bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Anger, Nostalgia, and the End of Empire: John Osborne's Look Back in Anger
Authors: Bhatia Nandi
Published: April 2013

As he reminisces about his Edwardian past during the period of British colonial rule in India, Colonel Redfern, who belongs to the class that ostensibly constitutes Jimmy Porter's "natural" enemy, is overcome by nostalgia. When Jimmy Porter, the working-class protagonist and anti-establishment hero, remembered by commentators as "represent[ing] a postwar generation in his anger, petulance, dissatisfaction, infirmity of purpose, railing, [and] complaining," alludes to the Colonel (after endless bouts of indiscriminate attacks on Alison, his wife and the Colonel's daughter, in an attempt to shake her out of her upper-class complacency), his anger wanes. Exhibiting sympathy for the Colonel, he sighs about the end of the imperial dream. The attitudes of the Colonel and Jimmy shed a new light on John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, a play that has been recorded as "the beginning of a revolution in the British theatre," and lead to some interesting insights about Jimmy Porter, hailed as the voice of a whole generation of disgruntled anti-establishment intellectuals On one level, references to the imperial dream reveal that at the time that Osborne wrote the play, the Raj was a pressing issue for both Jimmy Porter and his creator, Osborne. More importantly, they illuminate an essential contradiction in Jimmy Porter's anti-establishment stance. Even as he is critical of the establishment, Jimmy's sympathetic attention to the Colonel, and by implication to the executors of imperial policies in India, brings into the playa discourse of imperialism that refuses a critique of the empire.
Hidden Order in the "Stoppard Set": Chaos Theory in the Content and Structure of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia
Authors: Vees-Gulani Susanne
Published: April 2013

In his play Arcadia, published and first performed in 1993, Tom Stoppard explores a variety of ideas and themes along different time lines, ranging from history and chaos theory to gardening and sex. Despite this range, the play does not strike the audience as a clutter of unconnected parts. Rather, Stoppard succeeds in unifying the play with an all-inclusive structure. The principles and ideas of chaos theory, which form one of the central topics of the content, are also applied in the organization of the play as a whole — a point largely neglected by critics to date. Just as chaos theory attempts to offer a more universal approach to the way our world is arranged, Stoppard strives to explain his characters' behavior and thoughts as aspects of an "orderly disorder," which they, however, cannot fully perceive. By covering occurrences at three different moments of history on the stage, the past (1809 and 1812) and the present (1993), Stoppard offers the audience a scenario impossible outside the imaginary world: the exact description of events happening nearly 200 years apart. The interrelation of the past and the present together with the possibilities of interpreting or predicting either one thus form the central immediate concerns of the play. Using chaos theory in both content and structure, Stoppard also goes beyond these issues and touches on universal questions about the organization and evolution of our world and our place and role within it.
Beckett's Play, in extenso
Authors: Gontarski
Published: April 2013

To date none of the commonly available English texts for Samuel Beckett's Play, in fact, none of the printed texts in any edition in any language, is entirely accurate. None reflects the final text Beckett took such pains to establish; none, that is to say, includes the revisions he made after first consulting on the world premiere in German (1963), then overseeing more directly near simultaneous productions in French and English (both 1964), and finally directing the play himself at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt in October 1978. British and American publishers tried to accommodate Beckett's production changes in various editions of the published work, but Beckett's revisions were made in as well as on stages, over an extended period. As publishers revised texts to accommodate productions, Beckett re-revised his work to accommodate insights drawn from new productions; that is, production generally outpaced publication. The production and textual history of Play testifies, as well, to the growing professional pressures on Samuel Beckett as an international artist (if not an international commodity) by the mid-1960s. That pressure would culminate in the so-called "catastrophe" of the Nobel Prize in 1969. The early productions of Play, moreover, suggest a singular shift in Beckett's development as a theatre artist. At this period, Beckett began to embrace theatre not as the medium through which an authored script was given its preconceived expression but as a (or even the) means through which his theatre art was created. In many respects this aesthetic shift, much of it the result of theatrical necessity, represented a break from the hegemony of modernist textuality, from Modernism itself, in fact, and a move closer to the indeterminacy we more often associate with post-modernist textuality.
Chekhov's Tatyana Repina:From Melodrama to Mystery Play
Authors: Odesskaya Margarita
Published: April 2013

Anton Chekhov's one-act play Tatyana Repina (1889), for which he borrowed the title as well as the characters from a comedy written by his friend Alexey S. Suvorin, was intended neither for production nor for publication. On 6 March 1889, he sent Suvorin, the publisher of the newspaper New Times, "a very cheap and, according to the sender, a useless gift," a play entitled Tatyana Repina that "he had written in one sitting." In addition, the writer asked his friend to show the work to no one and, after having read it, to throw it into the fireplace. Chekhov's play, however, has continued to live somehow on the periphery of literature, where a number of readers have taken notice of it. First of all, Suvorin himself did not destroy his present but, on the contrary, gave it life by printing two or three copies of the play' and sending one of them to the author. In 1924, the writer's brother, Mikhail P. Chekhov, published the play, having made several cuts in the liturgy performed on stage, and supplied his own commentaries. The uncut play first appeared a year later in an edition brought out by the Atheneum publishing house, and later it was included in the complete edition of Chekhov's works and letters, published in thirty volumes. The first production of the play took place in the summer of 1998, when Moscow's Young Spectator Theatre opened the Avignon Festival with Valery Fokin's production. Yet, to be fair, it should be pointed out that in 1997, in Moscow's Gogol Theatre, the director Alexey Govorukho mounted a production called The Hunt for Women in which he combined Suvorin's Tatyana Repina and Chekhov's.
"A Subject Worthy of Ayvazovsky's Brush": Vanya's Misdirected Fury
Authors: Kramer Karl
Published: April 2013

In Uncle Vanya Il'ya I1'ich Telegin possesses a remarkable ability to either cloud an issue by stating the obvious in an involuted manner or utterly misrepresent it by calling it the reverse of what it is. Thus, when Sonya observes, "Cold tea," Telegin responds, "The temperature in the samovar has already decreased considerably.'" When Vanya begins praising Yelena's beauty, a subject highly distressing to Telegin because any whiff of infidelity portends disaster, he comments to the old nurse, "The weather is charming, the little birds are singing. we all live in peace and harmony - what more do we need?" In the midst of Vanya's scathing attack on Serebryakov in the third act, Telegin pleads with him: "Vanya, friend, don't.. .. I'm trembling .... Why spoil good relations?". "Good relations" had obviously been spoiled long before the play begins. But surely his crowning moment occurs at the beginning of the fourth act when he and Marina are discussing Vanya's two failed attempts to kill Serebryakov at nearly point-blank range: "Yes, a subject worthy of Ayvazovsky's brush". The nineteenth-century Russian painter Ivan Ayvazovsky specialized in gigantic maritime paintings most commonly of battles and storms at sea. His work invariably strove for a monumental quality that is, of course, wholly lacking in Vanya's vain effort to redress the wrongs he blames on the Professor. Telegin brands this dismal failure as an event of immense significance, thereby unwittingly revealing its complete in significance.
Stanislavsky's Production Score for Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904): A Synoptic Overview
Authors: Worrall Nick
Published: April 2013

In many ways, the Moscow Art Theatre's production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard was the most problematic and contentious of all its efforts to stage his plays. Events surrounding the composition of the play and its staging were not propitious. Chekhov wrote it over a prolonged period during which he was an increasingly sick man; the premiere, in January 1904. was closely followed by the dramatist's death in July. What is more, Chekhov's dissatisfaction with the production was couched in terms of frustration and anger unlike anything to be found elsewhere in his correspondence. The extent to which these sentiments can be attributed to his illness, rather than to real inadequacies in the interpretation, compounds the difficulties that the play and the production jointly present.
Center Stage: Chekhov in Russia 100 Years On
Authors: Freedman John
Published: April 2013

Anton Chekhov was not the only classic author to hold Russian theatres captive for much of the 1990s. At the beginning of 1999, a careful, though inexact, count of Moscow shows based on works by Chekhov, Alexander Ostrovsky, Nikolay Gogol, and Fedor Dostoevsky revealed some interesting numbers. The leader, Ostrovsky, who wrote or co-wrote over fifty plays, had thirty-five productions of his plays running at various houses thJoughout the capital. Right behind him, with thirty productions of plays or dramatized stories, was Chekhov. (If we include the ten one-act plays and count separately the early works that later evolved into others, Chekhov can generously be considered the author of eighteen dramatic works.) Gogol's plays and prose works formed the basis of fifteen productions, and Dostoevsky's novels and stories had been adapted for twelve stage productions.
Chekhov Translated: Shaw's Use of Sound Effects in Heartbreak House
Authors: Handley Miriam
Published: April 2013

Critics familiar with readings of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard will recognise the significance placed upon the play's sound effects. Writing of the "enigmatic" breaking string heard in Act Two and Act Four of Chekhov's play, J.L. Styan famously noted, "to interpret the sound is to interpret the play." Still earlier in the play's performance history, Vsevolod Meyerhold wrote to Chekhov, "the producer must first understand [The Cherry Orchard] with his hearing." In this article I want to argue that Shaw, too, recognised the importance of sound as a method of communicating the meaning of The Cherry Orchard. By looking at Shaw's play Heartbreak House (first published 1919; first performed 1921), sub-titled A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes, I will show how and why Shaw used sound effects to translate and interpret The Cherry Orchard for a British audience.
Unfinished Pieces: From Platonov to Piano
Authors: Allen David , Ghelardi Marco
Published: April 2013

Chekhov's Platonov has been plundered on a number of occasions by directors and playwrights, to create "new" works (such as Michael Frayn's Wild Honey) — but never, perhaps, so successfully as in Nikita Mikhalkov's 1976 film, Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano (Neokollchennaya p' esa dlya mekhanicheskogo piaino). Mikhalkov's screenplay, co-written with Alexander Adabashyan, eliminates a number of characters and strips the play of some its melodramatic excesses. It draws on a number of Chekhov's short stories for characters, themes, and dialogue, and it transplants motifs and devices found in the later plays. Platonov, for example, ends with the protagonist's death at the hands of his jilted lover, Sofya. Mechanical Piano, on the other hand, ends with a grotesque, failed suicide attempt. Platonov leaps into a river — only to find that it is too shallow to drown in. He is comforted by his wife, Sasha, in words that echo Sonya's final speech in Uncie Vanya:
Friel's Ballybeggared Version of Chekhov
Authors: Krause David
Published: April 2013

In his dramatization of the cyclical theme of aspiration and frustration which afflicts his hopeful but tormented characters, Brian Friel's impressive achievements have often been compared to the masterful plays of Chekhov, a tribute he has earned in many of his works, particularly Aristocrats, Faith Healer, and Translations. Friel is at the top of this recurring confrontation when the people in his mythic Ballybeg are caught between a quest for past ideals and a collision with grim realities. His affinity with Chekhov is readily apparent in his indigenously Irish treatment of this universal theme of denied expectations.
Dramatic Justice?: The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides and The Handyman
Authors: Stewart Victoria
Published: April 2013

There are many obvious parallels between the action that takes place in a courtroom and that which commonly occurs in the theatrical space. The trial is performative: within the courtroom, both the public gallery and the jury provide an audience, while lawyers and judges display a grasp of rhetorical skills designed to assist them in out-performing the witnesses. The end result of the trial is not only the verdict, but a completed narrative, pieced together from witness testimony. In this respect, the lawyer can be paralleled to the playwright, choosing what each individual should reveal at any particular moment and, in the lawyer's case, persuading them to do so. Certainly, playwrights themselves have often realised that as a dramatic device, interrogation, whether it takes place in a courtroom or elsewhere, is an economical means of conveying precisely elicited information to an audience. Not only does the trial format dispense with establishing dialogue and elements of exposition, but the question of whether witnesses are speaking the whole truth provides an undertow of dramatic tension.
From Jug Band to Dixieland: The Musical Development behind August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Authors: Abbotson Susan
Published: April 2013

Ma Rainey takes place in 1927 and introduces us to a fictionalized version of the real blues singer Ma Rainey, spending an afternoon in the recording studio with her backup band. The latter dominates the action, and we watch as Cutler, Slow Drag, Toledo, and Levee practise a few tunes, chat about their lives, and squabble over their differences while being overseen by the people who have the real control: the white producer, Sturdyvant, and the band's agent, Irvin. Ma, with her entourage, appears late in the play to make her recording, and although she is a powerful symbol, it is Levee who dominates the action of the play and provides the shocking denouement in which he kills Toledo.

One question the play raises is, Whom should we support — Ma or Levee? The play's title attests to the ambivalence of Wilson's answer. Although it names Ma, it actually refers to the song rather than to the person, and it is a song that Levee is trying to claim for his own. The similarities between the characters ensure that we cannot easily dismiss the claims of either one..
Postmodernism and Violence in Mamet's Oleanna
Authors: Porter Thomas
Published: April 2013

Among the many surprises in David Mamet's controversial play Oleanna, the most shocking is perhaps the professor's violent attack on his student. This sudden eruption is certainly climactic; the problems it raises, however, seem to leave the audience to "draw its own conclusions," to take sides with either the professor or the student. Either option turns the play into melodrama, with the professor as hero/victim and the student as villain or the student as feminist heroine and the professor as villain/oppressor. Critical opinion is divided, with a majority of critics and reviewers, even those with feminist credentials, seeing the student as "bitch/witch," representative of a radical and punitive feminist ideology run rampant. Following Mamet's lead, other critics have suggested that sexual harassment is a vehicle for a broader issue: that Oleanna is a play about "power," or a "tutorial" play with a genre affinity to Ibsen's social-problem dramas. Most recently, Thomas Goggans attempts to exculpate the Carol persona by pointing to textual suggestions of child abuse in her past. Then, in passing, he attaches blame for her actions to manipulation by her feminist support "Group." This effort to redeem her effectively nominates this shadowy collective as the "real" villain. A final option, suggested by John Simon, is to finger the playwright — according to him, the play is simply a jumble, seriously flawed in concept and/or execution.
The Pictures of Simon Gray: Dramatizing Degeneration
Authors: Gray Simon
Published: April 2013

In the process of surviving the fin de vingtieme siecle, British theatre re-enacts both literally and metaphorically the end of the nineteenth century, finding in the witty disillusionment of Oscar Wilde a way of seeing present reflections of failed humanism and modernism. The erosion of spiritual values finds expression in portraits of debauched idealism and self-loathing. Dorian Gray's picture comes down from the attic and inhabits the drawing room. That Wilde's life is more the object of scrutiny than the plays he wrote is also a reflection of a contemporary compulsion to investigate the relationship of life and art — an inquiry into biography as self-portrait. David Hare's The Judas Kiss opened at the Playhouse Theatre in London in 1998, produced by the Almeida Company, and transferred to New York, with Liam Neeson as Wilde; Moises Kaufman's Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde opened in 1997 in New York (and concurrently in San Francisco), directed by Kaufman at the Greenwich House Theatre, and was produced during the summer of 1998 in Toronto at the Canadian Stage Company's Berkeley Street Theatre, again directed by Kaufman; and Wilde, the movie, stalling Stephen Fry, was released in 1997.
The Politics of Catastrophe: Confrontation or Confirmation in Howard Barker's Theatre
Authors: Tomlin Liz
Published: April 2013

Howard Barker's prolific writing career dates back to 1969 when his first radio play, One Afternoon on the 63rd Level of the North Face of the Pyramid of Cheops the Great, was broadcast by BBC Radio 4. Over forty of his stage plays have since been published and produced, and his theoretical manifesto Arguments for a Theatre is now in its third edition. The touring company the Wrestling School was formed in 1988 exclusively to produce Barker's work; in 1994 Barker himself directed Hated Nightfall for the company, and he has continued to direct many of his subsequent texts for them. The unique support Barker has received from John Calder publications and the Wrestling School, discussed in detail by Robert Shaughnessy in "Howard Barker, the Wrestling School, and the Cult of the Author," has afforded Barker's own theoretical and practical interpretations of his theatre a privileged dissemination. Consequently there is a danger that the objectives of his self-defined "Theatre of Catastrophe" and their underlying premises may be accepted without critique as a starting point for any analysis of his work. Thus it is Barker's own starting point that this article will examine, throwing into question the basic assumptions on which his theories rest.
Wisdom! Light! Beauty! A Thematic Analysis of Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean
Authors: Able Douglas
Published: April 2013

Hernik Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean is a huge play in which the playwright wrestles with fundamental ideological systems of world-shaking significance. The spiritual agonies of one man, Julian the apostate and emperor, spill out to engulf the entire fourth-century Roman world, with implications for all future generations. Ibsen asserted, "My play deals with a struggle between two irreconcilable powers in the life of the world — a struggle which will always repeat itself. Because of this universality, I call the book 'a world-historic drama.’” He chose a mammoth dramatic canvas because "Only entire nations ... can join in great intellectual movements. A change of front in our conception of life and of the world is no parochial matter." "Inter-national" in size and scope — in political, social, moral, philosophical, and religious terms — Emperor and Galilean is fundamentally a play of ideas. At its thematic core are found the clash of universal ideologies, their predicated synthesis into a new belief system, and a resultant, inevitable intellectual and spiritual progress.
The Question of Liz: Staging the Prisoner in Our Country's Good
Authors: Weeks Stephen
Published: April 2013

First performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1988, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good is usually said to offer a strong defense of theatre — indeed, a celebration of its power — and, within the historical context of its premiere, to suggest the short-sightedness and social costs of Thatcherite cutbacks in arts subsidies. Yet this defense is more nuanced than is generally recognized, and the play's celebratory energies are everywhere qualified, revised, and deepened in ways I wish to address. To do so, I will weave together an account of Wertenbaker's treatment of subjectivity and agency in one of her principal female characters, the prisoner Liz Morden, with a complementary discussion of Stephen Greenblatt's theory of "subversion and containment" as a mode of power.
Tom Stoppard and the Invention of Biography
Authors: Nadel Ira
Published: April 2013

Tom Stoppard has always invented lives — including his own. From Rosencrantz and Guildenstem to Henry Carr and A.E. Housman, Stoppard has invented biographical facts and events that have never happened: James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin never met in Zurich in 1917, although they were there; Byron never visited Sidley Park, but in Arcadia his stay is the likely cause of his surreptitious disappearance to the Continent; Housman and Wilde never exchanged words, although they have a long and sympathetic conversation at the end of The Invention of Love; Shakespeare, to our knowledge, never had a love affair that sparked Romeo and Juliet, although such an event defines the script Stoppard co-wrote for the movie Shakespeare in Love.
Camusian Existentialism in Arthur Miller's After the Fall
Authors: Royal Derek Parker
Published: April 2013

An existentialist ethic permeates the fabric of Arthur Miller's drama. Perhaps more than any other American playwright of his time, he constructs situations that not only highlight a particular historical circumstance but also translate themselves into the larger ontological conundrums facing individuals in the last half of the twentieth century. His protagonists are faced with the inescapable project of defining themselves through a series of Promethean choices. Biff, in Death of a Salesman, realizes that Willy "never knew who he was" and refuses to follow him into a similar life of bad faith. In The Crucible, a morc direct expression of dramatic existentialism, John Proctor denies the right of the church and the state to define his actions by choosing death over a false confession, asking the profound question, "How may I live without my name?" Incident at Vichy, a play coming on the heels of After the Fall and continuing the latter's themes, broaches the subject of individual complicity and culpability in the light of an abstract condemnation, especially in the figure of LeDuc, who ha. to wrestle with his own guilt in accepting his freedom while those around him are doomed. He asserts that "there is nothing and will be nothing — until you face your own complicity with this ... your own humanity," In all cases, the individuals assert themselves by creating the terms under which they are to live, heroically or otherwise, thereby assuring themselves an accurate inscription of their names on the tablet of history.
Black Cats and Green Trees: The Art of Maria Irene Fornes
Authors: Porterfield Sally
Published: April 2013

"I didn't think I was a playwright before I started writing. I was a painter, but it's the same thing. You like so much the way that little tree looks beside that house and so you draw it.” Maria Irene Fornes indicates a tree just visible from the window of the small Greenwich Village cafe where we sit over coffee. It takes me a moment to find the tree because of the surrounding tangle of people, traffic, trash cans, and buildings. But there it is: a spindly little maple, leaning at a rakish angle toward one of the area's shabby-genteel apartment buildings.
Between Performative and Performance: Translation and Theatre in the Canadian/Quebec Context
Authors: Godard Barbara
Published: April 2013

Translation and theatre. The relations between these two spheres of activity are fraught, embedded as they are in profound contradictions generated by the long-standing tension between literal and figurative that haunts all representation with the paradox of the unlike likeness. The representational paradox informs the (im)possibility of translation within theories of equivalency and fidelity even as it fosters an understanding of theatre as event, albeit as simulation. What emerges as an issue in both spheres of representation is the problematic relation of truth-telling to action. Does truth inhere in repetition? How does sign relate to event? Beyond the complications within each of these systems of signification, the contradiction complicates any theorization of the relation between them, especially of translation in theatre. Translation is increasingly cast in the metaphor of theatre: for instance, Hans Sahl, a theoretician of theatre, writes that "[t]ranslating is staging a play in another language". Conversely, metaphors of translation are frequently used to describe performance of a text: Pirandello rages about the pain' he feels when attending rehearsal where the "translation [of his text] into material reality" does not correspond to his own conception. In this essay, I want to explore these entangled practices through the categories of the performative and performance that, within the so-called "linguistic turn" and a subsequent "cultural tum" (both aspects of a semiotic tum), have introduced paradigms for the discursive constitution of reality and, conversely, for the non-verbal unfolding of social behaviours. I shall then follow their turns and twists in some cases of French to English translation for the theatre in the Canadian/Quebec context.
Constructing a Cultural Icon: Nomos and Shaw's Saint Joan in Paris
Authors: Hamilton Craig
Published: April 2013

George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan quickly became a play without a passport. Shaw began writing the play in England in late April 1923 and completed it in Ireland in August of that same year. After its production in New York in December 1923 and in London in March 1924, the play appeared on the Continent. In Paris, it ran at the Theatre des Arts from 28 April to 30 June 1925. The director in Paris, Georges Pitoëff, staged the play with his wife, Ludmilla, in the heroine's role. While Shaw's Joan is usually seen as the "foremother of Protestantism and of French nationalism", the play can be read in many other ways, as Saint Joan lends itself easily to several approaches and parallels. With an eye to Ireland, the play can be read as a gloss on the Charles Parnell story referred to in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the Irish are seen as having betrayed their own MP. Joan's words to Dunois, "If the goddams and the Burgundians do not make an end of me, the French will", would be one place to begin such an analysis. The play could also be seen as a parable for Irish nationalism on the troublesome Protestant question in a society run by Catholics. Additionally, it could be viewed as a running political diatribe on British imperialistic tendencies overseas. However, as its reception in 1925 Paris suggests, Saint Joan may also be read as an allegory for a France undergoing a painful period of reconstruction after being shattered by World War I. While most critics are aware that Shaw's play was very popular in Paris (the Pitoeffs kept it in their repertory for several years), the reasons behind its popularity have yet to be adequately explained. Betrayal, sacrifice, dogmatic strife, and nationalist power plays fully overlap in the play to historicize the well-known story in terms contemporary audiences, particularly in Paris: found highly compelling. As I argue in this essay, the popularity of Shaw's Saint Joan in 1925 Paris involves three factors seldom discussed: the cultural semiotics of constructing an icon like Joan of Arc, the historical and political context of 1925 France as it relates to the play's reception, and the brash display of nomos (i.e., governance) in the trial scene.
Beckett's Dying Remains: The Process of Playwriting in the Ohio Impromptu Manuscripts
Authors: Seeling Adam
Published: April 2013

Samuel Beckett's works originate as highly personal accounts of the author's life and gradually evolve into elusive, enigmatic texts. In Beckett's oeuvre, autobiography provides the foundation for writing that then undergoes a painstaking process that purges the text of the author's identity. It is as though Beckett records aspects of his past with the conscious intent of undoing them, paradoxically developing his texts out of the erasure of autobiography. Far from creating works of "cryptobiography," that is, works in which the author only remotely disguises his identity, Beckett aims "not so much to disguise autobiography as to displace and discount it". The progression of Beckett's manuscripts exposes this refusal to accept the very autobiography that spawns his creative material. In particular, the manuscripts of the late play Ohio Impromptu (1981), including the many unpublished false starts now housed at Reading University's Samuel Beckett Collection, exemplify Beckett's attempt to unwrite himself through what he once called his "literature of the unword". This essay focuses on these recently acquired manuscripts to illustrate how Beckett's unique process of self-erasure informs his final text. In order to elucidate this process before turning to the specific manuscripts, I introduce the concept of "derangement" and its contribution to Beckett's dying presence in his works.
Space, Time, and the Self in Beckett's Late Theatre
Authors: Hattie David
Published: April 2013

Samuel Beckett's late plays are, it might be said, both immediately, engrossingly present and troublingly absent, unfinished even while they are rigorously formed. They are theatre pieces that seem to pick apart the seams of the theatrical event; they both involve and baffle the spectator, giving her or him both the promise of physical immediacy (for, if nothing else, the late plays are troublingly there; each one relies for its effect on the precise delineation of a carefully crafted stage image) and the frustrating certainty that, in this world, few if any conventional dramatic processes are in operation.
Oleanna and The Children's Hour: Misreading Sexuality on the Post/Modern Realistic Stage
Authors: Saur David Kennedy
Published: April 2013

Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934) and David Mamet's Oleanna (1992) confront similar problems: both deal with difficult-to-verify sexual accusations, and both were consequently banned or protested when first staged. Both are written by Jewish playwrights who moved easily back and forth between stage and film and who directed their own productions. Both are set in schools, but the line between home and school is blurred; both deal with female students and with accusations against teachers; both deal with sexual accusations, which by definition are murky and matters of perception. Yet both employ the conventions of realism, which require that the hidden secrets be revealed by the end of the play. So, from the outset, the clarity of the realistic form is potentially at odds with the sexually ambivalent content. As a result, critical response is deeply divided over these plays, producing particularly vituperative attacks on both playwrights. More importantly, however, the two playwrights are deeply linked by the common approach of attacking the objectivity of the audiences who make judgments on their plays. Both problematize the possibility of making objective judgments and thereby question the very foundation of the realistic conventions that they seem to espouse.
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Authors: Williams
Published: April 2013

In discussing the work of postcolonial writers, Homi Bhabha has observed that "the peoples of the periphery return to rewrite the history and fiction of the metropolis". While Bhabha is mainly discussing the periphery versus the metropolis within the former British Empire, and while his focus is on fiction, recent American theatre has produced a parallel movement, with formerly marginalized groups claiming centre stage in a multicultural society by placing the formerly offstage voices onstage. Such authors as Anna Deavere Smith (Fires in the Mirror and Twilight Los Angeles, 1992), Tony Kushner (Angels in America), and Suzan-Lori Parks (Imperceptible Mutabilities, The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and The America Play) have displaced dominant notions of national identity (such as e pluribus unum, which claimed a united whole but really included only parts of that whole) with novel images of a fragmented society. In particular, Suzan-Lori Parks adopts a postcolonial perspective by positioning African Americans as a formerly colonized people — so that, rather than their lands being occupied by colonial powers, slave traders could be said to have colonized their bodies, deporting them from their native land, enslaving them, depriving them of their families, their language, and their culture — and as a people who, having lost their roots, their identity, and their self-esteem, remain alienated in the modem American metropolis. In this article, I will examine how Suzan-Lori Parks has deconstructed conventional American history through her theatrical redeployment of space and time and refigured African-American identity by re/making African-American history.
Twister: Ken Kesey' s Multimedia Theatre
Authors: Huffman Bennette Tracy
Published: April 2013

In 1993, following a Grateful Dead concert in Eugene, Oregon, Ken Kesey held the world premiere of Twister: A Ritual Reality in Four Quarters Plus Overtime If Necessary at the National Guard Armory. A play structured loosely around the characters from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, since its inception Twister has seen manifestations and utilized technologies in a wide variety of media, including text, costuming, music, lighting, lasers, projection of puppet silhouettes, still and video images, pyrotechnics, hypermedia, e-mail, and computerized edited video. In the play each of the major characters faces turn-of-the-twenty-first-century crises in the world today: The Hungry Wind, The Lonely Virus, and The Restless Earth, which deal, respectively, with tornadoes and hurricanes that bring famine, AIDS and other plagues, and earthquakes, all of which Kesey cites as being on the rise. Kesey is trying to revolutionize theatre through the co-opting of ritual, and, through the use of new technologies he hopes to re-encode the customs of theatre within which Twister is invariably presented. For Kesey, theatre is neither solely ritual nor completely drama in a traditional sense: he unerringly challenges the view of theatre's obsolescence and brings forth a critical element to today's new communication channels (Kesey, personal interview). Kesey's use of technology attempts to create a dramatic arena never seen before and actually redefines the boundaries between drama and new textualities as the vanguard of contemporary cultural politics.
Alfred Dampier as Performer of Late Colonial Australian Masculinities
Authors: Kelly Veronica
Published: April 2013

Performers tend to imprint a strongly responsive and sympathetic outline upon the culture of their age. Through their distinctive resources of body. voice, gesture, personality, sex appeal, and manipulation of social personae they both mobilise and embody those identities, desires, and values held by their contemporaries. Spectral traces of their once vibrant and distinctive individual presence are detectable in newspaper accounts of live performances and discernible across a repertoire of varied roles. This actorly presence, while situational and diffused, may be articulated as a fairly constant gestaltconstellation of preferred attributes, vocal and physical presence, affects, and pleasures that are produced in dialogue with the values, emotions, and complex identifications of popular audiences. These affects and meanings will be explored
Book Reviews
Authors: Witham Barry , Krasner David , Barlow Judith , Chamber Jonathan , Chansky Dorthy , Jones Jennifer , Bennett Susan , Harvie Jennifer , Houston Andrew , Fox Ann
Published: April 2013

Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, ed., The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol II: 1870-1945, reviewed by Barry B. Witham

Annemarie Bean, ed., A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, reviewed by David Krasner

Alice Griffin and Geraldine Thorsten, Understanding Lilian Hellman, reviewed by Judith E. Barlow

Brenda Murphy, Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film and Television, reviewed by Jonathan Chamber s

Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, reviewed by Dorothy Chansky

Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin, eds., Women and Playwritting in Nineteenth-Century Britian, reviewed by Jennifer Jones

Dominic Shellard, ed., British Theatre in the 1950s, reviewed by Susan Bennett

Dominic Shellard, British Theatre Since the War, reviewed by Susan Bennett

Philip Roberts, The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage, reviewed by Susan Bennett

Gabriella Giannachi and Mary Luckhurst, ed., On Directing: Interviews with Directors, reviewed by Jennifer Harvie

Tim Etchellis, Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, reviewed by Andrew Houston

Elaine Aston, Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook, reviewed by Ann M. Fox
Physiologies of the Modern: Zola, Experimental Medicine, and the Naturalist Stage
Authors: Garner Jr. Stanton
Published: April 2013

I open with Neveux's tribute because it foregrounds an important intersection in the discourse of modem drama. In his reference to "today's theater," Neveux employs the language of the modem familiar to the late-nineteenth and early/mid-twentieth-century theatre's discourse about itself. Theatre "today" — and by this Neveux means the theatre of Jean Giraudoux, Almand Salacrou, Jean Anouilh , and himself — achieves its contemporaneity through reference to an earlier moment of disclosure. The newness of this disclosure — its modernity — is represented, in part, through the language of bodies and bodily penetration. If the "real" world is a body, then Pirandello's theatre constitutes an operation on that body, crossing its thresholds, turning it inside out, revealing in the organic matter of its entrails "the other side of ourselves". To the extent that the world of the "real" and of "ourselves" is something living, then the drama of Pirandello offers itself, before the spectatorial gaze, as a kind of theatrical vivisection.
Making Sense of Sensation: Enlightenment, Embodiment, and the End(s) of Modern Drama
Authors: Kruger Loren
Published: April 2013

The end of the twentieth century may have postponed millennial fever, but it gives us a good opportunity to revisit prophecies for the end of drama, which, like those for the end of humanism or the end of modernity, have yet to be completely dispatched by any post-al delivery. We may be witnessing a post-dramatic theatre, as Hans-Thies Lehmann argues in a recent magisterial study entitled Postdramatisches Theater, but, as he concedes, the post-dramatic, like the postmodern and the post-structuralist, performs a double act, hedging its bets, as it were, in an ongoing engagement with the dramatic, the modern, the structure and form of the aesthetic object it deconstructs (II). I am not going to imitate the Hegelian gesture of Aufhebung (summary, but also supersession) borrowed by Lehmann, a gesture that is modern as well as magisterial in its claim to master its subject, but, rather, will press a little on the genealogy as well as the current and future implications of this double-talk. Before we declare drama dead and modernity passe, we ought to conduct a genealogical investigation of "drama," to track its modernity. and perhaps its obsolescence. If, as Raymond Williams suggested more than twenty years ago, "modern drama" has migrated to "fiction" and "non-fiction" television, is performance still dramatic? Or is the order of the day a "post-dramatic theatre" or a polymorphously metaphorizing performance, in which both "modern" and "drama" can expect only supernumerary appearances in antiquarian costume?
Luminous Writing, Embodiment, and Modern Drama: Mme Blavatsky and Bertolt Brecht
Authors: Case Sue-Ellen
Published: April 2013

The Astral Light provided a luminous text base for Mme Blavatsky roughly a century before the digital script of the Internet began to appear to many others. Although Mme Blavatsky put the astral script to the use of print, she perceived it as a source of knowledge, accurate and sustained by physical and psychic properties "beyond" those practiced within print culture. Moreover, this fund of knowledge, like the World Wide Web of electronic technology, could be accessed from anywhere, including Ithaca, to be written into rigorous and scholarly accounts, without the warranty that print culture, or actual books, were constituted as bestowing. Even a professor of English at Cornell could be convinced of an astral accuracy that did not reside in a local print library. It could be said that Mme Blavatsky revealed a worldwide web of information outside of modern modes of production and access.
The Haunted Houses of Modernity
Authors: Savran David
Published: April 2013

Despite having survived a fin-de-siecle anxiety attack, the industrialized world has come more and more to resemble a spook-house. With the emergence of new media and new industrial and social technologies, it has developed ever more subtle ways of creating virtual realities, inspiring fear, and offering intimations of the sublime. Although these achievements of the so called information age may seem unprecedented, they are far less novel, I want to argue, than they at first appear. These new technologies represent instead the fulfillment of a particular historical logic, a kind of monstrous repetition of the past.
Hauntings: Anxiety, Technology, and Gender in Peter Pan
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: April 2013

J.M . Barrie's Peter Pan (1904) circulates in the popular imagination as a happy tale for children that, through the adventures of Peter and the other children in Never Land, celebrates playfulness. As Mark Twain commented, "It is my belief that Peter Pan is a great and refining and uplifting benefaction to this sordid and money-mad age; and the next best play is a long way behind". Tellingly, Twain's comment that Peter Pan is uplifting seems to depend on ignoring the fact that each of the "lost" boys is a baby who has fallen out of his pram "when the nurse is looking the other way" and who, if not claimed within seven days, is "sent far away to the Never Land". The boys of Never Land are dead, and so Peter Pan, arriving at the window of the Darling family, is a ghost. As the stage direction before Peter's arrival indicates, "the nursery darkens […]. Something uncanny is going to happen, we expect, for a quiver has passed through the room, just sufficient to touch the night-lights". As Freud suggests in his 1919 essay, the "uncanny" arouses an experience of "dread and horror," partially because the familiar (heimtich) evokes the unfamiliar (unheimlich), rendering the comfortable and "homey" uncomfortable and alien. The familiar, now both familiar and unfamiliar, generates anxiety.
August Wilson, Doubling, Madness, and Modern African-American Drama
Authors: Elam, Jr. Harry
Published: April 2013

My first association with August Wilson came in the spring of 1987 when I was cast in the Studio Theater's production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in Washington, DC. This was the second professional production of the play, and so August Wilson came in from Minneapolis to see the production. It was a hit and ran for over twelve weeks, well into the swelteringly hot and humid DC summer. I played Ma's stuttering nephew, Sylvester. Sylvester's — and my — shining moment occurs well into the second act, when, after unsuccessfully stuttering through two previous attempts to record the intro to the title song, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," with Ma's coaxing he/I steps trembling up to the mike and produces a stammer-free rendition.[…]

Sylvester marks Wilson's first venture into a form of character that becomes a repeated trope in his dramaturgy, one he develops through Gabriel in Fences, Hambone in Two Trains Running, Hedley in Seven Guitars, and Stool Pigeon in King Hedley II: figures who appear mentally or physically handicapped. Paradoxically, in Wilson's works those characters who appear mentally impaired, besieged by madness, unable to grasp the reality of the world around them, represent a connection to a powerful, transgressive spirituality, to a lost African consciousness, and to a legacy of black social activism. By "madness" here I mean a condition within these figures that operates on both symbolic and literal planes. Their madness has both individual and cultural significance; it both constrains and empowers these characters. Unlike the others, Sylvester does not suffer from madness; his sense of consciousness or activism is rather nascent. Nonetheless, his act of delivering the song intro without stuttering is a moment of personal and collective transcendence that benefits the gathered community. As such, it serves as precursor to the redemptive acts and transgressive rituals performed by these other figures in Wilson's subsequent dramas, rituals that will be the focus of this paper.
Modern:Drama (defining the field), Part II
Authors: Tompkins Joanne
Published: April 2013

This is the second of two special issues of essays from the Modem:Drama (defining the field) conference, held in Toronto in May 2000 to interrogate the terms of reference for both this journal, Modern Drama, and the field of study it encompasses. As Ric Knowles outlined at the beginning of the last issue (volume 43, no. 4), both of these terms — "modern" and "drama" — have been subject to substantial scrutiny through the almost fifty years since the appearance of the first issue of Modern Drama. Today, the terms, their institutional locations, and their contributions to the constructions of disciplinarity barely resemble the relatively stable constructions that supported the journal's original mandate in 1958. The essays in this issue develop some of the provocative lines of argument established in 43.4 regarding the textual, political, and theatrical formations — and transformations — of modernism, modernity, postmodernism, drama, and performance.