bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Book Reviews
Authors: Perkins Kathy , Breslow Maurice , Stoeber Colette , Porter Laurin , Putzel Stephen , Parker Brian , Scott Shelly , Rewa Natalie , Bain Ted , Kerr Rosalind , Hays Peter
Published: April 2013

Dana A. Williams, Contemporary African American Female Playwrights: An Annotated Bibliography, reviewed by Kathy A. Perkins

Edward L. Shaughnessy, Down the Nights and Down rhe Days: Eugene O'Neill's Catholic Sensibility, reviewed by Maurice Breslow

Keith Peacock, Harold Pinter and The New British Theatre, reviewed by Colette Stoeber

Charles S. Watson, The History of Southern Drama., reviewed by Laurin Porter

Leslie A. Wade, Sam Shepard and the AMerican Theatre, reviewed by Stephen D. Putzel

Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis, reviewed by Stephen D. Putzel

Mathew C. Roudane, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, reviewed by Brian Parker

Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre, reviewed by Shelly Scott

Joan Templeton, Ibsen's Women, reviewed by Shelly Scott

Remy Charest, Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights: Robert Lepage in Conversation with Remy Charest, reviewed by Natalie Rewa

John Stokes, Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations, reviewed by Ted Bain

Maggie Hünsberg, Gender and the Italian Stage: From the Renaissance to the Present Day, reviewed by Rosalind Kerr

Christopher Bigsby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, reviewed by Peter L. Hays
Particular Myths, Universal Ethics: Wole Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers in the New Nigeria
Authors: Hogan Patrick Colm
Published: April 2013

In Myth , Literature and the African World, Wole Soyinka set out to formulate a theory of African literature in relation to myth. He criticized African writers who based their work on European cosmologies, urging instead greater attention to African systems of belief. In his preface, Soyinka went so far as to say that "There is nothing to choose ultimately between the colonial mentality of ... West Africa's first black bishop, who grovelled before his white missionary superiors ... and the new black ideologues who are embarrassed" by African traditions. "Like his religious counterpart, the new ideologue has never stopped to consider whether or not the universal verities of his new doctrine are already contained in, or can be elicited from the world-view and social structures of his own people"; Soyinka concludes, simply, "they can."
Happy Days: Beckett's Rescript of Lady Chatterley's Lover
Authors: Thomas Jacqueline
Published: April 2013

The importance of Beckett's use of literary references in Happy Days is well established. The juxtaposition of truncated yet recognizable fragments of literature provides a frame of reference for the erudite reader or spectator to appreciate fully — at least subconsciously — the irony of the characters' speech and situation. In his manuscript study of the play, Stanley Gontarski lists fourteen allusions identified by Beckett and the stages at which they were deliberately added. However, Beckett did not acknowledge a significant literary source that resonates throughout Happy Days: D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Subtle echoes of Lawrence's novel provide a hitherto unexplored perspective from which to interpret Happy Days. Unlike the texts to which Winnie directly refers, this one does not deal with confronting death or with despair at the brevity of life. Instead, the Lawrentian subtext establishes Winnie's precarious sexuality and her womanly needs, which Beckett then undercuts, the better to establish the bitter irony of her situation.
Book Reviews
Authors: Golomb Anne , Maufort Marc , Sandrow Nahma , Harrower Natalie , McLaren Joseph , Anderson Lisa
Published: April 2013

Richard H. Palmer, The Contemporary British History Play, reviewed by Liorah Anne Golomb

Michal Manheim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill, reviewed by Marc Maufort

Glenda Abramson, Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel, reviewed by Nahma Sandrow

Edna Nahshon, Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art and Politics of the Artef. 1925-1940, reviewed by Nahma Sandrow

Jean Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer, eds., Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre, reviewed by Natalie Harrower

Yvonne Shafer, August Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook, reviewed by Joseph McLaren

Joseph McLaren, Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition 1921-1943, reviewed by Lisa M. Anderson
Casting Aside Colonial Occupation: Intersections of Race, Sex, and Gender in Cloud Nine and Cloud Nine Criticism
Authors: Amoko Apollo
Published: April 2013

A certain personal ambivalence defines my response to Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill's drama in two acts featuring an audacious attempt to parallel sexual and gender oppression with colonial and racial oppression. While the attempt to enact the interrelated nature of these oppressions remains attractive, the apparent ease with which a playwright and company drawn exclusively from and implicated by racial and colonial privilege make direct comparisons and equivalencies between gender/sexual and colonialist oppressions is disturbing. These comparisons and equivalencies are made despite critical material differences in the history of gender and sexual oppression within specific cultural contexts, and the history of colonialism and the peculiar history of gender and sexual oppression within colonialism. As a consequence, certain oppressed identities, for example white women, may have been provided with the prospect of empowering representation at the cost of consigning certain other identities, specifically African women, to further subjection and invisibility.
Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Sheppard Philippa
Published: April 2013

The primary objective of the annual bibliography 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 includes all playwrights who lived past 1899 (plus Becque and Büchner) and influential theatre figures other than performers. Reviews, reprinted books (unless the edition has been corrected or updated), unpublished theses, graduate student periodicals, and publications of letters or diaries are generally excluded. The bibliography does not include publications of original texts of plays or translations. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to Charles Carpenter's Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism, 1966-1980: An International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press, 1986).
Introduction
Authors: Blostein David
Published: April 2013

The life of Bertolt Brecht spanned little more than half the twentieth century, yet if there is one figure that will be looked back upon as central to the era's theatre, it will probably be "poor B.B." from the Black Forest. Some reasons are immediately apparent. He is an unavoidable figure in theatre because, apart from the greatness and performability of his considerable body of plays, he was a theoretician who took on Aristotle, a director who took on Stanislavsky, a political activist who took on Hitler, a screenwriter who (slyly) took on the House Un-American Activities Committee, and eventually a cultural icon struggling with how much to take on in the country that gave him his theatre. Perhaps most important is that he was a poet. It is increasingly apparent that had Brecht never written a play he would be remembered as a major twentieth-century poet. But the importance for the theatre is that, while poetry is generally regarded as essentially untranslatable, it is the Brechtian poetry that even those who don't know German find useful, adaptable, and transformable. It is what Jean Cocteau called the poetry of theatre: the use of text, movement, set, costume, gesture, and voice as metaphor, synecdoche, enjambement, rhyme — in short, as a new embodiment, and for a very different purpose, of Wagner's ideal Gesammtkunstwerk.
Mother Courage in France
Authors: Ubersfeld Anne
Published: April 2013

The French first came to know Brecht through G.W. Pabst's two films, the Gennan and French versions of The Threepenny Opera, and Kurt Weill's music had a lot to do with their enthusiasm. But they did not see what Brechtians and, indeed, Bernard Dort did see, a spectacle
Brecht: Gestus, Fable, Attitude–cum–Stance
Authors: Fiebach Joachim
Published: April 2013

Cestus, or "gest," as John Willett preferred to translate it, is one of Bertolt Brecht's key aesthetic notions. He insisted on regarding poetic and theatrical language as "gestic" and even on requiring gestic music. It was the "gestic material" (gestisches Material) that the actor must interpret (auslegen) in order to convey the (variously translated) "fable," "narrative," "plot," or "story-line(s)." He considered the narrative line to be the main business of any theatrical event (Veranstaltung). That narrative line, for which I shall choose the term "fable" (Brecht uses Fabel, in italics, in the German original of his "Short Organum"), he defined as the entirety of "all gestic activities" that make up the composition of a play as produced. It is this reading of fables as "coherent compositions," giving insights into societal structures and processes, that has contributed much to a widespread understanding of his theatre as over-didactic and purely rationalist. Hence his aesthetic has often been treated as the epitome of a closed system , and his approach to society and the arts has been filed away as old-fashioned, one-dimensional, and essentialist, regardless of his numerous emphases on incessant, ever-regenerating, contradictory, and thus open-ended change as the basic element or driving force of history, of societal processes and individual behaviour, and — not least — of the type of theatre he had in mind and tried to realize.
Brechtian Gestus and the Politics of Tea in Christina Reid's Tea in a China Cup
Authors: Luft Joanna
Published: April 2013

As the title of Christina Reid's play suggests, tea and its rituals provide key moments of insight into the dynamics of the narrative and characters of Tea in a China Cup. Reid constructs in Tea a female order around the phenomena of tea and china, the authority of which she emphasizes by equating it with the public, masculine, and what is usually considered more politically fraught, league of the Orange Order. She demonstrates that the domestic sphere of the female characters parallels that of the Orange Order and is steeped in as much of the Irish Protestant politics of the day as is the official organization. In Tea Reid investigates the gendered aspect of Northern Irish socializing processes and reveals how the perpetuation of social and political systems arises and is maintained in the private, traditionally female sphere of the house. While very little critical attention has been paid to her work — as Maria DiCenzo remarks, in his survey of Northern Irish political drama D.E.S. Maxwell's extremely narrow definition of "political" relegates Reid's undiscussed play to a "subsidiary list" — Tea directly engages with political issues in Northern Ireland. Diderik Roll-Hansen's treatment of the play suggests its political agenda by arguing the anti-naturalism of Reid's work, its difference from social realism. I would like to continue this discussion by exploring the political commentary that Reid conducts when she constructs tea — the drinking of it and discourse that surrounds it — as a Brechtian gestus. Through the female characters' custom of tea-drinking Reid both exemplifies and critiques the social relationships of the women themselves and the traditional values that they eternalize. Furthering the significance of tea as a political construct, I would like to discuss how it partakes in Elin Diamond's theory of a gestic feminist criticism, whereby the gestus enacts a social commentary on gender through an engagement among women specifically.
Georgio Strehleraad Bertolt Brecht: The Meeting of Two "Men of Poetry"
Authors: Piletti Anna
Published: April 2013

Thus Giorgio Strehler wrote in 1979. Often during his career and in his theoretical reflections, Strehler counted Brecht among his masters, along with Jacques Copeau and Louis Jouvel. In his eyes, Brecht is not the antagonist of the two French directors, but rather a point of intersection. As he wrote, "What Brecht taught me — among other things — is human theatre, rich, wholly theatrical (like Jouvet's, in a sense), but not self-absorbed; a theatre that is not only theatre."
Brecht's Influence in China: A Chinese Perspective
Authors: Guangrun Rong
Published: April 2013

Bertolt Brecht is one of numerous overseas dramatists who have influenced Chinese theatre. He was introduced to China as early as the 1930s, almost at the exact time that Brecht himself witnessed a Peking Opera performance by Mei Lanfang in Moscow and wrote an essay entitled "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting." It was not until the end of the 1950s, however, that Chinese theatre really paid attention to, and was influenced by, Brecht.
Book Reviews
Authors: Mews Sigfried , Gransow Volker , Kuhn Tom , Weber Carl , Gaddy Kerstin , Kleber Pia , Dobbie Shauna
Published: April 2013

John Fuegi, Brecht & CO. Biographie, reviewed by Sigfried Mews

Frederic Jameson, Brecht and Method, reviewed by Volker Gransow & Pia Kleber

Theater der Zeit / Brecht Yearbook 23: drive b:, reviewed by Tom Kuhn

Johnathan Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Müller., reviewed by Carl Weber

Richard Bodek, Proletarian Performance in Weimar Berlin: Agitprop, Chorus, and Brecht, reviewed by Kerstin Gaddy

Peter Thomas, Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children, reviewed by Volker Gransow & Pia Kleber

David F. Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage, reviewed by Shauna Dobbie
Magic Meanings in Mamet's Cryptogram
Authors: Schaub Martin
Published: April 2013

In one of his earlier essays, Mamet recalls what he thinks was a "magic moment" in theatre: "I thought: isn't it the truth: people are born, love, hate, are frightened and happy, grow old and die. We as audience and we as artists must work to bring about a theater, an American Theater, which will be a celebration of these things." Mamet's dramatic oeuvre, I maintain, is an attempt to live up to these principles. Through the ludic interaction of fictional characters, Mamet celebrates a "truth" lingering in theatrical spaces distorted by violence, suspicion, dishonesty, and deceit.

Should I rather heed D.H. Lawrence's slightly shopworn warning and "never trust the artist" here? Has postmodern theory not obliterated "truth" as an intellectual curiosity long ago? And have we not agreed on the "absence of the transcendental signified," called for an indefinite "play of signification," and affirmed "a world of signs ... without truth"? These canonical tenets of postmodem theory, I again maintain, fall short of describing the scope and import of Mamet's plays. In Mamet's dramatic universe, "things do mean things" — even though, and maybe also because, his characters are constantly denying it.
Shaw's Devil's Disciple: The Subversion of Melodrama/ The Melodrama of Subversion
Authors: Sterner Mark
Published: April 2013

George Bernard Shaw is arguably the last great rhetorical playwright of the English-speaking stage. Giving theatrical night to the weightiest of notions, Shaw prompted his dramatic characters to consider, analyze, and debate the prolific body of ideas produced by the latter half of the nineteenth century. He managed to avoid tendentiousness by painstakingly voicing both sides of an issue — his habitual mode of expression is in fact the paradox. An alarming number of pundits have concluded that paradox provided not only the major theme of Shaw's work but, in the manner of a contemporary soft drink commercial, its apparent objective as weIl. But Shavian paradox is more than intellectual grandstanding. It is a verbal expression of the fundamental dialectic that informs drama as,well as the life it imitates: the underlying tension between form and matter, objective and realization, convention and imagination. The Devil's Disciple is an illustration of this tension in its purest, most melodramatic form, a conflict of polar opposites in which the conventions of society are exploded by a rhetorical strategy geared to subversion. Shaw attempts to subvert the very conception of reality commonly held by members of his genteel Victorian audience.
Not about Nightingales: Tennessee Williams as Social Activist
Authors: Hale Allean
Published: April 2013

"I am at last being sincerely aroused in my social consciousness," Tom Williams, 27, wrote in his journal in October 1938. He had just written "a pretty strong denunciation of Fascism" as a news release for Sinclair Lewis's anti-Fascist play, It Can't Happen Here (1936), a forthcoming production of the St. Louis Mummers. That same month he was deep into writing his own political expose, which would become Not about Nightingales. Actually, the germs of social protest incubated in Tom at age thirteen when, on his first typewriter, he wrote "Demon Smoke," a verse tirade against St. Louis air pollution, published in his junior high yearbook. He would always consider his forced move from the tiny town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, to the factory city of St. Louis a tragedy, although it became the irritant which provoked his early plays.
"Missing Mothers and Absent Fathers": Howard Barker's Seven Lears and Elaine Feinstein's Lear's Daughters
Authors: Saunders Graham
Published: April 2013

If we are to accept that the family represents the bedrock of a stable society, or, as Milton termed it, "the Fountain and Seminary of good subjects," then what are we to make of Shakespeare's King Lear? Within that play we are presented with the alarming spectacle of a family and a kingdom that have both undergone savage dislocation and moral collapse. Barbara J. Bono believes that the family in King Lear is the key to providing an understanding of "a play that finally rests on our [own] kind nursery, in the pre-Oedipal realm of the maternal gesture." The dynamics of family structure motivating the tragic outcome that we see unfold in Shakespeare's play are shared by the dramatists Howard Barker and Elaine Feinstein in their respective plays Seven Lears (1989) and Lear's Daughters (1987). These plays use themes from King Lear to examine the idea of the family, particularly the role of the father within that family structure, in order to provide alternative readings to the familiar ending in Shakespeare's play. Both of the modem plays directly attribute Lear's tragic fate to his neglect of his roles as husband and father.
"Echo Spring": Reflecting the Gaze of Narcissus in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Authors: Crandell George
Published: April 2013

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, no less than in other works such as Batlle a/Angels (Orpheus Descending), The Glass Menagerie. A Streetcar Named Desire. Sweet Bird of Youth , The Night of the Iguana, and The Two-Character Play. Tennessee Williams draws upon mythological analogues to illuminate characters and to underscore thematic parallels. Myles Raymond Hurd points out. for example, that the idealized friendship between Achilles and Patroclus in Homer's Iliad conceals a possible homosexual relationship that sheds light on the "equally ambiguous" relationship between Brick and Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . On the other hand, Robert Hethmon suggests that the idealistic Brick more nearly resembles Hippolytus, someone who, like Brick. enjoys "the company of other young men, and the delights of athletic contests." Surprisingly, however, these and other critics have neglected to consider the similarities between Brick and Narcissus, the mythological figure whose name now denotes a psychological disorder, the kind of illness particularly appealing to Tennessee Williams, whose plays have often been noted for their psychological realism.
Book Reviews
Authors: Bazzoni O'Keefe , Buse Peter , Arrell Douglas , Scott Shelly , Frank Glenda
Published: April 2013

Gian-Palo Biasin and Manuela Gieri, eds.,Luigi Pirandello: Contemporary Perspectives, reviewed by Jana O'Keefe Bazzoni

Dan Rebellato, 1956 and All That: The Making of British Drama, reviewed by Peter Buse

David Roman, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS, reviewed by Douglas Arrell

Anne Davis Basting, The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture, reviewed by Shelly Scott

Brenda Murphy, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the American Woman Playwrights, reviewed by Glenda Frank
Introduction
Authors: Lindham Ralph
Published: April 2013

This collection offers a comprehensive picture of the state of contemporary Chekhov criticism and also points the way to new approaches and avenues of exploration. Written by a diverse group of scholars, writers, and critics from various countries, these essays deal with the four major plays of Chekhov, examine some less familiar plays by him, and also explore scripts "plundered," as one of the contributors has phrased it, from the author's dramatic and fictional writings. Important productions of Chekhov plays, their directors, and theatrical modes of performance are also considered, together with such issues as the translation of Chekhov's drama and its impact on later playwrights and their work.
The Seagull: The Stage Mother, the Missing Father, and the Origins of Art
Authors: Faith Carol
Published: April 2013

In the play that initiated the "modem drama" of this journal's title, Chekhov offers a timeless plot of intergenerational conflict played out on the field of art. The allegorically charged relationships in The Seagull (Chayka, 1896) challenge the audience to speculate as to the ways art and life are intertwined. It is treacherous territory. The sensitive critic is continually aware of the author's voice muttering peevishly in the background, "Unlike some people, I don't presume to know any answers; all I do is ask questions." Chekhov teases anyone who wants to find deeper meaning in his work. Asked his opinion on the lake in Simov's set design for the first performance of The Seagull, he says, "It's wet." Or take his suggestion to Stanislavsky, the Moscow Art Theatre's fist Trigorin, that he should wear not white, but checkered trousers. The critic seems doomed to failure, and the author remains silent. And yet, The Seagull is so clearly about the nature of the relationship between art and life that no interpretation of the play can be complete without tackling the theme.
The Whole of Italy Is Our Orchard: Strehler's Cherry Orchard
Authors: Kleber Pia
Published: April 2013

Giorgio Strehler called Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard a masterpiece, an example of the best that bourgeois society has left us. In 1974 Strehler embarked on his second production of the play, having been dissatisfied with his first staging in 1955. Both productions were presented at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Like Peter Stein, who subsequently directed The Cherry Orchard in Berlin for the Schaubtihne am Lehniner Platz (1989), Strehler did extensive research on previous Chekhov productions, and both directors took as the starting point for the development of their respective concepts Stanislavsky's initial 1904 staging of the play. However, different cultures, theatre histories, and social and political situations generated diametrically opposed transpositions of Chekhov's dramatic text onto the stage.
Into That Rinsing Glare?: Field Day's Irish Tragedies
Authors: Richards Shaun
Published: April 2013

At a symposium named "Writers on Stage" (Peacock Theatre, Dublin, July 1997), Seamus Deane commented that while many contemporary Irish playwrights may refer to the political situation in works that "can have great emotional appeal," they are still limited in that "they do not involve, or the manifestation of such feeling does not involve, an analysis of the power situation." Deane used the Field Day Theatre Company's production of Stewart Parker's Pentecost (1987) as an example of his overall point that while such works may make audiences feel pity for the onstage victims of the political system, they do not inform them as to the extent to which "[t]he political system isn't something that is separate or apart from them. They are the inhabitors of it and they are the creators of it in many ways.” But when riot and sectarian violence erupt in the province, the term adopted by commentators is "tragedy" — a term that functions equally as a description of political situation and theatrical genre. In both instances, powerlessness in the face of suffering is dominant.
Leaving the Labyrinth: Hella S. Haasse's A Thread in the Dark (De Draad in het donker)
Authors: Babbage Frances
Published: April 2013

The history of modem drama offers many examples of plays based on mythic narratives, but, as a strategy, the re-visioning of myth has had particular importance within contemporary women's playwriting. In Britain, Caryl Churchill, Maureen Duffy, Sarah Daniels, and Timberlake Wertenbaker have all taken classical mythology as a stimulus for new writing. In France and Italy, the work of Helene Cixous and Franca Rame provides further examples. When the diversity of this theatrical practice is considered even briefly, it becomes clear that the range of work, firstly, is far more complex than a simple identification of feminist "heroines," and, secondly, does not signify an escapist retreat into fantasy from the "real world." As Rita Felski has observed in relation to feminist literature, "[al celebration of subjectivity, spirituality, and myth does not necessarily imply a lack of commitment to social and political change." The playwrights I mention here, and the re-visionings of myth they offer, have received considerable critical attention in terms both of their approaches to specific narratives and of their relationship to a wider feminist project. In this essay, however, I wish to consider a somewhat earlier example, and one that is likely to be unfamiliar to the majority of readers.
Book Reviews
Authors: Gantar Jure , Parker Brian , Innes Christopher , Willinger David , Golomb Liorah Anne , Scott Chelley
Published: April 2013

William W. Demastes, Theatre of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism, into Orderly Disorder, reviewed by Jure Gantar

Philip C. Kolin, ed., Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance, reviewed by Brian Parker

Alice Griffin, Understanding Tennessee Williams, reviewed by Brian Parker

Annette J. Saddik, The Politics of Reputation: The Critical REception of Tennessee Williams' Later Plays, reviewed by Brian Parker

Christopher Murray, Twentieth Century Irish Drama: A Mirror up to Nation, reviewed by Christopher Innes

Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, The Theatre of Fernand Crommelynck: Eight Plays, reviewed by David Willinger

Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, The Crommelynck Mystery: The Life and Work of a Belgian Playwright, reviewed by David Willinger

Sheila Rabillard, ed., Essays on Caryl Churchill: Contemporary Representations, reviewed by Liorah Anne Golomb

Lisa M. Anderson, No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Stage and Screen, reviewed by Shelley Scott
"It's the Do-Gooders Bum My Ass": Modem Canadian Drama and the Crisis of Liberalism
Authors: Wasserman Jerry
Published: April 2013

Near the beginning of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967), George Ryga's classic Canadian play about the destruction of a young Native woman who has come to the city looking for a better life, Ryga introduces Mr. Homer, "a white citizen who has the hurried but fulfilled appearance of the socially responsible man." Mr. Homer is a pillar of what is known in social welfare terms as the voluntary sector. He runs an agency called (appropriately, in this postcolonial text) the Centre. "[W]e do a lot of things for our Indians here in the city at the Centre", he explains to the audience in his superficially good-natured and benignly paternalistic way. His Centre is an important adjunct to the formal justice system represented by the Magistrate, who assures Rita Joe, during one of her frequent, nightmarish trials, "There are institutions to help you". As the scene unfolds, Mr. Homer puts his hand "possessively" on Rita's shoulder, inviting her to confirm how he helped her when her mother got sick and died, and how he helps other "poor dears" who need a place to eat and sleep when they get drunk and leave home. He chuckles over how Indian women "get more of a kick diggin' through [old clothes] that's piled up" in a heap rather than hung on racks. Then he turns again to the audience and angrily complains that "It's the do-gooders bum my ass", those newspaper or TV reporters for whom a drunken Indian becomes a story about "Red Power" or the failure of government policy. "Let them live an' work among the Indians for a few months ... then they'd know what it's really like"
Shame, Guilt, Empathy, and the Search for Identity in Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman
Authors: Ribkoff Fred
Published: April 2013

Among other things, tragedy dramatizes identity crises. At the root of such crises lie feelings of shame. You might ask: what about guilt? There is no question that guilt plays a major role in tragedy, but tragedy also dramatizes the way in which feelings of shame shape an individual's sense of identity, and thus propel him or her into wrongdoing and guilt. In fact, Bernard Williams examines the relation and distinction between shame and guilt in his study of ancient Greek tragedy and ethics, Shame and Necessity. He "c1aim[s] that if we can come to understand the ethical concepts of the Greeks, we shall recognise them in ourselves." In the process of establishing a kinship between the Greeks and ourselves, Williams provides an excellent foundation upon which to build an argument on the dynamics of shame, guilt, empathy, and the search for identity in Arthur Miller's modem tragedy Death of A Salesman.
Performative Acts of Gendered Emotions and Bodies in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard
Authors: Tait Peta
Published: April 2013

Anton Chekhov's major plays are acclaimed for their depiction of complex Emotion. Yet even when the representation of emotions in his major plays is perceived to facilitate social networks between characters, Chekhovian emotions are divested of cultural meaning. The depiction of the emotions of male and female characters aligns with gender identity, but the significance of differently gendered emotion passes unquestioned. The perception of dramatic emotions becomes detached from social identity because they are presumed to be gender neutral, universal experiences. Recent feminist scholarship outside the field of drama, however, points out that particular emotions are culturally specific rather than universal and "natural" — their qualities and expression vary greatly between cultures — and they are gendered. In Western culture, women have traditionally been considered more emotional than men. Contrary to social belief that emotions are passive states (passivity aligning them with femininity within a meta-cultural binary), emotions can be experienced as active states, although they would seem to be experienced differently by men and women. Emotional expression is an integral part of social identity and exists through "socially regulated gestures” that establish a category of emotions. Moreover, emotion theory holds that the social meanings of emotions are established in their repetition as patterns and syndromes evident in behaviour and language. Therefore, we can ask whether the expressions of emotions by the characters in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard reflect repetitions of social patterns and whether these expressions are culturally meaningful because they align with gender identity.
Splitting Images: Samuel Beckett's Nacht und Träume
Authors: Herren Graley
Published: April 2013

No area of Samuel Beckett's work has received less attention than his television drama, and the least studied of his six teleplays is Nacht und Träume . Although the premiere broadcast of Nacht und Träume attracted an audience of two million, the teleplay is rarely seen today except at Beckett festivals and modem drama conferences. Nor should one expect a "Beckett revival" on commercial television any time soon. Envisioning such a revival, Eckart Voigts- Virchow cleverly hypothesizes that the ratings would "rocket through the floor." One expects mainstream resistance to works like Nacht und Träume, which challenge television's formulaic conventions and passive viewing habits. What is more puzzling, however, is the slight attention paid this teleplay within Beckett circles. Even among the author's most dependable champions, Nacht und Träume has been dismissed too easily. Martin Esslin, for instance, concedes that it offers an "extremely powerful" image, but concludes that it is, "for my taste, somewhat too sentimental." Beryl and John Fletcher accuse Nacht und Träume of being less visually interesting than Beckett's other teleplays, and they voice doubt as to "whether this script makes for a successful or effective use of the medium." Even James Knowlson, who praises the teleplay unconditionally, has a difficult time locating its specific appeal.
"So entirely unexpected": The Modernist Dramaturgy of Marjorie Pickthall's The Wood Carver's Wife
Authors: Badir Patricia
Published: April 2013

Both during her life and after her death, Marjorie Pickthall was praised for her earnest spirituality, her fervent patriotism, her moral sincerity, and her love of nature and of all its simple creatures. Pickthall's novels, short stories, and poems, published between 1903 and 1925, were heralded for their "delicate lyricism" and for their satisfying contemplation of a world that knows "no villain, no absolute evil." As Diana M.A. Relke has argued, the acknowledgement of all of Pickthall's feminine virtues "assured her immediate survival as a practising woman poet," and furthermore won her "recognition as the foremost poet of her generation." Pickthall herself, very much aware of the place she occupied in the Canadian literary landscape, understood the degree to which her success was predicated upon existing models of the writing woman.
Stewart Parker's Heavenly Bodies: Dion Boucicault, Show Business, and Ireland
Authors: Richtarik Marilynn
Published: April 2013

Belfast playwright Stewart Parker conceived his 1986 play Heavenly Bodies near the beginning of his career as a dramatist, wrote it when he was at the height of his powers, and revised it as one of the last acts of his professional life. Throughout the long genesis of this stage biography of the Victorian melodramatist Dion Boucicault, Parker used his play to focus his own recurring questions about the price of popular success and the responsibility of a playwright to his own place and people. Over time he came to see Boucicault less as a remarkable individual and more as a figure emblematic both of the demoralized condition of Ireland in the nineteenth century and of the plight of the artist in an inhospitable era. Like Boucicault, Parker was an Irishman who lived and produced plays in North America and England as well as in Ireland, and his subject's "equivocal lrishness" exerted a continued fascination for him. In Parker's opinion, Boucicault's nationality was central to an understanding of his career because, "[l]ike many Irish writers before and after him, he had tumbled headlong out of the country at an early age, only to find his imagination eventually returning there for its truest inspiration”.
Why Modern Plays Are Not Culture: Disciplinary Blind Spots
Authors: Jackson Shannon
Published: April 2013

My title is taken, with significant modification, from the same essay in which Robert Brustein chastised "the drama" for not being interdisciplinary. In that piece, "Why American Plays Are Not Literature," Brustein made clear that something called "literature" was the discipline with which drama most needed contact. Not only was it, in Brustein's view, the only discipline with which the drama needed contact, but its models of value were those to which all drama should aspire. Condemning the fact that American dramatists almost never sought representation in "the literary periodicals," his 1959 use of the term "interdisciplinary" was thus a way of rationalizing a formula for the cultural legitimation of the drama, American and otherwise. My second epigraph is from a drama scholar who was Brustein's contemporary, if also, at some level, his antithesis. Before and between renowned texts such as Culture and Society and Keywords, Raymond Williams published a series of books in the field of drama — Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, Drama in Use, Modem Tragedy, and a revised Drama from Ibsell to Brecht — a "set" that he considered a formative "critical study" of the dramatic form
Bodies, Revolutions, and Magic: Cultural Nationalism and Racial Fetishism
Authors: Lee Josephine
Published: April 2013

We might consider race in accordance with Judith Butler's useful conception of gender as constructed in terms of a corporeal style; in this sense the racialized body is also made meaningful through "the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or fact, whether natural, cultural, or linguistic". The particular ways in which we perceive, interpret, and value racial difference in the United States today can be understood as a kind of 'performance' that takes its significance from not one but, in fact, many layers of social meaning that history has deposited on bodies. Some of these meanings are determined by racist ideologies disguised as "natural" or "biological" hierarchies of difference, "punitively regulated cultural fictions that are alternately embodied and disguised under duress"; others present somewhat more optimistic possibilities for racial performance.
Gender and Melodrama in Ibsen's Lady Inger
Authors: Wilkinson Lynn
Published: April 2013

In Ibsen's early history play Lady Inger, the protagonist appropriates to her own ends one of the cliches of nineteenth-century melodrama. Early on during the night that brings three mysterious visitors to her castle, Inger gives two of them goblets of wine. The stakes are high — the fate of Norway and Scandinavia hangs in the balance — and at least one of the visitors is probably hostile. The knowing reader or spectator expects a violation of the laws of hospitality. At the very least, one of the visitors will soon begin to feel faint from the effects of the substance slipped into one of the goblets. Possibly both, or the wrong individual, will fall victim to the hostess's treachery. Instead, Inger calls attention to the function of the device she uses[…]This self-conscious scene suggests that Ibsen is using melodrama against itself, to point beyond the limits of the genre and the cliches it implies.
The Anti-Romantic Comedies of Dorothy L. Sayers
Authors: Eads Martha Greene
Published: April 2013

"[W]hat on earth do women want?" Dorothy L. Sayers imagines men asking in her 1938 essay "Are Women Human?" Her answer is unequivocal: “I do not know that women, as women, want anything in particular, but as human beings they want, my good men, exactly what you want yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet". Many of Sayers's readers may suspect her of having created detective novelist Harriet Vane to embody her dream of a life that features satisfying work, creature comforts, and a passionate marriage. As the love interest Sayers developed for detective Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane illustrates the possibility of an intelligent woman's finding happiness in both her work and her marriage to a wealthy and interesting man. As Harriet develops from the damsel in distress in the novel Strong Poison (1930) into a successful writer and amateur sleuth in Have His Carcase (1932) and proves capable of serious scholarship in Gaudy Night (1935), her relationship with Lord Peter resembles the standard romance plot Janice Radway develops in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Although the Vane-Wimsey romance depicted in the novels follows the romance trajectory Radway traces, Sayers veers from that path in Busman's Honeymoon (1937), her play about the first stage of the couple's marriage. This essay examines Sayers's use of that play and her next, Love All, to question the literary and cultural convention of romantic love. As she transplants Lord Peter and Harriet Vane from the page to the stage in Busman's Honeymoon, Sayers sows the seeds of anti-romanticism that bloom in Love All (1940). Moving away from the conventional courtship plot of the first three Vane-Wimsey novels, Sayers uses her early plays to assert the value of meaningful work, mutual respect, and loving service beyond the realm of romance.
Anti-theatricality and the Limits of Naturalism
Authors: Williams Kirk
Published: April 2013

In the broadest and most transhistorical sense, the anti-theatrical prejudice can be seen as a trope whereby the longstanding Western anxiety about secondariness or supplementarity finds cultural expression. This metaphysical problematic leads by implication to other familiar moral hierarchies, most notably the binarisms that set essence against appearance, feminine against masculine, writing against speech, fiction against truth. For the anti-theatrical polemicist, theatre stands in for the ambiguities and indeterminacy of history itself, metaphorically invoking, as Jonas Barish so eloquently puts it, "a whole shoal of evils, of varying shapes and sizes, from the social sea”. The reading of anti-theatrical discourse in the Western tradition that Barish gives us reveals the startling paradox that anti-theatricality is ultimately not about the theatre and always about something else: the stage is inevitably a mere symptom of some other, less effable social or metaphysical malady. The case "against" the theatre is fascinating precisely because it stages such a broad spectrum of transhistorical anxieties in historically and culturally specific terms, such that anti-theatrical diatribes often come to powerfully dramatize conflicts and antipathies that are essentially local and radically contingent.
Anti-theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera
Authors: Lindberg Herbert
Published: April 2013

An anti-theatrical opera would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Theatricality, after all, suggests an exaggerated perspective on what we take to be reality, a certain inauthenticity that, as Jonas Barish demonstrated in his magisterial book The Antitheatrical Prejudice, has been an issue within Western thought since its beginnings. The term operatic implies the exaggeration of a theatrical stance already assumed to be exaggerated. Thus, an opera that questions the nature and value of theatricality would seem to put enormous constraints on composers and performers, not to speak of audiences eager to experience the enactment of those high emotions that they would not dare to reveal in their everyday lives.
Book Reviews
Authors: Hamera Judith , Davis Tracy
Published: April 2013

Jo Bonney, ed., Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century, reviewed by Judith Hamera

Linda Montano, ed., Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties, reviewed by Judith Hamera

Sharon M. Varnicke, Stanisiavsky in Focus, reviewed by Tracy C. Davis

Alison Hodge, ed., Twentieth Century Actor Training, reviewed by Tracy C. Davis

Elly A. Konijn, Acting Emotions: Shaping Emotions on Stage, reviewed by Tracy C. Davis

David Krasner, ed., Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future, reviewed by Tracy C. Davis

Peter Thomson, On Actors and Acting, reviewed by Tracy C. Davis
The Bottom of Desire in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus
Authors: Miller Greg
Published: April 2013

The real Saartjie Baartman, the flesh-and-blood woman who was designated the Venus Hottentot and hideously transformed into a freak show's centerpiece, is presumed missing from the very beginning of Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus. Though the dramatis personae lists her as "Miss Saartjie Baartman, a.k.a. The Girl, and later The Venus Hottentot," the audience never knows her as Baartman. After the overture, we see her scrubbing a sparkling floor in southern Africa while a shady entrepreneur ("the Brother") negotiates her purchase.
The Laramie Project: Western Pastoral
Authors: Tigner Amy
Published: April 2013

All of the people above were murdered — murdered because of their sexual orientation. Yet probably only one name is widely familiar: Matthew Shepard, the young, gay, university student who was tied to a fence, beaten, pistol-whipped, and left to die in the cold. Why did Shepard, in particular, become the focus of enormous mainstream media and popular attention, including that of the White House? Doubtless, the violence and context of the crime are partly the cause; yet the other victims suffered equally horrendous deaths. Matthew's race, class, and age may have had much to do with the public interest in his story: he was white, attractive, middle-class — he could have been the college aged son of any stereotypical middle-class American family. However, the other primary factor involved has to do not so much with Matthew himself as with the location of the crime — the West.
The Wild Duck: A Play of Play
Authors: Smith Mathew Wilson
Published: April 2013

This journal entry of Ibsen's, written in early 1883, presents the reader with 'certain difficulties. To begin with, it departs from Ibsen's typical journal style; almost without exception, the notes that precede and follow it are explicit indictments of society: "Patriotism and such things are but passing phases"; "Marriage [...] has ruined the human race, set the brand of slavery on everybody"; "[L]et doctors experiment on journalists and politicians." But this entry is different, trickier to interpret. Is it yet another indictment, an accolade, or merely a neutral observation? Are we to mourn the fact that "adults have lost the ability to play with dolls," or celebrate the fact that "powers of logical thought are developed" with age? Or are we simply meant to note these characteristics impassively?
Hell is Other Girls: Joan MacLeod's The Shape of a Girl
Authors: Scott Shelly
Published: April 2013

A good number of books published around the turn of the millennium attempt to address the complexities of feminist identity for young women, suggesting that girls have a wider array of possible identities and empowering identifications than ever before. Yet we live in a time when there is a great deal of tension between the variety of role models available to girls, on the one hand, and the stultifying restrictions of a culture that still makes them unable to value and emulate any but the most conventional and conventionally beautiful of those models, on the other.