bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
L'Anti-Theatre ou L'Excommunication de Theramene
Authors: Aveline Claude
Published: April 2013

DEPUIS COMBIEN D'ANNEES parle-t-on en France et dans Ie monde de theatre "d'avant-garde"? Voila Ie premier point qui Ie rend remarquable: la persistance de son etiquette. Evocatrice d'audace, de temerite, de provacation, elle est maintenant cousue au rideau des scenes officielles, coHee sur des anthologies, gravee sur des cartes de visite. C'est Verlaine (la comparaison ne blessera personne) non pas au cafe Procope comme Ie montre une photo fameuse, mais a un diner de l'Elysee, a gauche de la maitresse de maison qui expliquerait au representant du Saint-Pere, son eternel voisin de droit: "Vous savez que Ie maitre Verlaine est un poete maudit?" Les principaux tenants de "l'avant-garde" ont atteint l'age des honneurs et des consecrations: ils n'en demeurent pas moins "d'avantgarde," ils sont meme devenus les "classiques de l'avant-garde." Dire que certains d'entre eux ont construit leur gloire sur Ie non-sens! II ne reste plus qu'a nommer leurs disciples: "l'arriere-garde de l'avant-garde."
The Games Diürrenmatt Plays
Authors: Robinson Gabriele Scott
Published: April 2013

FRIEDRICH DÜOURRENMATT SEES his art as playing a game with reality. He plays with characters, situations and ideas, manoeuvering them as in a game of chess. "The great art for me is the game, the production of a reality." In order to be assured of a measure of order and control in practising this high art of the game, Dürrenmatt needs distance between himself and his subject matter. Thus he tries to preserve in his work a distance from his personal beliefs and doubts, maintaining that "the case of the world" is invariably more interesting than "the case Dürrenmatt."
Remobilization from the Left: Peter Weiss' Viet N am Discourse
Authors: Kamala Thomas
Published: April 2013

IN A LETTER TO THE EDITORIAL STAFF of Theater heute in 1965, Peter Weiss expresses his discontent with the formalistic, politically evasive tendencies pervading postwar German literature, arguing that the time has come for a type of literature which directly confronts the problems of social reality. Only a year earlier, with the appearance of Marat/Sade, Weiss himself was not yet quite so realistic in his own mode of literary creation; in this play the logicality of historical conflict is dramatized within an absurd, "formalistic" medium, implying that ideological debate and method of presentation were still in need of reconciliation. Weiss soon attained the appropriate medium for presenting social conflict when, a year later, he clarified once and for all the issue of individualism contra collectivism that had gone unresolved in the play: "Between the two choices offered me today, I see the possibility of settling existing world misunderstandings only in the socialist order." The revolutionary doctrine espoused by Marat now becomes artistically programmatic for the author; as a politically engaged playwright embarking upon a new realism Weiss turns to documentary drama for portraying "dialectic confrontation [and a] continuous openness to change and ... development."
Three Sisters, Time, and the Audience
Authors: Babula William
Published: April 2013

IN AN OTHERWISE EXCELLENT ESSAY on Chekhov's dramaturgy, Robert Corrigan once made the following comment upon Chekhov's audience and the process of time: "We have no real sense of time passing." To put it flatly, I disagree. In Three Sisters — a play which Corrigan specifically includes in his generalization — that is precisely what we do have: an intense consciousness that time is swiftly passing by. It is a feeling shared by the characters on the stage and the audience in their seats. Further, I submit that we sense time fleeting not by noticing that the ages of Olga, Masha, and Irina are respectively twenty—eight, twenty—two, and twenty at the start of Three Sisters and thirty—two, twenty—six, and twenty—four at its conclusion, nor by noting the verbal allusions to time and change — though these references certainly have their effect — but by experiencing a carefully contrived series of changes that take place on the stage. Through Chekhov's artistry we shall share, during an evening of dramatic action, in Tchebutykin's experience of a "life [that] has flashed by like lightning." Time matters in the world of the Three Sisters.
Rehearsal as Critical Method: Pinter's Old Times
Authors: Eilenberg Lawrence
Published: April 2013

IF THE PERFORMANCE OF A PLAY may be considered an act of criticism, then rehearsal is analogous to critical method. We talk about play productions as "interpretations" of texts; we become animated over a director's "approach" to a play; we admire an actor's "analysis" of his role. Implicit in the vocabulary of such responses is the recognition that performance is "interpretive," that it does articulate an "approach," and is thus the same sort of activity as criticism. If criticism is centrally an analytical process rather than a descriptive or an evaluative one, then Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is as viable a piece of criticism of that comedy as any essay in a scholarly journal. The production is simply less easily published, which is to say less easily recovered or disseminated. Yet if a production or a performance may be appreciated, in one sense, as criticism of a play, then the rehearsals for that production encompass the critical methods by which the interpreters (actor, director, designer) arrive at their conclusion (the production itself).
Book Reviews
Authors: Cohn Ruby , Styan  , Murphy Vincent , Dietmann Margaret , Hoff Frank , Lane Harry , Berckman Edward , O'Conner Patricia , Blumenthal Eileen , Page Malcolm , Meserve Walter
Published: April 2013

Emmanuel Jacquart, Le Theatre De Derision, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

Andrew K. Kennedy, Six Dramatists In Search Of A Language: Studies In Dramatic Language, reviewed by J.L. Styan

Ruby Cohn, Back To Beckett, reviewed by Vincent J. Murphy

John H. Reilly, Arthur Adamov, reviewed by Margaret Dietemann

J. Thomas Rimer, Toward A Modern Theatre: Kishida Kunio, reviewed by Frank Hoff

Goran Stockenstrom, Ismael I. Öknen: Strindberg Som Mystiker, reviewed by Harry Lane

David Caute, The Illusion. An Essay On Politics, Theatre And The Novel, reviewed by Edward M. Berckman

Karen Malpede Taylor, People's Theatre In Amerika, reviewed by Edward M. Berckman

John Weisman, Guerilla Theater: Scenarios For Revolution, reviewed by Edward M. Berckman

Karen Malpede, Three Works By The Open Theater, reviewed by Eileen Blumenthal

Wilma Newberry, The Pirandellian Mode In Spanish Literature, reviewed by Patricia W. O'Connor

Arnold P. Hinchcliffe, British Theatre 1950-70, reviewed by Malcolm Page

Winifred Fraser, E. G. and E. G. O.: Emma Goldman And The Iceman Cometh, reviewed by Walter J. Meserve
No World of Its Own: Look Back in Anger Twenty Years Later
Authors: Bierhaus E.G.
Published: April 2013

MOST CRITICS OF MODERN DRAMA affirm that John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which opened twenty years ago on May 8, 1956, at the Royal Court, London, changed the direction of English drama. (Actually, it is more accurate to say that it changed the direction of drama written in English since its influence had been felt as much on this side of the Atlantic as on its own.) Allardyce Nicoll in English Drama: A Modern Viewpoint declares that with Look Back in Anger English drama was "reborn" (p. 126). It is a bold declaration, one that would be difficult to defend, but it does indicate the enthusiasm this play once generated.
Cocteau and "Le Numero Barbette"
Authors: Crowson Lydia
Published: April 2013

ONE OF THE ACCUSATIONS most frequently leveled against Jean Cocteau is that there is no continuity in his work, that he created merely for the sake of effect without having any real goal in mind. Yet, if the evidence is fairly examined, it becomes clear that this is not the case, at least in his conception of stage performance. One of his earliest esthetic formulations is an article entitled "Le Numero Barbette" which appeared in the July 1926 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, and his last play, L'Impromptu du Palais Royal, produced and published in 1962, is a theatrical presentation of his theories of theater. The latter is in fact a refinement, a sophisticated version of the former. However dissimilar Cocteau's plays may appear, they are linked by the same high ideal of the craft of theater: if their likenesses have been obscured, it is because they are united not by a theme or a message but rather by a conception of the art of the stage, of what theater as spectacle means. Cocteau was never interested in a play qua text; instead, he strove to create a certain art-object/spectator relationship based on illusion and enchantment. That this essential aim never changed in the course of his career becomes evident through a comparison of "Le Numero Barbette" and L'Impromptu du Palais Royal.
The Paradox of the Boyg: A Study of Peer Gynt's Humanization
Authors: Thun Ensaf
Published: April 2013

THE NEED TO COME TO TERMS with one's identity, to explore the many guises of self, to relocate the center of existence and to understand one's place in society are all recurring themes in literature growing out of, and expressing, shifts and transitions in the soul of an epoch. Such themes in fiction are frequently conveyed through varied patterns of the "second self' figure, a self who is both subjectively and objectively related to the protagonist. The second self is described by one critic as "the strange creature who in being second necessarily partakes of being first, who in his oppositeness to his counterpart is always the same, who walks without yet is rooted within: the ancient paradox of the self beside the self." Unlike the doppelganger, popular with the writers of the Germanic Romantic Movement, the second self suggests a psychological or inner continuum, without the concomitant of duplication inherent in the theme of the double. It provides a freer and more subtle metaphor for the working out of the enigma of personality, because its relationship with the protagonist is more often suggested through contrast and difference than through resemblance and similarity.
Murder in the Cathedral: The Plot of Diction
Authors: Wyman Linda
Published: April 2013

IT IS PERHAPS not so much that we argue over the signification of poetic drama as that we use the term rather indiscriminately. Ronald Peacock distinguishes "at least three major current meanings of 'poetic'" in regard to drama: "a text in verse," "the romantically poetic, and this refers rather to certain themes and attitudes irrespective of verse or prose forms," and "lyrical and musical style, primarily in verse, but also in prose.” Denis Donoghue notes, moreover, that in poetic drama, verse drama, dramatic verse, and dramatic poetry "we have a generous supply of terms, yet we confuse our speech by blurring their outlines." Certainly it is not hard to agree with Robert B. Heilman that "a play written in poetic form is simply not the same kind of literary work as a play written in prose," but it is less easy to find agreement on what "a play written in poetic form" is.
Comedy and Philosophy in Man and Superman
Authors: Gibbs
Published: April 2013

MAN AND SUPERMAN is sub-titled "A Comedy and a Philosophy." Shaw himself, in his discussion of the play and its antecedents in the Epistle Dedicatory addressed to A.B. Walkley, tends to encourage the notion that the comedy and philosophy are largely unrelated entities in the work. He refers to the dream-sequence as something "totally extraneous" to the "perfectly modern three-act play," and compares himself~ in his offering Walkley a glimpse of the Mozartian Don Juan and his antagonist in the Dream, to "the strolling theatrical manager who advertizes the pantomime of Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of second-hand picture posters designed for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of diamonds, and so fulfils the promise held out by the hoardings to the public eye." But the dramatic artist at work in Man and Superman brings the play and the philosophical Dream into a much more closely integrated relation than this comparison suggests. The play and the Dream are mutually modifying and mutually illuminating, and the "philosophy," that complex amalgam of views on politics, evolution, art, the relations of the sexes, and human nature in general which emerges from the work, is partly defined in its import and directions by the shape and development of the comic action.

This essay explores the relations between the philosophical themes expressed in the discussions in the play and Dream, and the meanings inherent in the action and in Shaw's manipulation of dramatic conventions.
The Solution as Problem: Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Authors: Breuter Rolf
Published: April 2013

WAITING FOR GODOT (written in 1948, first published in 1952) is Beckett's most popular work. Most popular not only among the wider audience of theatergoers but also among professional critics — as the amount of scholarly attention shows. Besides sociological, Marxist, existentialist, and even biographical interpretations, there are, above all, religious readings where the famous Mr. Godot who never shows up in the play is understood to be a deus absconditus. Taking this line of interpretation as a starting point, the following is an analysis of the structure of Waiting for Godot in light of concepts developed by Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (the distinction of logical levels) which were recently applied by a group of psychiatrists at Palo Alto to explain certain anomalies and paradoxes in schizophrenic as well as everyday communication. Furthermore, I shall refer to Beckett's other works as they help us to better understand the problems which arise in Godot.
Art in Microcosm: The Manuscript Stages of Beckett's Come and Go
Authors: Mitchell Breon
Published: April 2013

SAMUEL BECKETT'S Come and Go remains an enigma of the modern theatre in more than one respect. Although it was first published in 1966, it has yet to he produced professionally in America. Of the 127 words of the English version, 103 are to be spoken in colorless voices "as low as compatible with audibility." The cast consists of three women, who, apart from the muted color differentiation of their identical costumes, are to look "as much alike as possible." Given these ingredients, and the fact that the entire play may be produced in less than five minutes, it would seem worthwhile to analyze the origins of its surprising dramatic power.
Come and Go
Authors: Beckett Samuel
Published: April 2013

This final stage of the text of Beckett's Come and Go is based on the carbon copy of a typescript labelled "TS 3" and initialled by the author.
Beckett Criticism in Modern Drama: A Checklist
Authors: Marker Frederick
Published: April 2013

THE FOLLOWING CHECKLIST surveys, in the chronological order of their appearance, the chief contributions to Beckett scholarship that have appeared in Modern Drama since the journal's inception in 1958. Volume number and inclusive pages are given in parenthesis for each entry. Articles of a more general nature on absurdist drama are not normally listed.
The Grotesque in Amédée or How to Get Rid Of It
Authors: Kyle Linda Davis
Published: April 2013

THE ART OF THE GROTESQUE is developed by Eugene Ionesco in Amedee or How to Get Rid of It in the growing corpse, a dramatically effective image which along with the proliferating, giant mushrooms contributes elements of both the macabre and burlesque, and in the overall chaotic situation of the dehumanized couple Amedee and Madeleine. A corpse with the ability to grow is not an overused literary subject, but such a corpse is introduced in the first section of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: "That corpse you planted last year in your garden. / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?" While the corpse may express the idea that the past cannot be interred, it may also suggest that death must precede rebirth. On a lighter side, Robert Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee" describes a seemingly growing corpse in the lines, "With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid .... / And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow." In spite of a macabre subject, Service develops a humorous poem.
Stasis as Structure in Pinter's No Man's Land
Authors: Jones John Bush
Published: April 2013

ONE OF THE LEAST likely working dramatists one tends to think of in terms either of palpable surface artifice or deliberate literary borrowings is Harold Pinter, and yet his latest play, No Man's Land, reveals both of these characteristics, not only after study of the play in print but even in the immediacy of a first viewing of the play in production. Whether or not the atypical visibility of these elements reflects an attempt by the playwright to make patently clear in the theatre his avowed interest in the structure or shape of a play, No Man's Land indeed emerges lobster-like, its skeleton on the outside with the flesh hidden deep within. Whereas the form of this play becomes apparent as it displays itself in production, the thematic content or "meaning" (a term I apply to Pinter with great trepidation) is seemingly as hard to extract as in most of his previous works. And yet, a close examination of the literary affinities and the formal characteristics may demonstrate that through its structure the meaning of No Man's Land is dramatized. In other words, the shape of the play is what it is about.
Edward Harrigan
Authors: Moody Richard
Published: April 2013

EDWARD HARRIGAN WAS the undisputed master of "melee," and "general melee." His plays, particularly the famous "Mulligan" series — The Mulligan Guard Ball, The Mulligan Guard Chowder, and others — were Dickens- like documentaries of life among the immigrants on New York's Lower East Side. Harrigan and his chubby-faced partner, Tony Hart, were Broadway's farcical favorites in the 1880s. This much is common knowledge to most students of American theatre. Two other facets of the Harrigan phenomenon are less well known: the serious critics of his day took him seriously, perceived that he was more than a song-and-dance man turned playwright; Harrigan himself occasionally took time out from his writing and acting to contemplate what he'd done — the how and why — and to share some of his thoughts on drama and theatre.
American History in Drama: The Commemorative Tradition and Some Recent Revisions
Authors: Grant Thomas
Published: April 2013

AMERICANS HAVE always thought of history as something to make rather than recall, and therefore have been extraordinarily busy doing the first often at the expense of the second. However one defines the past, Americans are sure to have fled from it, in pursuit of dreams of otherworldly fulfilment or worldly success, or just out of some need to get on, feeling perhaps pushed like Huck Finn, or maybe for no reason at all, just an itch to light out for the territory ahead. When the past is recalled, rosy recollections of earlier glories usually spring into view as we collectively speed toward the future through the present — traces of a heritage seen like the old trees uprooted to make way for a gas station in Kunitz's "The War Against the Trees," "caught/In the rearview mirrors of the passing cars." "History was lived," says the politically astute Envoy in Genet's The Balcony, "so that a glorious page might be written and then read. It's reading that counts." Nowadays, though, it's viewing that counts.
At the Zoo: From O'Neill to Albee
Authors: Gabbard Lucina
Published: April 2013

EUGENE O'NEILL WAS unquestionably the first American playwright to become a major literary figure. Edward Albee is the most recent. Others are nudging their way into recognition, but none since Albee has created a body of work accepted for performance and study the world over. In a sense then, O'Neill and Albee set the limits of serious modern American drama. By a coincidence, almost fatefully opportune, they wrote early in their careers plays very similar to one another. In 1921 O'Neill transformed a short story, written in 1917, into a play — The Hairy Ape, which in 1922 became his third Broadway production. In 1958 Albee wrote The Zoo Story, which was not performed in New York until 1960. These two playwrights and these two plays have so much in common that they become ideal partners for comparison. Moreover, the differences in the plays' content and form highlight developments in American drama and its milieu during the intervening thirty-six years.
Arthur Miller on Plays and Playwriting
Authors: Martin Robert , Meyer Richard
Published: April 2013

THE FOLLOWING conversation took place at The University of Michigan in the late spring of 1974 between rehearsals for the premiere production of Arthur Miller's latest work, Up From Paradise. As Guest-Artist-in-Residence with the University's Professional Theatre Program, Miller agreed to meet with a class in American Drama that was engaged in a study of the plays of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. The scene: a classroom; the cast: students and faculty members of The University of Michigan. In the classroom, Miller is relaxed and informal. When he says he prefers a question-answer format, twenty hands immediately shoot up. Miller points to a woman student in the front row.
Defusion of Menace in the Plays of Sam Shepard
Authors: Bachman Charles
Published: April 2013

FOR SEVERAL YEARS Sam Shepard has been acknowledged as the most talented and promising playwright to emerge from the Off-off Broadway movement. Now, more than a decade after his work was first performed, he is increasingly recognized as one of the more significant dramatists in the English-speaking world. Praised by Edward Albee and Elizabeth Hardwick, he has been called "One of the three or four most gifted playwrights alive" and "the most talented of his generation." Catherine Hughes rightfully acknowledges that "there is no young American playwright who can match Shepard in his ability to employ language." Ren Frutkin in an article in Yale Theatre asserts that "he has brought the word back into the theatre," and London director Kenneth Chubb believes that Shepard's "perspective on his material has a relevance and universality that earmarks great writers." Granted the tendency of some reviewers to exaggerate in the enthusiasm of the moment, the body of positive opinion regarding Shepard's work is impressive. At least twenty- seven of his plays have been performed, not only in the United States and the United Kingdom, but in Canada and Australia as well. At least twelve plays have been performed in London alone, where he has been living for the past four years. Nineteen of his plays, as well as a book of poetry and prose, are in published form, and he has several screenplays to his credit.
Book Reviews
Authors: Murphy Vincent , Saari Sandra , Imhof Rüdiger , North  , Boring Zatlin , Moody
Published: April 2013

Ruby Cohn ed., Samuel Beckett: A Collection Of Criticism, reviewed by Vincent J. Murphy

by Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, The Scandinavian Theatre: A Short History, reviewed by Sandra E. Saari

Austin E. Quigley, The Pinter Problem, reviewed by Rüdiger Imhof

Griffith R. Hughes and Ruth Bury, Eugene Ionesco, reviewed by R. J. North

Douglas R. McKay, Enrique Jardiel Poncela, reviewed by Phyllis Zatlin Boring

Christopher Collins ed., Life As Theater: Five Modern Plays By Nikolai Evreinov, , reviewed by C. Moody
Character as Destiny in Hofmannsthal's Electra
Authors: Corrigan Robert
Published: April 2013

As AN ARTIST HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL was always violent in his reaction against materialism in philosophy and naturalism in art. Even as a young man, living in the morally debilitated pre-World War I city of Vienna, Hofmannsthal saw the limitations of an art which was committed to an external view of reality. Naturalism in the drama, with its convention of environmental credibility, from the time of Hebbel, Becque, Hauptmann, and Ibsen (up to The Wild Duck) had tended to show life as it existed on the surface; it was all too often sociological in its orientation and failed to capture the multiple complexities of man's inner life. Itwas because of this very ordinariness, this exaction of truth to life, that Hofmannsthal turned to Symbolism, the shrine of all the disenchanted young poets and dramatists of his time.
Comedy and Tragedy in Christopher Fry
Authors: Stanford Derek
Published: April 2013

BROADWAY CRITICS SOME TIME AGO declared themselves puzzled or uncertain as to Christopher Fry's sale tragedy The Firstborn. It had not left them with that rosy glow which most of this playwright's work diffuses. When, in the autumn of 1950, his comedy The Lady's not for Burning was performed, New York showed itself quick on the up-take. Whereas, stated Time, The Cocktail Party had "sent the audience stumping out of the theatre on its knees, pricing bad bargains out of the comer of its eye, Fry's audience pranced out into the welcoming night their eyes peeled for a pretty girl to hug or a fellow being, to clap on the shoulder." Certainly The Firstborn is not in this pattern. It hasn't the bouquet and Happy Birthday touch. It is more like an Elizabethan Tchehov-a blank-verse Cherry Orchard with the death-beetle ticking.
Theatre in London
Authors: Wellwarth George
Published: April 2013

THERE IS ONE MARVELOUS THING about the theater in London-the most expensive seat in the house is cheaper than the cheapest seat in a New York theater. In many theaters a gallery seat costs only the equivalent of 35 cents. There, unfortunately, the list of good things about the London theater ends. The West-end theaters produce for the most part trashy commercial vehicles, revues, and musicals-in short, pretty much the same thing as may be seen at any time in the Broadway theaters. But the New York theatergoer is never starved for good plays. There is always the off-Broadway theater with anywhere from ten to twenty little theaters presenting good drama-plays by promising new authors, avant-garde experimental theater, classics, and revivals of worthwhile failures which deserved a better fate. London has practically no counterpart to the off-Broadway theater. Only the Royal Court, the Theatre Royal, The Tower, and the Unity can compare with New York's live-wire theaters; and of these the latter two are non-professional.
Denmark and the Modern Drama
Authors: Mitchell
Published: April 2013

THE POSITION OF THE MODERN DRAMA IN DENMARK today suggests a conviction that the drama is a part of the national cultural life which deserves not only encouragement but also subvention by central or municipal government. Although the principle that the Danish stage has an obligation specifically to Danish drama may be implicit in this conviction, there is no chauvinistic desire to emphasize Danish plays at the expense of more renowned works by foreign authors. The Danish drama enjoys considerable largesse on several levels from the body politic, but most plays presented in Denmark are of foreign origin.
New Life in Chile's Theater
Authors: Jones Willis
Published: April 2013

PLAYS, BOTH RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR, were being presented in most of the rest of Spain's New World before the inhabitants of New Extremadura, later to be called Chile, saw their first performances. Churchmen looked unkindly on the drama as an educational device. Indian warfare, too, left little leisure for acting, and that lack of natural wealth that had discouraged Almagro as early as 1536, continued to have an adverse influence. For the growth of a natural theater, not only are dramatists and actors necessary, but there must be a public able and willing to pay for the performances or a wealthy patron with a love of the stage. This combination has rarely existed in Chile.
Shaw's Women
Authors: Block Toni
Published: April 2013

WE HAVE ALL HEARD THE OLD COMPLAINT that Shaw could not create a woman in any of his plays without making that woman a female Bernard Shaw. This is, to a certain extent true. In almost every other case, writers choose women characters from two basic sources: the women they would like to meet or the women they have met and on whom they wish to revenge themselves (Strindberg was an extreme case here; Shakespeare did it on more than one occasion). Women writers, of course, do the same with their male characters but mostly in the former category. In the latter case, they do not so much try to get their own back as to use the man in question as a basis for their character-and then remodel him in the way they think he ought to have behaved.
GBS and the ABC
Authors: Smoker Barbara
Published: April 2013

BERNARD SHAW WAS ESSENTIALLY A CRAFTSMAN. His own description of his job. was "that of a master of language." One of the many popular fallacies concerning him is that he was an original thinker. He was not. The original thinker gives his original thought-rarely more than one-to the rest of mankind, and bores them stiff with it. Shaw was teeming with ideas-other people's-and scattered them with exuberant vitality.
"Biographer–In–Chief"
Authors: Hill Eldon
Published: April 2013

ONE DAY IN 1903, a young mathematics student at the University of Chicago received an invitation to see an amateur performance at the Studebaker Theater. The play, entitled significantly, You Never Can Tell, was the work of an Irish dramatist, then comparatively unknown, named Bernard Shaw. The young researcher, engrossed in the "Twenty-seven Lines upon the Cubic Surface," though well versed in literature and the theater, had hardly heard of this Irish author. Overcoming his reluctance to run the risk of wasting an evening, he decided to attend. The play thrilled and enthralled him; he experienced a feeling of "being immersed in a shower bath of cosmic rays." Never again was his life to be the same.
Shaw and America: The End of a Century
Authors: Henderson Archibald
Published: April 2013

THERE APPEARS TO BE A CONNOTATION not wholly fortuitous between the writing of this account and of an earlier account just fifty-two years ago. Shortly after being authorized by the late George Bernard Shaw as his biographer, I prepared an article for a national American magazine, The Reader, of Indianapolis, Indiana, "The Present Vogue of Mr. Shaw" (June, 1904). The article you are now reading might bear the same title, with the added words, "in the United States of America." Even without bothering to argue the case, it may be taken for granted that a dramatist who first came into vogue in 1904 and is much more in vogue in these United States today, must be a living force in the drama of the twentieth century.
Genesis of a Dramatic Critic
Authors: Laurence Dan
Published: April 2013

ANOTHER COLLECTION (the fourth since 1906) of Shaw's Saturday Review drama articles has recently made its paperbacked appearance. To attempt to review it here would be to traverse critical pathways too heavily trafficked already; these weekly feuilletons have long since joined the theater essays of Hazlitt, Addison and Steele, and Coleridge in immortality. But at the same time they have tended to create a false impression that Bernard Shaw the dramatic critic was conceived out of a vacuum on that 4th of December 1894 when he called on Frank Harris and agreed to visit the theater professionally for a salary of £6 a week (surely no editor ever received better value for his money).
Ovation for Shaw
Authors: Brecht Bertolt
Published: April 2013

SHAW himself has experienced and subsequently suggested that any person, in order to express frankly an opinion on anything, has to overcome a certain congenital fear-that of being presumptuous. He has taken care early in his career to prevent people from molesting him with insincere incense burning. (But he has done it without shrinking from being considered famous. He knows that the tools of an honest man must always include boisterous self-advertising. He proudly declines to hide his light under a bushel.)
The Rhetoric of Candida
Authors: King Walter
Published: April 2013

OF ALL THE PLAYS in the Shavian canon Candida is certainly one of the more provocative, in the sense that it has roused more outraged contempt, more thoughtless praise, than any other Shaw piece. Yet it remains a considerable puzzle, even to critics sympathetic to Shavian ideology and esthetic. That the play has withstood criticism of varying tone and quality attests to its vitality; ,that it has lured the competent and the incompetent into exegetical adventures underscores its perennial attractiveness. Nevertheless, the fact that the Candida controversy is by no means over argues the possibility that somewhere there exists a key for its interpretation, as yet unfound. Whether such a key exists at all is perhaps dubious, but my own impression is that if there be one, it lies within the rhetoric of the play, and that by attending closely to the rhetorical twists and turns of the dialogue and stage directions, we can come as near to the secret of the playas we can ever come to the secret of any piece of verbal art.
On First Looking Into Archibald Macleish's Play In Verse, J. B.
Authors: Montgomery Marion
Published: April 2013

DEALING WITH THE RHYTHM, diction, and imagery employed by the author of a verse play involves complications more obvious perhaps than those encountered in considering the same elements in pure lyric. There is, for instance, a variety of voices to be considered in the play, whereas in the lyric there is, most often, only a single voice controlling idea and emotion through the selection and ordering of language appropriate to the voice. Of course there are lyrics in which one finds himself confronted by more than one voice, lyrics such as Yeats's "Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment" in which the refrain of alternate stanzas are the words of Jack the Journeyman. Jack's words ("That's certainly the case") ironically counterpoint the passionate and defiant and disturbed Jane, who is emotionally concerned over the true nature of love's relationship to body and soul. Jack, apparently, agrees dully with Jane, hardly interested in her concern. There is possible, then, a contrast of voice in a poem which is lyric despite its dramatic disguise. But in the verse play one expects to find not only a contrast of voices representing the several characters, but a modulation of the voices of each character as he reacts to the complexities of an unwinding plot. The diction, rhythm, imagery of a character in a verse play must not only elicit an emotional or intellectual response, but develop the character of the speaker as well. To put it another way: the lyric poet works at one remove from the poem; the dramatic poet at two removes: the lyric poet is to his lyric as the dramatic character in a verse play is to his speech. The lyric poet must be himself, usually in a limited emotional or intellectual state; the dramatic poet must be a variety of persons at the same time in an evolving series of emotional and intellectual states. The dramatic poet must remove, or at least disguise, himself with far more subtlety, if his play is to be successful, than must the lyric poet. The dramatic poet must be true to his several characters, must flow into each and speak from the depths of each so that no seeming partiality to characters leads to lop-sided characterization and to a "stacked" play. Otherwise he must depend on stage magic or startling ideas or situation to hold his audience. In Yeats's quasi-dramatic "Phases of the Moon," there is little chance of Aherne's being anything more than a straight man for Robartes or of Robartes beingmore than the excited voice of Yeats. Both are devices for getting at idea. The poem lacks, it seems to me, the dramatic surface tension necessary to keep the ideas adequately afloat. But it is, after all, not really drama in verse, and the uniqueness of the philosophical structure presented is a considerable compensation.
How I became a Playwright ("Comment je devins auteur dramatique")
Authors: Dumas Alexander
Published: April 2013

In 1833 Dumas wrote ten articles for the then infant but later celebrated journal, La Revue des deux Mondes, of which all but two were impressions of his recent travels in Switzerland. One of the two exceptions was a long biographical article: "Comment je devins auteur dramatique" ("How I Became a Playwright"). When Charpentier began to publish Dumas's Theatre Complet in the following year, the article was printed as a prefix to the first volume, and it has remained there ever since. The only English translation of it ever to be made, apparently, appeared in the Parlour Magazine for 1851, together with a lengthy sketch of Dumas's life.
Point of View in Modern Drama
Authors: Groff Edward
Published: April 2013

CRITICS OF FICITON generally agree that the most significant development in the modern novel has been the move away from the comfortable method of narrating a story whereby the author sees all, knows all, and tells all-frequently by nudging the reader with his elbow or by leading him ceremoniously into a room full of strange people. Perhaps the needs for greater psychological authenticity and dramatic immediacy finally prompted the novelist to step out of the scene. The extremely varied narrative methods which have been developed to satisfy these needs include the simple dramatic narrator of, let us say, Huckleberry Finn, the central consciousness of Henry James' later novels, the complex multiple narrators of Conrad, the stream of consciousness technique of James Joyce,and the poetic interior monologues of Virginia Woolf. All of these methods have at least one purpose in common: the desire to establish a point of view which is limited and, therefore, more dramatically convincing than that furnished by the omniscient author. But novelists since Henry James have certainly been aware that in achieving a measure of dramatic objectivity they often sacrifice some of their freedom to explore the psychological subtleties of character or to develop the rich philosophical implications of human experience. To strike a balance, they have sought-in the words of Joseph Warren Beach-a "subjective drama" in which the point of view is restricted to the consciousness of a character who is able to participate dramatically in the events of the story and at the same time reflect upon them, interpret them, within the boundaries of his own limited understanding and experience. This method has the advantage of expressing dramatic immediacy without depriving the form of its flexibility.
The MLA Conference on Modern Drama
Authors: Kauffmann R.
Published: April 2013

THE FIDST (and generally successful) Modern Drama Conference organized by Professor A. C. Edwards of the University of Kansas met Tuesday, December 29, 1959, at the national meeting of the MLA with more than thirty invited specialists in attendance. Professor Edwards acted as chairman and Professor R. J. Kaufmann of the University of Rochester as secretary. The program consisted of two brief talks and a somewhat longer discussion. The first of the two talks, by Professor Robert Shedd of Ohio State, concerned the proper anthology for a modern drama course. The second, by Professor Edith Kern of the University of Pennsylvania, was on the problems of translating foreign dramas into English.
Toward A New Interpretation Of Lenormand's Theatrical Ethos
Authors: White Kenneth
Published: April 2013

IN 1951, GABRIEL MARCEL termed H. R. Lenormand, the French playwright, "indisputably the man who contributed most to the French theater between the two World Wars." This assertion would arouse hot dispute, if not ridicule, from most present-day critics, who have pigeonholed Lenormand's dramas in that obscure drawer marked "out of date and dusty."

During the playwright's lifetime (1882-1951), his works were incessantly attacked and deplored by indignant writers proceeding on false assumptions about his dramatic ethos and aims. The most influential of these antagonists was Andre Rouveyre, the powerful drama critic of the Mercure de France. Virtually every time a new play by Lenormand appeared, Rouveyre released a flood of sarcastic epithets, condemning the author as a morbid eccentric, a pathological and essentially un-French dramatist.
The Lyric And The Philosophic In Yeats' Calvary
Authors: Gose Elliott
Published: April 2013

WHILE THE greatness of William Butler Yeats as a poet is seldom disputed today, his position as a playwright is more open to question. Despite enthusiastic acclaim of his dramatic technique by Archibald MacLeish and Eric Bentley, Yeats' plays are little performed in this country outside of the universities. Actually, Yeats himself was well aware of certain qualities which he purposefully built into his plays and which he knew would diminish the chances of their success on the conventional, commercial stage. One such quality is, of course, their poetic diction and construction, although it would be unfair to imply that the connection between his poetry and his drama is that simple. For it is fairly obvious, in retrospect, that Yeats' immersion in the drama, beginning slightly before the turn of the century, was at first perhaps a symptom of his desire to alter his style and later a cause of the change toward a more colloquial diction in his poetry. This influence of dramatic technique on poetry has been well demonstrated by Thomas Parkinson in his study, W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic (1951).
Directing Summer And Smoke: An Existentialist Approach
Authors: Brooking Jack
Published: April 2013

THE MODERN AMERICAN PLAY, unlike its Continental cousins and the classics, is usually a direct slice of life with a central plot line, uncomplicated characters, and a purpose to tell a story or entertain. However, a play occasionally appears on the scene which defies the pattern. Such a play is Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke. This nonconformity may at the same time challenge and confound the director who is saddled with the task of getting to the marrow of the playwright's meaning. He must discover the "spine" of the play, that central action which clarifies and embraces all elements of the drama, making of the myriad pieces a compact whole. The problem is summed up by Harold Clurman: "It is the function of the director of a playas subtly difficult as 'Summer and Smoke' to articulate a coherent interpretation which the audience can actually see." Seven Steps to Creative Children's Dramatics, by Pamela Prince Walker
Modern Indian Drama
Authors: Chaitanya Krishna
Published: April 2013

As RECENTLY AS SIX YEARS AGO, New Delhi, the capital of the Indian Republic, lacked a theater with adequate facilities for staging modern productions. When, in 1953, the Central Executive of the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society, of which the writer happens to be the Secretary, considered the question of taking a loan from the Government for building a theater, there were many who felt that it would be a suicidal venture, as the returns would not meet the four and a half per cent interest on the loan, not to say anything of the refund of the capital. Today, however, fifty dramatic groups are operating in the capital alone and the Fine Arts Theater is booked months in advance by these and others from the various regions.
Irony In Franz Werfel's Expressionistic Drama Bocksgesang
Authors: Scharbach Alexander
Published: April 2013

Defeat and failure of the Pan-German "Drang nach Osten" intensified the emergence of the new drama in Germany and Austria now characterized as "expressionism." It can be said to have been well under way by 1910 and finished by 1924, when the Ruhr was occupied. In the latter year, this drama was defined as "Das Ekstatische Theater" by Felix Emmel in his book of that title. Bernhard Diebold described it as a drama of intense emotional insight in his Anarchie im Drama ( 1925). In that same year, a survey of the elements of expressionism appeared in Das Deutsche Drama by Julius Bab and others. One of its most recent appraisals can be found in "Das Drama des Expressionismus" by Otto Mann. So far, however, scant attention seems to have been paid to one of Franz Werfel' s most typical expressionistic plays, Bocksgesang, a neglect that has occasioned this essay.
History, Autobiography, And The Shadow Of A Gunman
Authors: Armstrong William
Published: April 2013

Sean O'Casey is said to prefer his first major work, The Shadow of a Gunman, to his next play, Juno and the Paycock. To many of his readers, however, The Shadow of a Gunman has seemed much more limited, local, and topical in appeal. Passing judgement on O'Casey's achievement in this play in The Nineteenth Century and After (April, 1925), Andrew E. Malone has declared that "his characters are taken from the slums of Dublin, and his theme is little more than a commentary upon the warlike conditions of the city during the year 1920." One purpose of this article is to suggest that this verdict is a deceptive half-truth. O'Casey certainly does provide a realistic cross-section of life in a Dublin slum in 1920, and, as will be shown, the play certainly acquires greater significance when it is related to the social and political history of that year. But even where O'Casey's representation is closest to social or historical fact it exhibits a distinctive tone and colouring imparted by his imagination in obedience to a dramatic design. Moreover, a comparison between the play and certain parts of his autobiography, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949) reveals that the personal element in the play is more important that the historical one because it helped to determine its form and the interpretation of life which that form was designed to emphasize.
Love and "Vitality" in Candida
Authors: Lazenby Walter
Published: April 2013

MOST CRITICS of Shaw's Candida have approached the play "as if it were a geometry problem whose basic axioms can be located in The Quintessence and other Shaviana." They have assumed that Shaw was here merely illustrating his three types (Philistine, Idealist, Realist) and that the play demands a simplistic stock response: automatic scorn for Idealists and Philistines, automatic approval for Realists — that is, after one has identified the characters who represent the types. Unfortunately, they have not been able to agree on whether Morell is Idealist or Philistine; whether Marchbanks is Idealist or Realist; and, curiously, whether Candida herself is a Realist or a Philistine!
James Joyce's Exiles and the Tradition of the Edwardian Problem-Play
Authors: Simon Elliott
Published: April 2013

JAMES JOYCE'S CRITICAL INTEREST in the theatre of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, John Synge, George Moore, Edward Martyn, and other Edwardian problem-playwrights predates his major works of fiction. The unconventional problem-play, especially the symbolic drama of Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, appealed to Joyce as the most innovative artistic form in which an aspiring artist could capture his vision of that elusive truth of the human condition. In his early definition of drama, he makes the distinction between literary fiction which is dependent on the conventional and circumstantial aspects of daily life, and the problem-play which presents the underlying laws of life "in all their nakedness and divine severity":
From Loving to the Misbegotten: Despair in the Drama of Eugene O'Neill
Authors: Scrimgeour James
Published: April 2013

THIS PAPER TRACES Eugene O'Neill's treatment of despairing human consciousness throughout his dramatic career, focusing both on the unchanging characteristics of human beings in despair and on O'Neill's changing treatment of these despairing individuals. O'Neill consistently presents despair as a state of mind that grows naturally out of disobedience, idleness, pride, anger, and self-contempt; and he sees clearly the limitations of human "pleasures," rages over these limitations, is under the control of demonic forces, and finally tempts man to suicide. Further, his method of presenting this increasingly familiar blackening of human consciousness and his characters' responses to this blackness is often startlingly original.