bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Stoicism, Asceticism, and Ecstacy: Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows
Authors: Murphy Brenda
Published: April 2013

THE STUDY OF SYNGE'S DEIRDRE OF THE SORROWS has long been encumbered by two critical cliches which are responsible for the rather limited viewpoint taken by a good number of critics in writing about it. Both of the cliches, that the play is preeminently a "peasant drama," and therefore a strikingly new treatment of the Deirdre legend, and that its theme is chiefly autobiographical, may be traced back to Maurice Bourgeois' early and very influential study of Synge published in 1913. Bourgeois says that Synge "handled the ancient story as a peasant folk tale." This, he thinks, "was probably untrue to the heroic element in the legend; but what it lost in the heroic sense it gained in the human sense. Synge drew the character of Deirdre not as a queen, but as an untamed, unsophisticated child of Nature, and brought her out of the land of mystical visions where poets like Mr. Yeats and "AE" seemed to confine her, into the world of flesh-and-blood reality.” The essence of this view has continued to be expressed in critical studies of the play with little alteration. Daniel Corkery, for example, says that Synge took the Deirdre legend and "threw it into a peasant mold,” and David Greene asserts that Synge's peasant treatment "turned out to be the severest of limitations when used to exploit the ancient Ireland of the sagas.”
Strangers in a Room: A Delicate Balance Revisited
Authors: Bierhaus J.R.
Published: April 2013

W. H. AUDEN IN THE DYER'S HAND lists six functions of a critic, the fourth being: "Give a 'reading' of a work which increases my understanding of it." 1 In giving a new reading of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, I hope to increase the reader's understanding of this play by making him more aware of its ambiguities and by pointing out to him new associations within it. Although no one reading of A Delicate Balance, however careful, can reveal or distil or explain its full meaning simply because no work of art can ever finally be fully understood, a new reading does provide a new focus which changes the play's perspective.
"The Zola of the Occult": Strindberg's Experimental Method
Authors: Spinchorn Evert
Published: April 2013

"I DON'T KNOW WHAT FATE HOLDS IN STORE FOR ME, but I feel the hand of the Lord resting upon me." So wrote Strindberg to a good friend and confidant in 1894. "A change is about to take place, whether upwards or straight down to the center of the earth, who can tell?"

Two years later Strindberg plumbed the depths of his personal inferno, and out of the experiences of 1896 emerged a different Strindberg who created a new kind of novel and a new kind of drama. Since Professor Gunnar Brandell in his Strindbergs Infernokris has brilliantly charted Strindberg's course toward a new art form, all I propose to do here is to show that that course was less erratic than generally assumed and that in spite of the storms that beset him Strindberg never lost his way. Even two years before he enters the inferno he plots a course toward it.

It was after leaving the pit of this inferno that he declared his intention of becoming a "lola of the occult.” The phrase, dropped in Strindberg's mind by a theosophist correspondent, is particularly apt since it suggests both how long and how short was the journey from naturalism to mysticism.
Pinero: From Farce to Social Drama
Authors: Leggatt Alexander
Published: April 2013

THE REPUTATION OF ARTHUR WING PINERO IS CURIOUSLY SPLIT. In the theatre, he is remembered as the author of the Court farces — The Magistrate, The Schoolmistress, Dandy Dick — and of Trelawny of the 'Wells,' all of which are frequently revived and greeted with enthusiasm, while his serious pieces have lain neglected for at least a generation. But for critics, theatre historians, and the compilers of anthologies, he is primarily the author of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, a play that would be dangerous to any author's reputation, "a brilliant pastiche of Ibsen, grafted on an ordinary commercial melodrama of coincidence." Perhaps the reluctance of academic critics to acknowledge that farce is a form worthy of attention has had something to do with this: Allardyce Nicoll's remark that "Pinero, whose training had been in farce, discovered his real strength in a kind of tragic drama” suggests that while farce may be a good school for the beginner, the techniques learned in it need to be applied in more serious work.
"What Have I Seen, the Scum or the Essence?" Symbolic Fallout in Pinter's Birthday Party
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

IN ACT II OF HAROLD PINTER'S THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, Stanley Webber comes face to face with the two men whose arrival at the Boles' rooming house he had anticipated with so much dread. When he first confronts the chief intruder's bullyboy, McCann, he finds the surly Irishman seated at a table carefully tearing a sheet of newspaper into five equal strips. During the muted sparring match that follows, Webber twice picks up a strip of the paper and McCann menacingly tells him (using the same words both times), "Mind that." Obviously, mind it we must; symbolically or otherwise, it's got to have a point. However, the next time McCann tears up a sheet his boss, Goldberg, notices him and comments authoritatively: "Why do you do that all the time? It's childish, it's pointless. It's without a solitary point." Just as obviously, we have been conned.
The Dwarfs: A Study in Linguistic Dwarfism
Authors: Quigley Austin
Published: April 2013

PINTER'S PLAYS HAVE PRESENTED a variety of problems to audiences, reviewers and critics over the years, but none of his plays has resisted elucidation as firmly as a short radio play written in the same year as The Caretaker. Even in its revised stage version, The Dwarfs has remained disconcertingly opaque. It is tempting to dismiss the playas a failed experiment, but the author's own comments on it suggest that this should not be done too readily.
Arthur Miller's Incident At Vichy: A Sartrean Interpretation
Authors: Lowenthal Lawrence
Published: April 2013

IN 1944, JUST AFTER PARIS was liberated from the Nazi occupation, Jean Paul Sartre sat at the Cafe de Flore on the Left Bank and wrote Anti Semite and Jew (Reflexions sur fa Question Juive), a fascinating and controversial analysis of Europe's most terrifying problem. Twenty years later, America's leading dramatist, Arthur Miller, wrote a long, one-act play about the holocaust, called Incident at Vichy. Although Ronald Hayman, an English critic, recently suggested that "a good case could be made for calling Arthur Miller the most Sartrean of living playwrights," no critic has yet pointed out that Vichy is an explicit dramatic rendition of Sartre's treatise on Jews, as well as a clear structural example of Sartre's definition of the existential "theatre of situation."
An Giall and The Hostage Compared
Authors: Wall Richard
Published: April 2013

RECENT EVENTS IN IRELAND have led to a revival of interest in Brendan Behan's Hostage. The accidental topicality of the play is reflected in the use of current newspaper headlines to advertise a recent presentation of the play by Theatre Calgary, Alberta. Unfortunately, the only version of the play which is widely known, the Joan Littlewood production of the late fifties when the I.R.A. was something of a joke, is now in rather bad taste. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to An Giall,the restrained and almost forgotten tragi-comedy in Irish by Behan on which The Hostage is based.
Peter Terson's Vale of Evesham
Authors: Elvgren Jr. Gillette
Published: April 2013

PETER TERSON IS CERTAINLY one of the more significant playwrights being staged in Great Britain today. Since 1967 ten of Terson's plays have received West End showings. In 1967 he shared with Peter Nichols the John Whiting Award from the Arts Council; and in 1972 he received the British Writers Guild Award for the best radio play, The Fishing Party. Widely produced and written about in Europe, his almost total lack of recognition in North America remains a mystery.

Since 1963 Peter Terson has written over sixty plays in addition to his radio and television dramas. Most of his produced stage work has been originally performed at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent, a small Midlands theatre-in-the-round which has developed an international reputation for its support of new playwrights and for its innovative work in musical documentary drama. Terson was resident playwright at the Victoria under the director Peter Cheeseman from 1965-1967, and has been officially connected with the theatre as a writer-in-association ever Since.
Exploiting Art: The Pictures in Bernard Shaw's Plays
Authors: Weintraub Stanley
Published: April 2013

THROUGHOUT A LONG LIFETIME Bernard Shaw remained intensely interested in the visual arts, and exploited his familiarity with English and Continental art in his plays. A new dimension emerges when Shavian drama is examined through this lens. A century ago, when English painting was still suffering from the blight of the sentimental academic subject picture, and Ireland was culturally at least a generation behind, the young Bernard Shaw could have been guaranteed a surfeit of subject paintings in Dublin. When he left for London at twenty, in 1876, the art which English galleries found saleable, despite the inroads of PreRaphaelitism, was much the same. Victorian religiosity and humanitarianist idealism encouraged production of the overloaded anecdote or genteel landscape, and Shaw's early dramatic settings could not help but be influenced, even when he intended to use a scene ironically, by what English eyes were accustomed to encountering in art.
Individual and Society in the Early Plays of John Arden
Authors: Day Paul
Published: April 2013

CRITICS HAVE BEEN WARY in their attempts to come to terms with the works of John Arden. The majority of them, in fact, confine themselves to an astonished description of his several works, with tolerant comments on their "diversity," "unpredictability," "uncommitedness," "amorality" and so on. Only two or three have approached the works in tentative analysis — among them John Russell Taylor and J.D. Hainsworth. And Hainsworth's article springs from a minor disagreement with a statement by Taylor.

Taylor's criticism of Arden in Anger and After seeks to validate his contention that this writer changes his ground continually, seeking in every fresh playa fresh viewpoint: "There seems to be brooding one basic principle: not exactly the obvious one that today there are no causes — that would be altogether too facile, and in any case just not true — but that there are too many."
Madness in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill
Authors: Nethercot Arthur
Published: April 2013

In other words, O'Neill — consciously or unconsciously — found it almost impossible to write a play in which he did not use — sometimes incidentally, but usually fundamentally — the idea of mental unbalance. The idea appears in many verbal forms — madness, craziness, insanity, frenzy, imbecility, idiocy, queerness, half—wittedness, distraction, nuttiness, lunacy, loco, and so on. He uses these words in their various grammatical forms in both the literal and the figurative senses, and often in such purely casual and colloquial expressions as "Are you crazy?" But even such instances as the last indicate how deeply rooted in his mind was the idea of the widespread imbalance of the easily disturbed human mind.
Spherical Tragedies and Comedies with Corpses: Witkacian Tragicomedy
Authors: Dukore Bernard
Published: April 2013

IN AN ESSAY ON TOLSTOY, Bernard Shaw concisely contrasts the major distinctions frequently made between tragedy and comedy: "The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act. The classical definition is, of tragedy, drama that purges the soul by pity and terror, and, of comedy, drama that chastens morals by ridicule. These classical definitions ... are still much the best the critic can work with." But Shaw's observation notwithstanding, the several antitheses are really not mutually exclusive. In the same essay, Shaw admits that English tragedy "has always scandalized classic scholarship and French taste by defying them: nothing will prevent the English playwright from mixing comedy, and even tomfoolery, with tragedy .... We are incorrigible in this respect, and may as well make a merit of it."
Possibility and Form in Max Frisch's Biography: A Game
Authors: Ruppert Peter
Published: April 2013

MAX FRISCH'S MOST RECENT PLAY, Biography: A Game (1967), has puzzled critics because it seems to contradict the dramaturgy according to which it was written. Frisch indicated the principles of his new dramaturgy, "Variation Theatre" or "Theatre of Possibility," as early as his Schiller Prize speech (1965) and established these principles clearly in his correspondence with Walter Hollerer (1969). The principles are I) that contemporary drama should reflect the contemporary consciousness of the open possibilities, or open-endedness, of existence; 2) that "Theatre of Imitation" - theatre that pretends to copy "reality," presenting a predigested interpretation of reality with an underlying persuasiveness that the events presented could have happened in no other way - falsifies experience and is inauthentic theatre; and 3) that what is needed is a theatre not of fate (peripetie), but of possibility. Frisch sought in Biography to present a drama based on this dramaturgy, a drama that would be like a rehearsal in that it presented no final form for the actions considered, but a series of variations of action, of variant possibilities all equally plausible.
Beyond Absurdity: Albee's Awareness of Audience in Tiny Alice
Authors: Coe Richard
Published: April 2013

CLASSICALLY, theatre of the absurd was a Negation. As typified by the plays of Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet written in the 50's, it attacked conventional modes of perception and expression in order to negate the conceptions which formed and were signified by those modes. Like surrealism, its first goal was to destroy an outmoded vision of reality. Thus, as seemed to befit a theatre of negation, it utilized satire, paradox and surrealistic allegory.

The absurdist playwright eschewed any mimicking of surface reality lest he seem to imply its validity — as Sartre writes of Genet, "in order to be sure of never making proper use of appearance [he] wants his fancies, at two or three stages of derealization, to reveal themselves in their nothingness. “I Consequently, absurdist plays usually related only allegorically to the audience's reality.
Stage Convention in the Plays of Patrick White
Authors: Carroll Dennis
Published: April 2013

PATRICK WHITE, RECENT RECIPIENT of the Nobel Prize for literature, is chiefly known as a novelist. His four plays are mostly analysed in relation to the rest of his output; they have never received important productions abroad. Within Australia, they are more familiar and have had a good deal of significance in the recent development of Australian drama. All were performed between 1961 and 1964, at a time when their presentational conventions served as a model for other Australian playwrights seeking to break away from the plodding naturalism then pervasive on the local theatre scene.
Samuel Beckett's Endgame: A Structural Analysis
Authors: Hasselbach Hans-Peter
Published: April 2013

A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS of Samuel Beckett's drama Endgame may appropriately begin with a comment once made by the French film maker Jean-Luc Godard. Asked if his films had a beginning, a middle and an end he replied, "Yes, but not necessarily in that order." A first look at Beckett's play could lead to the same impression, but a closer view of the seemingly gratuitous structure will reveal its intricate and functional design and show the legitimacy of Beckett's statement at his Berlin production in 1967: "There are no accidents in Fin de Partie. Everything is based on analogy and repetition." In this paper I try to shed light on this calculated pattern by examining the structure of the dramatic action in Endgame, thus disclosing Beckett's successful fusion of form and content. More particularly, my approach aims to show that the thematic elements combined in the play's title, "ending" and "playing," constitute an opposition that becomes the basis of Beckett's dramatic structure.
Being and Non-Being: Samuel Beckett's Not I
Authors: Zeifman Hersh
Published: April 2013

WHEN THE CURTAIN RISES ON NOT I, Samuel Beckett's most recent work for the stage, the first thing we are aware of is a disembodied human mouth, seemingly suspended eight feet in the air, trapped in the harsh glare of a spotlight amid the surrounding darkness. The long line of partially disembodied characters in Beckett's drama makes its first appearance with Nagg and Nell in Endgame; having crashed on their tandem in the Ardennes and lost their shanks, the two now inhabit dustbins. Whatever else they may represent, the ash bins (or dustbins) are clearly death images, symbolically apt containers of decaying human flesh, linked with the grave via such traditional Biblical images as "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (Genesis 3.19). In Happy Days, the process of disembodiment has gone one step further. At the beginning of Act I, Winnie is discovered interred in a mound of sand up to her waist; by the second act, however, the mound has reached her neck, thus obliterating her entire body except for her head. This mound of sand is, once again, a brllliantly conceived icon of death-in-life; figuratively and literally, Winnie has both feet in the grave, and the rest of her must inevitably follow. The three characters of Play are likewise imprisoned up to their necks, in vases which Beckett specifically labels "urns," thereby evoking both the ashes of cremation and the tomb. All that remains of their bodies are their faces — "Faces so lost to age and aspect," Beckett directs, "as to seem almost part of urns." And in Not I, there is no longer even the entire face, but simply a mouth, chattering compulsively. By now we know full well what disembodiment signifies in Beckett's drama; there is no longer the need for an implicity coffin-like receptacle.
Myth as a Basis of Dramatic Structure in Orpheus Descending
Authors: Traubitz Nancy Baker
Published: April 2013

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' FIRST professionally produced play, Battle of Angels (1940), failed during its Boston tryouts. However, the play did not die. Williams continued to rewrite, to add, to modify and in March, 1957, with the great successes of Glass Menagerie (1945), Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) behind him, he committed Battle of Angels, now titled Orpheus Descending, to another Broadway production. "I honestly believe," Williams wrote, "that it is finally finished. About 75 percent of it is new writing, but what is much more important, I believe that I have now finally managed to say in it what I wanted to say .... " Few plays have been so long meditated and so staunchly believed in by their creators, yet after seventeen years of perpetual revising by America's most successful playwright and one of the most influential figures in the international theater, Orpheus Descending played only sixty-eight performances.
Death as a Mirror of Life: Edward Albee's All Over
Authors: Moses Robbie Odom
Published: April 2013

THE CRITIC Richmond Crinkley erred in judging Albee's All Over (1971) to be a "play about the end of the haute monde," and "an elegy for a particularly sterile social milieu." The import of All Over is not restricted to a single social class, nor does the play sound, as critics like Martin Gottfried and Jack Kroll thought, the death-knell of Albee as a dynamic playwright. In addition to being, as Henry Hewes attests, an honest and realistic reflection of contemporaneity, All Over confronts, as the title suggests, the endemic trait of all living organisms. Death, the great leveler to a poet like William Cullen Bryant, is, for Albee, man's final confrontation with life. In the play, death is tantamount to a metaphysical conceit, with the death of the body being but one thematic strain. The famous man, whose dying is both a public event for the press and the crowd awaiting word of his demise, and a private ritual for the circle of intimates assembled for the vigil, is the instrument through which Albee explores some issues attendant to dying and death. The age at which a person becomes aware of death is an idea examined that is important to the development of psychological maturity. Knowing her husband as a thorough man with almost as much knowledge about law as Best Friend, Wife forces the lawyer into a deeper meaning of death when she dismisses fifteen, "the age we all become philosophers," as the age when he became aware of personal extinction: "No, no, when you were aware of it for yourself, when you knew you were at the top of the roller-coaster ride, when you knew half of it was probably over and you were on your way to it" (AO, pp. 90-91). Best Friend reveals that the awareness of the inevitability of death came at thirty-eight and reflected itself, for him, in the making of a will.
Freedom and Order in Arden's Ironhand
Authors: Hampton Nigel
Published: April 2013

IRONHAND IS JOHN ARDEN'S "free paraphrase" of Goethe's first play, Goetz von Berlichingen, yet the play is very much Arden's. This judgment may not be the reader's first response, for Ironhand seems rooted in the turbulent world of Elizabethan drama which Goethe was imitating. The stark conflicts between the forces of freedom and order, the court intrigues, the treachery of politicians and clergymen, and the frustrations of the aspiring individual in a struggle between uncertain values suggest comparison with Shakespeare, Marlowe and Marston.2 At its core, however, Ironhand is a play about politics, not about character, and it is in the treatment of politics that the play is clearly Arden's. The play explores the paternalism of the feudal lords and the parliamentarianism of the nobles, the clergy and the peasants, but it is the politics of transition, the force for change between these two worlds, which interests Arden.
The Limited Naturalism of Arthur Pinero
Authors: Miner Edmund
Published: April 2013

WHEN THE NAME of Sir Arthur Pinero arises in discussion today, one thinks of this or that recent revival of The Magistrate or Trelawny of the "Wells," that charming little period piece which captures so well the language and spirit of the London stage in Tom Robertson's pioneer days. Pinero's triumphs of his major period (1893—1909), his "daring" forays into the new territory of naturalistic domestic drama, are all but forgotten. It is to be hoped that one day television will be the vehicle by which the better of these plays — The Thunderbolt, Iris, His House in Order, for example — will be resurrected for devotees of the Victorian theatre. Certainly it is regrettable that Pinero revivals are invariably confined to such "safe" but innocuous offerings as the first of his Royal Court farces and the sentimental story of Rose Trelawny.
Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

THE PRESENT ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHY follows the basic principles and limitations described in the first installment of March 1974. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of modern dramatic literature. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modern world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1900 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre other than performers. This year's list covers 1975 and further 1974 items, plus a sprinkling of missed 1973 items. The MLA International Bibliography for 1973 supplements the previous list even more, especially with regard to articles in nonliterary periodicals and material in non-Roman alphabets. The MLA volumes for 1974 should come out this summer.
Milestones
Authors: Marker Frederick
Published: April 2013

THREE SEPARATE anniversaries, each quite distinct in character, hold significance for Modern Drama at this time and form the subject of these brief prefatory remarks.
Roundelay
Authors: Beckett Samuel
Published: April 2013

Roundelay
Samuel Beckett's Interest in Form: Structural Patterning in Play
Authors: Pountney Rosemary
Published: April 2013

THE FORM EXPRESSES THE CONTENT in the work of Samuel Beckett - and it is precisely this fusion of content with form that he approved in the writing of Proust and Joyce. "It is the shape that matters," Beckett once said, expressing enthusiasm over the proportion of a sentence of St. Augustine's, a sentence he has echoed in Waiting/or Godot.

At the end of his article on J oyce5 Beckett considers in some detail the patterning in Joyce and Dante, comparing Dante's conical view of purgatory with Joyce's spherical one. Since Play, the most perfectly patterned of Beckett's plays, also takes the purgatorial theme and makes use of both motifs, this comparison is of especial interest.
Society as a Brothel: Genet's Satire in The Balcony
Authors: Bermel Albert
Published: April 2013

In some ways The Balcony represents a modern approach to the documentary theatre. It is much more mettlesome than any of the later examples of so-called "theatre of fact," and more factual. Genet's brothel may have no direct historical antecedents; one of its sources is his own novel Querelle de Brest. Nor does the revolution in the play reproduce any particular revolution in history. But the brothel and the revolution are no less "true" for not having literal referents. Genet treats them as two historical essences or social forces which he sends into battle.
A Bicentennial Foreword
Authors: Meserve Walter
Published: April 2013

FEW CRITICS ACCEPT the idea that American drama has a two-hundred-year history worthy of recall. Some feel that with the plays of James A. Herne American dramatists reached a point where their efforts should be recognized; one post-World War II English critic finally acknowledged American drama as a "potent intruder" nearly a hundred and fifty years after the first American play was performed in London. Among the majority of critics, however, it is assumed that significant native drama in America was first ushered into an established theatre by Eugene O'Neill some sixty years ago. An unfortunate view, first offered by William Archer, the English critic, it is distinguished only by presumptions born of ignorance and the same prejudices which prompted Ralph Waldo Emerson to urge the creation and recognition of American literary efforts in 1837. As historians of American drama are well aware, there were people writing plays in that land which declared the independence celebrated this year. They were, of course, a select and, by modern standards, a largely unprofessional group — these playwrights who helped entertain the new nation — but a number of their plays deserve far more than the patronizing aside usually accorded American drama by literary and theatre historians. As the vitality of these plays written during the early decades readily asserts in productions across the country, no bicentennial special pleading is necessary: American dramatists working along with the new nation during the first half-century of independence offered plays which, with the probable exception of certain works by Freneau, Irving, Paulding (all of whom wrote plays) and Bryant, are as distinctive as any literature produced during this period.
O'Neill's Grotesque Dancers
Authors: Robinson James
Published: April 2013

AS A POET of the theatre, Eugene O'Neill recognized the value of stage movement. Like all playwrights, he knew that gesture and stage position reveal character; unlike most, he was also interested in broader movements of individuals and groups to reveal theme. Nietzsche's praise of the Dionysian dance in The Birth of Tragedy, Kenneth Macgowan's emphasis on movement and music for the Theatre of Tomorrow, Max Reinhardt's pageant plays, and Gordon Craig's desire to bring "Dancing, Pantomime, Marionettes, Masks; these things so vital to the ancients" back into modern theatre - all exerted their influence on the young American dramatist. O'Neill seemed especially intrigued with the thematic possibilities of movement during his expressionistic period, when several of his plays exhibited bizarre, distorted dances or motions in accordance with their grotesque themes. Grotesque variations on the graceful movements of dance in The Emperor Jones, The Great God Brown, and Desire Under the Elms, for instance, served to point up man's alienation and domination by irrational passions. Mechanical motions also intrigued the playwright, and appeared in group movements of Jones, The Hairy Ape and Lazarus Laughed in conjunction with the themes of alienation from one's self, from modern society, and from life itself. Finally, in Lazarus Laughed, O'Neill choreographed mass movement on a grand scale in an attempt to restore theatre to the religious position it held in ancient Greek society; but again, the motions assumed modern, grotesque forms to express the play's central theme of man's perversity. For O'Neill's thematic use of movement was basically modern, functioning in these experimental plays to emphasize his major themes of the irrational, alienation, and the tragicomic condition of mankind.
Miss Julie and O'Neill
Authors: Törnqvist Egil
Published: April 2013

Already in the mid-twenties O'Neill had lauded the Swedish playwright in a program note for the Provincetown Players' production of The Spook Sonata. He then declared that Strindberg was "the precursor of all modernity in our present theater" and "the greatest interpreter in the theater of the characteristic spiritual conflicts which constitute the drama — the blood — of our lives today." At about the same time he told a newspaper reporter that he considered Strindberg "the last undeniably great playwright."
Realism and Theatricalism in A Streetcar Named Desire
Authors: Corrigan Mary Ann
Published: April 2013

ON THE MORNING after the premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Joseph Wood Krutch commented: "This may be the great American play." From the perspective of more than a quarter of a century later A Streetcar Named Desire appears to be one of the great American plays. Its greatness lies in Tennessee Williams' matching of form to content. In order to gain sympathy for a character who is in the process of an emotional breakdown, Williams depicts the character from without and within; both the objectivity and the subjectivity of Blanche are present to the audience. In A Streetcar Named Desire Williams synthesizes depth characterization, typical of drama that strives to be an illusion of reality, with symbolic theatrics, which imply an acceptance of the stage as artifice. In short, realism and theatricalism, often viewed as stage rivals, complement each other in this play. Throughout the 1940s Williams attempted to combine elements of theatricalist staging with verisimilitudinous plots and characters. His experiments either failed utterly, as in Battle of Angels in which neither literal nor symbolic action is convincing, or succeeded with modifications, for instance by the removal of the screen device in The Glass Menagerie. In A Streetcar Named Desire Williams is in control of his symbolic devices. They enable the audience not only to understand the emotional penumbra surrounding the events and characters, but also to view the world from the limited and distorted perspective of Blanche. The play's meaning is apparent only after Williams exposes through stage resources what transpires in the mind of Blanche.
Three Black Plays: Alienation and Paths to Recovery
Authors: Lee Dorothy
Published: April 2013

INDIVIDUALS TODAY, regardless of the particular society, too often have a tenuously held sense of personal or group identification. The phrase "identity—crisis" has become a cliche. "Alienation from" precedes every mode of relationship as a theme in literature and a syndrome in life. Literary voices are constantly lifted to express bleak statements of and occasionally solutions for generational, sexual, ethnic, and metaphysical estrangement. Among these artists, not unexpectedly, are Afro—American writers in every genre. Some of the most articulate and interesting are the creators of a burgeoning Black theatre. In some instances, their plays —like other Black literary expressions — though serving an important social function as protest are intentionally limited artistically to the "agit—prop" level of literature. However, the alienation theme perceptively handled in a Black context can and often does become a metaphor for the human condition. We can find in these works definitions of a sense of community — or its telling absence — both uniquely Black and universally relevant. As they movingly concretize individual isolation and the exile's legacy of despair, they reveal the peculiar shape of suffering in the modern world.
The Anti-Spiritual Vitory in the Theatre of Ionesco
Authors: Pronko Leonard
Published: April 2013

THE FRENCH DRAMATISTS who began writing about 1950, baptized by M. Jean Duvignaud the "School of Paris," have sometimes been called "anti-theatrical," for they employ dramatic methods which are frequently opposed to those of the conventional theater. Writers like Ionesco, Beckett, and the early Adamov wish to return to what might be called "pure theater," that is to say a type of theater employing means which are strictly theatrical and do not belong to the realms of philosophy, psychology, sociology or politics. One of the favorite devices of such a theater is the presentation of the author's views in a visual way, using space and movement rather than language. In Waiting for Godat, for example, the moral suffering of mankind is depicted physically by shoes which do not fit, hats which scratch, servants visibly attached to masters, and watches which do not run. In a play like Adamov's The Parody, the solitude and bewilderment of modem man are represented by a decor (including a clock without hands) which remains the same, but is constantly foreign because seen from different angles. In The Big and the Little Manoeuvre, a man's destruction by incomprehensible and impersonal forces is made more palpable by his loss of one limb after the other.
The Strategy of Samuel Beckett's Endgame
Authors: Eastman Richard
Published: April 2013

"ART,"SAID SAMUEL BECKETT in writing of Proust, "is the apotheosis of solitude." Certainly Beckett belongs with such authors as Proust and Kafka for whom the deadly isolation of individuality precludes communication in terms of conventional surface. The truth of personality is inscrutable: open perhaps to the intuition of the friend or of the reader, but merely distorted by any self-sufficient exercise of analytic reason. Hence the art of writing is, negatively, to render one's subject opaque to analysis; positively it is to invite the reader in his own solitude to grope, to imagine-often through clues which are absurd in their irreducible concreteness-and thus to sense through all the babble of language the meaning of another solitude.
Miracle on Broadway: And the Box-Office Magic of the Bible
Authors: Siegel Ben
Published: April 2013

ARCHIBALD MAcLEISH'S J.B., a verse recasting of the biblical Job story, opened on Broadway several months ago to excited customer and critical acclaim. The play's immediate box-office success was made more piquant by its arrival in the midst of a pre-Christmas newspaper strike that seemingly prevented the usual advance advertising and public preparation, a fact emphasized by both Time and Life. No direct claim of divine intervention was made, but Life's double year's end entertainment issue not only captioned the miracle of the play's "triumph without benefit of newspapers," but between shots of a pleading Job and painfully concentrated author and producer, made only fleeting reference to the favorable reactions, "reported in bits and pieces over TV, radio, and by word of mouth."
Book Reviews
Authors: Pronko Leonard , Vowles Richard , Gilbert Vedder
Published: April 2013

Antonin Artaud, THE THEATER AND ITS DOUBLE, reviewed by Leonard C. Pronko

Doris V. Falk, EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE TRAGIC TENSION: AN INTERPRETIVE STUDY ,reviewed by Richard B. Vowles

John Heath-Stubbs, HELEN IN EGYPT AND OTHER PLAYS,reviewed by Vedder M. Gilbert
The Shaw Society
Authors: Geduld H.
Published: April 2013

THE SHAW SOCIETY was founded on Bernard Shaw's birthday-26th July, 1941-by Dr. F. E. Loewenstein. It seeks to promote awider interest in and a deeper understanding of the work of Bernard Shaw, and provides a "rallying point for the co-operation and education of kindred spirits and a forum for their irreconcilable controversies." Apart from its work as a research organization, the Society meets regularly in London and New York and furnishes its members with performances, playreadings, lectures and publications of Shavian interest. Full members also receive The Shavian-The Society's journal-which is published three or four times a year, and occasional Shavian Tracts. American members who subscribe directly to the New York Regional Group are entitled to annual membership of the Society and of the Group itself.
Methuselah and the Birmingham Repertory Company
Authors: Geduld H.
Published: April 2013

IN ENGLAND, Back to Methuselah was first presented in 1923, by Barry Jackson at the Repertory Theatre, Birmingham. With this production, Barry Jackson and Shaw became closely associated in a series of Shaw productions that led to the inauguration of the Malvern Festival in 1929.
The Lightness in Shaw
Authors: Pollock Ellen
Published: April 2013

WHEN SHAW DIED, the press asked me if I would pay him tribute, but I declined, for I knew that no words of mine could convey my feelings for him or any idea of his greatness. Lawrence of Arabia once declared that he would rather visit the Shaws than read any book or hear any music on earth. And Einstein wrote: "By holding the mirror before us, Mr. Shaw has been able, as no other contemporary, to take from us some of the heaviness of living." If I can convey in this article something of this lightness, something of his gaiety, that "perpetual fountain of wit and intellectual energy," I feel I shall be paying him real homage.
Shaw on Art
Authors: Kalmar Jack
Published: April 2013

THE ART CRITICISM OF BERNARD SHAW is his first sustained publication. It gives some indication of his eclectic taste in art and his ability to cope with a specialized subject. In this criticism certain interests which he was to develop are also evident.
Book Reviews
Authors: Waggoner George , Solomon Stanley , Worth George , Lacampagne Robert
Published: April 2013

Louis Simon, SHAW ON EDUCATION, reviewed by George Waggoner

Paul Kozelka, A GLOSSARY TO THE PLAYS OF BERNARD SHAW, reviewed by Stanley Solomon

Julian B. Kaye, BERNARD SHAW AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRADITION, reviewed by George Worth

Committee on Playlist of the N. C. T. E., Joseph Mersand, Chairman, GUIDE TO PLAY SELECTION, reviewed by Robert J. Lacampagne
Bernard Shaw, Ladies and Gentlemen
Authors: Nethercot Arthur
Published: April 2013

IN THE INTRODUCTION to the chapter entitled "Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief ... ," in my book, Men and Supermen: The Shavian Portrait Gallery, I have quoted Shaw's remark in the autobiographical preface to his novel, Immaturity, "I sing my own class: the Shabby Genteel, the Poor Relations, the Gentlemen who are no Gentlemen," and have suggested that "Perhaps this rankling sense of social stratification and even modified ostracism in his younger days had something to do with his later selection of one of the targets that he most delighted to perforate: ladies and gentlemen." I have also called attention to the section headed "The Perfect Gentleman" in his collection of epigrams and aphorisms entitled "Maxims for Revolutionists" in "The Revolutionist's Handbook," appended to Man and Superman.
"The Eternal Against The Expedient": Structure And Theme In Shaw's The Apple Cart
Authors: McDowell Frederick
Published: April 2013

IN The Apple Cart (1929) Shaw was principally concerned with an analysis of ideal personal distinction, and he attempted to show how his protagonist, King Magnus, is as truly great as his Latinate name would imply. In the Shavian view, the individual's preeminence results from the wealth and variety of his resources and from his independent moral strength which he can evince both in crisis and in the conditions of ordinary life. These are the chief facets, too, of Caesar's greatness in Caesar and Cleopatra; Magnus is, in reality, a subdued and crafty Caesar. Like Caesar, he is a modified man of action, great by what he is as much as by what he does. He also possesses originality of the sort which Shaw ascribed to Caesar: "Originality gives a man an air of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently of convention and moral generalization." Shaw's searching inquiry into his theme provides not only the philosophic context of the play but its structural unity as well. At all costs, Shaw was determined to present Magnus's genius, not summarily in the abstract, but suggestively in the specific situations which it confronts in its effort to prevail or to survive.
Tennessee Williams' Early Heroines
Authors: Jones Robert Emmet
Published: April 2013

CRITICS HAVE GENERALLY AGREED that the heroines of Tennessee Williams are his finest creations. They dominate the plays in which they are found, and to them, as representatives of certain Southern types, Williams has brought much insight. This insight, which is at once poetic and sociological, has, since 1945, provided the American theater with several characters who may well rank in future histories of American dramatic literature with Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie and Nina Leeds as the most successful creations of dramatic heroines in the first half of the twentieth century.
The Poet's Three Comforters: J B. And The Critics
Authors: MacLeish Andrew
Published: April 2013

AT THE END OF A RATHER MYOPIC REVIEW of Archibald MacLeish's J. B., the New Yorker's Kenneth Tynan comments on the theological implications of the play by quoting Doctor Johnson's famous remark to Boswell: "Sir, there is no trusting to that crazy piety." Since Mr. Tynan is so appreciative of the good Doctor's aphoristic talents, he should be familiar with Johnson's remarks in his discussion of Degradation of Genius. When the Doctor comments that "Such degradation of the dignity of genius, such abuse of superlative abilities, cannot. be contemplated but with grief and indignation. . . ." he might well be aiming his remarks back from the grave at Mr. Tynan's review of J. B. Extreme as it is, Mr. Tynan's final judgment is of the same kind as that reached by two other knowledgeable but more moderate critics who write about J. B.
Sunshine And Substance: The Comic Theater Of Achard, Anouilh, Ayme, Roussin
Authors: Pronko Leonard
Published: April 2013

IN THE PAST FEW YEARS the American theater has become increasingly aware of a number of French playwrights whose existence they had previously all but ignored. Jean Anouilh, who began writing for the theater in 1931 and has long been considered a master in France, was for many years known here only as the author of a sombre Antigone which, even with the combined talents of Katharine Cornell and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, ran for a brief sixty-four performances.
A Lively Theater Of Lives: Portraiture Versus Art
Authors: Weissman Philip
Published: April 2013

RECENTLY the American theater has been afflicted with earthbound dramas on the lives of contemporaries. Last season's samplings range from an unsuccessful pair, Winkelberg and Winesburg, Ohio (the lives of Maxwell Bodenheim and Sherwood Anderson respectively), the short-lived Compulsion (an account of the pathological lives of Loeb and Leopold), to the more interesting Sunrise at Campobello (F.D.R.'s life) and the acclaimed Look Homeward, Angel! (based on Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel).
Moscow Theater Season
Authors: Markov Pavel
Published: April 2013

THE THEATERS OF Moscow have presented sixty new productions this season; and it is hardly possible to do full justice in the space of a brief article to the 25 premieres of entirely new shows, each with its own destiny. It would be difficult to forecast the longevity of anyone of them. The Moscow theaters which have always adhered to the repertoire system have been running some shows for 10 and 20 years, to say nothing of such exceptional plays as In the Lower Depths, a work running in its original interpretation at the Moscow Art Theatre for nearly sixty years, though its cast has, of course, been changed several times in that period.
The Theatre in Dublin
Authors: Fitz-Simon Christopher
Published: April 2013

DUBLIN is, very properly, the capital of Ireland; for, though the island is still divided (the northeastern section remaining as part of the United Kingdom) the British city of Belfast cannot, for all its progressive material development, produce the kind of cultural climate in which a university stops being called "red brick" and an art collection ceases to be "municipal." Since this is to be an article on the Dublin rather than the Irish theater I can only mention the Belfast companies in passing; but as these are but two in number against Dublin's halfdozen (and the two cities are of roughly the same size with just over half-a-million inhabitants in each) it will be enough to say that while the Belfast Arts and the Ulster Group theaters have a vigorous outlook and more than competent styles of production they have rarely come forward with a resounding succes d'estime, nor, on the commercial side, do they in any measure constitute a tourist attraction.
Book Reviews
Authors: Crafton Allen , Hirschbach Frank , Kaye Julian
Published: April 2013

Alice Lewisohn Crowley, The Neighborhood Playhouse, reviewed by Allen Crafton

Elder Olson, Plays and Poems, reviewed by Frank D. Hirschbach

Robert Boies Sharpe, Irony In The Drama: An Essay On Impersonation, Shock, And Catharsis, reviewed by Julian B. Kaye
The Plays of D.H. Lawrence
Authors: Waterman Arthur
Published: April 2013

For the most part critics have ignored Lawrence's plays. They are justified in that none of them is very good drama and contains nothing new in dramatic technique. They are important, however, in their relationship to Lawrence's other work, as they do reflect and sometimes severely qualify the themes of his other forms. If we are to praise Lawrence as an important thinker as well as an artist, as Mr. Leavis does, then we had better know the plays where his ideas are not always the same as in his novels. In the differences between Touch and Go and Women in Love, which I shall treat later, we find that Lawrence has handled the theme of industrial England in opposing ways. A case, then, can be made for the plays, and in this paper I propose to discuss Lawrence's plays in relation to his other work, and to analyze their dramatic nature in order to show Lawrence's artistry, for better or worse, at work.