community Drama On The World Stage, reviewed by Kirsty Johnston

Michael Balfour, ed., Theatre In Prison: Theory And Practice, reviewed by Lorraine F. Moller
Ivanov: The Perils of Typicality
Authors: Reid John McKellor
Published: April 2013

It was Turgenev who taught Chekhov that, in an age of censorship, objectivity could have the force of polemic without overtly disclosing its critical intents. In the appropriate rhetorical situation, objectivity can function as a mode of “hidden polemic,” a crucial part of the weaponry of the ironist. Even if the objectivity of Turgenev’s presentation did not always guarantee that provocative voices and attitudes would evade the censor’s pen, the mask of objectivity was a subtle rhetorical tool for any writer concerned with social and political criticism.2 Does Ivanov need to be recognized as a play exploiting the rhetoric of objectivity? Can one deploy a rhetoric of objectivity and yet remain committed to an ethics of objectivity? In polemical terms, objectivity has it limits, since, functioning as an ironic mode, its “non-statement” is a severe form of understatement – and, as such, subject to the vagaries of indeterminacy. It is the threat of such indeterminacy, I think, that leads Chekhov to create a play in which the objective is always in tension with the grotesque and the satirical: but understatement counterbalanced by statement still runs the risk of remaining indeterminate.
Ja, til Island! The Icelandic Reception of Hærmændene paa Helgeland
Authors: Kaplan Merrill
Published: April 2013

The final lines of Hærmændene paa Helgeland point to Iceland, whither the survivors of Ibsen’s 1858 Viking drama fare on longships. ‘‘Aye’’ says Ørnulf to Gunnar, ‘‘to Iceland.’’ What befalls them there, we are not told. However, the play does have an Icelandic fifth act, after a fashion. More than thirty years later, the play lands in Reykjavı´k as Vı´kingarnir a´ Ha´logalandi, an Icelandic translation by Indriði Einarsson. The performance of this work in 1892, also directed by Indriði,1 was the first production of any Ibsen play in Iceland and one of the very first performances of drama on the Icelandic stage (it occasioned the printing of Iceland’s first playbill). This was a historic moment, and the Icelandic press gave it attention as such.
‘‘First and Foremost a Human Being’’: Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll’s House
Authors: Moi Toril
Published: April 2013

This article explores three major themes in A Doll’s House: idealism, theatre, and gender. Although idealist aesthetic norms were a primary concern for many of the play’s first critics, contemporary literary scholars have barely raised the subject. In this article, I use the term ‘‘idealism’’ to mean ‘‘idealist aesthetics,’’ defined broadly as the idea that the task of art is to create beauty, combined with the belief that beauty, truth, and goodness are one. Taking questions of beauty to be questions of morality and truth, idealist aesthetics thus seemlessly merge aesthetics and ethics. Although the earliest versions of idealist aesthetics had been espoused by Romantic radicals such as Friedrich Schiller, Madame de Stae, and – a little later – Shelley, by the time of A Doll’s House, the Romantic movement was long dead; yet idealist aesthetics lived on, albeit in increasingly tired and exhausted forms, which often were aligned with conservative and moralistic social forces. Not surprisingly, then, in the wake of the radical Danish intellectual Georg Brandes’s fiery call for a modern literature in his 1871–72 lectures on Hovedstrømninger i Europeisk litteratur, idealism was increasingly coming under attack, and – as I show in my book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism – Ibsen’s works were the linchpin of the burgeoning modernist opposition to idealism.