bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Trading Art(s): Artaud, Spies, and Current Indonesian/American Artistic Exchange and Collaboration
Authors: Frost Christine Mangala
Published: April 2013

In E. M. Forster's A Passage to India Adela Quested, like Mrs. Moore, wants to see the real India. Instead, both have to sit through an amateur production of Cousin Kate. Adela is appalled: she predicts rather gloomily that her desire to see the "real India" will be thwarted by her compatriots:
Journeys from Frustration to Empowerment: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and its Debt to Garda Lorca's Yerma
Authors: Weimer Christopher Brian
Published: April 2013

The extent to which Federico Garcia Lorca's works influenced Tennessee Williams's creative output remains a largely neglected question, one often passed over in favor of Williams's debt to Anton Chekov and D. H. Lawrence. However, Lorca (1899—1936) was one of the authors whom Williams (1911—1983) studied intensively during his college years, while a 1947 New York Times interviewer reported that "among his favorite writers are Chekov and the Spanish poet and dramatist Garda Lorca, and it is probable that they, more than any others, have contributed to his own particular style." Nowhere is Lorca's influence more apparent than in Williams's early one-act The Purification, a rural tragedy in verse clearly modeled after the Spanish author's Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding).
The Communal Dream of Myth: David Rudkin's The Triumph of Death
Authors: Wilcher Robert
Published: April 2013

Two years after the success of Afore Night Come in 1962, and before he had completed a second play for the stage. David Rudkin described himself as "afflicted by images, by things that are seen, pictures of things." He continued, "They are extraordinary, momentary, but they stay with me, and slowly accumulate around them some hardening of dramatic ritual life, and I find that my plays, my ideas of plays, tend to be processions towards climaxes which are enactments of such images.” The Triumph of Death, first performed in March 1981, can be seen in its entirety as such a climactic enactment — a work distilled out of the twenty-year-long ferment of ideas, language, and experiences that followed its author's impressive debut as a dramatist.
States of War in Sam Shepard's States of Shock
Authors: Willadt Susanne
Published: April 2013

After a six-year silence, Sam Shepard, formerly one of the most prolific and most produced American playwrights, finally returned to the American theater with States of Shock. The play was first presented by The American Place Theatre in New York City on April 30, 1991, for a very limited run. As has been the case for so many other Shepard plays before, States of Shock was eagerly anticipated by New York theater critics as an opportunity to fight another critical war about Shepard. Shepard has always had what Walter Kerr, the "high priest" of the New York theater critics, once named his "cult audience."
Cain, Canaanites, and Philistines in Sam Shepard's True West
Authors: Hoeper Jeffrey
Published: April 2013

"Myth speaks to everything at once, especially the emotions," writes Sam Shepard. Acting on this indirect authorial invitation, critics have understandably devoted much attention to the mythic elements in Shepard's work. Most notably, Tucker Orbison has exposed three levels of mythic response in True West: the mythic West of the cowboy; the mythic "mystery of the artist" in which the writer delves into the self to explore archetypal conflicts "fraught with the terrors of nightdreaming"; and finally the mythic conflict of the doppelganger, the "second self," as revealed in the role reversal of Lee and Austin at the play's crisis.
Book Reviews
Authors: Durbach Errol
Published: April 2013

Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone marker, Ibsen's lively art: A performance study of the major plays, reviewed by Errol Durbach
Cutting Philomela's Tongue: The Cocktail Party's Cure for a Disorderly World
Authors: Severin Laura
Published: April 2013

Although readers of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1949) have long noted its connection to his 1940 tract The Idea of Christian Society, none have fully or critically explored the play's social agenda. Like Eliot's earlier treatise, The Cocktail Party presents a hierarchical world view that is alarming in its implications for both class and gender. Occasionally, the play's class implications have disturbed critics. For example, David Jones comments on the "Christian conspiracy" of the play's Guardians; this elite group, who as Jones points out "set themselves apart," manipulate rather than aid, dictate rather than discuss. However, the implications of the play 's violence against women have never been examined.
The Dialectics of Space in Synge's The Shadow of the Glen
Authors: Velissariou Aspasia
Published: April 2013

The conflict between staying and leaving in Synge's plays has, so far, attracted a great deal of critical notice. It has become a commonplace that his main characters face a crucial choice: either to stay within the boundaries of a certain community or to abandon it for wandering or for death. At the same time, a number of Synge's thematic preoccupations, such as the passing of time, the fear of loneliness, and the transience of love, have repeatedly been connected to this choice. This article, using The Shadow of the Glen as a paradigmatic expression of fundamental tensions in Synge, attempts a redefinition of the very same conflict between staying and leaving, by setting it into a different methodological context. While not ignoring its thematic importance, I treat the conflict as a major structural antithesis organizing this particular play, and Synge's drama as a whole, in terms of an opposition between the mimetic space (that which is made visible and represented on the stage) and the diegetic space (that which is referred to by the characters). The opposition between these two forms of dramatic space is also associated with the general tendency of the main characters to "lose" their mimetic dimension and become purely diegetic.
The Theatre of Thomas Murphy and Federico Garcia Lorca
Authors: Lanters Jose
Published: April 2013

Thomas Murphy has said in an interview that he learned much of the business of playwriting by reading the works of established writers for the stage, and that in the course of doing so he discovered his "favourite playwright" in Lorca. While underlining that Lorca and Murphy are very different in many respects, and that Murphy has too much of an original mind for his works to be considered in any sense derivative. this article will attempt to trace some of the connections between Murphy's work and Lorca's, both in thematic terms and in terms of stagecraft. Although these connections may suggest ways in which Murphy was influenced by Lorca, this is, of course, difficult to prove. However, the similarities do suggest reasons why Murphy should have felt particularly drawn to the works of the Andalusian playwright.
Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest: Polyphonic Representations of Southeastern Europe
Authors: Mitchell Tony
Published: April 2013

Caryl Churchill has often been designated a socialist feminist in her work as a playwright, and associated with a theoretical perspective which, in Michelene Wandor's words, "aims to analyse and understand the way in which power relations based on class interact with power relations based on gender." Her dramaturgical approach to themes involving women and patriarchy has been distinctively different from that of many of her male peers of socialist persuasion in the British theatre of the past two decades. She uses fragmented, open-ended dramatic structures, and an approach to characterization which is often the result of extensive field-work, workshops and improvisations carried out with her actors before she begins writing her plays. This workshop approach, which frequently dispenses with linear "master narrative" forms altogether, was first developed with the feminist theatre group Monstrous Regiment — with whom she wrote Vinegar Tom (1976), a play about witch-hunts in seventeenth-century England — and extended with Joint Stock, and the director Max Stafford-Clark, in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976), Cloud Nine (1979), Top Girls (1982), Fen (1983), and Serious Money (1987).
Bernard Shaw's The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles: A New Approach
Authors: Berg Fredric
Published: April 2013

In 1933, seventy-six-year-old Bernard Shaw journeyed east to India. The troubling effect this visit can have on Westerners is documented in much of twentieth-century English literature and has recently been ubiquitous in film and television. The Indian subcontinent during the British Raj was the most vivid theatre for the playing out of the clash of cultures between East and West, and one can easily assume that it must have had its effect on the mystically prone Shaw.
Morality in Pirandello's Come tu mi vuoi
Authors: Mazzaro Jerome
Published: April 2013

The choice ending Luigi Pirandello's Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me, 1930) has not received the attention it deserves. L'Ignota's decision to go off with Salter rather than remain with Pieri comes as close as any decision by a Pirandello character to making a moral choice. Domenico Vittorioi's view that the decision is that of a soul "that has tried to live on this earth and could not" is, perhaps, not so overstated as John Gassner would have one believe. Nonetheless, the role's being often thought of as simply an acting vehicle for Marta Abba (for whom it was written) and Pirandello's allowing Hollywood to alter the choice have lulled critics into minimizing the decision's moral significance, provided, of course, that whatever decision occurs is convincingly presented. The play's historical and literary antecedents argue for the film 's "happy" ending. The Bruneri-Canella controversy and trial which inspired it ended finally with the amnesiac choosing to stay with the wealthy "wife," and Giovacchino Forzano's libretto for Giacomo Puccini's Gianni Schicchi (1918), which is cited as another source, ends with Schiechi better off than when he began, if one discounts the negative afterworld aspects of Dante's: telling in the Inferno (30: 25-45). All the same, L'Ignota's decision offers a resolution to the quandary of identity that audiences were left in with Cosi e (se vi pare) (Right You Are [If You Think So], 1917) and the rejection of normal reality in Enrico IV (1922). L'Ignota decides who she is in a reality which audiences can accept, and in doing so, she chooses what strikes playgoers as apparently the less attractive alternative because, presumably, it offers growth.
Victorian and Modern Drama: Social Convention and Theatrical Invention in T.W. Robertson's Plays
Authors: Denison Patricia
Published: April 2013

It is not uncommon for one age to dismiss the accomplishments of another. It is even less uncommon for an era to dismiss as neither old enough to be venerated nor new enough to be valued the accomplishments of the era immediately preceding it. Twentieth-century theatre criticism has been no exception in this respect, and it has often portrayed nineteenth-century British drama in terms of decay and decline. In recent decades, however, interest in the Victorian theatre has revived, with various studies devoted to theatre history, production practice, the theatre as social institution, the plays in new editions, and the field as a whole in terms of broad surveys. These studies offer valuable material for anyone interested in Victorian theatre and drama. Yet Victorian plays themselves seem not to attract the kind of close analysis that characterizes scholarly activity in the fields of medieval drama, renaissance drama, restoration drama, and modem drama. The plays of T.W. Robertson serve as a signal case in point.
Alice Gerstenberg's Overtones: The Demon in the Doll
Authors: Maddock Mary
Published: April 2013

Alice Gerstenberg's experimental one-act drama, Overtones (1915), is a good example of a play that portrays women in conventional roles at the same time as it implicitly reveals the destructive limitations of such roles. As such, it is like other women's dramas of the early decades of the twentieth century that accurately depict typical dilemmas facing women characters in traditional society (e.g., lack of autonomy, sex discrimination, and infantilization), but that stop short of proposing solutions. Like other women's plays of the first half of the twentieth century — for example, Zoe Akins's Declassee (1919), Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928), Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934), and Clare Boothe's The Women (1936) — Overtones is an easy play to misread. Consequently, some of Gerstenberg's contemporaries saw the play as a realistic portrayal of women's "natural" cattiness toward each other, while later critics, taking the play out of the context of its time, have mistaken Gerstenberg's depiction of the status quo for her sanction of it, resulting in the wrongful devaluation of her drama. Overtones may show women acting in predictable patriarchal stereotypes, but because it exposes the roots of such behaviour in women's inferior social status and in their distance from centers of power, it serves as an important indictment of society.
Authorization and Subversion of Myth in Shepard's Buried Child
Authors: Orbison Tucker
Published: April 2013

Some confusion has resulted from recent views on how Sam Shepard uses myth in Buried Child. Critics have asserted that two myths form the sub-text of the play: the vegetation myth of the Corn King and the legend of the Holy Grail. Opinion differs, however, on how Shepard treats these patterns. Some suggest that Shepard accepts these myths uncritically; others ,see the play's dramatic structure as subverting them. The argument here holds that Shepard authorizes the validity of the first and subverts the second. The vision of Buried Child is characterized by a bitter irony: while the natural world is renewed, the human world is not.
Reconstruction of Legend in Contemporary Panjabi Drama in India
Authors: Singh Pankaj
Published: April 2013

A significant section of Hindi and Panjabi drama (which emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries respectively) has engaged itself with subjects derived from myth, legend, and history of India. The choice might have been partly a pragmatic one because the narratives from the past provided a structure of shared beliefs; yet it was also a conscious attempt to infuse the country with cultural vitality and to awaken the national spirit. The past was invoked to portray models of endurance, self-sacrifice, courage, and undaunted resistance in the characters of Sita, Savitri, Abhimanyu, Maharana Pratap, Rani Padmini, and others to inspire the writers' countrymen to fight against oppression and colonial rule. The return to the past was inevitably characterised by "revivalistic romanticism" which countered the colonizer's image of the inferior, the barbaric, the uncivilized of the colonized. However, in the post-colonial phase, the use of myth, legend, or history is problematic and multidimensional; in addition to using the past to clarify and comment on the present, playwrights (particularly from the sixties onwards) present a critique of their own cultural traditions which they confront, question, subvert, and at times even reject.
Smashing Temples: Cultural Symptoms of the 1980s in Australian Mainstage Comedy and Farce
Authors: Kelly Veronica
Published: April 2013

In his commentary on Nick Enright's 1989 farce Daylight Saving, Peter Fitzpatrick observes that "A number of things have conspired to ensure that life isn’t easy for the Australian playwright." Nationalist traditions of criticism, he discerns, "[confer] privilege on those kinds of theatre which most suit the idiom, ... a process which condemns some plays to the margins of a lopsided national dramatic tradition.” This has generic and stylistic implications, since the various mutations of boulevard comedy — romantic comedy, comedy of manners, and bedroom farce — tend to become marginalised in academic criticism as not sufficiently serious to offer themselves as allegories by which the Australian community can "mean" to itself. Cultural negotiation can be as crucially at stake in a new contemporary playas in a "classic" with an accumulated corpus of critical and performance readings; and genre no less than theme has political implications, variable and strategic though these may be at any historic moment or site.
Ibsen's Tragicomedy: The Wild Duck
Authors: Foster Verna
Published: April 2013

Tragicomedy is an exceedingly slippery genre that can incorporate the tragic and the comic, the melodramatic and the farcical, the romantic and the satiric in a variety of combinations. It can boast antecedents in Euripidean, Terentian, and medieval drama and cognates in sentimental comedy, the drame (serious drama that is neither tragic nor comic), melodrama, savage farce, and so on. But the dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable and theoretically significant new genre, tragicomedy, has developed only twice in the history of drama. Controversial in the Renaissance, tragicomedy has in modem times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic kinds.
Book Reviews
Authors: Leland Charles , Jackson Russell , Daniel Lanelle , Dicenzo Maria , Baker Stuart , Ferris Lesley , Klaver Elizabeth , Demastes William , Ganz Arthur
Published: April 2013

Lise-Lone Marker and Frederick J. Marker, Ingmar Bergman: A Life in the Theatre, reviewed by Charles Leland

John Russell Stephens, The Profession of the Playwright: British Theatre 1800-1900, reviewed by Russell Jackson

Leslie Kane, David Mamet: A Casebook, reviewed by Lanelle Daniel

Gay Brewer, David Mamet and Film: Illusion/Disillusion in a Wounded Land, reviewed by Lanelle Daniel

Diane Bessal, The Canadian Dramatist, Volume Two: Playwrights of Collective Creation, reviewed by Maria Dicenzo

Albert E. Kalson, Laughter in the Dark: The Plays of Alan Ayckboun, reviewed by Stuart E.Baker

Lizbeth Goodman, Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own, reviewed by Lesley Ferris

Sheila Stowell, A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era, reviewed by Lesley Ferris

Rosette C. Lamont, Ionesco's Imperatives: The Politics of Culture, reviewed by Elizabeth Klaver

Leonard Wilcox ed., Rereading Shepard. Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard, reviewed by William W. Demastes

Katherine H. Burkman And John L. Kundert-Gibbs, eds., Pinter At Sixty, reviewed by Arthur Ganz
Crossing Borders: Sharon Pollock's Revisitation of Canadian Frontiers
Authors: Northoff Anne
Published: April 2013

Sharon Pollock's "history plays" are essentially iconoclastic, deconstructing comfo rtable assumptions about the growth of the Canadian nation and the peaceful integration of "others" from across the borders. In two of her early plays — Walsh, which premiered at Theatre Calgary in 1973, and The Komagala Maru Incident, which was first produced at the Vancouver Playhouse in 1976 — she demonstrated how the politics of exclusion determined the characteristics of a "white man's country." In Fair Liberty's Call, which opened at the Patterson Theatre in Stratford, Ontario in July, 1993, she deconstructs the "Loyalist myth" which assumes that Canada's democratic freedoms owe a great deal to the courageous, independent exiles from America, who crossed the border to begin a more egalitarian society. The title of Pollock's play is shown, in fact, to be ironic: there is little difference between the policy or actions of rebel and loyalist, Patriot and Tory. The contentious issues which fuelled the War of Independence are replicated in Canada. In all three plays, borders are imposed — between countries, between individuals — in the interests of securing or protecting property. Political or ethical principles are modified to serve basically acquisitive impulses, and government policy expresses the entrenched bigotry and greed of an established population, all immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.
Politics over the Gulf: Trevor Griffiths in the Nineties
Authors: Garner, Jr. Stanton
Published: April 2013

In a January 1992 interview with Douglas Kennedy of the Sunday Telegraph, Trevor Griffiths lamented the current state of British political theater: "The social function of theater is dead — someone should call the priest and say last rites over the British theater," He has not been alone in his anger and concern. In a May 1988 symposium on the state of the theater in Thatcher's Britain, John McGrath observed, "The number of new plays being done now is a third of what it was ten years ago. There's a real chance that within the next five years they will disappear completely." This symposium was followed (in December 1988) by a conference of British theater professionals and academics entitled "Theater in Crisis."

The 1980s were clearly a decade of attrition for the British theater, particularly on the Left, and the early years of the 1990s have offered little change in the underlying policies and trends that brought about this attrition. Yet Griffiths's career in the early nineties — like those of Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, and others in the theater — suggests that British social and political theater is still alive, if diminished from its flourishing in the sixties and seventies.
With(holding) the Knife: Representing the Unrepresentable (Wo)man in Anna
Authors: Kerr Roalind
Published: April 2013

When the Toronto-based feminist Company of Sirens approached me in December 1994 to act as dramaturge for Anna, I found myself confronted with a script which problematizes many of the traditional stage codes surrounding the representation of gender. This article is an attempt to encapsulate some of the key moments in the dramaturging-workshopping process with which I as both an academic and a theatre practitioner continue to grapple in trying to bring Anna, a new play written by April Hubert, to performance.
Theatre as Social Science: A Comparative Study of Eugenio Barba's Barter Performances and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots
Authors: Watson Ian
Published: April 2013

As the reappraisals of theatre's function and aesthetics by the likes of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, Artaud and Grotowski suggest, theatre has been under threat of becoming moribund and irrelevant for the better part of the twentieth century. With the rise of political and social conservatism in much of the Western world, this threat appears to have escalated as we approach the end of the millennium. If critics are to be believed, theatre in the United States, for example, lacks the dynamic character of the 1970s or even the 1980s, in addition to which, its audience base has been in decline during the past years, it has suffered massive reductions in government as well as corporate funding, and is faced with ever-increasing competition from mass media and the cinema.
Body Politic(s): the Actor as Mask in the Theatre du Soleil's Les Atrides and La Ville Parjure
Authors: Singleton Brian
Published: April 2013

Ariane Mnouchkine's interpretation of Greek tragedy, Les Atrides (1990-93), and ilS postmodern sequel of contemporary scandal and corruption La Ville Perjure ou Ie reveil des Erinyes by Helene Cixous (1994), sourced not only the ancient texts of Western theatrical heritage but also intertextually referred to the intercultural acting codes used in previous Theatre du Soleil productions. The Soleil's multicultural casting policy created a fabricated and "neutral" body canvas on which were inscribed a decontextualised postmodernm bricolage of styles and codes. The first bodies encountered by the spectator, however, were found before Les Atrides began, in a pit between foyer and auditorium of the Soleil’s theatre, the Cartoucherie. These were the still-life representations of the living bodies about to appear on stage. Fossilized and distanced, these bodies, like Chinese terracotta warriors, signified a self-conscious historicity on the part of the Soleil. Mnouchkine's theatre thereby declared its function: not re-presentation per se, but embodiment. And, thus in the intercultural theatrical landscape of Mnouchkine's theatre, the inscriptions on the actor's body had political dimensions: dead, the body became the sign of remembrance and revenge in Les Atrides; alive, it signified death in La Ville parjure.
Maeterlinck and the Quest for a Mystic Tragedy of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Evans Calvin
Published: April 2013

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The Anti-Theater of W. B. Yeats
Authors: Sandberg Anna
Published: April 2013

AT THE CORE of the poetic and dramatic achievement of William Butler Yeats lies the search for the opposite. As he conceived of this search, it was essentially the pursuit of, an image which was most unlike himself and, at the same time, his double. The full realization of the image of the opposite was not only a means of escape from the realism of every day and from his own personality, but a means of achieving a higher unity. The search for the image of the opposite became the means through which an ideal art could be attained. It led not only to the adoption of poetic masks through the use of such legendary figures as Michael Robartes and Cuchulain, but to the final achievement of his career as a playwright, the Four Plays of Dancers.
Tradition and Innovation in the London Theater, 1960-61
Authors: Armstrong William
Published: April 2013

THE REPERTOIRE of the London theatres during the 196CW>1 season has been remarkable for its range and quality. The London playgoer has had the opportunity of seeing Aeschylus's Choephori and Eumenides, the first production of the Wakefield miracle plays since the sixteenth century, the first production of Middleton's The Changeling since Restoration times, and the second production in 200 years of Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing-Master as well as revivals of She Stoops to Conquer, Schiller's Marie Stuart, and half-a-dozen Shakespearean plays. He has also been able to see the first London production of Chekhov's Platonoo, revivals of Ibsen and Synge, and new plays by Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, John Whiting, Robert Bolt, Harold Pinter, Shelagh Delaney, and Alun Owen, together with an unprecedented number of plays by such French dramatists as Giraudoux, Anouilh, Genet, and Sartre. On the other hand, he has seen little of John Gielgud and nothing of Laurence Olivier or Edith Evans, and has not been able to extend his knowledge of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. In general, the best productions have been more notable for successful experiments in decor and stagecraft than for the quality of the acting, which has seldom risen above the competent, apart from the virtuosity and incisiveness of Alec Guinness in Rattigan's Ross, Donald Pleasence in Pinter's The Caretaker, and Alan Badel in Anouilh's The Rehearsal. The season has also been enlivened by sharp contrasts between the treatments of similar themes by older and more recent dramatists, by an attack by Noel Coward on the Method and the ‘dustbin' drama of the New Movement, and by an American playwright's criticisms of Joan Littlewood's methods of production at the Theatre Royal, London E.1S.
Book Reviews
Authors: Draper Samuel , Ruhl Klaus , Anderson Hans , Ivask George
Published: April 2013

Michel de GhelderodeSeven Plays, reviewed by Samuel Draper

Pierre-Henri SimonTheatre Et Destin, reviewed by Klaus Ruhl

Henrik IbsenBrand, reviewed by Hans H. Anderson
Scenes of the Crime: Returning to the Past
Authors: Stachurski Christina
Published: April 2013

Two young women murdered the mother of one of them by beating her head with a brick in a secluded spot in Victoria Park, Christchurch, New Zealand in 1954. At that time the Parker-Hulme murder and Pauline Parker's and Juliet Hulme's relationship were reported and sensationalized worldwide. Now in the 1990S a resurgence of interest by New Zealanders in the two young women and their relationship and actions has produced not one but three works.
Anarchy and Resistance in Tristan Tzara's The Gas Heart
Authors: Varisco Robert
Published: April 2013

Several years after Alfred Jarry's Ubu legacy, Dada abruptly erupted. More than just an antagonistic de-evolution into baby talk and probably more fun than riding a hobby horse, Dada surfaced on the war-era wave with a fresh irrationality, contaminating the minds of a whole generation of artists much to the gathering's delight. Though Dada is now widely acknowledged as one of the major founts of modern avant-garde drama and the direct forerunner to Surrealism and other extensions of the Theatre of the Absurd, few if any dramatic surveys (or their glossaries) mention Dada at all. This hardly seems fair, after all, when it is Dada's petulant anarchism which allowed radical playwrights like Jean Genet to carry the torch to a higher level of social anarchism decades later. In part, then, this survey hopes to repair such an oversight.
Book Reviews
Authors: Berkowitz Gerald , Doucette Leonard , Rae Lisbie , Parker Brian
Published: April 2013

William W. Demastes, ed., Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, reviewed by Gerald M. Berkowitz

Annie Bresset, Sociocritique of Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec, 1968-1988, reviewed by Leonard E. Doucette

Sally Peters, Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman, reviewed by Lisbie Rae

Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman, eds., Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, reviewed by Brian Parker

George W. Crandell, ed., The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams, reviewed by Brian Parker
Revisiting the Prozorovs
Authors: Cousins Geraldine
Published: April 2013

So realistically did the first (1901) production of Three Sisters present the lives of Chekhov's characters that Russian audiences talked not of going to the theatre but instead of "paying a call on the Prozorovs." In the course of the year beginning February 1995 I twice visited the Prozorovs, and, in addition, paid a call on their late-twentieth-century counterparts. On the occasion of one revisiting (Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint production of Three Sisters) I found the Prozorovs still at their old address, but, on the other (Scarlet Theatre's The Sisters), there had been a change in their circumstances. Adapted from Chekhov's play by the Polish writer Andrzej Sadowski and directed by his compatriot Katarzyna Deszcz, The Sisters transformed the Prozorovs' home into a grey square on the stage floor, furnished with a table, a large movable french window, and three narrow, straight-backed chairs. Overhead was a low, oppressive ceiling and four dangling lights in large cone-shaped shades. The cast list had also been drastically reduced: all the male characters were cut, leaving only the sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irena, their sister-in-law, Natasha, and the old nurse, Anfisa.
The Chess Metaphor in Samuel Beckett's Endgame
Authors: Kumar K. Jeevan
Published: April 2013

Samuel Beckett's drama depicts a relentless search for the central self or the ultimate being which remains unidentified, unseen and unattainable. Time makes this search an unending process by presenting the seeker with the illusion of being static and at the same. time creating a flux, making the distinction between illusion and reality blurred. The central self which eschews the seeker is often presented in Beckett's works as a non-existent entity. In Waiting for Godot the central self that the tramps could never get at is presented as the enigmatic Godot. Alain Robbe-Grillet observes that "Godot is the inaccessible self. " In Watt this non-existent central reality takes the form of Mr. Knott, who never makes his appearance and who is continuously sought out.4 In the course of this futile search, man is caught within the infinity of Time, and bewilderment at the nature of Time finds its expression in such telling phrases as Vladimir's "Time has stopped" or Hamm's "time was never and time is over." Thus an "Infinite emptiness" binds their lives, as Hamm says in Endgame.
Variations on a Theme: Respecting Daria Po
Authors: Farrell Joseph
Published: April 2013

A translator is conventionally expected to content himself with a condition of self-effacing invisibility, which surpasses anything even Victorian parents once imposed on their offspring. The good translator should be neither seen nor heard. He should fade into the background, and should expect that if his presence is noted, it is as a prelude to some censure or reproach. A translator will receive attention only when responsible for some gaffe, transgression or solecism which will require discussion and correction at a later date, once the guests have withdrawn.
Fin-de-siec1e Reflections and Revisions: Wertenbaker Challenges British Chekhov Tradition in The Break of Day
Authors: Young Stuart
Published: April 2013

Plays such as Edward Bond's Lear (1971) and The Woman (1978), Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and Caryl Churchill and David Lan's A Mouthful of Birds (1986), a reworking of Euripides' Bacchae, testify to the confidence and imagination with which modem British dramatists have ventured to revise or "mediate" classical texts. Although Shakespeare and the Greeks have been the most common sources of inspiration for such rewritings, more recently attention has turned to Chekhov. This is not surprising: not only does Chekhov reign supreme among foreign playwrights in Britain, easily overshadowing Moliere, Brecht, and even Ibsen, but he enjoys a place in the classical repertoire second only to Shakespeare's. Consequently, during the past forty years Chekhov's plays have been unrivalled in the number of translations or "adaptations" they have received. Those translators and adaptors include the playwrights Ann Jellicoe, Edward Bond, Christopher Hampton, Pam Gems, Michael Frayn, Trevor Griffiths, Thomas Kilroy, Mustapha Matura, Frank McGuinness and David Hare.5 It is perhaps not surprising that, more recently, British playwrights have also presumed to take greater licence in (re-)interpreting Chekhov's drama.
"Plotting the Apple of Knowledge": Tom Stoppard's Arcadia as Iterated Theatrical Algorithm
Authors: Melbourn Lucy
Published: April 2013

Valentine Coverly's explanation of the new mathematics of chaos theory points to a central metaphor for the dramatic structure of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia: the non-linear story and plot unfold from the interaction of the unpredictable and the predetermined. Science provides metaphors that Stoppard applies to this play's structure as a way of knowing and in order to underline its theme of knowledge. While scientific models are necessarily inexact when applied to a dramatic work of art, they nevertheless provide clues to understanding this play of ideas. Just as Valentine is careful to explain that the apple leaf plotted (drawn) by the iterated algorithm (a feedback equation) is not a real leaf but "a mathematical object," so too is Arcadia no imitation of real-world space and time, but a self-consciously artistic creation — an aesthetic object.
Acting Gay in the Age of Queer: Pondering the Revival of The Boys in the Band
Authors: Schele Tomothy
Published: April 2013

"Bellwether," "watershed," "crossroads," "turning point": with these and other ponderous terms, critics have hailed Mart Crowley's 1968 The Boys in the Band as the breakthrough production that brought frank and direct representations of homosexuality to American theatre. Where earlier plays had disposed of their "deviant" characters in a denouement that was often tantamount to a cleansing of the homosexual taint, spectators of The Boys in the Band witnessed for the first time a group of men discussing their sex lives, dancing together, kissing, and even having sex on a mainstream stage. The play takes the spectator to an exclusively gay birthday party at the apartment of Michael, a troubled man who coerces his guests into playing a truth game that elicits a series of witty barbs, confessions, and emotional outbursts as each tells the story of his life and loves. In a marked reversal of theatre tradition, the sole straight character, Michael's former college roommate Alan, is the outsider; it is his unexpected arrival that triggers an explosive scene in Crowley's play, and the restoration of order requires the purging of the straight man from the stage. The Boys in the Band was a hit (1002 perfonnances). Thereafter, gay characters have frequently occupied center stage instead of the more pathologized regions of the margins, and "gay plays" have flourished in the years since The Boys' success.
Phyllis Nagy's Fatal Women
Authors: Barnett Cladia
Published: April 2013

When Lorraine Hansberry 's A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959, the vast majority of white critics praised the play's "universality." One reviewer wrote, "A Negro wrote this show. It is played, with one exception, by Negroes. Half the audiences here are Negroes. Even so, it isn't written for Negroes .... It's a show about people, white or colored .... I see ‘A Raisin in the Sun' as part of the general culture of the U.S." The phrase "happens to be" appeared with remarkable frequency among reviews: the play was "about human beings, who happen to be Negroes'" (or "a family that happens to be colored"); Sidney Poitier played "the angry young man who happens to be a Negro.”
Welcoming in the New Millennium: The Possibilities of Brecht's The Days of the Commune for Northern Ireland
Authors: Seymour Anna
Published: April 2013

I want to begin by addressing the contention that either Brecht is not a convinced Marxist or somehow his plays and poetry can be detached from his politics. This assertion not only resorts to a traditional critical approach, namely that art has access to transcendent values and universal meanings that can remove it from its historical and material roots, but also suggests that critics likewise can be above material concerns in an unassailable "neutral" intellectual territory. In reality, critics are products of their own period and communicate as much about themselves as they do about their subject matter.
Is There a "Chinese" Brecht? Problems of Brecht's Reception in China — from Mother Courage to Mack the Knife
Authors: Schlenker Wolfram
Published: April 2013

The first performance of one of Brecht's plays in China took place in 1959, but only a small number of Chinese were willing to subject themselves to a production of Mother Courage and Her Children that was based on Brecht's model. Director Huang Zuolin later spoke ironically of "only a few stray cats making up the audience." He attributed the lack of success to having "slavishly followed Brecht's handbook of direction" and ostensibly having driven the audiences from the theatre by his use of the V–effect. Huang was not, however, to be discouraged by this failure or by the subsequent suppression of Brecht's plays during the Cultural Revolution. Until the 1980s, he was one of the most important players in Brecht's reception in China, largely because, as one of the most prominent directors in China, he was able to give support to the foreign author.
Enter the Theatre (in between)
Authors: Cixous Héléne
Published: April 2013

Editors' Note: Modem Drama is pleased to present Helene Cixous's "Enter the Theatre," the original text of a special guest lecture she delivered in English at the University of Toronto on 30 September 1999. Cixous's visit was sponsored by the Drama Program and Sexual Diversity Program of the Department of French, University College, and by the Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Studies. We are grateful to Professor Jeannelle Savona for her help in acquiring the text, to Brian J. Mallet for his translation, and of course to Helene Cixous herself permission to publish her lecture.
Chekhov in Massachusetts: Competing Modernisms at the American Repertory Theatre
Authors: Tulloch John , Burvill Tom , Hood Andrew
Published: April 2013

This article is based on rehearsal and performance observations and interviews with the personnel involved in a graduating production of Chekhov's Three Sisters by trainee director Simone Fedennan at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training (IATT) at Harvard in May 1994. The IATT is particularly interesting because it is a leading training institution housed within a well-known theatre company, the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the article we investigate the production as a process of negotiation between different contemporary readings-in-production of several Chekhov texts. We argue that this process involves both contestations and convergences between the powerful and persuasive — and modernist — ideas, practices, and creative styles of the ART and Simone Fedennan's feminism and postmodemism.
Dancing at Lughnasa: Unexcused Absence
Authors: Kramer Prapassaree
Published: April 2013

Though the memory play represents an increasingly familiar and substantial sub-genre of drama, its conventions — and what might be called its "ontology" — have generally avoided direct scrutiny. By asking the audience to accept the framing narrator's substantiality, but to take the other characters as aspects of that narrator's memory, the memory play poses something of a metaphysical puzzle: namely, how to account for our ability to see into the world of the narrator's memory. Do we assume some telepathic contact with the narrator, or does he possess the ability to make the objects of his memory materialize? Admittedly, similar questions were raised about how the audience at a Shakespearean drama could account for being so swiftly transported across the Mediterranean, and were famously dismissed as shortsightedly pedantic by Samuel Johnson. One of the most often noted hallmarks of modem drama, however, is the employment of metatheatrical techniques that implicitly or explicitly challenge spectators to a conscious examination of their assumptions toward what they observe behind the curtain.
Book Reviews
Authors: Fischer Eileen , Gaddy Kerstine , Gantar Jure , McLaren Joseph , Santeramo Donato , Weissengruber Erik
Published: April 2013

Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, reviewed by Eileen Fischer

Michael Robinson, Studies in Strindberg, reviewed by Kerstin Gaddy

Mark William Roche, Tragedy and Comedy: A Systematic Study and a Critique of Hegel, reviewed by Jure Gantar

Mary L. Bogumil, Understanding August Wilson, reviewed by Joseph McLaren

Joan L. Herrington, "I Ain't Sorry for Nothin' I Done", reviewed by Joseph McLaren

Daniela Bini, Pirandello and His Muse: The plays for Marta Abba, reviewed by Donato Santeramo

Mark Pizzatto, Edges of Loss: From Modern to Postmodern Theory, reviewed by Erik Weissengruber
Modem:Drama (defining the field), Part I
Authors: Knowles Ric
Published: April 2013

I was offered the privilege of editing Modern Drama at a significant moment in the history of the field. Until relatively recently, periodization was taken more or less for granted as a way of organizing areas of study in most disciplines, even as, until relatively recently, disciplinarity was taken for granted as a way of organizing scholarship, research, epistemology, and knowledge itself. But those modes of constructing and dividing the archive no longer seem as natural or as neutral as they once did, nor do the types of material that might belong in any archive or constitute any "object of study" seem so clear.
Book Reviews
Authors: Plastow Jane , King Thomas , Dolan Jill , Wolf Stacy , Aldama Frederick , Wolford Lisa , George-Graves Nadine , Orkin Martin , Richardson Sandra
Published: April 2013

Laurence Senelick, Lovesick: Modernist Plays of Same-Sex Love, 1894-1925, reviewed by Thomas A. King

Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century, reviewed by Jill Dolan

John M. Clum, Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture, reviewed by Stacy Wolf

Jose Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, reviewed by Frederick Luis Aldama

Caca Fusco, ed., Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, reviewed by Lisa Wolford

Bernth Lindfords, ed., Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, reviewed by Nadine George-Graves

John Conteh-Morgan and Tejumola Olaniyan, ed.,Drama and Performance, reviewed by Martin Orkin

L. Dale Byam, Community i Motion: Theatre for Development in Africa, reviewed by Sandra L. Richardson

Marcia Blumberg and Dennis Walder, eds., South African Theatre as/And Intervention, reviewed by Jane Plastow
Modem Drama/Modernity's Drama
Authors: Diamond Elin
Published: April 2013

Modem drama, the question raised by the conveners of the Modern:Drama (defining the field) conference and the current editors of Modern Drama, has a past that is selectively remembered and denied in the institutions that support our scholarship. It is nearly absent from current scholarship investigating the times, spaces, and practices of Western modernity and modernism. It is also absent from the academic memories of those who, like me, found themselves happily ensconced in high school literature classes that, even through the 1960s, were dominated by the methods and ideology of the New Critics." Focusing on the autotelic object, most often the short poem, to the exclusion of authorial biography, tradition, and historical context, New Criticism sought to create a preserve of literary language in imitation of T.S. Eliot's modernist imperative to purify the language of the tribe. In its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, New Criticism exhorted us to never "go outside the poem" lest we merely use literature to defend a depleted liberal humanism or, far worse, to illustrate a Marxist analysis of social forces.
Nosferatu: A Play on the Vampire by Francisco Nieva
Authors: Lima Robert
Published: April 2013

Until 1961, when Francisco Nieva wrote his play Aquelarre ynoche roja de Nosferatu ("Witches' Sabbat and Red Night of Nosferatu"), the theme of the vampire had not been treated in serious Spanish or Spanish American literature. With the play's belated publication in 1991 and production in 1993, the Spanish-speaking public was given an opportunity to experience, through the interpretation of one of its dramatists, a dark subject that had long fascinated many readers and filmgoers, Spaniards included. In order to achieve his end of informing and interpreting, Nieva steeped himself in the lore of the vampire, derived from sources which, by necessity, were external to Spain. That material, extensive and multifaceted though it is, affected Nieva's conception of the vampire in an unexpected manner, for he found therein an opening to a new view; his is substantially a heterodox stance, a departure from the canonicity established by the first assessors of the tradition.
Dancing for an Oath: Salomé's Revaluation of Word and Gesture
Authors: Hartwig Heidi
Published: April 2013

The aestheticist philosophy of the late nineteenth century effectively countered a gradual but pervasive cultural degradation of language by revaluing the concept of action for art. Oscar Wilde, the most well-known exemplar of aestheticism in Britain, noted that "action belong[ed] to the sphere of ethics", but would deny it a place in art for that very reason. For Wilde, in true dandiacal spirit, the less practical the action, the more artistic and, paradoxically, the more utilitarian it would be. He wholeheartedly suggested that art itself was the better for being divorced from practical action: "Action! What is action? It dies at the moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact. The world is made by the singer for the dreamer". Likewise, Havelock Ellis wrote of the "artist for art's sake" that "in turning aside from the common utilitarian aims of men [hel is really engaged in a task none other can perform, of immense utility to men". Thus aestheticism was patently concerned, if only in a negative way, with the concept of action. Rather than severing the link between action and utility (which always carried with it the nuance, at least, of physical or political enactment), Wilde and other aesthetes simply dislodged action from its strong association with the physical body, its labor, and its products. From this perspective, the best actions were the rarefied products of the imagination. For Wilde, literature in particular distinguished itself as the imaginative act par excellence.