bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Strindberg's To Damascus: Archetypal Autobiography
Authors: Gillespie Diane Filby
Published: April 2013

In August Strindberg's last play, The Great Highway, the Hunter, an architect, encourages the Woman to remember his buildings after his death but to forget him. Such a statement seems inconsistent with Strindberg's own practice as a writer, particularly with his many frankly autobiographical prose works. In a letter to his sister dated 13 June 1882, he wrote: "creating literature does not mean inventing, finding what has never existed; literary creation means relating what one has lived. The writer's art consists in arranging his memories, impressions and experiences.” The artist, in other words, cannot be totally forgotten. The significant word in Strindberg's remark, however, is "arranging." Memories, impressions, and experiences. are only the available materials out of which the architect designs his buildings. Not the materials themselves, but the ways they are used are most important. Possibly Strindberg's autobiographical prose works are his primary attempts to cope with personal experiences and psychological problems, while the plays, with their visual and aural dimensions, are the more consciously aesthetic arrangements or refinements of the same materials.
Natasha Ivanovna, the Lonely Bourgeoise
Authors: Majdalany Marina
Published: April 2013

Whilst all commentators of Chekhov's play dwell at length upon the aesthetic longings of the three sisters, and tenderly evoke their sensitivity bruised by frustration , no comparable sympathy is extended to Natasha, their brother's young wife. She is indeed as vain, selfish and even ruthless as she has been categorized; but what all these attributions have crowded out is the fact that first and foremost she is a disoriented petite bourgeoise, socially insecure and lonely in an alien and hostile environment.

To maintain objectivity, the critic must resist the temptation to redress the balance by tilting it in Natasha's favour. She is no more a flawless heroine than any of her sisters-in-law, but she deserves a fair appraisal. Natasha should be examined as an individual with feelings and attitudes which , although they may lack subtlety and charm, still have a right to our understanding and a claim on our compassion. Yet, what invariably seems to happen is that she is criticized as the sisters' antagonist, who she is in a sense, and it is not taken into account that the source of the conflict resides in a personal and social incompatibility for which all four women must share equal responsibility.
A Note on O'Neill, Nietzsche, and Naturalism: Long Day's Journey into Night in European Perspective
Authors: Grimm Reinhold
Published: April 2013

Toward the end of O'Neill's autobiographical play, when everything is being confessed and revealed , the two names Nietzsche and Ibsen appear side by side. This is the decisive cue for a historical assessment of Long Day's Journey into Night , for situating it in the development of modem drama and, specifically, tragedy. If we can agree that, on the one hand , Henrik Ibsen is the most important playwright of Naturalism, which strove to endow even "the most ignoble, debased lives" with a glimpse of tragic dignity , and that, on the other hand, Friedrich Nietzsche is the most important modem philosopher who propounded a concept of tragedy, "in as near the Greek sense as one can grasp it"; and if we can further agree that Nietzsche and Naturalism, around 1870, together mark the beginnings of modem Western drama at large: then O'Neill's play of 1940 constitutes a most remarkable, in fact, a unique acceptance and combination as well as rejection and revaluation of those two determining forces and their overpowering heritage.
The Elephant Man as Dramatic Parable
Authors: Larson Janet
Published: April 2013

In 1977, Foco Novo, a radical fringe group named after a play by Bernard Pomerance about South American guerrillas, first produced The Elephant Mall in England; early in 1979, the play opened in mid Manhattan at St. Peter's Lutheran Church, a worship space built into the Citicorp Center; a few months later, the production was moved to a Victorian theater on Broadway, where it has enjoyed a long run. This brief production history suggests the broad span of reference in this most recent Pomerance play: beginning in radical politics, it ends in metaphysics . and in between. it directs questions of aesthetics and ethics against show business, theatrical illusion, and all kinds of imitative performance from language learning to orthodox religious discipline and the imitation of Christ.
Beckett's Actor
Authors: Worthen William
Published: April 2013

In performance, Beckett's drama makes extensive demands of the actor, and of the spectator as well. Emptied of psychological motivation, of setting, of spectacle, and often apparently of action, Beckett's plays challenge actors and• audiences to create theater from the tatters of the traditional stage. From this extreme, as Jonas Barish has noted, Beckett's theater seems so markedly "eviscerated of everything the world has always thought of as theater," that it sometimes appears designed to frustrate theatrical enjoyment, to be calculatedly "antitheatrical" in attitude. And yet, in many respects Beckett's drama seems less to negate theater than to distill it. Although Beckett's plays eschew the allied diversions of the stage — no scene painters or fencing masters, please — they do so not to impress us with the poverty of the theater, but instead to rivet our attention to the theater's essential means: the actor. Beckett's drama scrupulously clarifies the actor's art, and substantially reconsiders the modem actor's complex enactment.
"Faint, though by no means invisible": A Commentary on Beckett's Footfalls
Authors: Simone R. Thomas
Published: April 2013

In June of 1976 I had the good fortune to see in London the Royal Court Theatre's premiere productions of Samuel Beckett's stage plays That Time and Footfalls. Although I had seen fine productions of Waiting for Godot , Happy Days, and Endgame, I was not prepared for the brilliant technical presentation of That Time, nor for the emotional impact of Footfalls with the gray intensity of Billie Whitelaw, for whom the play was written. The measured but iron pacing of Beckett's own direction helped to create a dramatic experience beyond any I had previously known in the theater. This strange, obsessive play of a woman pacing a gray path of light, talking with her mother, explaining her life through story and fitful movement, and then finally disappearing, created heart-stopping pity in me, and an inexplicable terror. I felt and continue to feel that Beckett has created a distilled but potent tragedy in Footfalls that is equal in resonance and power to Godot or Endgame. In this essay I would like to explain what seem to me the sources of power in this play and to claim for it a significant place in Beckett's career.
The Theatrics of Triangular Trysts, or Variations on a Form: Labiche, Vitrac, Beckett
Authors: Miller Judith
Published: April 2013

"Two's company. Three's a crowd!" As children we sling about that isolationist dictum meant to exclude an irksome third party from the bliss of coupledom. Sigmund Freud explains the libidinal why for: "Sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can be superfluous or disturbing." And yet, he warns: "Civilization [here we should perhaps read 'bourgeois society'] depends on relationships between a considerable number of individuals !" We human beings, then, are condemned to live a paradox. We base our society on that consecrated and tellingly designated twosome "Man and Wife." We even continue to write more about marriage than about any other subject — although, as Carolyn Heilbrun points out, it is "the getting out of" rather than "the getting into" which now takes thematic precedence? But we also seek to protect and promote that civilization of which the irksome third party is the most simple expression.
"Minting their Separate Wills": Tennessee Williams and Hart Crane
Authors: Debusscher Gilbert
Published: April 2013

Although unusually talkative and candid about his private life, Tennessee Williams was always comparatively reticent about his work. In fact he expressed strong feelings about the need for secrecy in order to protect "a thing that depends on seclusion till its completion for its safety.” Those who expected his Memoirs of I975 to shed light on his writing were therefore disappointed. However, he alluded repeatedly over the years to other writers who had deeply influenced him. When pressed for names he never failed to mention Hart Crane, D.H. Lawrence, and Anton Chekhov.
America as Junkshop: The Business Ethic in David Mamet's American Buffalo
Authors: Schlueter June , Forsyth Elizabeth
Published: April 2013

The America of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts is a spiritual wasteland, the suffering of its people chronicled in the doleful letters received by "Miss Lonelyhearts," the newspaper advice columnist. Psychologically exhausted by the pleas of his readers, Miss Lonelyhearts imagines himself gazing at "the paraphernalia of suffering" through a pawnshop window, seeing among its accumulated objects the remnants of America's broken dreams.

Some fifty years later, the secondhand shop reappears in David Mamet's American Buffalo, not as pawnshop, from which possessions may be redeemed, but as junkshop. In Mamet's play, the castoff objects of American life, including souvenirs from the "Century of Progress" exhibition at the Chicago World's Fair and a buffalo nickel, form the pile of cultural artifacts thatthe shop's proprietor, Don, peddles as junk. Within thejunkshop, Mamet's three petty criminals plan the robbery that symbolizes the corrupted, contemporary version of the American success myth. As plans for the heist continue, it becomes clear that for Mamet the decadence of the American dream is directly attributable to the dominance of the American business ethic.
Contradictions and Dualities in Artaud and Artaudian Theater: The Conquest of Mexico and the Conquest of Peru
Authors: Podol Peter
Published: April 2013

In her "Introduction" to his Selected Writings, Susan Sontag offers the following assessment of Antonin Artaud's influence on the theater: "Upon that art, theater, he has had an impact so profound that the course of all recent serious theater in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods — before Artaud and after Artaud. No one who works in the theater now is untouched by the impact of Artaud' s specific ideas about the actor's body and voice, the use of music, the role of the written text, the interplay between the space occupied by the spectacle and the audience's space." Despite the frequent difficulty of proving a direct influence, or establishing that an aesthetic or philosophical concept is truly original, Sontag's somewhat hyperbolic statement would probably not provoke any strenuous objections on the part of most critics of the modern theater. However, the contradictions, ambiguities and extravagances in Artaud's writings, as well as the whole mystique surrounding the "mad genius" posthumously converted into cult hero for our modern counterculture, do interject an element of dissonance and perhaps even doubt into the picture. It is therefore not entirely surprising that a noted Artaud scholar such as Naomi Greene should arrive at a very different conclusion from Sontag's.
Carr's Views on Art and Politics in Tom Stoppard's Travesties
Authors: Rod David
Published: April 2013

Most critical treatments of Tom Stoppard's Travesties have characterized the playas a debate about the proper relationship between art and politics. Critics have recognized that the three major historical figures in the play — James Joyce, Lenin, and Tristan Tzara — represent contrasting views on the issue, views that Stoppard juxtaposes with one another within the comic framework of the play. For the most part, critics have focused on the conflict between Joyce's and Lenin's positions; Tzara is generally acknowledged as a third party in the debate but not considered to be a serious contender.

The aesthetic—political views of Henry Carr, the protagonist of Travesties, are frequently ignored altogether. Yet the debate occurs, as the critics point out, within Carr's memory, and the play makes it clear that the events presented are highly colored by Carr's remembering them. Indeed, Carr's introductions of each of the other three participants in the debate emphasize their status as products of his memory.
Expressionism in the Contemporary Spanish Theatre
Authors: Zatlin-Boring Phyllis
Published: April 2013

Although expressionism as a theatre movement per se is primarily a phenomenon of the German stage, culminating in the 1920'S, expressionism continues to have an important impact on dramatic structure and technique. Spanish theatre especially makes widespread and innovative use of expressionism, both in the social/allegorical form most directly associated with the German movement and in the personal/stream-of-consciousness form associated with American theatre, notably Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The esperpento, or grotesque tragicomedy, of Ramon de Valle-lnchin in the 1920'S is closely related to German expressionism in time and intent. The contemporary Spanish avant-garde, in a theatre of social and political protest, tends to reflect the influence of Valle-Inclan in particular and expressionism in genera1. On the commercial stage, the dominant form of expressionism is the psychological with its projection of inner states of mind; it is found most frequently in the works of two of contemporary Spain's most important and innovative playwrights, Antonio Buero Vallejo and Jaime Salom.
Book Reviews
Authors: Reinert Otto , Sondrup Steven , Gerould Daniel , Parkin Andrew , Ritchie  , Zipes Jack , Arnold Herbert , Weals Gerald
Published: April 2013

John S. Chamberlain, Ibsen: The Open Vision, reviewed by Otto Reinert

Harry G. Carlson, Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth, reviewed by Steven P. Sondrup

Laurence Senellck ed., Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, reviewed by Daniel Gerould

Edward Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage, reviewed by Andrew Parkin

Paul Schmidt ed., Meyerhold at Work, reviewed by Andrew Parkin

Henry I. Schvey, Henry I. Schvey, reviewed by J.M. Ritchie

Michael Patterson, Peter Stein: Germany's Leading Theatre Director, reviewed by Jack Zipes

J.L. Styan, Max Reinhardt, reviewed by Herbert A. Arnold

Ruby Cohn, New American Dramatists: 1960-1980, reviewed by Gerald Weales
Vaclav Havel's Second Wind
Authors: Bradbrook
Published: April 2013

Sentenced to four-and-a-half-years' imprisonment in October 1979 for his work in Czechoslovakia as spokesman for Charter 77, in January 1983 Vaclav Havel developed viral pneumonia complicated by an abscess on the lung; he was sent first to Prague Pankrac prison hospital, then when his sentence was suspended, to Charles University Hospital. His first act was to appeal for his fellow prisoners, whom he named in an article recently printed in Ceske Slovo, newspaper of Czech exiles. From prison came "Reflections on the Theatre," printed in Index on Censorship, April 1983 (translated from the unofficial quarterly Kriticky Sbornik [Critical Review], No. 4/82).
The Pragmatics of Dialogue in the Theatre of St.I. Witkiewicz
Authors: Krysinski Wladimir
Published: April 2013

St.I. Witkiewicz's endeavour stems from a desire to remake theatre entirely in order to give it a radically new structure, that of "Pure Form," following the incentive of concrete music and abstract painting. Interpreting dialogue in a pragmatic perspective raises the question of communication between a metenunciator, Witkiewicz, theoretician and practitioner of theatre, and a commentator, an analyst, or ultimately a spectator or reader of his theatre; the latter cannot gain full access to Witkiewicz' s dramatic text without knowing the author's theory of Pure Form. Consequently, the problem of communication is the reader's and/or spectator's cognizance of a series of what I would call epistemological presuppositions. These structure the interdetermination of syntax, and the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of this
Ambiguity, Discontinuity and Overlapping in Peer Gynt
Authors: Benston Alice
Published: April 2013

"Peer, you're lying!" From this famous first line we are given a characterization that invites us to view the play's hero negatively. But the speaker is Aase, Peer's mother, and her love for him is obvious from this first scene. This double or ambivalent reaction has been mirrored in the critical tradition. As Bernard Shaw puts it, " ... Peer Gynt, selfish rascal as he is, is not unlovable." In explaining this ambivalence, Shaw notes Peer's affinity to Don Quixote. Their common error is the pursuit of beautiful, seductive "ideals." But even in their failure to recognize the "real," Shaw adds, one cannot "despise [them] or wish [them] to have been ... Philistine[s]."

Shaw's comparison of Peer to Don Quixote is continued by Brian Downs, whose overall distaste for Peer's character is expressed in his wonder that Peer had become "something in the nature of a national hero." Downs contents himself, finally, with the observation that comparable characters like "Don Quixote ... exhibit attributes by no means altogether consonant with perfection or palatable to the more discerning among their compatriots.” Peer Gynt, in his view, "is the tragedy of a man who, however much of amor he may have, lacks principle and ignores ideals."
The Spectator in Drama! Drama in the Spectator
Authors: Chaudhuri Una
Published: April 2013

The theoretical maneuver by which the reader came to occupy the space vacated by the disappearing author did not remain unquestioned for long. The reader — whether it be the "mock—reader," the "model reader," the "implied reader," the "super reader," or even the "real reader (me )" — could hardly withstand the pressure exerted by contemporary literary theory upon any construct in which meaning can be grounded (or, as Barthes says, "collected, united"). The "multiple writings" which Barthes found playing through and pulverizing the once closed, organic, stable, objective, autonomous text would hardly remain absent from the reader. They soon appeared, in the forms either of the institutional codes and conventions of semiotic theory (see Culler's "literary competence") or of "interpretive strategies," shared, cultivated and enjoined by the fact of one's membership in "interpretive communities." Barely installed as a literary fact, the autonomous reader was revealed as a critical fiction, the latest in a series that has included the autonomous author and the objective text. If the reader remains at all, it is as a psychologically unique individual (the actual person reading) imprinting private fantasies, desires and neuroses, in a radically personal way, upon the text. This reader is a construct of little theoretical use to literary study, though not without attraction to literary theologians desirous of justifying the existence of literature.
On the Structure of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus
Authors: Huber Werner , Zapf Hubert
Published: April 2013

On its first appearance, Peter Shaffer's play about the rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri met with rather mixed reactions from professional theatre critics. With theatre audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, however, Amadeus has been enjoying tremendous popularity. Its world premiere was given on November 2, 1979, in London's National Theatre, where it ran in repertory for eighteen months before the production was transferred to the West End in July 1981. After its American premiere in Washington, D.C., in November 1980, the play opened on Broadway in December of the same year, where it was greeted with enthusiasm similar to that of its later receptions in France, Austria and West Germany. The great number of awards Amadeus has earned itself and its author also make it "officially" the most successful (and best?) drama of recent years.
Equus: Shaffer, Nietzsche, and the Neuroses of Health
Authors: Walls Doyle
Published: April 2013

Peter Shaffer, like Nietzsche, is a student of psychology as well as culture, and he is very much interested in the idea of madness, certainly not in praising it — as one critic has suggested — but rather in illustrating dramatically a particular strain of madness: the madness personified in Equus by the psychiatrist Martin Dysart. Everyone familiar with Equus understands that Alan Strang is mad. The challenge of the play — to those among us who are "normal" and "sane" — is to see what may be our own madness, a modem malady which has become so commonplace that we may fail to recognize it.
The Image of Theater in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending
Authors: Wallace Jack
Published: April 2013

In Tennessee Williams's first major play, Battle of Angels (1940), a young vagabond poet named Valentine Xavier wanders into a small Southern town where his sympathy for dispossessed blacks and emotionally starved women gets him in trouble with the citizens. In the end he is framed for murder and lynched with a blowtorch. The play's symbolic system implies that the artist hero is a Christ figure destroyed by the cruelty and commercialism of modem America. Most critics agree with Nancy M. Tischler that Val is meant to be the "archetypal artist" and an "idealized self-portrait" of the playwright. In his preface to Orpheus Descending (1957), a later version of Battle of Angels, Williams encourages the autobiographical approach to Val's story.
Late Tennessee Williams
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2013

Sex, South, and violence brought Tennessee Williams to a Broadway which then allowed him no deviations. From A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) set in New Orleans to Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) set in Florida, Williams usually wrote true to type. Even though The Night of the Iguana (1961) garnered his fourth (and final) New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Williams was edged out for the Pulitzer Prize, a more responsive barometer to current climate. Night started his descent from popularity, as his Lord Byron had prophesied in Camino Real (1953): "There is a passion for declivity in this world!" New York reviewers are imbued with this passion, but even a serious critic in a serious journal took Williams's declivity as axiomatic: "What is the significance of the large body of work which Williams has contributed to our national literature, and why has his effectiveness as a playwright suffered a marked decline in the last two decades?" (my emphasis). The correct critical question seems to me: "Has Williams's effectiveness as a playwright suffered a recent decline?"
"The Will to Live": An Interview with Arthur Miller
Authors: Centola Steven
Published: April 2013

This interview, the transcript of a conversation I had with the playwright on June 25, 1982 at his Roxbury, Connecticut home, has been deliberately left in its colloquial form. I have tried to re-create as closely as possible the sound and spirit of our conversation in the hope of sharing with the reader the distinctive intonation, quick wit, and candor of Miller's responses.
Tadeusz Rozewicz's The Card Index: — A New Beginning for Polish Drama
Authors: Filipowicz Halin
Published: April 2013

The Card Index (Kartoteka) is the best known and most seminal of some fifteen full-length plays by Tadeusz Rozewicz, foremost Polish poet and dramatist who has achieved an unimpeded style of his own. Written in the late 1950s, when the arts in Eastern Europe were emerging from the dreary period of enforced socialist realism, The Card Index revolutionized Polish theatre by its radical concept of open dramaturgy, an approach which does not imitate or embellish life but creates a self-contained reality on stage. Using the formal principles of construction found in modem poetry, art, and music, Rozewicz gives his playa fluid dramatic form, one that is more open and loose than forms developed by the conventional, mimetic dramaturgy of realistic psychology and storytelling. Yet The Card Index never becomes an abstract construction in pure theatricality. The fragmentary, seemingly incoherent form of the play serves to express severe dislocations in postwar Polish society, which witnessed the Communist takeover, the subsequent Stalinist reign of terror, a collapse of the Soviet-backed regime, and the short-lived liberalization of the late 1950s. The form of The Card Index also reflects Rozewicz's view of malleable human nature in the world of instability and endless flux. No conventional realistic drama could capture those complex sociopolitical and moral issues as profoundly as The Card Index does by exclusively antimimetic means.
Using Words on the Stage: Shaw and Granville-Barker
Authors: Nickson Richard
Published: April 2013

This observation in his ABC of Reading was no doubt set down by Ezra Pound as not only elementary but incontrovertible. But that was five decades ago - decades that have generated in the West a spate of challenges to spoken language in the theatre. A mistrust of language most likely dates back to the time of its very invention, yet for 2500 years dramatists and actors have prevailingly employed words in a way that has made their predominance in drama traditional. But today, as we look about us in this or that city street or park or theatre, we are apt to find all manner of bristling experiments in nonverbal techniques. The spigot of dialogue is all but shut tight in many quarters, where the antitraditional and the random improvisational move in their mysterious ways their wonders to perform
Book Reviews
Authors: Hinden Michael , Ben-Zvi Linda , Paolucci Anne , Paolucci Anne , Taylor Thomas , Gale Steven , Kuzicka Danuta , Sandrow Nahma , Hiedemann Robert
Published: April 2013

Carol Rosen, Plays of Impasse: Contemporary Drama Set in Confining Institutions, reviewed by Michael Hinden

Robert Karoly, Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment, reviewed by Linda Ben-Zvi

Julian N. Wasserman, Joy L. Linsley And Jerome A. Kramer ed., Edward Albee: An Interview and Essays, reviewed by Anne Paolucci

Richard E. Amacher, Edward Albee, Revised Edition, reviewed by Anne Paolucci

Richard Schechner, The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance, reviewed by Thomas J. Taylor

Herbert Goldstone, Coping with Vulnerability: The Achievement of John Osborne, reviewed by Steven H. Gale

Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre , reviewed by Danuta Kuznicka

Ellen Schiff, From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama, reviewed by Nahma Sandrow

Kenneth S. White, Einstein and Modem French Drama: An Anthology, reviewed by Robert E. Hiedemann
After Magritte, After Carroll, After Wittgenstein: What Tom Stoppard's Tortoise Taught Us
Authors: Elam Keir
Published: April 2013

The noble tortoise occupies an important place in the history of philosophy, in the history of the moral fable, not to mention, naturally, the history of zoology in its testudinal branch. If it has yet to leave its claw print on the history of theatre (with episodic exceptions such as a couple of passing and not very flattering references in Shakespeare, or a burlesque reduction to its shell in Jonson), this might be put down to the animal's fabled slowness and timidity rather than to any innate lack of theatricality. Indeed there are signs, as we shall see, that the said chelonian beast may finally be clambering its comical reptilian way onto the boards.
Ghost Trio: Pinter's Family Voices
Authors: Zeifman Hersh
Published: April 2013

The first voice we hear in Harold Pinter's 1981 radio play, F amity Voices, is that of a young man, starting a new life "in this enormous city, all by myself," dutifully writing a letter home to his mother. Although lacking both salutation and signature, the words the voice speaks are obviously meant to be epistolary, as the close of his first communication clearly suggests: "And so I shall end this letter to you, my dear mother, with my love" (p. 69). The tone of his letters captures beautifully that uncertain mixture of bravado and fear, innocence and guile, characteristic of a young man gingerly testing the boundaries of a recently won independence. "At the moment I am dead drunk," he boasts early in his first letter, only to retreat uneasily a dozen lines later: "When I said I was drunk I was of course making a joke. / I bet you laughed. / Mother? / Did you get the joke? You know I never touch alcohol" (pp. 67-68). Quickly sketching in the contours of his new life, the son writes that he has rented a room in a house run by a charming landlady, and the bulk of his letters describe in detail his relationships, vacillating between the implicitly sexual and the bewilderingly mystifying, with the other occupants of the house, each relationship a little dagger designed to pierce his mother's heart.
The American Dream in American Gothic: The Plays of Sam Shepard and Adrienne Kennedy
Authors: Blau Herbert
Published: April 2013

If the drama in the text, as we are always told, is to be realized on the stage, even on the stage there is something unrealized in American drama. Whatever the cause in our disheartening theater, there is a certain improvidence in our social history. From his earliest plays to his last, it troubled the imagination of Eugene O'Neill, still by sheer ambition our greatest playwright. He put the case against America when he was canonized by Henry Luce on the cover of TIME, which — right after World War II, from which we emerged as a superpower — was announcing the imperium of the American dream. On the contrary, said O'Neill, this nation is the greatest failure because it has betrayed the greatest promise. He put the case against himself in the enormous pathos of Long Day's Journey Into Night, which almost transcends the limitations by the exhaustiveness of their confession, the obsessive massing of the desire to have it all out.
French Feminism and Theatre: An Introduction
Authors: Savona Jeannette Laillou
Published: April 2013

I want to outline briefly a conceptual framework for the two following articles: Helene Cixous's "Aller a la mer," and Josette Feral's "Writing and Displacement: Women in Theatre." Starting from these two texts, I shall also raise a few broader questions concerning a feminist criticism of drama.
Comic Textures and Female Communities 1937 and 1977: Clare Boothe and Wendy Wasserstein
Authors: Carlson Susan
Published: April 2013

Although comedy's Lysistratas and Rosalinds have prompted general critical agreement that comedy promotes sexual equality, the women in two twentieth- . century comedies by women suggest how easily such conclusions may be called into question. As they create all-female comic worlds, both Clare Boothe in The Women and Wendy Wasserstein in Uncommon Women and Others magnify some of the special dissonances which accompany the appearance of any woman in comedy. Neither Boothe's nor Wasserstein's is a major achievement, but as solid, successful plays, both tell us a great deal about the conventions and assumptions we depend on and respond to in all comedies. Specifically, the two plays disclose the kinds of female characters and communities comedy encourages or discourages.
Ibsen's Little Eyolf: Family Tragedy and Human Responsibility
Authors: Jacobs Barry
Published: April 2013

In the late autumn of 1894 Ibsen's British publisher, William Heinemann, permitted Henry James to read the English version of Little Eyolfact by act, as it became available from the translator. On November 22, after reading the fIrst two acts, James wrote an ecstatic letter to the great actress Elizabeth Robins about Ibsen's "ineffable Play" that, he claimed, distinctly promised to stand "at the tiptop of his achievement." After having read the third act, however, he wrote her again to say that the play had now become "a subject of depressed reflection" for him. Many subsequent readers — and critics — have shared James's disappointment in the last act of this play. For example, Ronald Gray, who finds a great lack of dramatic incident in the play as a whole, sees nothing in the final dialogue but orotund inflation. A few critics, on the other hand, see this playas one of Ibsen's subtlest masterpieces; chief among them, John Northam feels that because it presents "an action whose real source is never defined," but is instead "recreated through a range of imagery itself ambiguous and obscure," it "succeeds in expressing the inexpressible." The fact that responsible critical evaluations of this play differ so widely stems from the very ambiguities Northam lauds, especially those in the final scene, in which Alfred and Rita Allmers move abruptly from despair to something like serenity as they respond to the (literally) crying needs of the poor children in the village below and look upward — for solace — toward "the peaks," "the stars," and "the great silence." Does Ibsen expect us to believe in this abrupt double conversion, or is this another of his contrapuntal, ironic endings? We can only begin to answer this question by making a careful assessment of the leading characters.
The Master Builder and the Failure of Symbolic Success
Authors: Calderwood James
Published: April 2013

At a time when "difference" is so powerfully in vogue Ibsen's The Master Builder would seem thrust into a defensive posture by virtue of its reliance on symbolism. For its symbolism apparently asserts, not difference, but identity, and thus seems to run counter to the diacritical character of language itself: the arbitrary division between signifier and signified, between sign and referent. As a result of this recent stress on the diacritical, the figural dominance of symbol over allegory and discursive language that has been in force since the Romantics is now threatened with reversal, as Murray Krieger has shown. The supposed fusion of object and meaning wrought by the symbol is regarded in some quarters no longer as a virtue but as a species of linguistic bad faith, a mystifying refusal to acknowledge what Paul de Man calls the fallen world of our facticity and the existential gap between man and nature.
Imitating an Icon: John Erman's Remake of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire
Authors: Schlueter June
Published: April 2013

When the news broke that John Erman would be directing a television film version of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, most of us thought not of the Williams play but of Elia Kazan's 1951 Hollywood film, wondering how Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois would be possible without Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. The combination of Brando's raw sexuality and Leigh's desperate fragility had become not merely the measure of any subsequent performance but an icon: inevitable, indelible, inimitable. After Brando, who would dare to wail "Stella!" from the bottom of that New Orleans staircase, shriek out a cat cry to frighten Blanche, or "clear off' his place at table? After Leigh, who would dare to pluck up the threads of dignity from the unraveled spool and walk out of Stanley's house on the gentleman caller's arm, acknowledging, "Whoever you are - I have always depended on the kindness of strangers?” But Treat Williams and Ann-Margret did dare and, under Erman's direction, were gutsy enough to do a remake of the Kazan film. Erman's A Streetcar Named Desire (1984), in imitating this icon, prescribes its own limitations, yet it still manages to accomplish a distinct if subtle reinterpretation of the Williams play.
Two Mephistos: A Study in Dialectics
Authors: Lundstrom Rinda
Published: April 2013

The scene is a rehearsal of Goethe's Faust: the Act I encounter between a student and Mephistopheles posing as a scholar. Hendrik Hofgen, a former Communist who has since repented and become a good Nazi actor, plays Mephisto. The student is played by Miklas, a young Nazi who, at Hofgen's insistence, had been fired for his politics at a time when Hitler was less powerful. Although fireworks are expected, the explosion never occurs. Each discovers that the other is a consummate actor. They lose themselves in their roles and the joys of acting. The two fall into a laughing embrace, as Hofgen/Mephisto teaches Miklas the student to forget his past in the pleasure of performance.
Toward a Poetics of Television Technology: Beckett's Nacht und Träume and Quad
Authors: Brater Enoch
Published: April 2013

Written for and produced by Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1982 and transmitted on May 19, 1983, Beckett's Nacht und Träume creates its unique atmosphere through the collaboration of specific musical and poetic motifs, a combination of the melodic structure of Ghost Trio with the lyrical pattern of ... but the clouds .... In Nacht und Träume a male voice conveys Schubert's music, the last seven bars of a lied by the same name, while the poetry comes from Schubert's source, the Austrian writer Josef Heinrich von Collin: "Come again o lovely night ... Lovely dreams O come again." The play focuses, as its title makes clear, on night and dreams; it opens with a black-and-white shot of an old man sitting in still another "chamber" in the series Beckett has made so "familiar," a dark, empty room. Lit "only by evening light from a window set high in back wall," the work dispenses with written dialogue but speaks to us instead through the interplay of its two primary visual images, each one the mirror reflection of the other ("right profile," "left profile"). The first one we encounter represents the dreamer (A), the second the dream, the dream felt in contrastto the "dreamt self' (B). B, as M1 sometimes does in ... but the clouds ... , appears on the screen to exhibit "the other outline," the dream image set against the waking world, recorded in this medium, inevitably and ironically, as merely another black-and-white illusion broadcast on the screen.
Drama and the Media in Britain
Authors: Esslin Martin
Published: April 2013

The renaissance of play-writing in Britain, usually dated from the opening in May 1956 of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and the astonishing number of important dramatists it has brought to the fore, are among the most intriguing phenomena of the English-speaking world's recent cultural history. Undoubtedly the Education Act of 1945 was a contributing factor: it opened up the educational ladder for talented young people from social classes that had hitherto been barred from institutions of higher learning. But another, perhaps equally important, element that may have played a part in setting this "new wave" in motion was certainly the emergence of the electronic media, radio and television, and their availability as outlets for the production and diffusion of drama. By what was perhaps no more than an accident of history, Britain was spared, at least initially, the linkage between the mass media and advertising which has turned radio and television into cultural wastelands in the United States.
Television Drama and the People's War: David Hare's Licking Hitler, Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game, and Trevor Griffiths' s Country
Authors: Johnstone Richard
Published: April 2013

But as the sixties themselves began, with hindsight, to take on those very qualities "of manoeuvre, concession, and studied betrayal" of which Calder speaks, so his view of the Second World War achieved a wider currency, not least through its influence on some of the best of recent television drama. In David Hare's Licking Hitler (first broadcast by the B.B.C. in 1978), Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game (i980), and Trevor Griffiths's Country (1981), we have attempts by three writers, themselves children of the forties, to deal with what, largely as the result of Calder's work, they have come to see as the true historical significance of the War - an historical significance that lies beneath the familiar iconography of Spitfires and buzz-bombs, of fishing boats off the coast of Dunkirk, of sleeping figures on the platforms of the underground.

It was as a direct result of reading Calder's book in 1978 that Ian McEwan "resolved to write something one day about the war." For David Hare, "reading Angus Calder's The People's War changed all my thinking as a writer; an account of the Second World War through the eyes of ordinary people, it attempts a complete alternative history to the phoney and corrupting history I was taught at school.” What caught these writers' imaginations, and seemed to strike them as true, was the paradox that Calder deliberately emphasizes in everything he has to say about the War: that a national experience which seemed, despite the suffering, to offer new beginnings, new roles, which seemed to point the way to an exciting and fulfilling future, was in fact a dead end.
Dreams, Myth, and Politics in Ionesco's L'Homme aux valises
Authors: Gaensbauer Deborah
Published: April 2013

"All my plays have their origin in two fundamental states of consciousness. … an awareness of evanescence and solidity, of emptiness and of too much presence, of the unreal transparency of the world and its opacity, of light and thick darkness.'" In this, and many other similar and oft quoted pronouncements by Ionesco, he is describing an affective swing from euphoria to despair. However, such descriptions present just as aptly important thematic shifts that have characterized much of Ionesco's recent theatre. Since the late 1950s, Ionesco's writing has been increasingly dominated by two often conflicting interests: a preoccupation with dreams and dream theatre, and an obsession with politics. Indeed , the initial Berenger cycle was an early indicator of the inextricable melange of dreams and ideology that was to become a hallmark of Ionesco's theatre. The odious indifference to suffering in the Radiant City of Tueur sails gages (The Killer), "rhinoceritis," and the violence encountered by Berenger in his flight to the "Antimonde" in Le Pieton de I' air (A Stroll in the Air), for example, justify the equation of "light" and "thick darkness" to dreams and politics in Ionesco's plays.
Artaud and the Balinese Theatre
Authors: Clancy Patricia
Published: April 2013

When Antonin Artaud saw the Balinese actor-dancers at the Exposition Coloniale held in the Bois de Vincennes late in July 1931 , he was electrified by their perfonnance. Almost instantly, they became one of the major inspirations for his writings on the theatre, and provided him with the central idea for his Theatre de la Cruaute. In the months that followed , Artaud wrote feverishly to Jean Paulhan and others of what he had seen and of the significance of this experience for Western theatre as a whole. The Balinese in one perfonnance revealed what he had been dimly seeking in the Japanese Noh drama, in the Eastern and medieval Jewish mystics, in his work with the Theatre Alfred Jarry. Here at last was a living drama of movement and gesture, stylized but at the same time capable of expressing strong basic emotions; a drama both concrete and abstract that springs from ancient religious and tribal sources, and a time when man was still in direct contact with the natural world and with the ebb and flow of the cosmos; a drama in which music and costume form an integral part of the spectacle, suggesting a wealth of interrelated significances and symbols, both visible and invisible.
The Art and the Business of W.S. Gilbert's Engaged
Authors: Cardullo Bert
Published: April 2013

Stanley Kauffmann has characterized W.S. Gilbert's Engaged (1877) as a play that could not have been written in a theologically secure society and that makes an aesthetic leap by not including a normative character within the confmes of its comedy. Gilbert wrote about forty plays, mostly comedies, of which Engaged is arguably the best. They have been unjustly neglected in favor of the comic operas that he wrote with Arthur Sullivan, and in favor of the subsequent satiric plays of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
W. Stanley Houghton: An Introduction and Bibliography
Authors: Mortimer Paul
Published: April 2013

W. Stanley Houghton is one of these forgotten playwrights who made an important contribution to English drama. Since his death at the age of only thirty-two, in 1913, his name has gradually faded from memory, although his most famous play, Hindle Wakes (1912), remains familiar. No detailed biography of him exists; indeed, the absence of such a work is curious, since he achieved national and, in due course, American fame, and his reputation remained high for several years after his death. Ironically, the 1914 edition of Who's Who was released to the press at the time of his death on II December 1913; in it was Houghton's first entry. Virtually all the national papers carried his death, with The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) in particular giving it wide coverage because he had been a part-time member of its staff. His native city, Manchester, was so proud of him that it erected a memorial tablet in his honour. Its unveiling in February 1915 was performed by Miss A.E.F. Horniman, whose Gaiety Theatre (Manchester) was an influential enterprise in the development of repertory theatre in England. Houghton wrote many of his plays for her. At approximately the same time, a memorial scholarship, originally intended to be offered to Manchester University, was instituted at The Manchester Grammar School, where Houghton had been a pupil.
What Makes a Masterpiece? Ibsen and the Western World
Authors: Fjelde Rolf
Published: April 2013

Just over forty years ago, in 1944, T.S. Eliot gave a presidential address to the Virgil Society in London entitled "What Is A Classic?" Not surprisingly, Eliot found Virgil the very measure of the term as he chose to define it. The distinguishing quality of the classic work, in his view , could be found in its maturity. The talent of the individual poet matures into an unexampled ripeness only in a society or civilization that has itself matured adequately; thus, the maturity of mind that marks the classic is conjoined necessarily with the maturity of manners and maturity of language that are culturally given, as occurred when Virgil's poetry flowered in the compatible Augustan age. This fortunate fusion results in the achieved perfection of a common style, as if the inherent genius of the mother tongue had found its voice in and through the classic writer.
Why Does Hedda Gabler Marry Jørgen Tesman?
Authors: Olsen Stein Haugom
Published: April 2013

More than one critic shares Professor Kohl's doubt about the probability of the marriage between Hedda Gabler and J0rgen Tesman. Professor Koht sees a problem of social and psychological motivation here, and he "solves" this problem by pointing out that Tesman in earlier drafts of the play appears less ridiculous and that this characterization makes it less odd that Ibsen should cause Hedda to accept him. Other critics try to defend the marriage by identifying realistic motives for Hedda's acceptance of Tesman.
W.B. Yeats and Florence Farr: The Influence of the "New Woman" Actress on Yeats's Changing Images of Women
Authors: Laity Cassandra
Published: April 2013

Studies of the women in Yeats's art have too often been reduced to what Parkinson calls "Maudism.” Yeats himself romanticized his compulsion to locate Maud Gonne behind every legendary or historical female figure he undertook to describe: "O, unquiet heart," he laments in "The Old Age of Queen Maeve," "Why do you praise another, praising her,/As if there were no tale but your own tale/ Worth knitting to a measure of sweet sound?” But Yeats's beloved/muse Maud Gonne was, in fact, a fiction which he continually re-created, like his tale of unrequited love, to accommodate the many "masks" or personae he assumed in his career. Yeats's Maud Gonne was consequently more a poetic conception than a real personality in his work, a coalescing of the many women in art and life that captured his imagination, and a changing form as new influences entered and he discarded old notions of love, art, beauty, and sexuality.