bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Tragic Vision in The Zoo Story
Authors: Bennett Robert
Published: April 2013

WHILE THE CONCLUSION to The Zoo Story has met with the approval of some readers and the disapproval of others, the meaning of the protagonist's death has not been disputed. The consensus has been that Albee intends us to understand Jerry's death as a Christ-like sacrifice. Rose Zimbardo and George Wellwarth praise the symbolism. Martin Esslin and Brian Way complain that the play's ending loses absurdist rigor and degenerates into sentimentality. Similarly Lee Baxandall argues that when Albee resorts to aesthetic solutions, which are symbolically instead of historically meaningful, he does not offer a solution viable in drama, "the most socially rooted of the arts."
Stoppard's Jumpers: A Mystery Play
Authors: Gabbard Lucina
Published: April 2013

TOM STOPPARD'S JUMPERS is a many-splendored mystery play — so many-splendored that it is, metaphorically, a kaleidoscope. Bright fragments of many forms and many themes make new configurations with each twist of the dial. The most obvious ingredients are rollicking comedy and metaphysics. This combination recalls the mystery plays of medieval times which mixed morality and Bible stories with humorous and grotesque details. Stopping there, however, would misrepresent and oversimplify the generic classification of Jumpers, for the kaleidoscope contains bits of many genres assembled in the overall design of a "whodunit."
Theatre as Dream: Yeats's Stagecraft
Authors: Leamon Warren
Published: April 2013

YEATS WAS A LYRIC POET who desired to return poetry to the stage. Consequently his own plays-and in particular his attempts to stage them-are the result of the same motive which lay behind his poetry: an attempt to reduce the accidents of character and surface reality to their proper place in relation to the unchanging reality of the soul (or, to use a term central to the plays, personality). This is a commonplace which one should not lose sight of in discussing the specifics of his stagecraft, for it determined from the beginning that Yeats would never succeed in mastering the demands of a popular theatre. His earliest plays, though of little interest in regard to the development of modern drama, are important in that they exhibit his desire to make action barely more than an ornament for the poetry, a desire he never really abandoned. In both The Land of Heart's Desire and The Countess Cathleen the action, because it is hardly more than a metaphor for a personal conflict, is undramatic. And the history of the various drafts of The Shadowy Waters' gives us the best record of Yeats's early unsuccessful attempts to fuse the emotionalism of lyric poetry and drama into a convincing unity.
The Dumb Waiter: Undermining the Tacit Dimension
Authors: Quigley Austin
Published: April 2013

THE DUMB WAITER is a puzzling play which is rendered even more puzzling by its abrupt termination at precisely the point at which we feel that something decisive is finally about to happen. The carefully aimed gun does not go off at the end of the play though there is plenty of time for it to do so. We seem to be left wondering about the fate of the two characters, who remain motionless onstage in silent confrontation. But, whatever the conclusion we might anticipate to the confrontation between Ben and Gus, it is safe to assume that the play's concerns are already concluded in the final tableau. And that final tableau is climaxed not by a gunshot, nor by the lowering of Ben's gun, but by a long, silent stare. The stage directions are quite specific on this point. As Ben aims his gun at the opening door: Gus stumbles in. He is stripped of his jacket, waistcoat, tie, holster and revolver. He stops, body stooping, his arms at his sides. He raises his head and looks at Ben. A long silence. They stare at each other. Curtain. (p. 121) Any interpretation that bases its argument on the presumption that Gus is subsequently murdered is thus engaging in interesting but irrelevant speculation. The play is already over. The question that needs to be answered is not, then, the standard query, does Ben kill Gus, but rather, what kinds of issues could suitably be synthesized in the lengthy concluding stare?
Liturgical Imagery in Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie
Authors: Doyle Jacqueline
Published: April 2013

THE SILVER TASSIE represents a radical departure from Sean O'Casey's early work, and its most significant aspects have been almost consistently misunderstood by his critics. The play is a conscious blend of naturalism and symbolic expressionism and as such is unified through language, imagery, and theme, rather than through character. O'Casey himself wrote to W. B. Yeats, in their famous controversy over the play: "I'm afraid I can't make my mind mix with the sense of importance you give to 'a dominating character.' God forgive me, but it does sound as if you peeked and pined for a hero in the play. Now, is a dominating character more important than a play, or is a play more important than a dominating character?" Characterization in The Silver Tassie is clearly subordinate to the play's ritualistic structure and to its complex symbolic framework. Symbol and imagery throughout the four acts revolve around the trinity of war, religion, and sexuality-"the decorations of security." This imagery is placed within the dual context of a strong anti-war theme and the Sacrifice of the Mass. The thematic and structural function of the imagery is well expressed by the Croucher's lines in Act II: "Then the decorations of security/Become the symbols of self sacrifice."
American Women Playwrights as Mediators of the "Woman Problem"
Authors: Sutherland Cynthia
Published: April 2013

IBSEN'S NORA shut the door of her "doll's house" in 1879. Among the generation of American women born in the 1870's and 1880's, Zona Gale, Zoe Akins, and Susan Glaspell all won Pulitzer Prizes. Rachel Crothers, the successful dramatist who wrote more than three dozen plays, characterized her own work as "a sort of Comedie Rumaine de la Femme." In an interview in 1931 she said: "With few exceptions, every one of my plays has been a social attitude toward women at the moment I wrote it... I [do not] go out stalking the footsteps of women's progress. It is something that comes to me subconsciously. I may say that I sense the trend even before I have hearsay or direct knowledge of it." During a period in which most American playwrights confined their work to representations of the middle class, these women were distinctive because they created principal roles for female characters whose rhetoric thinly veiled a sense of uneasiness with what Eva Figes and others more recently have called "patriarchal attitudes."
IBSEN'S THEATRE: ASPECTS OF A CHRONICLE AND A QUEST
Authors: Marker Lise-Lone , Marker Frederick
Published: April 2013

AS WE GATHER in various places this year to ponder, commemorate, and read papers to one another about the significance of the sesquicentennial of Henrik Ibsen's birth,. there is presumably no one who would any longer dispute the fact that Ibsen's plays belong, permanently and securely, to the theatres of the world. In a rather special and particular sense, however, Ibsen's "own" theatre may be thought of as being the Scandinavian theatre, from the context of which he emerged as a dramatist and to which his works have never ceased to bear a seminal relationship.
Alejandro Casona and Nikolai Evreinov: Life as Theater
Authors: Boring
Published: April 2013

WHEN ALEJANDRO CASONA began writing plays in the years immediately preceding the Spanish Civil War, his concept of theater was very much in tune with the times. As Adela Palacio has noted, "El teatro poetico de Casona respondia a gustos y exigencias, no solo espafioles, sino europeos." I As part of a widespread reaction against realism and naturalism in the theater, Casona emphasized the fantasies and illusions of his characters, thus creating a "double plane of reality and dream" that linked his works to those of Pirandello.' The possible literary relationship between Casona and the Italian playwright has been the subject of frequent critical discussion.' Not surprisingly, however, one may also find parallels between Casona's plays and those of other twentieth-century playwrights interested in similar themes. Some of these similarities are superficial, merely reflecting the Zeitgeist or the common impact of Pirandello, but in the case of the Russian Nikolai Evreinov, the influence on Casona may be direct.
Book Reviews
Authors: Dervin Daniel , Sykes Arlene , Kerckhove Derrick
Published: April 2013

Lucinda Paquet Gabbard, THE DREAM STRUCTURE OF PINTER'S PLAYS: A PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH, reviewed by Daniel Dervin

Steven H. Gale, BUTTER'S GOING UP, reviewed by Alrene Sykes

Judith Graves Miller, THEATER AND REVOLUTION IN FRANCE SINCE 1968, reviewed by Derrick De Kerckhove
Symbolic Naturalism in David Storey's Home
Authors: Rosen Carol
Published: April 2013

WHEN DAVID STOREY'S HOME first opened in London and New York in 1970, some critics were quick to categorize it as "a kind of Briticized Waiting for Godot" or as "a revue-sketch parody of Pinter. Such associations are easily made. Like Beckett's plays, Home is characterized by static surface action and a lack of plot. And like Pinter's The Birthday Party, Home never actually confirms just who or where its characters are. Yet unlike these plays by Beckett and Pinter, Home was a Broadway success. The complementary performances of Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson contributed substantially to this success. Nevertheless, the play itself, an evocative "Chekhovian mood piece," stands on its own. It works metaphorically as a model of modem life, and it works concretely as a close-up of the private world of five mental patients. Storey's Home is a symbolic play built on a firm foundation of new naturalism.
The Artist as Con Man in No Man's Land
Authors: Kalson Albert
Published: April 2013

FROM LOVE'S COMEDY TO WHEN WE DEAD A WAKEN, Henrik Ibsen frequently centered his dramatic works on an artist-protagonist. Such a structure enabled him to mine his own experience as he explored the relationship between the artist and the family and society which sometimes accepted him but often forced him to question his endeavor. Most major modern dramatists have followed Ibsen's lead. August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello and Eugene O'Neill have all revealed the artist's private anguish as impetus toward creativity.
Book Reviews
Authors: Cohn Ruby , Weales Gerald , Sidnell Michael , Musumeci Antonino , Page Malcolm
Published: April 2013

Artaud in Printreviewed by Ruby Cohn

Harold Cantor, CLIFFORD ODETS: PLAYWRIGHT-POET, reviewed by Gerald Weales

Liam Miller, THE NOBLE DRAMA OF W. B. YEATS, reviewed by Michale J. Sidnell

Alba Amoia, THE ITALIAN THEATRE TODAY: TWELVE INTERVIEWS, reviewed by Antonino Musumeci

Peter Cheeseman, FIGHT FOR SHELTON BAR; a documentary, introduction and notes, reviewed by Malcolm Page

Stephen Poliakoff, STRAWBERRY FIELDS, reviewed by Malcolm Page

David Mercer, "HUGGY BEAR" AND OTHER PLAYS, reviewed by Malcolm Page
The Anatomy of the Gag
Authors: Havel Vaclav
Published: April 2013

Crying over the death of one's wife does not constitute a gag. Mixing a gin-fizz for oneself is also not a gag. However, when Chaplin receives news that his wife has died, turns away from us shaking with grief, and then, as he slowly turns back towards us, we discover that he was not shaking with grief but rather shaking a cocktail shaker -that is a gag.
Pirandello and the Waiting Stage of the Absurd (With Some Observations on a New "Critical Language")
Authors: Paolucci Anne
Published: April 2013

In his Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus defines the feeling that in our time has replaced the security of a "world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty," as the result of "the divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting." Lifted from his familiar moorings, "man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile ...." This existential condition is what "truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity." Almost four decades have gone by since Camus wrote these words; literature has exploded many myths and has found new fertile ground since his time; and it is hardly surprising that French playwrights should have proved the most consistent in exploring what Camus had recognized as the prevailing mood of our century. Theater of the Absurd owes a great deal to Camus; but the man who restructured the modern stage for a corrosive scrutiny of a world in which we are no longer at home and who provided the sustained dramatic energy for the task was Pirandello. It was Pirandello who first shifted the dramatic sights to the fragmented internal world of self, forging a new language for the purpose, a new stage. Without him, Theater of the Absurd might not have corne into being; certainly it would have taken a very different direction. His influence on Sartre, Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Albee, Wilder, Gelber, Anouilh, Giraudoux, O'Neill, and Camus himself makes him without a doubt "the most seminal dramatist of our time."
Peter Handke: The Staging of Language
Authors: Nagele Rainer
Published: April 2013

Paradoxical as it might seem on first glance , experimental literature reached a flourishing phase in the Federal Republic during the late sixties at a time of intensive politicalization and questioning ofliterature. It moved from a marginal position during the fifties and early sixties towards more publicity and attention. Through authors like Hans Carl Artmann, Ernst Jandl and Peter Handke, it even gained a certain popularity. As the three names indicate , however, this was mainly the achievement of Austrian authors, and among them Peter Handke soon became the most influential and widely read not only in the German-speaking countries but also beyond their borders. Indeed, his texts offer paradigms by which to study the possibilities and problems, functions and pretensions of experimental literature in the era of the neo-avantgarde. In the following, I shall attempt to develop some aspects of this problematic on the basis of Handke's dramatic and theatrical texts.
The Emancipation of Dance: Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theatre
Authors: Servos Norbert
Published: April 2013

When Pina Bausch took over the direction of the Wuppertal Dance Theatre in the 1973/74 season , she introduced a caesura in the stagnating development of the German ballet scene. Her works moved more and more away from the perception of dance held by classical ballet, and from modem dance; they created a mixed form composed of modes of genuine dance and theatre, modes that were given a new use under the term "dance theatre." In this regard, the production of the Wuppertal Dance Theatre cannot be seen in isolation as an aesthetically avant-garde phenomenon. Its historical beginnings reach back to the development of German expressive dance in the 1920' S and '30'S. It is in this tradition that Pina Bausch, with her training at the Folkwang Institute in Essen, should be regarded. Other factors also enter in the discussion: demands for an organic code of movement, for mimetically stated expression in the sense of the Expressionist expressive dance movement, as opposed to the ideal of autonomous technique in classical ballet; and the impulses of surrealism. Different developments in the theatre recently, by Bob Wilson, for instance, or by Dario Fo or Heiner Muller, also shape dance. It is a question of new didactics based on Brecht. The motto "Theatre of Experience" ("Theater der Erfahrung") emphasizes the way in which the works of the Wuppertal Dance Theatre are to be regarded. This in turn determines the emancipatory significance of Pina Bausch for the whole artistic genre: emancipation of dance to its own modes.
"Acting it out": Sam Shepard's Action
Authors: McCarthy Gerry
Published: April 2013

Sam Shepard has made it clear that he writes in terms of images. He does not conceive plays as narratives, still less as statements or expressions of ideas. In writing he follows the progress of a visualisation. He speaks of "taking notes ... on an event that's happening somewhere inside me." He disclaims any sort of hallucinatory effect but speaks instead of a relationship between imagination and craft. He follows the image and controls it.
Suggestions about the Social Origins of Semiotic Practice in the Theater, with the Example of Alphonse Daudet's Arlésienne
Authors: Hays Michael
Published: April 2013

It should by now be obvious how much semiotics can contribute to our understanding of the structure and function of the theater. We have theoretical models which describe the relationship between the author's text and the signifying systems of the performance; the interplay between the text, the director's interpretation and the performance, and the system of signification which operates between the stage and the house. Generally these models are no longer based on the early and faulty assumption that language is the primary modeling system for the theatrical event; but it seems to me that they are all nonetheless incomplete to the degree that they assume a simple, straight-line transfer of information from the sender/encoder to the receiver/decoder.
Creativity and Commitment in Trevor Griffiths's Comedians
Authors: Quigley Austin
Published: April 2013

Trevor Griffiths began writing plays in the mid nineteen-sixties, had a play performed for the first time on stage in 1969, and became a full-time writer in 1972. He lost the first three plays he wrote, but does recall their general concerns: “one about the army, one about a homosexual, one about me and our kid.” A fourth play, Love Maniac, “about a guy who really tries to love kids in the teaching of them ... ,” was written for television in 1967, but was performed, instead, on radio. His fifth play, The Wages of Thin, staged in Manchester in 1969, was set in a public lavatory, partly as a result of a challenge Griffiths offered himself to see whether he could, indeed, write a play set in such a location. Subsequent plays for the theatre, television, and radio (The Big House [1969] , Occupations [1970], Apricots [197[]' Thermidor [1971], Sam Sam [1972], The Party [1973], All Good Men [1974], Absolute Beginners [1974], Comedians [1975] , Through the Night [1975])3 have established Griffiths's reputation as an important playwright. The degree and nature of that importance remain, at this point, a matter for conjecture and debate.
Common Carrier: Performance by Artists
Authors: Monk Philip
Published: April 2013

Performance is Dot a twentieth-century history that can be elaborated, but a development from two specific moments of art and dance in the early '60s and '10S. Rather than rush to provide a theoretical base or historical context for a phenomenon that is no one thing, this paper examines one particular peIfonnance by a dancer/choreographer turned performance artist.
The Liberated Performance
Authors: Dort Bernard
Published: April 2013

The status of the theatre is fraught with contradiction. Obvious though it may be, we tend to lose sight of that fact. The theatre is based on "mimesis"; out of action it creates an illusion and also occasionally it transforms illusion into action. Its operation is thus governed by a major contradiction: that between text and performance. By definition the text is lasting and can be read or rehearsed any number of times: it tells a story. The performance, on the other hand, is transitory, and while reproducing the text, can never itself be repeated exactly: it portrays. The collusion between text and performance, which is the essence of the theatre, is therefore to some degree an unnatural alliance and is arrived at only through compromise and an uneasy balance of power. In some cases it is the performance which is subordinated to the text. This is true of one particular tradition in the Western world , but it is after all a fairly recent tradition, dating back only to about the seventeenth century, and certainly it does not apply to all forms of theatre. In fact the so-called popular forms of entertainment, from farces to variety shows, are unaware of it. In other cases - and much more frequently - the text is subordinate to the staged production. This is particularly true of all non-European theatre.
Genet's The Balcony: A 1981 Perspective on a 1979/80 Production
Authors: Schechner Richard
Published: April 2013

The poison of the commercial theatre has so soaked into our ways of thinking about theatre that even in experimental work a production is regarded as a success or a failure. Either the show makes it at the box office, with critics, by word of mouth, or it is sent away defeated. "Forget about it," is the sign, "and go on to the next thing ." This is a stupid way of advancing theatrical thought: for why can't a work in the theatre be neither a success nor a failure but a step along the way, an event that yields some interesting data? In other words, though values of entertainment are truly important in the theatre, they are not the only values. And those of us devoted to experimentation in the theatre need to be particularly rigorous in separating out from each of our works what is useful, regardless of the overall "success" of the project.
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. The checklist is divided as follows:
Parody Play in Pinter
Authors: Diamond Elin
Published: April 2013

"Parody," Eric Bentley has said, "is more important to modern than to any previous school of comedy.'" Although Pinter's first critics felt his comic edge, no one before Andrew Kennedy (Six Dramatists in Search of a Language)' discussed his talents for parody. Perhaps early emphasis on Pinter's originality seemed inconsistent with a form that places a writer in direct communication with predecessors and peers. Perhaps Pinter's own insistence on the spontaneity of his creative process (" ... I write in a very high state of excitement and frustration. I follow what I see on the paper in front of me — one sentence after another"') precluded, or seemed to preclude, the idea of his using other literary and theatrical styles as targets. Pinter once declared: "I'm not interested in the general context of the theatre."
Jean Tardieu and Comedy: So Frolic Music Wards Off the Gathering Dark
Authors: Duckworth Colin
Published: April 2013

A glance at a bibliography of critical works devoted to Jean Tardieu would not allow one to guess that he is graced with an everpresent sense of humour and a comic touch that constantly erodes despair and gloom. The four monographs, fourteen theses and fifty—five articles — plus the ultinnate accolade for a French writer, a Cerisy colloquium — bring out many different qualities of his writing, certainly: the lyrical poet, the avant—garde experimenter, the verbal magician, the synaesthetic transposer of music and painting into words, the creator of a strange world full of anguish and menaCe ... but a comic touch? The most recent major study of his drama, Paul Vernois's La dramaturgie poetique de Jean Tardieu, is profoundly sympathetic, sensitive, and impeccably analytical, but makes only the briefest allusion to comedy or humour. One of the reasons for this omission may be that a good deal of the comedy in Tardieu's plays is physical, gestural, and appears only in perfonnance (this is a quality his plays share with Beckett's). In this article, therefore, I shall concentrate on Tardieu plays which I have directed; I can vouch for their comic qualities on the basis of audience reactions.
Richard Foreman: Comedy Inside Out
Authors: Pasquier Marie-Claire
Published: April 2013

Why bring Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre into an issue of Modern Drama which centers on modem comedy? My immediate response and bold answer will be: because he is a great comic writer. Does that mean that his plays are "comedies," really, that they can be made to fit into the established canon? One could argue that, when they were first produced, neither La Cantatrice chauve nor En Attendant Gadot, to take two "classic" examples. qualified as "comedies." Yet both plays came to be recognized unmistakably as transgressive, innovative forms of modern comedy. This is one problem faced by the innovative artist: either the audience rejects him, failing to see what sense he makes, or it is only too willing to tailor him into an acceptable shape so that he can figure in the honors list of the great artists of all times. And the critic faces the well-known dilemma of wanting to discover or herald originality and, in doing so, contributing to its becoming accepted, labeled, consumable. Susan Sontag analyzed "Camp" effectively, but by exposing its strategies, she also hastened the end of "Camp" as a collective mode of resistance.
Bernard Shaw's "Unreasonable Man"
Authors: Brown Barbara
Published: April 2013

Although this quotation contains more than a hint of Shaw's talking for effect, it also prefaces the dramatist's exhibition of the qualities of this "unreasonable man," qualities which would enable him to effect social progress. Moreover, although there has been abundant discussion of Shaw's concern with the problems of his society, the definition of the Unreasonable Man, an examination of his qualities, has not been attempted. It is illuminating to define the major qualities Shaw evidently had in mind and to illustrate each from a variety of characters in the plays.
Comedy of Ambush: Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing
Authors: Zeifman Hersh
Published: April 2013

When the curtain rises on The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard's most recent comedy, we see a solitary figure, Max, seated in his living-room; "[he] is using a pack of playing cards to build a pyramidical, tiered viaduct on the coffee table in front of him. '" Suddenly we hear the off-stage front door being opened; Max calls out "Don't slam - " (p. 9), but before he can finish his sentence, the door slams and his viaduct of cards collapses. The door-slammer is his wife, Charlotte, who pops briefly into the room before returning to the hall to remove her topcoat. Charlotte has just come back from a business trip to Switzerlandor so she claims; the problem is that, during her absence, Max has ransacked her private belongings and discovered her passport in her recipe drawer.
The Classical Tradition in Contemporary Quebecois Theatre: Patterns of Ambivalence
Authors: Usmiani Renate
Published: April 2013

In its oft-repeated attempt to achieve both "identity" and "liberation," the quebecois theatre of the sixties and seventies has turned aggressively, vociferously anti-classical. Although definitions vary as to what exactly constitutes the "classical tradition," and its ever-lurking threat of colonial dependency, one might state in general terms that the anti-classical rebellion is directed , first and foremost, at the French classics, immediate roots of the French Canadian cultural colonial tradition; by extension, it includes the entire tradition of "classical" Western theatre, from the Greeks to the twentieth century, as well as the contemporary "Establishment" theatre.
Ethics at the Crossroads: The Czech "Dissident Writer" as Dramatic Character
Authors: Goetz-Stankiewicz Marketa
Published: April 2013

In a survey of contemporary national literatures it seems only sensible to speak of a "Czech literature," as well as of "Czech drama." After all, Czech writers have lately been making their marks with increasing clarity on the international literary scene. Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting has reached the best-seller list in the United States; Vaclav Havel's and Pavel Kohout's plays are performed in many countries and languages; Josef Skvorecky has received the prestigious Neustadt Prize; Ludvik Vaculik publishes essays in the New York Review; Ivan Klima's plays are performed in Canada; Jiti Grusa's prose attracts international praise. If we consider the biographies of the writers, however, we find that speaking of a "Czech literature," though true in one way, misleads in another.
Book Reviews
Authors: Adler Thomas , Manheim Michael , Dukore Bernard , Gianakris  , Diamond Eun , Harrop John , Nagy Moses , Kareda Urjo , Kirk Irina
Published: April 2013

C. W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume One, 1900-1940, reviewed by Thomas P. Adler

Normand Berlin, Eugene O'Neill, reviewed by Michael Manheim

Kristin Morrison, Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, reviewed by Bernard F. Dukore

Jim Hunter, Tom Stoppard's Plays, reviewed by C.J. Gianakaris

Michelene Wandor, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics, reviewed by Eun Diamond

Peter Davison, Cotemporary Drama and the Popular Dramatic Tradition in England, reviewed by John Harrop

Bettina L. Knapp, Paul Claudel, reviewed by Moses M. Nagy

Robert Wallace And Cynthia Zimmerman, eds., The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights, reviewed by Urjo Kareda

Vera Gottlieb, Chekhov and the Vaudeville: A Study of Chekhov' s One-Act Plays, reviewed by Irina Kirk
Contexts for Vatzlav: Mrozek and the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Gerould Daniel
Published: April 2013

During the twenty-five years that Slawomir Mrozek has been writing for the theatre, two distinguishing marks of his work have been a preference for parable forms and an obsession with dialectical polarities of nature and culture, instinct and reason, primitivism and civilization, experience and theory. Now these are characteristics typical of many French writers in the Age of Enlightenment, but Mrozek's affinity for eighteenth-century thought and literature might pass unnoticed if it were not for Vatzlav, a play that is the dramatic equivalent of a conte philosophique, such as Candide, and that was given an eighteenth-century staging in its only Polish production.
Feasts in Time of the Plague: Polish Theatre and Drama, Post–Solidarity
Authors: Czerwinski
Published: April 2013

The classics are back and East European theatres are feasting on them. It is that time again when the winds of resistance die down and the ominous calm spreads across the theatre community. It has happened before, each time signaled by the censorship of Adam Mickiewicz's Dziady (Forefather's Eve), a nineteenth–century classic that straightforwardly excoriates the old Russian regime. Unfortunately, things have not changed much and Mickiewicz's diatribes against the Russians translate fortuitously into criticism of the Soviets. The present state of theatrical ennui in Poland, however, was precipitated not by Mickiewicz's poetic abuse, but rather by General Jaruzelski' s prosaic convening of ZOMO — the Polish equivalent of Hell's Angels. Polish actors, directors and producers responded with their own convocation — a total boycott of television (one channel continues to drone on, attempting to give a semblance of normality to a catastrophic cultural situation).
High Points of Theatre in the First Czechoslovak Republic
Authors: Burian Jarka
Published: April 2013

In the 1960s Czech theatre achieved international recognition through the work of such major artists as directors Otomar Krejca and Alfred Radok, scenographer Josef Svoboda, and playwright Vaclav Havel, to name only those in the vanguard of an extensive artistic movement. Often ignored, however, was the antecedent of that creative surge in the 1960s, the rich period of Czech theatre that dated back to the nineteenth century and reached a first major crest in the 1920S and 1930S as if in response to the creation of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia after World War I.

Theatre in the First Republic had great vitality and great variety: the vitality due in large part to the enormous release of spirit accompanying the creation of an independent republic after several centuries of alien citizenship within the Hapsburg Empire; and the variety to Czechoslovakia's central location between east and west, which facilitated its access to the theatrical avant-garde of France, Germany, and the Soviet Union, and to such vital stimuli as American jazz and film.
Book Reviews
Authors: Pentzell Raymond , Daubenas Jean , Anderson Michael , Charney Maurice , Lamont Rosette , Carlson Harry , Hubbs Clayton , Bennett Benjamin , Todras Arthur , Jackson Esther , Mcellan Samuel
Published: April 2013

John Lahr, Coward the Playwright, reviewed by Raymond J. Pentzell

Susan Rusinko, . Terence Rattigan, reviewed by Jean Daubenas

Frances Gray, John Arden, reviewed by Michael Anderson

C.W.E. Bigsby, Joe Orton, reviewed by Maurice Charney

Robert Champigny, Sartre and Drama, reviewed by Rosette C. Lamont

Evert Sprinchorn, Strindberg as Dramatist, reviewed by Harry G. Carlson

Richard Peace, Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays, reviewed by Clayton A. Hubbs

Ronald Speirs, Brecht's Early Plays, reviewed by Benjamin Bennett

Tony Butiitta And Barry Witham, Uncle Sam Presents: A Memoir of the Federal Theatre 1935-1939, reviewed by Arthur Todras

Thomas H. Pauly, An American Odyssey: Elia Kazan and American Culture, reviewed by Arthur Todras

R.B. Parker, ed., The Glass Menagerie: A Collection of Critical Essays, reviewed by Esther M . Jackson

Errol Durbach, "Ibsen the Romantic": Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays, reviewed by Samuel G. Mclellan
The Narrow Escape in The Lady's Not for Burning
Authors: Davis Mary Ann
Published: April 2013

Near the end of his brief and tantalizing essay on comedy, Christopher Fry notes that in the twentieth century, "literature has been thought unrealistic which did not mark and remark our poverty and doom.” The attitude he distinguishes here is, of course, the characteristic modem malaise, an attitude which has carried over into theories of comedy as well —Louis Kronenberger's argument, for instance, that comedy is pessimistic. To Fry, however, comedy rather offers an alternative to the bleakness of the modem vision; indeed, the most compelling function of comedy is to present such an alternative: "Joy (of a kind) has been all on the devil' s side, and one of the necessities of our time is to redeem it" (p. 17).
Ben Travers and the Aldwych Farces
Authors: Smith Leslie
Published: April 2013

Critics and writers have generally held farce in low esteem: for example, L.J. Potts describes it as "comedy with the meaning left out"; Allardyce Nicoll regards "gross and improbable characterisation" as symptomatic of it; and Cleanth Brooks and Robert B. Heilman make these astonishing assertions in their drama textbook: "the situations in farce do not mean anything: ... [F]arce is by its own nature one-dimensional. ... Any farce ... fails, by being fundamentally off-center, to challenge greatness or even seriousness." More recent studies, both of the genre itself (Jessica M. Davis's Farce) and of individual practitioners (C.W.E. Bigsby's Joe Orton5 ) have begun to redress the balance, and some writers on contemporary drama (Katharine J. Worth's Revolutions in Modern English Drama) show a lively appreciation of farce's potential. Yet critical discussion still tends to ring an apologetic note. When Jessica M. Davis takes an O.E.D. definition as her starting-point and expands it herself, she does not seem to notice that the resulting description neglects the genre's capacities for serious import, subtlety, and laughter that repays analysis.
The Fascination of Fascism: The Plays of Stephen Poliakoff
Authors: Peacock D. Keith
Published: April 2013

Born in 1952, Stephen Poliakoff has already established for himself an enviable reputation as a dramatist. He showed early promise. His first professionally produced play, Day With My Sister, was written while he was still at Westminster School and presented at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 1971 Five years and seven plays later, 1976 saw the transfer to the West End of his play City Sugar; its companion-piece, Hitting Town, televised by Thames Television; an award as the Evening Standard's "Most Promising Playwright"; and appointment as "Writer in Residence" at the National Theatre. The Company produced Strawberry Fields in 1977, and Britain's other prestigious "national" theatre company, the Royal Shakespeare, presented Shout Across the River in the following year. Poliakoff's most recent success has been in the medium of television drama where his screen-play Caught on a Train won the 1981 BAFTA award for the Best Single Play, as well as the Television Critics' Best Play Award, and was B.B.C. Television's entry for the Prix Italia.
Mythic Levels in Shepard's True West
Authors: Orbison Tucker
Published: April 2013

Sam Shepard is gradually becoming recognized as one of America's foremost playwrights. An indication of his dramatic power is his continuing ability to create mythic meanings on several simultaneous levels. Analysis of the mythic levels in True West, for example, demonstrates that even though, as most critics realize, Shepard has moved from a relatively mysterious, mythic, surreal theatre to a more realistic and conventional one, he continues to draw on the resources of myth. Moreover, this investigation may put to rest the canard that, compared to the early, the later Shepard is flatter, less complex, less exciting. Ruby Cohn has rightly pointed to the recent tendency to oversimplify Shepard's plays by reducing them to themes. Reviews of True West, for example, tend to focus on themes of sibling rivalry or role reversal to the exclusion of other possibilities. To be sure, Shepard said in a 1974 interview, "I'd like to try a whole different way of writing now, which is very stark and not so flashy and not full of a lot of mythic figures and everything, and try to scrape it down to the bone as much as possible." We should not conclude, however, that mythic elements have dropped out of his recent plays. Though perhaps less obvious in True West than in his earlier work, the myths are there, sometimes helping to create conscious thematic material on what might be called the sociohistorical and artistic levels, always working on a third, a psychological level.
A Doll's House Revisited
Authors: Quigley Austin
Published: April 2013

Much has been written about Nora's slamming shut the door at the end of A Doll's House. It seems to summarize in a single action Nora's rejection of her husband, her children, her home, and her social position, along with the society that had taught her how to need such things. As Meyer puts it: "the terrible offstage slamming of that front door which brings down the curtain resounded through more apartments than Torvald Helmer's. No play had ever before contributed so momentously to the social debate, or been so widely and furiously discussed among people who were not normally interested in theatrical or even artistic matters." Lucas, in the same vein, remarks that "that door slammed by Nora shook Europe." And contemporary discussion of Nora's dramatic exit was so extensive and so heated that stories circulated about "certain Scandinavian families [who] even went so far as to add to their cards of invitation to evening parties the request: 'Please do not discuss the Doll's House. " But discussion of the play continues now as it continued then, with that slammed door operating as the persistent catalyst for repeated debates between Nora's defenders and detractors.
A "Laingian" Reading of Pirandello's Henry IV
Authors: Patterson Michael
Published: April 2013

It is not difficult to recognize that in the figure of the Doctor in Henry IV Pirandello is satirizing the mechanistic attitudes of many psychiatrists of his day — attitudes largely derived from a crude application of Freudian theory: that an instantaneous psychic cure might be effected by a dramatic reliving of a traumatic experience. Admittedly, Pirandello is too skilled a playwright to reduce the Doctor to a mere satirical figure: though essentially mechanistic in his perception of the human mind, the Doctor has a playful, impish quality. After all, his forename is Dionisio, and his introductory stage direction refers to his "impudent, rubicund satyr's face" He has indeed something of the anarchic quality of the traditional "mad scientist," more a Frankenstein than his robot. Nevertheless, like his namesake in the commedia dell' arte, the Doctor is learned but stupid; he explains by mystifying, using bombastic jargon like "a certain analogical elasticity, absolutely characteristic of systematised madness". While purporting concern for his "patient," he treats him like a machine: "We can hope to restore him to his senses, like a watch which has stopped at a certain time", and he subjects him to a terrible shock — an only slightly more sophisticated version of electroconvulsive therapy.
Book Reviews
Authors: Oliver Roger
Published: April 2013

Susan Bassnett-Mcguire, Luigi Pirandello, reviewed by Luigi Pirandello
The Politics of the Earlier Arden
Authors: Cohen Michael
Published: April 2013

The usual perception of John Arden's career as a dramatist is that it has undergone a radical change, commonly described in such terms as "from liberal to Marxist" or "from detachment to anger," a trajectory which is in marked contrast to the paths of his fellow playwrights of the 1950s. But in recent years there has been an increasing tendency in left-wing British theatrical circles, and even sometimes on the part of Arden himself, to minimize the differences between the earlier and later works. In 1977, Arden described Serjeant Musgrave's Dance as the story of "an old soldier who, sickened of the oppressive role of the Army in the colonies, deserts, and attempts to strike a blow against his masters: by his inability to understand the political implications of the labour movement (the striking pitmen), he fails, and is executed.” This is a very simplified description of one of the most ambiguous and widely debated plays of its period. The exclusively political analysis is at odds with the predominantly moral and pacifist tone of Arden's 1960 preface to the published text.
Book Reviews
Authors: Quigley Austine , Simard Rodney , Brown Barbara , Cahn Victor , Mitchell Breon , Martin Robert , Dukore Bernard
Published: April 2013

Simon Trussler ed., New Theatre Voices of the Seventies: Sixteen Interviews , reviewed by Austin E. Quigley

Bonnie Marranca, Theatre writings, reviewed by Rodney Simard

David Thomas, Henrik Ibsen, reviewed by Charles Leland

Warren Sylvester Smith, Bishop of Everywhere: Bernard Shaw and the Life Force, reviewed by Barbara B. Brown

Thomas Whitaker, Tom Stoppard, reviewed by Victor L. Cahn

Charles R, Lyons, Samuel Beckett, reviewed by Breon Mitchell

Arthur Miller, Salesman In Beijing, reviewed by Robert A. Martin

A.M. Gibbs, The Art and Mind of Shaw, reviewed by Bernard F. Dukore
To Damascus I: Reading the Set
Authors: Sandler Natalie
Published: April 2013

When Strindberg completed To Damascus I in 1898, he had already written two other journey plays, Lucky Peter's Journey and The Keys to Heaven. Whereas both treated religious themes, To Damascus I was the first of Strindberg's dramas to link self-recognition with the quest for God. The pilgrimage of the Stranger, or literally of the Unknown One, is toward recognition of God and self, and is modeled after the journey of Saul, a journey which led to his conversion . In the play, the Stranger's conversion, or near conversion, takes place through interaction with the landscape and important characters, male doubles of himself, all reflections of his guilt and preoccupations. The emphasis is on recognition. If one sees the resemblance between landscape and self, one is brought face to face with painful aspects ordinarily hidden , and forced to see clearly as in an undistorted mirror. Since spiritual and psychological change is brought about by seeing, the decor is crucial.
Elizabeth Robins and the 1891 Production of Hedda Gabler
Authors: Gates Joanne
Published: April 2013

On 1 June 1891, when the controversy and success of the Elizabeth Robins production of Hedda Gabler had subsided after the longest run to date of any Ibsen play in London, publisher William Heinemann reprinted a deluxe "Large Paper" edition of the English translation that he had introduced in January. Ostensibly, this edition preserved the version of the playas it had been performed in April and May at the Vaudeville Theatre. Translator Edmund Gosse added an introduction which praised the London performers and stressed that "the version here printed is that which they used," except that, "for working purposes, and to avoid certain crudities of the original, they made a few highly judicious alterations." The large paper edition of the play testified to the astounding new popularity of Ibsen's drama. And, as Gosse most elaborately pointed out, the success of the production was due primarily to the acting talent of Elizabeth Robins.
Theatre at the Limit: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Authors: Perletie John
Published: April 2013

The last act of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead presents its audience with an exceptionally peculiar incident which has, to my knowledge, elicited no comment from critics of the play. Yet the text repeats the incident, presenting it not once but twice, and not merely as a simple repetition but as a repetition with a difference, taking the form of a chiastic inversion. On a ship bearing Hamlet to England, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's efforts to decipher their role in the play's events and the implications of this trip for their future degenerate into ' another inscrutable dead end. Exasperated and depressed, Rosencrantz finally professes himself unable to believe in England.
Book Reviews
Authors: Bryer Jackson , Ley Ralph
Published: April 2013

Horst Frenz and Susan Tuck ed., Eugene O'Neill's Critics: Voices From Abroad, reviewed by Jackson R. Bryer

John Willett, Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches, reviewed by Ralph Ley

John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett eds., Beyond Brecht, reviewed by Ralph Ley
Laocoön at the Frontier, or The Limit of Limits
Authors: Gerould Daniel
Published: April 2013

Almost all the classical myths — the House of Atreus, Return of Odysseus, Medea, Oedipus — providing impetus for modern versions and offshoots have been transmitted in literary form as dramatic or epic poetry. An interesting exception is the Laocoön, which exists spatially as something seen — a sculptural myth less remembered for its narrative content than for the immediacy of a single visual anecdote.
Bond, Shakespeare, and the Absurd
Authors: Bulman James
Published: April 2013

Edward Bond thinks that playwrights must be morally responsible to their societies. Their plays ought not only to analyze history — how societies became what they are — but also to suggest ways in which societies can better themselves. Too often, he believes, theater is immoral. It encourages playwrights who have no political awareness; it fosters uncritical attitudes toward plays that have become classics. Such plays, he argues, may have been moral enough in their days. But they have outlived their historical moments and entered the realm of myth; and because myth codifies and perpetuates the values of the old order, it is dangerous. Bond wants his audiences to "escape from a mythology of the past, which often lives on as the culture of the present,” and thus be free to correct injustices: theater therefore must commit itself to political reform if it is to be moral instead of frivolous. Its aesthetic cannot be divorced from that commitment.