bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Book Reviews
Authors: Hinden Michael , Morris John , Zapf Hubert , Pickar Gertrud , Marker Frederick
Published: April 2013

James J. Martine, ed. , Critical Essays on Eugene O'Neill, reviewed by Michael Hinden

Tim Brassell, Tom Stoppard: An Assessment, reviewed by John Morris

Rodney Simard, Postmodern Drama: Contemporary Playwrites in America and Britain, reviewed by Hubert Zapf

Gerhard F. Probst and Jay F. Bodine eds., Perspectives on Max Frisch, reviewed by Gertrud B. Pickar

Gunnar Syrehn, Maktenoch ensamheten: Studier i Lars Forssells historiedramatik, reviewed by Frederick J. Marker

Brian Parker, Corrigendum
Letting the Dead be Dead: A Reinterpretation of A Moon for the Misbegotten
Authors: Black Stephen
Published: April 2013

O'Neill organizes A Moon for the Misbegotten not around Jim Tyrone, as most interpreters believe, but around Josie Hogan. The play's central dramatic action occurs in the growth we witness in Josie's understanding of Jim, herself, and the world. The action of the play is the process of mourning: not, primarily, the unending mourning of Jim for his mother, but the mourning of Josie for Jim, who dies to her during the course of the play, and whose deadness Josie eventually accepts. I Jim gains little peace or "insight" from his third act confession. The "salvation," or "forgiveness" Josie gives him is mainly significant in its meaning to Josie. We must take Jim seriously when he insists that he is "dead": he cannot grow, feel, love, or do anything except, by drinking himself to death, send his body to join his soul and his mother.
Dialogue in Waiting for Godot and Grice's Concept of Implicature
Authors: Gautam Kripa , Sharma Manjula
Published: April 2013

A characteristic feature of the pattern of dialogue in absurdist drama is the gap between what is uttered and what is conveyed. In Waiting for Godot what is said and what is implicated together form the meaning of the utterance in its context. In this play, the gap between what is literally expressed and what is intended is so great that a reader unable to understand what is implicated will not appreciate the complex nature of the exchanges between Vladimir and Estragon. A Gricean approach may be useful in studying this aspect of the use of language in Waiting for Godot. I
Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth: The Uses of Shakespeare
Authors: Diamond Alin
Published: April 2013

"I haven't even got the courage of my lack of convictions," quipped Tom Stoppard in 1974, but a few years later his writing became explicitly political. Professional Foul (1977), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), Night and Day (1978), and Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (1979) all exhibit a concern for what Stoppard rather coyly called "topics of the day.” In this period he marched with Amnesty International, protesting the treatment of Soviet dissidents, wrote to The Times concerning the Czech government's harrassment of Vaclav Havel, and in 1977 visited his native Czechoslovakia where he met the playwright Pavel Kohout and the actor Pavel Landowsky, whose theatrical output had been confined to writing and performing abbreviated versions of Shakespeare in private living-rooms. Not surprisingly, considering his overall career interests, Stoppard's political phase proved to be shortlived, but in Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth he created an effective and suggestive piece of theater.
The Perils of Authorship in Le voyageur sans bagage
Authors: Vlasopolos Anca
Published: April 2013

Despite its respectable history in performance, Anouilh's Le voyageur salis bagage has received little critical attention. Regarded as Anouilh's first mature play, Le voyageur sans bagage is seen as heralding the existential themes of Anouilh's greater theater. Perhaps critical neglect of the play has had to do with the historical position of this between-wars drama. Focused on the restless specter of the First World War, the 1937 Voyageur sans bagage appeared too late, too close to the outbreak of the Second World War, to be relevant in an immediate political sense. Anouilh's later productions, particularly Antigone, were a more satisfactory response to the overwhelming turmoil of Europe. Yet in a film like Renoir's La grande illusion, which was released at the same time as the first performance of Le voyageur sans bagage, World War I becomes an enduring and timely reflection on a past that presages, especially in the irony of the title, the greater horrors to come. Thus, it might seem odd that this play has not attracted more critical notice , even after a brief revival of performances and study during the sixties in the United States.
David Rabe's Sticks and Bones: The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
Authors: Cooper Pamela
Published: April 2013

For David Rabe, the Vietnam war has been a source of artistic inspiration and creativity. His political and social consciousness, fused with his command of dramaturgy, produces taut expositions of the encounter between the American psyche and a war which assaulted some of the most traditional American values. His "Vietnam Trilogy" is clearly based on knowledge gained at first hand: he spent two years in Vietnam with a hospital support unit and later tried to return there as a war correspondent. This personal experience of the war is central to Rabe's career. A Fullbright Fellowship then enabled him to complete the first two plays of the Trilogy: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones.
The Divided Self In The Society Comedies Of Oscar Wilde
Authors: Ganz Arthur
Published: April 2013

IT IS USUALLY SAID that Oscar Wilde's society comedies have foolish plots and brilliant dialogue, and as. far as it goes this critical commonplace is true. Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband do in fact have foolish plots and brilliant dialogue. But the foolishness of these plots does not prevent them from expressing Wilde's personal and artistic positions, while the brilliance of this dialogue has often obscured both its value and its meaning. These are the things that I wish to demonstrate here.
A Letter from Paris
Authors: Scherer Jacques
Published: April 2013

THE LAST TWO SEASONS brought important innovations in the theatrical life of Paris. Bold accomplishments attracted attention in the realm of staging as well as in that of dramatic literature,at the same time as the structure and activity of the national theatres were modified by the new political regime. The Opéra, the Comédie Française and the Odéon have in fact seen the beginning of a new stage in their long history.
The Reception Of Thornton Wilder's Plays In Germany
Authors: Frenz Horst
Published: April 2013

IN 1945, the Germans were confronted with the problem of becoming acquainted again with some of the literary and cultural developments which had been going on in the outside world during the twelve years of the Hitler regime. In their theater American and French playwrights soon caused surprise, at times confusion, and frequently excitement. Two writers in particular, Jean Anouilh and Thornton Wilder, became the center of spirited discussion and were often looked upon as representatives of the modern French and American drama respectively. The work of both men was considered unusual in form and content, but by 1957 there was every evidence that Wilder's reputation in Germany had far outshone that of Anouilh.
Modern Drama: A Selective Bibliography Of Works Published In English In 1959
Authors: Norton Elizabeth , Shedd Robert
Published: April 2013

A FEW ARBITRARY RULES have been improvised for this first annual bibliography of materials which we hope will facilitate research in modern drama. Our general policy has been to emphasize what might be called scholarship at the expense of slighting journalism. However, anyone who works regularly with published materials in this area knows of many cases in which scholarship and journalism merge; we have included entries for several such indeterminate, but possibly useful studies.
The Young British Drama
Authors: Trilling Ossia
Published: April 2013

IT IS SAID that some 120 dramatists are active in Britain today. Of these not more than thirty are likely to see one of their plays performed in the West End of London in anyone theatrical season of twelve months. Fifteen of these at the most can expect to earn as much as £500 a year. If you bear in mind that the dramatic author has to wait for months if not for years before a play of his reaches the stage-John Osborne's Look Back in Anger was rejected by every London theater director before it was finally accepted for production after two years of waiting by the Royal Court Theatre-you will see why so few English writers are attracted to the stage. Note, by contrast, that well over 4,000 novels were published in England last year!
The Search For The Absolute
Authors: Rey John
Published: April 2013

WHILE THE NAMES of Claudel, Gide, Giraudoux, Camus and Anouilh are well known on both sides of the Atlantic, that of Henry de Montherlant is practically a mystery in America. It is all the more strange that Montherlant should be ignored here since he has been for many years a fascinating figure to the French. His personality as well as his works has stirred up endless controversy and he himself has contributed, with a clever sense of showmanship, to the Montherlant legend.
Spiritual And Political Reality: Shaw's The Simpleton Of The Unexpected Isles
Authors: McDowell Frederick
Published: April 2013

IT IS LIKELY that Shaw's later plays will soon be regarded more highly than they are now. These works will scarcely rank, however, with his first dozen, because Shaw seems in his latest phase to have lost interest in human beings as individuals and in the critical analysis of their psychological motives. The result is a dearth of intrinsically interesting personalities in the plays after The Apple-Cart (1929). To compensate for this withdrawal of interest from the individual, Shaw turned to speculation upon the current social and political scene and to the recording of his impressions thereof as an interested spectator. In the form of the extravaganza he presented his deeply felt ideas upon the parlous state of the world and utilized increasingly the symbolic fable as basis for the drama. The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, Geneva, and Far-Fetched Fables record the extreme reaches of the allegorizing tendency which came to supplant in Shaw the firm, precise rendering of the individual human psyche.
O'Neill, 1960
Authors: Engel Edwin
Published: April 2013

I COME TO PRAISE O'NEILL, not to bury him. Not only is he more alive today than he was a decade or two ago, he stands a better chance for immortality now than he did in those days when intimations thereof were strong-that is, during that score of years beginning at Provincetown in 1916 and ending at Stockholm in 1936. His last plays, composed around 1940, have crowned the distinguished earlier career, not only culminating but surpassing (in depth, power, truth) the pieces which earned him his original reputation.
Dynamo And Lazarus Laughed
Authors: Dahlstrom Carl
Published: April 2013

READERS OF O'NEILL eventually develop an awareness of the dramatist's limitations. Lazarus Laughed and Dynamo are two plays that contribute to such awareness, for one reads and rereads them with a feeling of growing dissatisfaction. In both works O'Neill seems to have grasped raw materials which are of great importance, concerned as he is. with religion, science, sex, man's fear of death, and the human incapacity for a life of good will. In neither play, however, is he able to give artistic body to the potentials of the raw materials he has selected.
O'Neill And The Comic Spirit
Authors: Pallette Drew
Published: April 2013

THE REACTION OF BROADWAY CRITICS to Take Me Along when it was produced in October, 1959, gives an interesting insight into an attitude toward Eugene O'Neill's plays that has developed in recent years. Take Me Along, of course, is the musical version of Ah, Wilderness! which in New York has featured Jackie Gleason. Critical comment, however, stressed not the comedy or satire, but O'Neill's compassion. The critics revelled in the warmth and tenderness of the play. John Chapman praised Gleason for playing Sid "straight and with engaging sweetness." And though Brooks Atkinson complained that the comedian clowned too much in the first act, he felt that O'Neill's "innocence and sweetness" triumphed over the "razzle-dazzle of a Broadway musical show." He recalled nostalgically how the original Sid had been played by Gene Lockhart as a "tender portrait of an obscure failure who will never escape from his own weak nature."
Amor Fati: O'Neill's Lazarus as Superman and Savior
Authors: Day Cyrus
Published: April 2013

O'NEILL may be said to have thought emotionally, or-to put it the other way-to have been profoundly moved by ideas. He was an artist and not a philosopher, but he asked himself ultimate questions, brooded over them, sought answers to them in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Lao-tze, and gave them emotional expression in his plays.
A Study in Auto Hypocrasy:Mortis Sans Sepulture
Authors: Abraham Claude
Published: April 2013

NONE OF THE LEGION of articles written about Morts sans sepulture since its first presentation in November; 1946, center around the presence- or lack-of bad faith in the various characters of the play. It is this lacuna that I shall attempt to fill.

Let us first define what is meant by "bad faith." In daily speech, the grocer who knowingly cheats his customers, but hides the lie with which he lives, is guilty of bad faith. In Sartrian terms, however, it is only when the grocer, hypnotized by his own trickery, begins to believe in his basic honesty, that he becomes guilty of bad faith. It is only when hypocrisy turns into autohypocrisy that bad faith in the Sartrian way sets in. This is the case of Egisthe in Les Mooches.

As all Sartrian plays, Morts sans sepulture is centered around one theme. In this case, it is duty. All the characters of the play have forgotten how to live. Instead, they "act" in a fashion dictated by their notion of their duty. This role, though self-imposed, destroys all subjectivity and brings about a state of utter bad faith.
Book Reviews
Authors: Black Stephen , Parker  , Kolin Philip , Weaver Lauren , Roudane Mathew , Olshen Barry , Freedman John , Langford N. Kim , Lamont Rosette , Carballis Richard
Published: April 2013

Dorthy Commins, eds., "Love and Admiration and Respect": The O'Neill—Commins Correspondence, reviewed by Stephen A. Black

Roger Boxill, Tennessee Williams, reviewed by R.B. Parker

Gerry McCarthy, Edward Albee, reviewed by Philip C. Kolin

Philip C. Kolin abd J. Madison Davis, eds., Critical Essays on Edward Albee, reviewed by Laura H. Weaver

Lynda Hart, Sam Shepard's Metaphorical Stages, reviewed by Mathew C. Roudane

Dorthy Parker, ed., Essays on Modern American Drama: Williams, Miller. Albee, and Shepard, reviewed by Barry N. Olshen

Henri Troyat, Chekhov, reviewed by John Freedman

Peter Gidal, Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett, reviewed by N. Kim Langford

Michelene Wandor, Carry On, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics, reviewed by Rosette C. Lamont

Dennis Carroll, Australian Contemporary Drama 1909—1982: A Critical Introduction, reviewed by Richard Carballis
Catastrophe: Beckett's Laboratory / Theatre
Authors: States Bert
Published: April 2013

How would an artist like Samuel Beckett, whose work instinctively avoids the timely , write a political play? Or, more explicitly: how would the man who wrote the opening line of Murphy (,The Sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new") deal with a "relevant" issue?
The Space of Play in L'Impromptu d'Ohio
Authors: McMullan Audrey
Published: April 2013

One of the most innovative aspects of Beckett's dramatic practice is his sculptural and semantic use of space. The "framing" of individual forms against the space of the stage, of sounds against silence, emphasizes their visual or aural materiality, and highlights the "gestalt" between form and space, figure and ground. The rigourous dramatic structure provides a framework within which each element is juxtaposed with other scenic or verbal elements, creating a continual interplay and questioning of levels of interpretation, while expanding and extending the play of associations or implications. Instead of a linear unfolding of plot, there is a juxtaposition of presented or represented "images of being" throughout the space and time of the performance, emphasizing the Derridean lack of a stable centre of meaning, or indeed of being, at the heart of the formal structure.
The Consumption of Empty Signs: Jean Genet's The Balcony
Authors: Shevtsova Maria
Published: April 2013

Not since Pirandello has a playwright so skillfully exploited the principle of the theater within the theater as Genet. The Balcony is probably the most intricate example of Genet's five plays of this process of mise-en-abyme.' Its singularity, also in the Genetian canon, lies in the fact that it is always about the theater, even when it least appears to be. This thematic and structural characteristic certainly has not escaped Genet criticism. Bernard Dort, one of the playwright's earliest commentators, specifies tbat not only The Balcony in particular, but all of Genet's dramatic output is quintessentially a theater of representation, by which he means that theater is both subject matter of Genet's theater and the mirror-image through which this very subject is repeated. In other words, Dort distinguishes between "theater in the theater" and "theater about the theater" in order to give a twofold thrust to his notion of "representation", while sustaining his argument that a double theatricality of this kind necessarily leads Genet to celebrating theater all the better to destroy it2 Dort does not dwell on the combative, destructive impulse he imputes to Genet vis-a-vis the theater. Yet it can be deduced from his argument that the Geoetian process of mise-en-abyme - a term, incidentally, that Dort does not . use - is a mechanism for self-destruction, the negative side, we could say, of self-representation and, we might add, perhaps the only outcome possible for texts whose exclusive focus of attention are themselves.
Fool of Desire: The Spectator to the Plays of Sam Shepard
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: April 2013

The extravagant theatricality which characterizes the plays of Sam Shepard intrigues and frequently perplexes critics. Some, like Walter Kerr, dismiss the work with the suggestion that the flamboyance masks its essentially trite content. He suggests that Shepard is deliberately and relentlessly obscure: "His tendency is to stick to his bailiwick and keep on doing what he's been doing even if this forces him into repeating doleful banalities.” Others. like Gerald Weales. suggest that conventional critical strategies concerned with the discovery of meaning never adequately address the dynamic play of Shepard's work. "Traditionally. reviewers have found it congenial to handle plays by talking about what they are about and that is the least valuable way of approaching Shepard's work.” In Shepard's work meaning (in the sense of action which refers to a "reality" beyond the play) often seems to be subverted by the theatricality of the plays because Shepard is concerned not with producing meaning but with the production of meaning in the theatre.
Expectation, Confutation, Revelation: Audience Complicity in the Plays of Sam Shepard
Authors: Putzel Steven
Published: April 2013

For over a decade now Stanley Fish and his fellow Readers have been settling back within the warm confines of an established critical school , not so much to read books as to describe their own responses to books. Those who wish to describe audience response to performance texts, however, still remain out in the cold. Even Hans Robert Jauss's five modalities of "identification," Wolfgang Iser's "implied reader" and the many other useful and provocative tenets of German "reception theory ," though they touch on the reception of dramatic texts, provide little information concerning the reception of performance texts. Although reader-response and reception theories are certainly not simple constructs, an aesthetic of theatrical audience reception is far more complex. The writer-text-reader relationship becomes the writer-text-directordesigners- perfonners-spectators relationship, and , of course, all these participants bring their own codal baggage: their personal histories, their cultural givens, their literary and theatrical precursors, their theatrical conventions, their expectations, their fears, etc.
A Problem of Translation: Structural Patterns in the Language of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea
Authors: Des Roches Kay Unruh
Published: April 2013

When I first read The Lady From the Sea in Norwegian, I was arrested by a repetitiveness in the text that seemed to signify purpose. Not only are characters, settings and plots repeated, so that various of them are variations on others, but cenain words occur so frequently that their recurrence became a matter of interest. I particularly noticed EIlida's repetition of what I will call "fear" words, such as "grufulle," (dreadful) "forferdelig," (terrible) and "skremmer og drager" (frighten and pull). Examining several English language translations, I discovered that some of these words were repeated: in the Penguin translation, "fascinate" is given as an equivalent for "drager" often enough to create a repetitive effect; in the Signet, "terrify and attract" are consistently given for "skremmer og drager"; in the Oxford, "undenow" is given twice for "dragende." However, in none of them is any word translated consistently enough for a repetitive pattern to emerge from the English language text. To illustrate: "dragende," the adjectival form of the verb "Ii dra" (to pull. draw I attract) , is used five times, each at a moment of crisis in the text. Ellida uses it four times in her attempt to explain that she feels pulled or compelled against her will: she describes her homesickness for the sea, the power the Stranger and the sea exert on her, and her unfulfilled longings and desires as "dragende"; she also names the particular force or compulsion she fears as "det dragende." Significantly, Wangel also uses "det dragende" in Act IV when he admits that he, too, is compelled against his will by a force which is gathered for him in the person of Ellida. As this is a crucial moment in the action, it is important that all the available information be included in the translation; and one piece of information rests in the repetition of "det grufulle" and "det dragende," phrases which Ellida and Wangel use solely to identify that force which they seem unable to fight.
Norman's 'night, Mother: Psycho-drama of Female Identity
Authors: Spencer Jenny
Published: April 2013

By the time I saw a production of Norman's play 'night, Mother, it was a highly acclaimed Broadway success that had already won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Like most of the audience, I knew the play ended with a suicide. But being armed against an indulgently emotional response did not prevent me from having one. What I experienced as almost overwhelmingly painful, however, was viewed with utter indifference by the otherwise sensitive men in my company. The post-production discussion re-affirmed what I found to be a surprising difference between men's and women's responses to this play. Most of the discussion was among female viewers, who found the play intensely disturbing, realistic, and utterly riveting. Only a few men attended and fewer spoke at that session; several had left the performance early. It appeared that for most of them the play seemed too limited in focus, too predictable in effect to capture their interest completely. A subsequent survey of reviews revealed a similar disparity of reaction, although not entirely along lines of gender. John Simon and Frank Rich applauded Norman's ability to weave a shattering existential experience out of the most homely of materials. But Stanley Kauffman and Richard Gilman envied the "rapture" of others, finding Norman's play blatantly contrived on the one hand and utterly boring on the other. Gilman, in particular, captures the predominant male attitude I witnessed with this comment: "When the shot sounded, I wasn't startled, dismayed, or much moved; it was all 'sort of' sad, 'sort of' lugubrious."
Machine and Magus in Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise
Authors: Knapp Bettina
Published: April 2013

So spoke Dr. Hinkfuss, director of the play within the play in Luigi Pirandello's Tonight Weimprovise (1929). For Pirandello, then, the theatre is a machine, hungry for poetry, which is in insufficient supply in the early decades of the twentieth century. The poetry needed to nourish the hungry machine is, for Pirandello, a concoction of motility, imagination, fantasy, mystery, and illusion, which would invite spectators, protagonists, and readers alike to substitute for their staid and preconceived notions the unforseen (from the Latin, improvisus) — the improvised, the unknown, the world of imponderables. And thus the title expresses an aspiration: Tonight We Improvise.
The Sea: Anarchy as Order
Authors: Des Roches Kay Unru
Published: April 2013

Critical opinion, so fractious in its assessment of the plays of Edward Bond, is remarkably cohesive about his stated dramatic aims: whether they call it "propaganda" or "politics," critics agree that Bond has something urgent to say about the way we live in our world. A characteristic of this criticism is the assumption that it is possible, and desirable, to align Bond's plays with the ideas stated in his Prefaces. To this end, Richard Scharine dedicates his book "To Edward Bond: May This Book Help His Ideas Gain the Audience They Deserve"; and Malcolm Hay and Philip Roberts state in their Preface, "What we hope emerges is some sense of the ideas in Bond's work , and the means whereby those ideas are rendered in performance." The result is a coherent criticism of Bond's plays as vehicles for his ideas.
The Domestic Tragedies of Roger Vitrac
Authors: Levitt Annette Shandler
Published: April 2013

Unlike conventional drama, which reinforces stereotypes and expectations, the drama which emerged from Surrealism undermines such preconceptions, as part of a movement which attacks the status quo or convention in life and art. While all institutions were ripe for the Surrealists' attack, the family was a particularly appealing subject/object. As Clifford Browder comments in his book on Andre Breton, leader of the Surrealist Movement, Breton and the other Surrealists regarded the family as "an immoral bourgeois institution inimical to the freedom of the individual" Attacked were conventional attitudes such as "honor, propriety, good taste, and the cult of work." From the start Surrealism was a movement engaged with the world around it, and not tied to some solipsistic inner universe.
The Subtext of The Real Thing: It's "all right"
Authors: Thomson Leslie
Published: April 2013

In The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard focuses on language: on what it can and cannot do, both in the theatre and in real life. While he demonstrates the importance and value of words as representations of "real things," he also examines the limitations of language and the possibilities for its misuse. He is particularly concerned with the difficulty of finding words adequate to express ideas or emotions — especially love — "things" that are not "real" the way a coffee mug is real.
The Beckettian O'Neill
Authors: Berlin Normand
Published: April 2013

My title, "The Beckettian O'Neill," points directly to my thesis, but at the outset I must say that I do not wish to push this thesis so far that it seems "absurd." I recognize that there is something oxymoronic about the phrase, "The Beckettian O'Neill." Eugene O'Neill seems to thrive on expansiveness, a maximalist who wrote not only full-length plays but marathon plays, allowing for dinner breaks, and relying on the patience of his audience if not the fleshiness of their backsides. Robert Benchley, commenting on the notorious Strange Interlude, jokingly wondered what everyone was getting excited about; after all, it's "just an ordinary nine-act play." And a reviewer of the massive Mourning Becomes Electra captioned his piece, "Evening Becomes Intolerable." Samuel Beckett, on the other hand, thrives on minimalism, and with the passing years he offers less and less by way of stage time, reducing and simplifying, hardly giving his audience a chance to settle in before the play is over. Beckett told Peter Hall that "all true grace is economical," and he dedicatedly practices that belief. To my knowledge, no one writing or talking about O'Neill ever used the words "grace" or "economical."
O'Neill's Hairy Ape and the Reversal of Hegelian Dialectics
Authors: Zapf Hubert
Published: April 2013

Dramatic works, apart from everything else they are, are also what I would call intellectual experiments. Certain ideas or philosophical concepts are used and "put to the test" in the medium of communicative action. That way, the abstract nature of pure philosophical thought and the apparently self-sufficient status of (ideo-)logical systems is broken up in the process of their dramatic concretization. In confronting the philosophical with the pragmatic, the logical with the dialogical level, concepts of reason with processes of interaction, dramatic literature can critically explore the validity of abstract thought systems in the light of their relationship to the communicative life-worlds of concrete individuals.
Intention and Effect in The Hairy Ape
Authors: Massa Ann
Published: April 2013

American plays do not always travel well. A recent performance in London of George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum was misunderstood by an audience which did not possess the kind of knowledge of black American life and culture to allow it to recognise caricature and parody. In the hands of the Schaubiihne Company from West Berlin, O'Neill's The Hairy Ape — shown at the National Theatre in May 1987 — was a production in which the play became the victim of distortions imposed by the actors, the director, and the designer.
Shakespeherian Rags
Authors: Astington John
Published: April 2013

Shakespeare's presence is difficult to miss in Long Day's Journey into Night. If we don't catch sight of his portrait over the bookcase in the room where the action takes place, then the repeated quotations, allusions, and both Tyrone's bitter memories of his lost chances as a great classical actor, and his admonition to Edmund to "remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters" alert us to some kind of reference from the drama of the four haunted Tyrones to the patterns of Shakespearean tragedy.
On the Edge: The Plays of Susan Glaspell
Authors: Dymkowski Christine
Published: April 2013

Until recently, Susan Glaspell has been little more than "a footnote in the history of drama," remembered chiefly for her association with Eugene O'Neill and the Provincetown Players; her contemporary reputation as one of the two most accomplished playwrights of twentieth-century America may come as a legitimate surprise even to serious students of dramatic history. Her plays have rarely been performed by professional companies and, apart from the often-anthologized Trifles, have been unavailable in print; such marginalization of Glaspell's work is the most obvious way in which her drama can be said to be "on the edge." Its own preoccupation with the limits of experience is another.
Food and Drink in Shepard's Theater
Authors: Whiting Charles
Published: April 2013

Half of Sam Shepard's published plays have food or drink onstage at or very near the beginning, and in at least half of his plays food and drink play an important role. Except perhaps for lobster in Cowboy Mouth and tequila in the same play and in Fool for Love, these are always very ordinary comestibles, but never are they used by Shepard merely to achieve an effect of realism or naturalism, nor are they ever presented to the spectator in an unremarkable or banal manner. In one way or another, Shepard always makes them noticeable and significant. From the beginning he has been aware of theater as spectacle and has known how to exploit all the visual possibilities of food and drink on the stage. The first scene of The Rock Garden (1964) is played in total silence, thus accentuating what is seen. The setting is simple, uncomplicated, focusing the audience's attention on a father and two children seated at a table. The father is totally absorbed in a magazine, and Shepard specifies that" The only action is that of the BOY and GIRL drinking milk." The scene ends with the girl dropping her glass and spilling the milk. Again in 4H Club (1964), food and drink have strong visual accents; typically, however, Shepard does not repeat himself. The stage is empty, except for a small kitchen extreme upstage left where there are two young men. A third young man is downstage facing the audience, kneeling beside a hot plate and stirring something in a pot. He hits the spoon on the pot and serves coffee to all three, who slurp it down and smash the cups on the floor. Then, while one young man sweeps up the pieces, the two others enter, one at a time, loudly crunching an apple. Two of the trio throw an apple back and forth, amusing themselves by imagining an apple war against the pedestrians below.
Two Concepts of Society in Drama: Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan and Edward Bond's Lear
Authors: Zapf Hubert
Published: April 2013

Bertolt Brecht and Edward Bond, though of different generations, are two major representatives of a theater noted for its close relationship to modem society. Both playwrights are self-professed socialists and regard drama as a medium for expressing and communicating their political views. Brecht's Epic theatre is a rational form of theatre, aiming not at the emotional identification of a passive audience but at their critical awareness of what is happening on the stage and at their ability to transfer the fictitious reality of the play to the social reality of their everyday lives. Bond, too, conceives of his works as manifestations of a "rational theatre," confronting the spectators with analytical insights into modem society, and making them aware in which way they themselves are oppressed by and at the same time part of the alienating mechanisms of this society. For both playwrights, then, the theatre is closely linked with a pragmatic intention: it becomes a means critically to investigate and, it is hoped, to change the dehumanizing structures of modem society.
Brecht and Friel: Some Irish Parallels
Authors: Binnie Eric
Published: April 2013

In the ancient and troubled frontier city of Derry, Brian Friel established the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980. He was joined in this bold endeavour by a number of other artists, including the actor Stephen Rea and the poet Seamus Heaney. All of the Board of Directors are Northerners. Their motives, in founding the new company, were to reappraise the political and cultural situation in Northern Ireland as it affects the whole of Ireland. They aim to examine and analyze the established opinions, slogans, myths and war-cries which have gone to the creation of the present troubles in Ireland. Like Brecht's Galileo in his final exchange with Andrea, perhaps like Brecht himself in his final years, on a not dissimilar frontier, Friel and his fellow directors clearly believe that there can, indeed, be a new age, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The Lehrstuck Experience on a Contemporary Stage: On Brecht and the GRIPS–Theater' s Voll auf der Rolle
Authors: Fischer Gerhard
Published: April 2013

Theatre-on-theatre can be described as a dramaturgical and scenic-theatrical strategy of constructing play texts that contain, within the perimeter of their fictional reality, a second or internal theatrical performance, featuring actors playing other actors and an "internal audience'" present on stage which acts as a double to the actual audience. This strategy has a long tradition in dramatic literature, and it has fascinated and challenged playwrights who have used it for a variety of purposes up to this day. Three different, perhaps paradigmatic approaches can be distinguished.
Post-Modernism and the Multi-Media Sensibility: Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine and the Art of Robert Wilson
Authors: Zurbrugg Nicholas
Published: April 2013

Robert Wilson's adaption — or transmutation — of the East German playwright Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine typifies both the relatively staid, monodimensional quality ofMüller's Post-Modernity, and the more dynamic, multi-media vision of its producer. Hamletmachine' s London season opened at the Almeida Theatre; a theatre which could well have been renamed the "All-Media" for this occasion. Mixing almost every theatrical and extra-theatrical trick in the Post-Modem book, it combined classical declamation, parodic classical declamation, autistic anti-declamation, colloquial declamation, cry, whisper, laugh, whimper, tape-recorded screech and mutter, tape-recorded noise, mime, acrobatics, sculptural immobility, videoesque choreography, virtuoso lighting, projected slide-imagery, black and white and coloured film-imagery, digitally deconstructed video-image, and an array of musical sound-tracks ranging from the nostalgic tango accompanying the cast's final bow, to the echoing tones of a piano piece by Lieber and Stoller (composers of Elvis Presley's Hound Dog).
A Conversation with Robert Wilson and Heiner Müller
Authors: Holmberg Arthur
Published: April 2013

Robert Wilson and Heiner Müller collaborated for the first time in 1983 on the Cologne section of the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down. Much of the material for Müller's text came from the earlier play Gundling's Life Frederick of Prussia Lessing' s Sleep Dream Scream. Wilson conceived of the CIVIL warS as a twelve-hour multilingual epic, exploring the theme of civil war from many different cultural perspectives. Wilson worked on the CIVIL warS for over six years on three continents. Sections premiered in Japan, Minneapolis, Rotterdam, Rome, Marseille, and Cologne. Wilson intended to present the entire work at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984, but the project was cancelled for lack of funds.
Logician, Heal Thy Self: Poetry and Drama in Eliot's The Cocktail Party
Authors: Selmon Michael
Published: April 2013

Consider, for instance, The Cocktail Party of 1949, the play which preceded "Poetry and Drama." Rather than permitting the passive acceptance of verse, time and again this work asserts the primacy of language. As we will see, Linguistic concerns structure the drama. Its first act exploits the contradictions of language in order to explore communication's limits. Act resolves these contradictions only to restate them; Act gives a final solution. Moreover, language structures even the lowest levels of the play. Sound and semantics, patterning and parody: in The Cocktail Party, each device emphasises language, and each prefigures the eventual resolution of the drama.
Samuel Beckett and the Postmodern: Language Games, Play and Waiting for Godot
Authors: Nealon Jeffrey
Published: April 2013

In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon pass the time while waiting by playing at a series of games — language games — which constitute their existence and form their social bond. Language games and play are two key concepts in much of contemporary thought; as Wittgenstein — the "father" of language–game theory — writes , "the term ' language game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of a language is part of an activity, a form of life (Lebensjorm)." As Wittgenstein sees it, a word is analogous to a chess piece, and utterances can be thought of as moves within the language games that make up the human social bond. This notion of language games, as appropriated from Wittgenstein and modified by 'subsequent thinkers, has had a great influence on contemporary thinking about language, shifting the emphasis of language analysis from an enquiry into the meaning of a statement to its role in a language game.
Images in the Interstice: The Phenomenal Theater of Robert Wilson
Authors: Armstrong Gordon
Published: April 2013

Two decades of startlingly beautiful oneiric landscapes, elaborately calibrated lighting plots and multi—scrirnmed stage settings have not detracted from Robert Wilson's reputation as America's foremost experimenter in avant—garde drama. His reputation dates at least from the Paris production of his Deafman Glance at the Theatre de la Musique, June 1971. On that date — or shortly thereafter — Louis Aragon addressed a posthumous letter to Andre Breton, in praise of Robert Wilson's creation. The spectacle of Aragon's calculated public advertisement, proclaiming Wilson as the true heir to the surrealist revolutions of the 1920s, was published in Les Lettres Francaises. The movement that had faded in the 1930s with Breton's espousal of Marxism, and had lain quiescent for three decades, was reborn (in Aragon's eyes at least) in the collaborative works of Wilson, a trained architect who expanded the limits of the communicative act in the theater.
Book Reviews
Authors: Laughlin Karen , Leland Charles , Morris John , Hays Michael , Fisher James , Lovrick Peter
Published: April 2013

Martin Esslin, The Field a/Drama: How the Signs of Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen, reviewed by Karen Laughlin

Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, eds., Ingmar Bergman: A Project for the Theatre, reviewed by Charles Leland

Anthony Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, reviewed by John Morris

Michael Billington, Stoppard: The Playwright, reviewed by John Morris

Beate Neumeier, Spiel und Politik: Aspekte der Komik bei Tom Stoppard, reviewed by Michael Hays

Robert F. Kiernan, Noel Coward, reviewed by James Fisher

Francis Gray, Noel Coward, reviewed by James Fisher

Hsu Tao-Ching, The Chinese Conception of the Theatre, reviewed by Peter Lovrick
Missing Lines In Long Day's Journey Into Night
Authors: Hinden Michael
Published: April 2013

At the end of the second act of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Edmund Tyrone quarrels with his mother about Dr. Hardy, their family physician, then goes off without saying goodbye. But that is not the ending of the scene as O'Neill wrote it. Since 1956, Yale University Press has been reprinting O'Neill's masterpiece minus several important lines. Long Day's Journey Into Night is longer (slightly) than the published text.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

The present annual bibliography follows the basic principles and limitations described in the June 1984 issue. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of dramatic literature and, to a lesser extent, of theatre history. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modem world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1899 (plus Btichner and Becque) and influential theatre figures other than performers. Reviews, reprinted books, unpublished theses, and graduate-student periodicals are generally excluded. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to my Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism 1966-1980: An International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press).
Granville Barker and Galsworthy: Questions of Censorship
Authors: Innes Christopher
Published: April 2013

The transient nature of theatrical activity is well illustrated in the chequered reception of the two British playwrights who, together with Bernard Shaw, established the terms for modem drama in England. In the first decades of the century both Harley Granville Barker and John Galsworthy ranked with Shaw - indeed Shaw's breakthrough to public acceptance was largely due to Granville Barker, the initiator and driving artistic force of the Court Theatre seasons between 1903 and 1907. Yet their plays remained almost completely unperformed from the 1930S to the mid 1970S, and even renewed interest over the last decade has not led to a general revaluation of their significance as dramatists. Although The Marrying of Anne Leete was staged by the RSC in 1975 and Waste in 1985, while the significance of his role as an early advocate of a National Theatre was acknowledged by mounting a showcase production of The Madras House in the Olivier Theatre in 1977, Granville Barker is still looked on almost exclusively as a Shakespearian scholar and director. Similarly Galsworthy's reputation continues to rest entirely on his novels , and though Strife was resurrected by the National Theatre in 1978 Justice was only given a West End revival on the coat tails of the televised Forsythe Saga.
Women Dancing: The Structure of Gender in Yeats's Early Plays for Dancers
Authors: Koritz Amy
Published: April 2013

Yeats's plays for dancers were, in part, a response to the failure of his version of national literature to establish, conceptually as well as practically, a popular context for his work. He wrote, in 1919, that the Abbey was not the kind of theatre he had wished to create, "and its success has been to me a discouragement and a defeat." In "The Theatre," Yeats gave up the earlier ideal of an elite art that is also "the Art of the people," and accepted the necessity for two theatres, the Popular Theatre, and his own, "unpopular theatre" meant for a small audience in a small room and for which "there are my Four Plays jor Dancers as a beginning." Yeats's adaptation of Noh drama, his decision to call plays based on that form plays for dancers, the placing of a dance at the climax of the play, "instead of the disordered passion of nature" — these came at a time of retreat from a public theatre after the failure of his conception of the relationship between politics and art to set the agenda for the theatre in Ireland.
Book Reviews
Authors: Fischer James , Adler Thomas , Morrow Laura , Youngs Tim , Merritt Susan Hollis , Lamont Rosette , Norwood James
Published: April 2013

Brenda Murphy, American Realism and American Drama, 1880-1940, reviewed by James Fischer

Carl Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and her Legacy, reviewed by Thomas P. Adler

Philip C. Kolin, David Rabe: A Stage History and A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, reviewed by Laura Morrow

Leslie Catherine Sanders, The Development of Black Theatrein America: From Shadows to Selves, reviewed by Tim Youngs

Steven G. Gale, ed., Harold Pinter: Critical Approaches, reviewed by Susan Hollis Merritt

Michael Scott, Harold Pinter: The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming. A Casebook., reviewed by Susan Hollis Merritt

Jordan R. Young, The Beckett Actor, reviewed by Rosette C. Lamont

Julian Hilton, Performance, reviewed by James Norwood
Strindberg's Miss Julie and the Legend of Salome
Authors: Parker Brian
Published: April 2013

Since Strindberg's letter to his publisher claiming Miss Julie (1888) as "the first Naturalistic Tragedy in Swedish Drama'" and the important Foreword which he wrote alter the play was completed, it has been usual to see Miss Julie as an experiment in the kind or drama developed by Zola from Darwin's theories of environmental conditioning and the survival of the fittest. Thus, Martin Lamm calls the play "a strict application of Zolaesque principles" and Eric Bentley a "tragedy of the Darwinian ethos. '" Its theme of war between the sexes has been traced partly to Strindberg's ambivalence towards his parents, as revealed in the first volume of his autobiognphy , The Son of a Servant, and partly to his stormy marriage to Siri von Essen, the aristocratic actress who created the role of Miss Julie, which he had anatomized in The Confession of a Fool just before he wrote the play. It is argued that he interpreted these personal experiences mainly through his reading of Schopenhauer's misogynist philosophy of "will" and Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten complicating them further by his fervent Rousseau—ist socialism at this period of his life and by his fascination with the experiments that Charcot and Bernheim were currently conducting in the treatment of hysteria by hypnosis — experiments which also excited the young Sigmund Freud.