bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Anus Mundi: Jews, the Holocaust, and Excremental Assault in Michel Vinaver's Overboard (Par-dessus bord)
Authors: Fox Michael David
Published: April 2013

This essay examines the representation of Jews, the Holocaust, and excrement in Michel Vinaver's Overboard (Par-dessus bard). What is argued here is that Overboard's inscription of Jewish images and the Holocaust, in contrapuntal combination and juxtaposition with images of excrement, stages the Holocaust by producing a kind of excremental assault on the audience.
The "Bogus Woman": Feminism and Asylum Theatre
Authors: Aston Elain
Published: April 2013

At the start of the twenty-first century the number of people at risk from persecution, fleeing their homes, and seeking asylum in another country continues to ri se. Under the United Nations Convention on Refugees that reinforces the international protection promised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all people have the right to asylum from war or persecution. While the Declaration promises the "right to freedom of movement'" European countries such as Britain, Germany, and France are also trying to initiate border control, especially as the threat of international terrorism increases. Hence there is a conflict of interest between those people who are displaced and in need of refuge, and those of whom they ask help who are looking for ways to tighten rather than to relax borders. All of this fuels an image of the asylum seeker as unwelcome suppliant and encourages racist and nationalist thinking so that seekers are viewed as "bogus" rather than genuine, despite evidence to the contrary.
Performing the Future of Memory: Algerian Playwrights in France
Authors: Gross Janice
Published: April 2013

Amid controversy and fanfare, the year 2003 was declared Djazaïr or Year of Algeria in France. Not surprisingly, Algerian and French organizers and artists alike faced the challenge of determining how to commemorate a long and contentious colonial and post-colonial history set in the more recent context of a brutal civil war which raged between security forces and armed Islamic groups from 1992–1998. In addition, Algeria's Berber population, with its long history of resistance to repressive governmental policies. organized protests and a boycott against the government's sanctioned role as "official" purveyor of Algerian culture in the context of the 2003 program. Deeply rooted in a pre-Islamic identity layer, this vocal community has long represented the voice of the pluralistic cultural heritage of the "other" more essential and democratic Algeria. This latest controversy is another reminder of the Algerian nation's long and arduous struggle toward self-definition, as played out both within and outside of its borders. For Algerian playwrights and performers living in Paris, the past, both distant and recent, asserts itself as an omnipresent and seemingly inescapable backdrop against which the creative process takes place. This paper briefly outlines that backdrop before exploring the various ways that Algerian playwrights have articulated exile over the past thirty years.
The Compromise of Commemoration: The 1927 Centennial of Romanticism at the Comedie-Française
Authors: Mccready Susan
Published: April 2013

The 1920s in France were marked by a major shift in the aesthetics of theatrical performance. Theatre scholars speak of a "revolution" in the dramatic aesthetic during this period; however, the great changes were not as visible in the new plays being written as they were in theatrical productions. The real innovations were in stagecraft and the real innovators were directors, not playwrights. Directors such as Jacques Copeau and his disciples stripped the stage of its cumbersome props and detailed costumes, favoring a bare stage and simple clothing. In this way, they moved the French stage incrementally from realism to abstraction, mirroring the great changes that were taking place at the same time in the other arts. In fact, the radical revision of the dramatic aesthetic between the wars laid the foundation of contemporary French stagecraft.
Been There, Done That: Paving the Way for The Vagina Monologues
Authors: Scott Shelly
Published: April 2013

In her foreword to the "V-Day Edition" of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Gloria Steinem writes of her initial reaction to seeing Ensler's performance: "I already know this: it's the journey of truth telling we've been on for the past three decades". I shared that reaction as a spectator of the monologues, performed as part of the V-Day College Campaign on university campuses for the past three years, and when I sat in a US$55 seat to watch a professional production in Chicago in 2001. The four performances had only the text in common, but audience reactions were very much the same. The standing ovations, the whistles and yells, and the jubilant atmospheres left me wondering about this newly discovered need to jointly celebrate womanhood. What may initially appear as old-fashioned and redundant to those familiar with feminism's theatrical history in the U.S. strikes many in the general publicas outrageous and innovative, and they can't get enough. Why is such a need still present in these postfeminist days? and What does it signify that the need is being met through theatre (another old-fashioned notion for some)? If, indeed, The Vagina Monologues is merely echoing what early feminist consciousness- raising groups were teaching in the seventies, why has it now become a political sensation unparalleled in American feminist theatre?
Place in the Performance Experience
Authors: Mcauley Gay
Published: April 2013

Theatre and performance are art forms that play intensively with space and place. Central to each is the live presence of performers and spectators, which means that space becomes a vital factor in the performance experience. because it is the performance space that makes this co-presence possible. The nature of the theatre building and its location within the civic space of the community are significant elements in the performance experience for spectators, and theatre historians and semioticians have produced an impressive body of scholarly work exploring the ways in which theatre buildings can be seen to manifest prevailing philosophies of representation 'and to reflect the functions fulfilled by theatrical performance in the society in question. In the second half of the twentieth century, theatre practitioners all over the western world engaged in an enormous amount of exploration and experimentation with the material realities of the performance space.
Animal Geographies: Zooesis and the Space of Modern Drama
Authors: Chaudhuri Una
Published: April 2013

The burgeoning field of animal studies offers a new perspective on that overlap of cultural and performance space that we call mimesis. In proposing the neologism "zooesis" for this new perspective, I hope to invoke, as a foundation for my exploration of animal discourses in modern drama, the path-breaking work of Cary Wolfe, whose term "zoontologies" suggests just how much is at stake for literature and the humanities in the "the question of the animal"
This Is Home, This Isn't Home: Reza Abdoh's Tight Right White
Authors: Fordyce Ehren
Published: April 2013

"It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining". The aesthetics of aporia and failure that Beckett ushered in has been an unlikely legacy to try to build back from, especially for artists with an interest in the sociopolitical. Likewise, Artaud 's lucid madness and his mockery of the world 's mad pseudo-lucidity have seemed no less vital for late twentieth-century theatre artists to struggle with, but as with Beckett's aporia, Artaud's madness has seemed relatively intractable when applied to political theatre. In recent years, the Italian company Societas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS) has been one of the few companies to scramble successfully across this paradoxical terrain of aporia and madness and to retain a sense of perspective on the sociopolitical.ln the late 1980s and early 1990S in the United States, the director and writer Reza Abdoh was also one of the few artists able to acknowledge the potentially solipsistic deconstructions of identity furnished by Beckett and Artaud while still holding onto a sense of social engagement.
The Art of Living: History as Use-Value in The Romans in Britain
Authors: Carney Sean
Published: April 2013

In The Romans in Britain we are presented with a vision of history located not in the triumphant work of imperialist colonization, nor even in the movement of large collectives of human beings towards self-liberation through struggle, but instead in the isolated activities of dispossessed individuals. These isolated activities are bare acts of survival in the face of implacable necessity and cannot be interpreted as collective or political in any proper sense. They are, in my interpretation, acts of determinant negation that are utopian because they are bound to the assertion of use-value. Brenton's historiographic vision emerges within an English context, and in The Romans in Britain, there is visible a specific rejection of both major trends in English historiography at the end of the 1970s:
Playing at Lives: Biography and Contemporary Feminist Drama
Authors: Claycomb Ryan
Published: April 2013

In the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol, a visitor can stroll the along the parade of great men, admiring the busts, standing figures, and horsed figures carved in Italian marble and other polished chunks of stone. The parade marches on in traditional style until it comes across the suffragists, a memorial to Lucretia Molt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Immediately, the visitor notices the stylistic and ideological incongruities of the suffragist memorial amidst the phalanx of polished soldiers that surrounds it: Matt, Stanton, and Anthony are incompletely carved, their bodies seemingly rising from a partially formed, seven-ton slab of marble, and rising behind them, taller than the three, is an unformed figure, the beginnings of a fourth feminist, yet to be realized. I was introduced to the statue, a gift of the National Woman's Party, by a friend of mine, herself introduced to it by a friend who insists that every young feminist she knows take a photo in front of the statue, as an image of her potential to become that as-yet-unformed fourth figure.
Mirror up to Nurture: J. M. Synge and His Critics
Authors: Levitas Ben
Published: April 2013

"[T]he frenzy that would have silenced his master-work," W. B. Yeats wrote in J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time, "was, like most violent things, artificial, that defence of virtue by those who have but little, which is the pomp and gallantry of journalism and its right to govern the world". Thus polemicizing against the rhetoric of Synge's opponents, Yeats breathed new life into the arguments that - as he saw it — had by their "bitterness and ignorance" killed his friend and fellow dramatist. Yet also evident in the indictment is Yeats' commentary on his own flair for controversy, as the critics' critic, energetically condemning his era's easy condemnations: "[L]ife became sweet again when I had learnt all I had not learnt in shaping words, in defending Synge against his enemies"
Violence on the Abbey Theatre Stage: The National Project and the Critic; Two Case Studies
Authors: Leeney Cathry
Published: April 2013

During the early decades of the twentieth century in Ireland, the privileging of nationalist values, and the concomitant exclusion of women from active roles in violent struggle (as well as the erasure of the contributions they did make (see McCoole) meant that energy was diverted away from the dramatic representation of revolutionary changes in the roles of women in the family, in politics, and in society. It also meant that women's interrogation of violence effectively was censored at a number of levels: by producers, by critics, by audiences. Such censorship, in hindsight, is visible in the readings and misreadings of plays by women. Much of women's work did not reach the stage of production. Producers and directors edited or skewed certain dramatic texts during the process of rehearsal. Critics and audiences saw, in certain cases, mystery and ineptitude where dramaturgical daring or experiment was before them.
Irish Theatre Criticism: De-territorialisation and Integration
Authors: Wallace Clare
Published: April 2013

During the 1990S Ireland underwent a much-publicised transformation and highly dramatic transformation in status. Whether conceived as a Cinderella story or a tale of tiger economy, this devout, under-privileged, and perhaps rather peripheral European state, apparently overnight, "definitively joined the rich world [becoming] the icon of the globalisation process”. The speed of transformation has opened much debate as to what is being gained and lost, and - apart from its much-debated impetus and effects — this process of social and economic change in Ireland inevitably bears far-reaching implications for cultural discourse. Specifically, in terms of theatre, the 1990S was a decade of significant activity for both playwrights and practitioners, critics and commentators.
Ibsen and Darwin: A Reading of The Wild Duck
Authors: Aarseth Asbjørn
Published: April 2013

The question of the possible influence of Darwin’s scientific ideas on Ibsen’s plays, on The Wild Duck in particular, has been addressed more than once in Ibsen scholarship, and yet the answers produced so far are hardly exhaustive. The subject deserves attention by anyone interested in Ibsen as a mediator of modernity, since the works of Darwin, and particularly his most famous book, On the Origin of Species (1859), although controversial at first, came to acquire a central position in the modernization of European intellectual life at roughly the same time as the Norwegian playwright became famous in Europe for his works.
Fables of (Cuban) Exile: Special Periods and Queer Moments in Eduardo Machado’s Floating Island Plays
Authors: Ortiz Ricardo
Published: April 2013

Between the time of its publication by the Theatre Communications Group in 1991 and its first major West Coast production at the Mark Taper Forum three years later, Eduardo Machado’s four-play cycle of Cuban and Cuban-exile histories, Floating Islands, underwent major revision.2 Of the four, the play that bore the most revision was the third, Fabiola. As a whole, Floating Islands recounts the story of three connected, extended, and eventually dispersed bourgeois Havana families, the Ripolls, the Hernándezes, and the Marquezes, beginning with the first family’s rise to economic and social prominence in 1920s Havana, and taking us to the marriages that connect the three families in the decades preceding the 1959 Revolution, to the Revolution and its aftermaths in Cuba (the setting of Fabiola), and finally to the ambivalent moment of the family’s exile “success” in 1980s suburban Woodland Hills, CA. The differences between the earlier published and later performed “versions” of Fabiola are considerable, and significant. In this first of four sections to this discussion, I will summarize the two versions; I then take up aspects of Fabiola, and of the Islands cycle that situate Machado’s work in relation to the vexed ideologies still (mis)directing Cuban familial, (trans) national, and diasporic histories; the theory and history of theatre, drama, and performance as they inform the plays; and the legacies of spirit, ritual and religion, still haunting Machado’s Cuban/American theatre.
Transnational Legitimization of an Actor: The Life and Career of Soon-Tek Oh
Authors: Lee Esther Kim
Published: April 2013

He is the voice of the father in the Disney animation film Mulan (1998). He is Sensei in the Hollywood hit film Beverly Hills Ninja (1997). He is Lieutenant Hip in the 007 film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). These examples may trigger memories of Soon-Tek Oh in the minds of many Americans. Some would vaguely remember him as the “oriental” actor whose face often gets confused with those of other Asian and Asian American actors, such as Mako and James Hong. Theatre aficionados may remember him for his award-winning role in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Pacific Overtures in the 1970s, but more Americans will know him as the quintessential “oriental” man in Hollywood. This is not the legacy Soon-Tek Oh wanted. He would prefer to be remembered as an artist, an actor who played Hamlet, Romeo, and Osvald Alving; who founded theatre companies; who promoted cultural awareness for Korean Americans; and who taught youths with all of his integrity. He wanted to be a “great actor,” who transcended all markings, especially racial ones, and who was recognized for his talent as an artist. He has sought what I describe in this essay as “legitimization” as a respected actor at every crucial point in his life.
Unimaginable Fine Communities: Identities in Traffic in Rukhsana Ahmad’s Black Shalwar
Authors: Menon Jisha
Published: April 2013

In March 1999, ten months after the nuclear testing in India and Pakistan and two months before the Kargil conflict poised the two nations at the brink of a nuclear war, Kali Theatre Company produced Black Shalwar. Rukhsana Ahmad’s dramatic adaptation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story, “Kali Shalwar,” opened at the Oval House Theatre in London on 4 March 1999. The play emerged at a global political moment that signalled the growing power of a virile, martial, and chauvinist brand of nationalism in the Indian subcontinent. It also signalled increasing violence against non-European minorities within the U.K. Black Shalwar, directed by Helena Uren, reflects upon interethnic love and betrayal at a historic juncture, marked by mounting aggression towards minorities in India as well as Britain. Ahmad explores how the porous bodies of prostitutes confound the ontological purities of ethnic identities and allow the co-mingling of religious differences. The ambivalent sense of betrayal that pervades the inter-ethnic relationship in Black Shalwar allegorizes the treatment of minorities and the crisis of secularism and multiculturalism in both the Indian subcontinent and England.
Noël Coward and Sexual Modernism: Private Lives as Queer Comedy
Authors: Farfan Penny
Published: April 2013

The emergence of modern drama in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was integrally linked to the development of modern sexual identities, and Noël Coward’s career was at once shaped by and definitive of this larger historical development. Coward began his career when male homosexuality was still illegal in England and the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for “gross indecency” was still a recent memory; his breakthrough play The Vortex premiered in 1924, just four years before Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity. Coward’s historical situation as a necessarily closeted homosexual raises the question of whether and how the subversiveness of his sexual identity is reflected in his work.
Negotiating the American West in Sam Shepard’s Family Plays
Authors: Westgate J. Chris
Published: April 2013

On the network of highways that crisscrosses the continent – a conspicuous doubling of the ever-receding frontier – Shepard simultaneously seeks to revitalize the vestiges of the American West and to be revitalized by the transformative power associated with the West. He implicitly endorses Frederick Jackson Turner’s romantic conviction that the frontier,1 even if mediated by more than a century of urbanization, cultivates the individuality, self-reliance, and morality that are essential to the “American character.” Out there, away from overcrowded cities, Shepard merges with the frontier, with the journey, with America. And in so doing, he undergoes a distinctly American blend of epiphany, metamorphosis, and transcendence. Or, at least, the largely uncritical response to Shepard’s fascination with the American West is maintained.
Cognitive Catharsis in The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Authors: Gobert R. Darren
Published: April 2013

Brecht here employs his customary sly irony, echoing the tragic form while signaling the Lehrstück’s militancy against Aristotle by castigating pity, one of the constituent elements of katharsis as well as its enabling precondition. More generally, the Agitators’ disdain for the Young Comrade’s pity (a disdain they describe but do not display for the Control Chorus) enacts Brecht’s contempt for theatrical emotion in his early career.
Dead Center: Tragedy and the Reanimated Body in Marina Carr’s The Mai and Portia Coughlan
Authors: Doyle Maria
Published: April 2013

If, as Martin Esslin argues, the actor’s body is the “iconic sign par excellence:a real human being who has become a sign for a human being” (56), what happens to an audience’s experience of the theatrical event when the central such sign of the drama, the body of the hero, “dies” in the middle of the play? “A corpse on stage” quite obviously “demands attention” (Swander 139), much more so when the corpse in question is that of the title character. Yet a dead body on stage, which is, after all, not in fact dead, can be reanimated, and doing so, either through a disruption of linearity or through the dramatic presentation of an afterlife, testifies to the vitality and malleability of the theatrical experience. In attempting to represent “death,” the bodily sign implies a chronological endpoint, a culminating stillness that provokes analytical engagement: like the conclusion of any motion, “the stillness thus draws […] the attention of the spectator […] and calls for some effort either of aesthetic appreciation or interpretation” (McAuley 106–07). Stillness and motion define one another, and later motions of the “revived” body must always be read though the audience’s remembrance of the character’s ultimate conclusion, as if the theatrically animated figure becomes a trace of its own imaginatively extinguished self.
Ibsen Lite: Robert Wilson’s When We Dead Awaken
Authors: Templeton Joan
Published: April 2013

In the late 1980s, Robert Brustein, the artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conferred with Robert Wilson about choosing a text for Wilson’s second adaptation for the ART; his previous production had been Euripides’s Alcestis in 1986. ‘‘What’s interesting,’’ Brustein wrote, ‘‘is his growing attraction to texts, which we will do our best to further in our next production’’.
Beckett and Television: In a Different Context
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: April 2013

Sociologist Manuel Castells's sweeping 1,445-page, three-volume study, under the general title The Information Age, details the ways in which the rapid development and proliferation of information technology over the past two decades has created radically new social paradigms that call into question traditional societal structures and individuals’ relations to communal organizations as well as their personal perceptions of self. “Our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self,” Castells writes in his introduction to volume 1. “The Net,” a term covering the ever-expanding networked communication media, he defines as fluid and constantly changing, while the “Self” is in a constant search for some fixity or certainty, now that the primary markers of identity – sexual, religious, ethnic, territorial – are no longer clearly delineated or self-evident. This bipolarity between Net and Self has given rise to a condition Castells describes as “structural schizophrenia,” in which “patterns of social communication become increasingly under stress” (3).
Observations On The Viennese Theater
Authors: Kauf Robert
Published: April 2013

VIENNA, one of Europe's oldest theatrical capitals, is worth our attention not only because of the vigor of its theatrical life but also because of its reluctance to go with international theatrical trends and its preference for a path outlined for it by its own rich theatrical tradition.

In observing the Viennese theater one is forcefully reminded of the truism that although theater and literature are related they are not identical with one another. In the theater the literary component, the logos, has to share its place with the play component, the mimos. A struggle between the two for ascendency is discernible throughout the history of the European stage. Great theatrical performances have often been the result of a happy synthesis of these two elements. Where one of them has heavily predominated at the expense of the other, the outcome has usually not been a happy one: a preponderance of the mimos favors a theater that is purely amusement and entertainment, and-worse perhaps-that of the logos brings about bloodless, academic performances. The prominent, contemporary Viennese playwright Fritz Hochwalder pleads for a mimos-dominated theater: "Theater is by no means literature. It may become literature. From the viewpoint of the stage, literature is only the noble patina which the products of great theatrical periods acquire with age…
Protean Wit and Wisdom: Shaw's Uncollected Essays and Speeches
Authors: McDowellS Fredrick
Published: April 2013

THESE TWO BOOKS are the third and fourth in a series of Shaw's miscellaneous writings published by Hill and Wang. Shaw on Theatre, edited by E. J. West, and How to Become a Musical Critic, edited by Dan H. Laurence, preceded them. Dan H. Laurence is preparing other volumes of Shaw's uncollected work. To emphasize that these collections are integral parts of Shaw's achievement, the publishers are making format, printing, and styling conform to those patterns used in the standard edition. Shaw's uncollected work states certain of his ideas succinctly and memorably. The books are especially important for Shaw's comments about the theater and his own plays and for the illumination which they cast upon the thought of Shavian drama.
Modern Drama: A Selective Bibliography of Works Published in English in 1960 and 1961
Authors: Shedd Robert
Published: April 2013

Modern Drama: A Selective Bibliography of Works Published in English in 1960 and 1961
Creditors Reexamined
Authors: Johnson Walter
Published: April 2013

LITTLE EXCEPT A SMATTERING of details can conceivably be added to the analysis of the autobiographical basis of Strindberg's Credit01's (Fordringsiigare, 1888) presented by the late Martin Lamm in his Strindbergs dramer, I, 330-348. But that analysis is frankly and almost completely an examination of the playas a reflection of Strindberg's personal idiosyncracies, his reading, his troubles with his wife as recorded in En dares forsvarstal (The Confession of a Fool, 1887) and elsewhere, and possible influences in his immediate environment. Illuminating as all these matters are, they can hardly fail to color any reader's interpretation of a play that will have to and can stand on its own merits as literature and theater for non-Swedish readers and theatergoers, who neither have access to the wealth of biographical and period background nor care particularly about the author's personal frustrations and dilemmas.
Strindberg's Isle of The Dead
Authors: Vowels Richard
Published: April 2013

FROM TIME TO TIME a bold hand and a sympathetic heart conspire to complete a play left unfinished by the author. The four dramatic fragments left by August Strindberg and issued posthumously are not, except in one instance, of such shape and moment as to prompt extrapolation; but they are worth attention simply for the light they shed on the aging playwright. All of them date from the last ten years of Strindberg's life; two are substantial and especially revealing. Though I am chiefly concerned with presenting the first English translation of Toten-Insel, or The Isle of the Dead, perhaps the most personal and certainly the strangest of the fragments, something might be said a bout the others.
The Prompter’s Box: The Place of Modern Drama
Authors: Ackerman Alan
Published: April 2013

To locate an early-modern sensibility in the ‘‘modern’’ drama of Christopher Marlowe is to recognize the vital relationship between the blank space of the Renaissance stage and the linguistic efflorescence of the (blank-verse) plays written for it. Marlowe’s dramatic heroes, from Faustus to Tamburlaine, are wanderers; his scenes change quickly from the local to the global to the cosmic, indicating ‘‘the essential meaninglessness of theatrical space, the vacancy that is the dark side of its power to imitate any place’’ (Greenblatt 195). Yet his characters also assert compulsively, often pathetically, the significance of the local for the purpose of defining (i.e., limiting) themselves. It is Faustus, not Mephistopheles, who insists upon returning to Wittenberg to make an end. And despite the fact, as we may agree in general, that a sense of displacement, of homelessness, of radical mobility, characterizes ‘‘modernity,’’ Faustus’s puzzled interrogation of Mephistopheles about the place of damnation continues to haunt our own discussions of the significance of place in modernity and of the locations of culture, especially in the study of drama and theatre.
La Donna Mobile: Massimo Bontempelli’s Nostra Dea as Fascist Modernism
Authors: Gaborik Patricia
Published: April 2013

‘‘La Donna Mobile: Massimo Bontempelli’s Nostra Dea as Fascist Modernism’’ offers a reading of the 1925 play Nostra Dea in the context of the widespread aesthetic return to order of the period. Discussing the play as a response to Gabriele d’Annunzio’s decadentism and F.T. Marinetti’s futurism, the author considers it one of the new ‘‘myths for the modern era’’ Bontempelli called for in his literary movement Novecento, which he claimed was spiritually akin to fascism. Revealing how the play both draws on and subverts key aspects of fascist modernism — such as its ‘‘rhetoric of virility’’ and ‘‘aesthetization of politics’’ — the article finally cautions against simple equations that render art of the right ‘‘irrational’’ and art of the left ‘‘alienating,’’ suggesting that the play’s ideological ambiguity is its artistic success.
Book Reviews
Authors: Carney Sean , Wessendorf Markus , Friedman Sharon , Harrison-Kahan Lori , Fordyce Ehren , Pattie David , Gilman Luc , Marra Kim , Clum John , Shepherd-Barr Kristen
Published: April 2013

David Barnett, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre , reviewed by Markus Wessendorf

Linda Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times , reviewed by Sharon Friedman

Laura Bradley, Brecht and Political Theatre: The Mother on Stage , reviewed by Sean Carney

Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910, reviewed by Lori Harrison-Kahan

Matthew S. Buckley, Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama , reviewed by Ehren Fordyce

S.E. Gontarski And Anthony Uhlmann, eds., Beckett after Beckett , reviewed by David Pattie

John Heilpern, John Osborne: A Patriot for Us , reviewed by Luc Gilleman

Katie N. Johnson, Sisters in Sin: Brothel Drama in America, 1900–1920 , reviewed by Kim Marra

Scott Mcmillin, The Musical as Drama , reviewed by John M. Clum

Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, reviewed by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr
Ghosts from an Imperfect Place: Philip Ridley’s Nostalgia
Authors: Urban Ken
Published: April 2013

The characters of Philip Ridley’s plays are sick with nostalgia. Ridley’s three major works from the 1990s serve as powerful reminders of nostalgia’s origins as a physical affliction caused by an acute longing for home and the past. The characters of The Pitchfork Disney (1991) and The Fastest Clock in the Universe (1992) are so enamoured of fictions of the past that they go to violent ends to preserve them. The recurrence of nostalgia in Ridley’s plays reflects larger, ongoing debates about nostalgia in British culture, from Thatcher’s call for a return to Victorian values to the rise of Tony Blair’s New Labour party and its championing of Cool Britannia, which looked backed to 1960s Swinging London as its model. Yet, in his final play of the decade, Ghost from a Perfect Place (1994), Ridley suggests that the cure for nostalgia is perhaps nostalgia itself. That is, the recognition of nostalgia can serve as a means of transforming it from a purely retrospective gesture into a prospective one.
D. H. Lawrence's Biblical Play David
Authors: Panichas George
Published: April 2013

In the Bible the name David is given to no one except the great king of Israel. The Hebrew meaning of the word is "Beloved," and according to one interpretation it was even at one time a title for a sun-god. David has come to signify both kingly and divine qualities, and the name of the youngest son of Jesse, of Bethlehem, is often associated with the celebrated life and exploits of a shepherd, minstrel, courtier, warrior, poet, statesman, prophet, king. Concurrently, it connotes the deeper human feelings of loyalty and kindness and tenderness expressed by a friend and husband and father. David Herbert Lawrence was certainly to be fully aware of the fact that he was to bear a name of ancient and goodly reputation, although from his early days in Eastwood he disliked his first name. To the name "Bert," as used by his family and friends, he responded without hesitation; yet, this "delicate brat with a snuffy nose, whom most people treated quite gently as just an ordinary little lad," defied and enraged his teachers when he refused to answer to David. Indeed, to the end of his life the English novelist maintained this antipathy against his name, and in most of his letters and all his works he appeared simply as D. H. Lawrence.
Drama and Theater In Puerto Rico
Authors: Dauster Frank
Published: April 2013

THE HISTORY OF THE MODERN THEATER in Puerto Rico is brief, covering less than twenty-five years. It is the story of the dedication of a small group which has, in a relatively short time, made serious theater a reality. There is still much to be done, but the most difficult steps have been taken. Around these men, notably Emilio Belaval, Francisco Arrivi, Manuel Mendez Ballester and Rene Marques, must be written any serious
Julian Green, Novelist as Playwright
Authors: Rose Marilyn
Published: April 2013

An established novelist like the Gallic-American Julian Green presents his plays under the most favorable circumstances: distinguished casts, impressive sets and costumes, forewarned critics, and eager spectators. Why is it then that Sud (1953), L'Ennemi (1954), and L'Ombre (1956) were disappointing? Why is it, indeed, that an acknowledged technician of the novel, such as Green-or Edith Wharton, Henry James, Fram;ois Mauriac; the list, despite exceptions, would be interminable-seldom writes a good play? G. M. Loney, examining Mrs. Wharton's failure with the dramatization of The House of Mirth, speculates that the novelist mistakenly considers a play "little more than a novel brought to life." I find this speculation only partially acceptable. After all, a novel, bound by fewer structural limitations, can evoke life as effectively as a play (if not more effectively). I think we have to do with a mystique of genres. When a good novelist fails on the stage, is not this because he tries to translate his fictional mode into a dramatic mode when he should have been creating in a dramatic mode from the start? Mauriac, defending Sud against its baffled critics, said in Bloc-Notes I952-57 that only a novelist could have written it. Precisely. If we study Green's plays in the context of both the generic requirements and his fictional practice, we find that he is attempting to translate novels into plays. Along the way we can throw light on the entire novelist-as-playwright enigma, for in Green's case the novelist clearly defrauds the dramatist.
American Regional Drama, 1920-1940: Frustration and Fulfillment
Authors: Wentz John
Published: April 2013

THOUGH REGIONAL ELEMENTS HAD BEEN PRESENT in American plays since the eighteenth century, regional drama underwent a fundamentally new development after the First World War. Stirred by the general cultural quickening of the time, the new regionalism was shaped by the regional realism of turn-of-the-century fiction and poetry, by such foreign influences as the Abbey Theatre and its playwrights (Synge, in particular), by a fascination with primitivism, by the exploitation of native folk material, and by the growth of a strong and diversified non-commercial theater-little, civic, and academic.
Pirandello's Mirror
Authors: Rosenberg Marvin
Published: April 2013

IN A TIME WHEN GREAT QUESTIONS HAD TO BE ASKED in the drama, Pirandello seemed to be ready to ask the right ones, brilliantly. He was the proper child of a questioning age, nourished on two great revolutionary movements: a revolt of the arts against all conventional forms that obscured experience, and a parallel revolution in psychology that stripped away conventional ideas of behavior to get at the nuclear process. Pirandello seemed ideally to combine the means of the new art with the probe of the new psychology, in that exploration of the self that has always been one of the chief provinces of drama. Unlike contemporaries following the same paths who were pasting the insights of Freud and Jung upon their drama, he seemed to have made his own many secrets of the psyche: he understood, with the first psychoanalysts and Gestaltists, that each man perceives life in a context determined by his needs and wants, that men seldom break out of this narrow personal world in which, instead of "seeing," they project on the screen of life the meanings they want to find there. So his drama asked the crucial questions: What is the self, if indeed there is one? What is its morality? Its conscience? Its goal? What is the responsibility of the artist who deals with it, of his audience?
Masks And Mummeries In Enrico 117 and Caligula>
Authors: Savage Edward
Published: April 2013

To PROPOSE Pirandello's Henry IV and Camus' Caligula as representative of the conventional and traditional theater is, admittedly, unconventional. Critics continue to categorize both plays as dramas of the Absurd, while popular taste, accustomed to a slice-of-life realism in the modem theater, hesitates to look upon the theater of Pirandello and Camus as anything other than an avant-garde freak, interesting and provocative perhaps, but little more.

The inability of both critic and popular audiences to accept Henry IV and Caligula as traditional theater arises, perhaps, from the utilization in both plays of currently unfamiliar theatrical devices, devices which are artificial and stylized rather than realistic. I refer specifically to the play-within-the-play and the assumption of a role within the play. Furthermore, that Pirandello and Camus utilize these age-old artifices of the theater as the main agents in revealing thesis, character, and action in their plays additionally hinders modem audiences from fully understanding Henry IV and Caligula. For, under the influence of nineteenth and twentieth century realism, we have forgotten that the essential nature of the traditional stage is basically artificial and stylized.
Samuel Beckett And Happy Days
Authors: Eastman Richard
Published: April 2013

THE WRITING, PERFORMANCE, AND PUBLICATION OF Happy Days in 1961 has brought the number of Samuel Beckett's stage plays to four, most of them composed in the last few years during an eclipse of his novel-writing. The famous Waiting for Godot (written in the late 1940's) has been followed by Endgame (written in 1956), Krapp's Last Tape (written in 1958), and Happy Days. To this output should be added two radio plays—All That Fall (written in 1956) and Embers (written in 1959)—and two pantomimes, Acts Without Words I and II.

Here is a body of work large enough to confirm or modify certain earlier inferences about Beckett's plays. What is "the Beckett myth"if by "myth" is meant that recurrent dramatic pattern which concentrates and objectifies a fundamental valuation of human life? What are the evident lines of growth of this myth? Following the necessary description of the new play, these questions will be attempted in their order.
The Trouble with Lorca
Authors: Oliver William
Published: April 2013

"THE TROUBLE WITH LORCA" is an irritating phrase—at least it is to me and for a variety of reasons: its use is ever more and more frequent, it is generally a statement prompted by an undefined bias and, finally but not least, I strongly suspect that I became aware of the phrase as it issued from my own mouth. Whatever this trouble is I have found myself reluctant to consider it. My admiration for Lorca's plays has been so strong as to have a connotation of indenture. I have studied his plays, translated them, acted in them, directed them, and criticized them favorably in print. I have been loath, therefore, to venture into any strongly negative criticism of a playwright whose works have given me such pleasure and whose influence upon my own theater practice has been so pronounced. It is almost as though I were reluctant to admit flaws in Lorca for fear of admitting my own mistaken judgments. However, there is no escaping the persistent fact of my own dissatisfaction with Lorca's plays any more than I can escape hearing the recurrent critical gambit, "The trouble with Lorca is ... "
Body And Soul On Broadway
Authors: Goldstein Malcolm
Published: April 2013

MOST ATTEMPTS TO ACCOUNT FOR THE POPULARITY of American psychological drama include a claim that audiences look to it for a comforting release from the deep troubles of the age. This observation, though now almost too familiar to command attention, is reasonably accurate. The age is troubled. It carries a weight of worry over international unrest at least as great as burdened the decade immediately preceding World War II, and the affluence amid which the American population worries has created other anxieties no less keen than those born of poverty in that not-so-distant decade. It is also true that most of the new plays give comfort, and that audiences are grateful for it. But on this point we must pause for speculation, if ever we are to make a sensible appraisal of the notions our popular playwrights bring to us. It is time to give thought to what lies under the skillful plot construction, character development, and turns of phrase in the work of a Tennessee Williams, a William Inge, a Paddy Chaye£sky—to look at the heart of their mystery. Much too seldom does the public for new plays or the corps of critics who speak for it question these playwrights' casual procedure for offering encouragement, or recognize that the comfort they offer is only temporary. No "healing" process undergone by any of the disturbed protagonists of Broadway could take effect outside the theater, and it is both dangerous and unintelligent to think otherwise, as unfortunately many persons who observe them do think. Our new playwrights, like the most popular playwrights before the war, are propagandists of a sort who would have us believe that we can allay our most serious troubles by not much more than will power alone. Though we may admire qualities of their work to the same degree that we admire certain qualities of such propaganda plays as, say, Shakespeare's Henry V or Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, we should be wary of their propensity for evasiveness, question-begging, and special pleading.
The Significance of Andre Gide's Oedipus
Authors: San Juan Jr. E.
Published: April 2013

Andre Gide's theater may be defined at the outset as the projection of an inner state of dialogue. To Gide a work of art is born out of spiritual conflict. Similarly, all moral reform and self-criticism discloses itself as the resolution of mental and emotional struggle. Gide's mind has justly been described as "the theater of an incessant drama." Accordingly his plays may be validly considered as faithful reflections of the tension between psychological extremes. They reveal and crystallize the reconciliation of intellect and desire,. of the symbolic world of abstract ideas and the sensuous world of nature. In his play Oedipus, for example, we perceive the clash between Hebraic (Tiresias) and Hellenic (Oedipus) cultures, resulting ultimately in the affirmation of classic precision and romantic vitality of style. Such an atmosphere of conflict, to Gide, is really a sign of complete, mature creativity.
Berenger, Protagonist Of An Anti-Playwright
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2013

IONESCO HAS WRITTEN FOUR PLAYS about a protagonist named Bérenger The Killer, Rhinoceros, Le Pieton de l’air, and Le Roi se meurt (the latter two have not yet been translated). In French the name Bérenger is not uncommon, and Ionesco probably intended it to suggest two things: Bérenger as the name of kings in the first millennium of French history, and Beranger (pronounced Bérenger) as the name of a democratic nineteenth-century song-writer. All four Bérenger of Ionesco combine the common man and the king, the trivial and the towering. Ionesco's Bérenger: are and are not the same character, and to the extent that they are not the same, it is illuminating to consider them in pairs.
Book Reviews
Authors: Quirino Leonard , McAnany Emil , Stanton Stephen , Nethercot Arthur , Weisstein Ulrich , O'Neill Michael , Pronko Leonard , Johnston Denis , Bishop Thomas
Published: April 2013

Walter H. Sokel An Anthology Of German Expressionist Drama, reviewed by Leonard Quirino

Jorn Dönner The Personal Vision Of Ingmar Bergman, reviewed by Emile G McAnany

Abraham Tauber, George Bernard Shaw On Language, reviewed by Stephen S. Stanton

Audrey Williamson, Bernard Shaw: Man And Writer, reviewed by Arthur H. Nethercot

Jean Cocteau, The Infernal Machine And Other Plays, reviewed by Ulrich Weisstein

Walter Starkie, Scholars And Gypsies, reviewed by Michael J. O'Neill

Donald Watson, Eugene Ionesco, Notes And Counter Notes, Writings On The Theatre, reviewed by Leonard C. Pronko

Saros Cowasjee, Sean O'Casey, The Man Behind The Plays, reviewed by Denis Johnston

Michael Benedikt , Modern French Theatre. The Avant-Garde, Dada, And Surrealism, reviewed by Thomas Bishop
Yeats and the French Drama
Authors: Worth Katherine
Published: April 2013

THERE IS A FITNESS in considering Yeats and the French drama at this particular moment in the history of the theater. For it is only now, more than fifty years after he had explored its possibilities, that the English speaking theater has become fully aware of the drama of ritual, is applauding Beckett and hastening to sit at the feet of Artaud. The idea of a theater of cruelty, working through symbols and violent physical effects, was completely realised by Yeats in such plays as A Full Moon in March (1935) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939).1 He anticipated some of Beckett's central themes, perfected in a play like Purgatory (1939) a dramatic form which ideally reflects them, and must indeed, through his own work and the exceptionally rich corpus of his dramatic theory, have stimulated a good deal of Beckett's thinking about drama.
Book Reviews
Authors: Lesage Laurent , Wall Vincent , Sollnea W.
Published: April 2013

Adele King, Albert Camus, reviewed by Laurent Lesage

Baird R. Shuman, Robert E. Sherwood, reviewed by Vincent Wall

Bil Baird, The Art Of The Puppet, reviewed by W. J. Sollnea