bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Prompter’s Box: Back to the Future: One-Hundred Years after Ibsen
Authors: Ackerman Alan
Published: April 2013

Stephen Greenblatt’s comic-tragic, autobiographical parable for his New Historicist project, ‘‘to explore the ways in which major English writers of the sixteenth century created their own performances, to analyze the choices they made in representing themselves and in fashioning characters, to understand the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity,’’ is marked by a radical and irremediable alterity, a sense of difference between self and other that is impossible to overcome (256; emphasis added). It also indicates a tension between writing and orality (or performance); the ‘‘impaired’’ speech of the son here is silent and leads only to more silence, the difference in the text, as Michel de Certeau describes it in The Writing of History, like ‘‘a missing precious stone’’ waiting for a ‘‘writing to circumscribe it’’ (213, 210).
Ibsen, Heroism, and the Uncanny
Authors: Kittang Atle
Published: April 2013

In his ‘‘Second Impression’’ of Henrik Ibsen and his work, from 1882, the Danish critic Georg Brandes summarizes a conception of the dramatist’s attitude and literary strategy that still belongs to the standard repertoire of Ibsen criticism. Gradually, after having reconsidered the idealism of some of his early plays, Brandes claims, ‘‘a superb idealistic [ideal] (or moral) suspiciousness became his muse’’. And he adds, ‘‘In Ibsen’s eyes the average man is small, egoistical, and pitiful. He looks upon him, not from the purely scientific, but from the moral point of view, and in his character of moralist, he dwells far more on the badness of man than on his blindness and foolishness’’. Ibsen’s pessimism, which cannot be denied, is consequently ‘‘not of a metaphysical, but of a moral nature’’.
John Gabriel Borkman’s Avant-Garde Continuity
Authors: Sandberg Mark
Published: April 2013

Henrik Ibsen, filmmaker. A pause is necessary after that particular juxtaposition, if only to sort out the immediate clash of impressions: Ibsen, the culminating nineteenth-century dramatist, on the one hand; film, the nascent twentieth-century popular visual medium, on the other. Ibsen’s plays, among the most renowned dramas of entrapment, interiority, and inertia, do not resonate easily with the spatial–temporal mobility of the cinema. The fact that Ibsen was no Eisenstein evokes little surprise; other writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a much more visible interest in the new medium (Maxim Gorky and Franz Kafka come to mind).1 Ibsen, sixty-eight years old at the time of the cinematograph’s debut in Paris, lived out most of his creative life before regular public cinematic projection became a truly viable possibility in the early twentieth century and before film could possibly have a significant cultural impact. Given that Ibsen was incapacitated by the series of strokes in 1900–03 that put an end to his writing and led to his death in 1906, he simply did not have the historical opportunity to explore the formal possibilities of the new medium directly. Case closed?
Happiness as End: A Reading of Rosmersholm
Authors: Stanton-Ife Anne-Marie
Published: April 2013

Rosmersholm is a play about happiness and how to achieve it; yet only a handful of critics, notably Hjalmar Brenel, Edvard Beyer, and more recently, Errol Durbach, have given the theme of happiness due consideration (‘‘Ibsen’’). The play’s gloomy reputation precedes analyses of it, frequently leaving this crucial dimension unexamined. Much is lost in the process, not least essential concepts from the lexicon of classical tragedy, happiness [eutuchia], and its opposite, unhappiness [dustuchia], the poles between which Aristotelian tragic action ranges. At the semantic core of eutuchia and dustuchia is tuche [chance or luck], which has the capacity to overturn both. The Norwegian lykke [happiness] preserves this relationship as it can denote ‘‘happiness’’ and ‘‘success’’ as well as ‘‘chance’’ and ‘‘luck.’’
When We Dead Awaken: A Scene That Gets out of Control
Authors: Goldman Michael
Published: April 2013

The scene referred to in the title of this article belongs to a type that is important in Ibsen; it gets out of control in the sense that its characters let it get away from them. Broadly speaking, of course, all decent dramatic scenes get out of control in this way. When any two characters come onstage, each has a script of |his own in mind, a notion of how the scene is supposed to go, and the drama comes not from Hamlet’s script or Gertrude’s script, say, but from the clash between scripts as they argue in her closet. Indeed, a good way of getting actors to play a big scene freshly and spontaneously is to urge them to concentrate, not on the script that they have memorized, but on the script their character thinks will be played when the scene begins.
A Look Anew at Beckett’s Other Peg
Authors: Mellamphy Dan
Published: April 2013

The topic of this essay, as the title suggests, is Endgame's “dramatis non-persona” Mother Pegg, and how this non-persona functions as the focal point not only of that play in particular (Endgame), but figuratively – or rather, figurelessly: that is, as a function (functionally) rather than a figure per se – more generally in Beckett's work. As early, indeed, as 1935 (when Beckett attended a lecture at Tavistock and thought that he had heard a comment about someone who had “never really been born”), Beckett, in his works, began to delve or dig (“claw,” as he once put it [Disjecta 107]) deeper and deeper into his personae – and “the persona” more generically – in order to come into contact with (if not, in fact, to come to terms with) the non-persona obscured by the persona, the non-being “masked” or “covered over” by being itself (which, thanks to the work of Beckett's contemporary and fellow ‘Parisian immigré’ Émmanuel Lévinas, is, in this article, designated as the “illeity” – ill-seen, ill-said – beyond the individual persona qua “ipseity”). In Endgame, Mother Pegg is this ill-seen, ill-said illeity (non-person) displaced – replaced – by the “personae” present and presented in the play; personae who (as we come to learn in Endgame's diegesis) are presented – illuminated – onstage by dint of a denial: viz. the denying of any light to Mother Pegg. At a critical point in the play, indeed, we are told (by way of the character Clov) that the light which shines upon the stage shines by the grace of a prior disgrace: the death by darkness of an absent other, Mother Pegg (who “died … [o]f darkness” [75], which explains her non-appearance in the play – her “existence by proxy” as Samuel Beckett would say [qtd. in Harvey 247]). This absent other or “être manqué” (Harvey 247) is, I argue, the focal point qua vanishing-point of the play itself and of Beckett's writerly gaze en générale (poetic and dramatic) from the late 1930s or 1940s onward.
Dublin's Fourth Theatre Festival
Authors: Fallon Gabriel
Published: April 2013

DUBLIN'S FOURTH INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL opened with the sensational news that Sean O'Casey had refused permission for the presentation of his play The Drums of Father Ned. This, of course, is the play that reputedly had been banned by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin two Festivals previously. Now here was the Festival Committee evidently willing and anxious to defy that ban. And no one was standing in the way but Mr. O'Casey.

In a letter to The Irish Times an Abbey Theatre Director accused Mr. O'Casey of banning his own play. Evidence was produced that on the occasion of the earlier Festival Mr. O'Casey had publicly stated that he had withdrawn the play because he refused to allow the Dublin Globe Theatre company to alter it to their satisfaction. The letter-writer went on to accuse Mr. O'Casey of trying to create the impression that his plays were no longer acceptable in the land of his birth. He then challenged Mr. O'Casey to lift his ban, stating that the Abbey Theatre would in this event produce every play in the O'Casey canon in the order in which each was written. Mr. O'Casey did not reply.
James M. Barrie's Concept Of Dramatic Action
Authors: McGraw William
Published: April 2013

IT WOULD DEMAND A THOROUGH EXPLORATION of modem British drama to determine, with any degree of authority, the precise reasons for the descent of J. M. Barrie's star in the dramatic firmament. Time will, of course, facilitate the final judgment, but for present purposes it should be sufficient to suggest that criticism finds his work, for the most part, unsuited to the contemporary palate. Critics remind us that his plays do not bespeak a sense of urgency and, above all, they do not preach. This we know was Barrie's intention. He deliberately avoided "idea" plays for many reasons, one of which was that he felt he could not write them. More important, in order that he might capitalize on the contemporary Victorian reaction to, and even fear of, the rise of scientific and skeptical thought, he wanted to avoid the type of social criticism that crept into the works of Pinero and Jones and made up the bulk of Galsworthy's plays. It would be wrong, though, to think of Barrie as purely Victorian. There is so much that is truly modem in his work along with all of that which is reminiscent of the theater of romance and spectacle that to be quite fair he must be placed on the bridge between the two periods or, more accurately, in his own special category. Barrie was not determined to revolutionize the drama, but the undeniable seriousness that pervades most of his work stands as evidence of his concern for modem man and his problems. It may come as a surprise to some that Shaw himself, perhaps in a rare moment of benevolence, in a letter to J. T. Grein gave Barrie credit for "the relegation of the nineteenth century London theatre to the dust bin."
Cocteau, Stravinsky, Brecht, And The Birth of Epic Opera
Authors: Weisstein Ulrich
Published: April 2013

As ITS TITLE INDICATES, this paper is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of anti-Romantic and anti-Wagnerian tendencies in modern opera, but merely an attempt to evaluate certain affinities among Jean Cocteau's Le Coq et l’Arlequin, a collection of brilliant apercus about music and the theater, Stravinsky-Ramuz' Histoire du Soldat, Brecht-Weill's Dreigroschenoper, and the series of Anmerkungen which Brecht appended to the latter work. An historical outline of the epic trends on the musical stage of our day would necessarily entail consideration of such other key works as Erik Satie's Parade, Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le Toif, Cocteau's Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel, Milhaud's La Creation du Monde, Sitwell-Walton's Fagade, and Claudel-Milhaud's Christophe Colomb, whose authors, instead of wishing to place the audience at once in a "narcotic atmosphere," "wanted to show how the soul gradually reaches music."
Modern Drama Conferences
Authors: Meserve Walter
Published: April 2013

Modern Drama Conferences
Book Reviews
Authors: Scobbie Irene , Shedd Robert
Published: April 2013

F. L. Lucas, The Drama of Ibsen And Strindberg, reviewed by Irene Scobbie

August Strindberg, The Chamber Plays, reviewed by Robert G. Shedd
A Cook's Tour of Strindberg Scholarship
Authors: Vowles Richard
Published: April 2013

THE IMAGE OF STRINDBERG is blurred abroad. Outside of Sweden the myths of Strindberg are still scattered about the literary landscape like so many Easter Island effigies, a little absurd in their distortion and ponderous inscrutability. "Bedeviled Viking," "Shakespeare of the North," "mad misogynist," "psychopathic Don Quixote of the bedroom." In one of the most recent studies, so notable a critic as F. L. Lucas finds that the "warped and poisoned personality" of Strindberg (p. 461)1 lies somewhere between Narcissus and Nazi Sturmführer (p. 407). To him The Father seems "more squalid and revolting than tragic" (p. 358) and the later works are not so much dream plays as "scream plays." In short, confronted with the personality of Strindberg, Mr. Lucas doubts "if a more fantastic biped has walked the earth since the days of the pterodactyl" (p. 305).
August Strindberg— Reminiscences of a Protege
Authors: Alin Hans
Published: April 2013

My ACQUAINTANCE and association with August Strindberg began in 1910 and extended over a period of slightly more than two years, until his death on May 14. 1912. His influence, however, was destined to have a decisive bearing on my whole life and future. While a student in a preparatmy school in Stockholm, I had eagerly read almost everything Strindberg had written at the time: plays, novels, short stories, autobiographies, poems, as well as his historical, scientific and linguistic works, not to mention polemical newspaper and magazine articles. His dramas, above all, had made on me a profound and lasting impression that was strengthened by witnessing performances of some of them at Strindberg and August Falck's Intima Teatem. dedicated exclusively to the presentation of the great Swedish dramatist's own plays. Strongly influenced by all I had read and seen of Strindberg’s works, I devoted all my spare time after school to the writing of a play, which, when finished, I called On the Pf'ecipice. It was a realistic drama, with its action set in modern times. It had a tragic ending.
Strindberg And The Symbolist Drama
Authors: Block Haskell
Published: April 2013

THE EFFORT of the symbolist poets and dramatists of the 1890's to create a drama in accord with their poetics of suggestiveness, mystery, and occult correspondences, was a major impulse shaping the development of the modem theater. While the leading symbolist playwrights were French and Belgian writers who had come under the direct influence of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Mallarme, the new movement rapidly spread throughout Europe, affecting the work of dramatists who were not symbolists in any strict sense, but who responded to the new emphasis on dream, magic, and atmospheric evocation perhaps best exemplified in the early plays of Maeterlinck. Such varied writers as Hofmannsthal, Hauptmann, Yeats, and Strindberg drew upon the experiments and innovations of the symbolists and. contributed to their effort to bring about a theater of fantasy, musicality, and poetry.
How to Do Nothing with Words, or Waiting for Godot as Performativity
Authors: Begam Richard
Published: April 2013

This essay analyzes how Waiting for Godot exposes the structural logic of both rhetorical and dramatic performativity. Drawing on the languagephilosophy of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Begam considers what happens to ‘‘performative’’ locutions – statements that actually make things happen, such as ‘‘I now pronounce you man and wife’’ – when they are theatrically represented. Austin claims that such locutions when uttered on stage are rendered intransitive – i.e., they lose their performative force – and are therefore relegated to the Kantian realm of the purely aesthetic. Yet Beckett’s play spends two acts demonstrating that the primary function of language is not ‘‘constative’’ – not meant to give us a picture or representation of reality. Rather, Beckett’s conception of language – drawn from his reading of Mauthner – is essentially performative. But if words, phrases, and sentences all function performatively, if all descriptive uses of language are, in fact, instrumental uses, then the larger effect is to return illocutionary or transitive force to the theatre. As a result, Beckett’s play breaks through the wall not only of Ibsenian realism but also of Kantian aestheticism, reclaiming for the dramatic event the kind of ‘‘there-ness’’ that Alain Robbe-Grillet discovered in the first performances of Godot.
Challenging the Selectivity of Memory in 1950s West Germany: Erwin Sylvanus’s Dr. Korczak and the Children
Authors: Mueller Kerstin
Published: April 2013

The end of the Cold War and German unification have brought about a more complete treatment of the Nazi past in Germany, one that includes the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Since the early 1990s, perpetrators have increasingly become a part of the discourse about the Nazi past, in historiography as well as in fictional literature. I would argue, however, that perpetrators have been part of the cultural memory of (West) Germany since the first post-war decades. Many dramatists wrote plays that included Nazi perpetrators as characters and, in doing so, confronted Germans with this difficult and suppressed memory. One of these was Erwin Sylvanus, who wrote Dr. Korczak and the Children in 1957 in order to challenge his contemporaries’ faulty memory of their difficult past. With his play, Sylvanus countered their strategies of distancing themselves from the crimes of the Holocaust and from those who committed them. Employing a Pirandellian technique, he presented Germans with a Nazi character who reminded them that the perpetrators had come from out of their midst and were still with them in the present. After its world premiere in 1957, the play was performed in West Germany numerous times in the late 1950s and early 1960s. An examination of newspaper reviews written in response to these stagings reveals, however, that the playwright’s attempt at stimulating more critical self-reflection in discourse about the Nazi past was largely unsuccessful. The majority of reviewers interpreted the productions as a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and they saw these performances as celebrating the spirit of humanism exemplified in the play by the character of Janusz Korczak. This reception illustrates Germans’ conflicted struggle with remembering the perpetrators’ experience and highlights the role of the media in the construction of cultural memory.
Book Reviews
Authors: Irwin Kathleen , Campell Peter , Taylor-Batty Mark , Oesmann Astrid , Wolf Stacy , Rebhorn Matthew , Wylam Lisa Wolford , Kershaw Baz
Published: April 2013

Christopher Baugh, Theatre, Performance and Technology: The Development of Technology in the Twentieth Century, reviewed by Kathleen Irwin

Scott T. Cummings, Remaking American Theater: Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and the SITI Company, reviewed by Peter A. Campbell

Charles Grimes, Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence beyond Echo, reviewed by Mark Taylor-Batty

Gad Kaynar And Linda Ben-Zvi, eds., Bertolt Brecht: Performance and Philosophy , reviewed by Astrid Oesmann

Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, reviewed by Stacy Wolf

Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes, reviewed by Matthew Rebhorn

Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement, reviewed by Lisa Wolford Wylam

Maurya Wickstrom, Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical Seductions , reviewed by Baz Kershaw
The Meaning Of The Importance of Being Earnest
Authors: Ganz Arthur
Published: April 2013

For Wilde, dandyism was a philosophy and an attitude toward life. Embodied in his plays, it functions as a rationale for the actions and attitudes of his characters, as a coherent system which forms the basis for their thoughts and their conduct. In the great tradition of the Romantic exile artist, Wilde rejected the middle-class, Philistine society of his day. Its coarseness, its pitiless morality, and its incomprehension of beauty were all alien to him. Searching for a new basis for life, Wilde, the most extreme of esthetic critics, turned to the only part of experience in which he had faith, to art-whose secret for him lay always in the achievement of perfect form. He took form, the basis of art, turned it into a philosophy of life in which esthetics replaces ethics and, as we shall see, introduced it into his plays cloaked with the elegance and wit of nineteenth-century dandyism.
Sean O'Casey and The Lockout Of 1913: Materia Poetica Of The Two Red Plays
Authors: Esslinger Pat
Published: April 2013

PERHAPS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT event in Ireland in the twentieth century was the Easter Rebellion of 1916, that most successful failure in the history of warfare, whose gunfire has been echoed and amplified by such Irishmen as William Butler Yeats, Lennox Robinson, James Stephens, and George Bernard Shaw. That famous April 24 also had its influence on the observing genius of Sean O'Casey and is the origin of his The Plough and the Stars and most of his powerful third volume of autobiography, Drums under the Windows. But as important as this 1916 defeat was to O'Casey, there was an earlier event, a more complete fiasco, that was to him much more significant, the Great Lockout of 1913.
The Infernal Machine, Hamlet, and Ernest Jones
Authors: Feynman Alberta
Published: April 2013

IN 1923, ERNEST JONES PUBLISHED "A Psycho-Analytic Study of Hamlet," the first chapter in his Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis. Two years later, Jean Cocteau completed a French adaptation of Oedipus Rex; ten years later, Cocteau used the same Sophoclean material as a basis for his own play, The Infernal Machine. The latter has since become a classic among modem adaptations of the myth of Oedipus. In constructing this new version, Cocteau drew chiefly, but not solely, upon the original myth. He fused the myth of Oedipus with that of another great tragic heroHamlet. Considerable internal evidence in The Infernal Machine points to the conclusion that Hamlet as well as Oedipus was in the mind of the author when he wrote the play. Cocteau did not, however, draw upon the myth of Hamlet as we usually conceive it; he reflects one particular interpretation, that made by the eminent English psychoanalyst, Ernest Jones. Consciously or unconsciously, Cocteau looked at Hamlet through the eyes of this critic. The consequence—The Infernal Machine— is a play about Oedipus the King, originally adapted from Sophocles, with overtones and undertones of Shakespeare's Hamlet as psychoanalyzed by Ernest Jones.
Book Reviews
Authors: Behringer Clara , Crafton Allen , Jones Willis , Kelson John , Kelson John , Hartman Nurray , Pronko Leonard , King Walter , Ginestier Paul , Spencer Benjamin , Kinne Wisner , Cordell Richard , Knepler HenryPaul , Davis Jed , Loram Ian , Hill Claude , Anderson Sam , Gudas Fabian , Knepler Henry
Published: April 2013

Randolph Goodman ed, Drama On Stage, reviewed by Clara Behringer

Benjamin Nelson, Tennessee Williams: The Man And His Work, reviewed by Allen Crafton

Edward Fitzgerald,Eight Dramas Of Calderon, Freely Translated, reviewed by Willis Knapp Jones

Jan Setterquist, Ibsen And The Beginnings Of Anglo—Irish Drama, I. John Millington Synge, reviewed by John Kelson

Jan Setterquist, Ibsen And The Beginnings Of Anglo—Irish Drama, II. Edward Martyn, reviewed by John Kelson

Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill, reviewed by Murray Hartman

Jean Jacquot ed., Le Theatre Tracique, reviewed by Leonard C. Pronko

Bamber Gascoigne, Twentieth Century Drama, reviewed by Walter N. King

Aureliu Weiss, Le Destin Des Grandes Oeuvres Dramatiques, reviewed by Paul Ginestier

William Carlos Williams, Many Loves And Other Play, The Collected Plays,, reviewed by Benjamin T. Spencer

Nancy M. Tischler, Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan, reviewed by Wisner Payne Kinne

Adolphe Appia, The Work Of Living Art, reviewed by Richard A. Cordell

Michel Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, reviewed by Henry Knepler

Rose Schneideman, Radio Plays For Young People to Act, reviewed by Jed H. Davis

William Harkins, Karel Capek, reviewed by Ian C. Loram

by Michael Hamburger ed., Poems And Verse Plays Of Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, bilingual edition, reviewed by Claude Hill

Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin, Krechinsky's Wedding, reviewed by Sam Anderson

George Steiner, The Death Of Tragedy, reviewed by Fabian Gudas

Elder Olson, Tragedy And The Theory Of Drama, reviewed by Fabian Gudas

Richard N. Coe, Eugene Ionesco , reviewed by Henry Knepler

Frederick J. Hoffman, Samuel Beckett: The Language Of Self, reviewed by Henry Knepler
Harold Pinter: The Caretaker And Other Plays
Authors: Boulton James
Published: April 2013

Naturalistic dramatists or dramatists wishing to present a rational argument would not subscribe to Richards' pronouncement. Shaw or Arnold Wesker presume that one human individual understands an• other, that logical exchange of ideas is the normal mode of communication, and that human actions are capable of explanation. Wesker and Shaw, for example, assume that they fully comprehend the motives of Sarah Kahn or Major Barbara and can demonstrate, by cause and effect, why these characters act as they do; they assume in other words that there is a logic of action and of thought and that both are capable of dramatic exposition. Further, such dramatists believe it important to make clear to their audience the stages in the logic of thought or action; in fact, this process goes part of the way to prove the validity of the thesis advanced by their plays. And even where the dramatist is not proposing a precise thesis, these comments still apply. John Osborne does not set out to "prove" anything in Look Back in Anger, but he considers it essential to provide evidence, for example, of Jimmy Porter's previous experience of suffering, his attitudes to the "Establishment," or his University education; the play, so to speak, advances from the point achieved by such evidence. There is a basic assumption that, given such-and-such information, a dramatist can document comparatively fully the subsequent actions and responses of his created figures.
Creation's Lonely Flesh: T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry On the Life of the Senses
Authors: Carnell Corbin
Published: April 2013

THE PLAYS OF Eliot and Fry exist on a level of awareness and discovery seldom reached by dramatists since Shakespeare. Eliot, partly because of his poetry and criticism, is more often praised; yet of these two Christian dramatists, I find him less orthodox and less successful in his handling of Christian belief. He has failed conspicuously and chronically in one important area-in his handling of the relation between the natural world and God, that is, in his doctrine of Creation. As an artist, and a Christian artist, he knows full well one must approach the physical world with respect, even with a kind of joyful receptivity. But Eliot's receptivity, no matter how keen, is almost totally devoid of joy. He consistently understates when he describes that which is beautiful or happy. A kind of fear of enjoyment, perhaps a Puritan fear, dilutes even his finest responses to the world of smell and sight and hearing.
Theatrical Moscow
Authors: Markov Pavel
Published: April 2013

Moscow's Present THEATRICAL SEASON is distinguished not only by a whole crop of new premieres; a considerable place in it is held as well by guest performances of theaters from other Soviet cities and countries abroad. The two new theater buildings in the Kremlin offer their stages for this purpose. The first—the Kremlin Theatre regularly features performances by the provincial Soviet theaters. Last year it held a contest for their best productions. Some, like Rasul Gamzatov's romantic Goryanka (Daghestan Theatre), or Yuli Chepurin's publicistic Masters of Life (Yaroslavl Drama Theatre), could easily have graced the stage of any Moscow playhouse. The second theater is the new Kremlin Palace of Congresses with its vast auditorium and stage. The Palace was built not only for congregations of state, but also for the presentation of concerts, operas, and ballets of the Bolshoi Theatre. The Bolshoi's productions of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" and Borodin's "Prince Igor" were revised to suit the larger dimensions of the Palace's stage.
Book Reviews
Authors: Meserve Walter , Day Cyrus , Grossvogel David
Published: April 2013

by Gerald Weales, American Drama Since World War II, reviewed by Walter J. Meserve

Doris Alexander, The Tempering Of Eugene O'Neill, reviewed by Cyrus Day

Richard M. Eastman, Four Playwrights And A Postscript: Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett,Genet, reviewed by David I. Grossvogel
Book Reviews
Authors: McDowell Frederick , Waggoner George , McAnany Emile , Jones David
Published: April 2013

G. Wilson Knight, The Golden Labyrinth: A Study Of British Drama, reviewed by Frederick P. W. McDowell

Arthur H. Nethercot, The Last Four Lives Of Annie Besant, reviewed by George R. Waggoner

Harold Ehrensperger, Religious Drama: Ends And Means, reviewed by Emile G. McAnany, S.J.

Carol H. Smith, T. S. Eliot's Dramatic Theory And Practice,, reviewed by David E. Jones
Eugene O'Neill: An Evaluation by Fellow Playwrights
Authors: Hebert Edward
Published: April 2013

Eugene O'Neill: An Evaluation by Fellow Playwrights
George S. Kaufman, 1889-1962
Authors: Freedley George
Published: April 2013

THIS LITTLE ESSAY will only be concerned with the earlier section of George Kaufman's long career as a playwright and director in one of the most exciting periods of our theater when American drama came of age in the period between the World Wars, roughly 1918-1939. All of Kaufman's serio-comic genius came to flower in that period. There is nothing of real significance after that if you disregard the dramatic recrudescence of John P. Marquand's brilliant novel of Boston society, The Late George Apley (1944) and the delightful spoof of big business provided by The Solid Gold Cadillac, written in collaboration with Howard Teichmann (1953).
Sidney Howard and the Social Drama of the	Twenties
Authors: Meserve Walter
Published: April 2013

UNDERLYING A GREAT PORTION of the American plays written after the turn of the twentieth century there is a social consciousness and a concern for realism that distinguishes a trend in American drama. At its beginning it was a dual and almost parallel movement, the most significant in late 19th century American drama: the development of a social comedy, and the Rise of Realism in the drama. Numerous plays began to caricature aspects of society and also to reflect the literary interest in realism. Later, after the shock resulting from the American production of Ibsen's Ghosts in 1889, Ibsenism lent a certain unifying force to these trends. But it was not until the 1920's that social drama became a serious and dominant trend, part of a national growth in American drama which was reflected in the plays of Maxwell Anderson, Philip Barry, Paul Green, Rachael Crothers, Eugene O'Neill, S. N. Behrnan, Elmer Rice, and Sidney Howard. Of these dramatists, only Sidney Howard produced his most significant plays during the twenties. During this decade which is now remembered mainly for the work of the Provincetown Players and the plays of Eugene O'Neill, Sidney Howard emerged as the first major writer of social drama in a long line of development that leads from James A. Heme to Tennessee Williams.
New Theatre
Authors: Lecky Eleazer
Published: April 2013

AMONG THE MAKERS OF THEATRICAL HISTORY in America during the thirties we are used to including playwrights, directors, acting companies, stars, designers, producers, and even a few critics. The names of writers like Odets, Green, Hellman, Saroyan, and Wilder shine out, and so do those of companies like the Group Theatre, the Theatre Union, the Mercury Theatre, and the protean Federal Theatre Project. Much less well known, if not generally forgotten, are organizations like the New Theatre League and New Theatre magazine. Who remembers that to a certain extent Clifford Odets was discovered by New Theatre? His Waiting for Lefty received the top prize-fifty dollars-in a contest that the magazine sponsored jointly with New Masses. Moreover, when the curtain rose for the first time on that play-at the Civic Repertory Theatre on Sunday evening, January 6, 1935-the performance, by members of the Group Theatre cast of Melvin Levy's Gold Eagle Guy, was for the benefit of New Theatre.
Myth in American Drama Between The Wars
Authors: Dusenbury Winifred
Published: April 2013

ASIDE FROM EUGENE O'NEILL, whose use of myth deserves extended treatment,1 the most important and prolific playwrights of the period were Maxwell Anderson, Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, Robert Sherwood, and Elmer Rice.2 All showed some understanding of myth, which, although it cannot be compared to that of Tennessee Williams and others since World War II, is revealing of the playwrights and the period.
Verse Drama in America: 1916-1939
Authors: Gerstenberger Donna
Published: April 2013

VERSE DRAMA HAS NO VITAL TRADITION in the United States, for there has never been a period in the literature of this country in which verse drama has been a popular form created to express living issues. American literature had created for itself, by the end of the nineteenth century, a recognizable tradition in fiction and poetry. As the result of a number of historical factors, however, an important dramatic accomplishment came more slowly, and it was not until the period between the wars in the first half of the twentieth century that American dramatic achievement secured its place in literature. This was a period in which interest in verse drama persisted in America, and yet it was a period in which verse drama had no appreciable influence on modern American drama.
Pirandello and His French Echo Anouilh
Authors: Fazia Alba
Published: April 2013

"I CAN JUST HEAR A CRITIC whispering into his neighbor's ear that he has already seen this in Pirandello," anticipates 'The Author in the opening scene of Jean Anouilh's recent play La grotte—a plotless play which has yet to be written and which depends largely on audience cooperation, according to Anouilh.

La grotte's point of departure is a fait accompli: the apparent murder of the cook. An investigation of the real cause of death ensues. The Author, a combination of Pirandello's Director in Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore and Hinkfuss of Questa sera si recita a soggetto, poses, before his audience, the problems of staging an "improvised" play. He wrangles with unruly characters and capricious stage technicians. He dramatizes the conflict between an author's illusory creation and his characters' living reality.
Three Major Symbols in Four Plays by Pirandello
Authors: May Frederick
Published: April 2013

ONLY THE MOST INNOCENT or the most corrupt of Pirandello Critics would take at its face value the playwright's assertion, "I hate symbolic art," for Pirandello is a consistent and fertile user of symbols. More, he has the capacity to deploy them in the modes of compelling allegory, not least in those dramas which he has himself described as myths, Lazarus, The. New Colony and The Giants of the Mountain. The truth is, of course, that Pirandello had no patience with the confidence tricksters of literature—D'Annunzio (with good reason) he found repellent—whose gold brick of symbolic ornamentation has no reference to meaning and is in no way derived from substance. He was aware that almost all symbolic art which claims to be such is evasion, so that his whole career as a writer became an insistent declaration of our need to recognise what seems to be (the nearest we ever come to what is). By confronting the apparent law of an unchanging mutability, by acquiescing in the rule of paradox, and by discerning the tragedy inherent in his orgasmic hunger for ideal form, man gropes forward to an apperception of that conflict which (in defensive terror) he calls his identity. The conflict is a vision of being-and-unbeing, flux eroding and abolishing what we construct (ourselves, others, our beliefs, even the fallacy of communication), and the dignity implicit in the humiliation of our nakedness.
The Folk Hero in Modern American Drama
Authors: Flanagan John
Published: April 2013

WHEN JONATHAN WALKED OUT ON THE STAGE of New York's Park Theatre in 1787, he began a procession of folk characters that has never ceased to pass before the footlights of the American stage in astonishing variety and number. This first stage Yankee became the progenitor of a multitude of rustics, backwoodsmen, minstrels. cowboys, and bandits with whom generations of audiences have identified themselves delightedly and volubly. From Jonathan and Solon Shingle to Joe Hill and Jesse James is a long road, a road which one is tempted to say leads from fantasy to realism and back again to fantasy. Not all the folk creations of the American mind have been successfully transplanted to the stage. Major Jack Downing and Hosea Biglow and Sut Lovingood never became the protagonists of plays which enjoyed long runs and appealed to a variety of audiences. But after Royall Tyler gave birth to Jonathan, and Joseph Jefferson animated Rip Van Winkle for almost half a century, modern dramatists seized on John Henry and Paul Bunyan, on Roy Bean and Johnny Appleseed, expropriated them from the popular imagination, and made them into interesting stage figures. The folk hero, naive but shrewd, earthy or whimsical, sometimes voluble and sometimes aphoristic, has become one of the few American contributions to the world's dramatic gallery and in so doing has remained as autochthonous as he is a personality.
Parallels And The Possibility Of Influence Between Simone Weil's Waiting For God And Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot
Authors: Cohen Robert
Published: April 2013

Waiting for Godot IS ONE OF THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL PLAYS to be widely published and produced in the post-war era, for beyond its extraordinary theatrical values and unique humor lies an apparent pattern of symbolism which has fluttered the imagination of audiences and critics unceasingly. Most often given and debated among the many "interpretations" of the play are those modeled along the lines of Christian theology. In February, 1956, the London Times Literary Supplement published an article interpreting the play "more or less as a Christian parable." In discussing the results of that article the paper said, "The article evoked a long and excited correspondence in which Mr. Beckett's play was claimed in turn by Christians, atheistic existentialists, nihilists, and Nietzscheans." Recently one of the nihilists has said of Beckett, "his pessimism is deeper than any ever expressed; there is no evidence whatever of compassioa or of a Christian approach." This essay postulates a Christian interpretation based specifically on a comparison of Beckett's play and works with the religious essays of the French theologian, Simone Weil.
Synge's First Love: Some South African Aspects
Authors: Ayling Ronald
Published: April 2013

IN HIS DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF J. M. Synge Professor 'David Greene tells the story of the playwright's unrequited passion for Cherrie Matheson. The biographer is handicapped, however, by the scarcity of material relating to this episode in Synge's life: indeed, the diary and letters of Synge's mother appear to be the only source of information about the relationship and the possible reasons for Cherrie's rejection of his proposal of marriage. Bearing these difficulties in mind, Professor Greene's description and interpretation are admirable. There are, however, certain inaccuracies in his account which I wish to correct, while giving a fuller portrait of the woman with whom Synge first fell in love.
Book Reviews
Authors: Irvine William , Hogan Robert , Gerstenberger Donna , Heringman Bernard , Clubb Roger , Rowe Kenneth , Carpenter Charles , Bishop Thomas , Ehrensperger Harold , Miller Jordan
Published: April 2013

Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater, reviewed by William Irvine

Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory, Selected Plays, reviewed by Robert Hogan

Peter Ure, Yeats The Playwright: A Commentary on Character And Design in the Major Plays , reviewed by Donna Gerstenberger

Helen Hennessy, Donna Gerstenberger, reviewed by Bernard Heringman

Glynne Wickham, Drama in A World Of Science, , reviewed by Roger L. Clubb

Gerald Weales, Religion In Modern English Drama, reviewed by Kenneth Thorpe Rowe

Edwin Wilson ed., Shaw On Shakespeare: An Anthology Of Bernard Shaw's Writings On The Plays And Production Of Shakespeare, reviewed by Charles A. Carpenter, Jr.

Robert Emmet Jones, The Alienated Hero In Modern French Drama, reviewed by Thomas Bishop

Balwant Gargi, Theatre In India, reviewed by Harold Ehrensperger

Clifford Leech, Eugene O'Neill, reviewed by Jordan Y. Miller
Thematic Patterns in Lorca's Blood Wedding
Authors: Touster Eva
Published: April 2013

LORCA HAS BEEN WIDELY PRAISED for the achievement in Blood Wedding of a tragic form the distinctive features of which are the fusion of lyric and dramatic impulses; the skillful integration of a musical pattern in the drama's structural design; the thematic relevance of songs, stage effects, and recurrent images—in short, for the assimilation of the Spanish folk and classical traditions in a poetic drama that is modern, sophisticated, and authentic. But some questions remain to puzzle the reader, especially the reader of an English version of the play: How does Blood Wedding fit our current concept of poetic drama? In what sense is the organization of the play musical? What is the function of the lyrics in the development of action and theme? Is there a comprehensive structure of imagery defining the tonality and modulations of the play, and supporting themes perhaps resting upon and therefore nearer to the surface of the text than those more profound echoes of vegetation gods and human sacrifice which the archetypal symbols of the play suggest? The following essay is an attempt to explore some aspects of these questions.
Casona And Lorca: A Brief Comparison
Authors: Leighton Charles
Published: April 2013

WHEN ALEJANDRO CASONA achieved his first success as a dramatist in 1934, there was, in the judgment of contemporary critics, only one other Spanish playwright capable of original work: Federico Garda Lorca. In the intervening years the situation has altered little. Of the younger men of Spain's theater only Antonio Buero Vallejo has really made a contribution, and this only within the last decade. As a consequence it can be maintained that in the first half of the current century Spain has produced only two original dramatists, Lorca and Casona, both members of what has been called the "Generation of '27." Of the two, Lorca is undoubtedly the more famous. Much of his fame is due, however, to his greatness as a lyric poet. There is no doubt, on the other hand, that had his life not been cut short by political murder, he would have attained equal renown as a playwright. As things stand, the few plays he did write remain as a standard by which to judge the productions of his contemporaries in the Spanish theater. Such being the case, it seems advisable to use that yardstick here to measure the stature of Alejandro Casona.
James Bridie And The Prodigal Son Story
Authors: Luyben Helen
Published: April 2013

IN HIS LAST PLAY, The Baikie Charivari, James Bridie's theme is man's temptation 'to be less than himself, to act inhumanly rather than superhumanly. In The Black Eye, an early play (1935), Bridie's development of the major theme of his plays—man's capacity for superhuman achievement—is straightforward rather than oblique. In The Baikie Charivari he uses the biblical story of Pontius Pilate; in The Black Eye he works with the prodigal son story.
The Living And The Dead in All My Sons
Authors: Wells Arvin
Published: April 2013

LOOKED AT SUPERFICIALLY, Arthur Miller's All My Sons may appear to be simply a social thesis play. Such classification—a valid one if severely qualified—is suggested both by the timeliness of the story and by the presence of considerable overt social criticism. The story itself is obviously calculated to engage the so-called social conscience. Stated in the simplest terms, the play dramatizes the process by which Joe Keller, a small manufacturer, is forced to accept individual social responsibility and, consequently, to accept his personal guilt for having sold, on one occasion during World War II, fatally defective airplane parts to the government.
Arthur Miller And The Common Man's Language
Authors: Moss Leonard
Published: April 2013

THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, Arthur Miller has shown a marked tendency to argue general propositions in colloquial terms. "Listen!" a character shouts in "That They May Win" (1944), a one-act play about returning veterans: "We the people gotta go into politics. Politics is just another way of saying how much rent you'll pay; and how much bread, chopped meat and milk your food dollar will buy, and what you'll have to pay for junior's new shoes! You have to go to those Senators and Congressmen you elected and say, 'Listen here, Mister! We're your boss, and you have to work for us!'" Later, of course, Miller became more adept at shaping an outlook with the mannerisms as well as the rational content of speech, but all his writing reveals his penchant for voicing ethical abstractions, usually of wide social relevance. This habit evidences high seriousness; unfortunately, it has also caused stylistic problems.
“Drop A Tear ... ": Henry James Dramatizes Daisy Miller
Authors: Mendelsohn Michael
Published: April 2013

HENRY JAMES'S PLAYS SUGGEST the musty atmosphere of a museum curio. Even Leon Edel, who took the trouble to resurrect the complete plays, does not attempt to justify James as a dramatist. James reached the low point of his dramatic career with the disastrous opening night of Guy Domville in 1895, when the author was hissed off the stage, an experience which he never lived down. It was only two weeks later that James inscribed in his notebook the memorable sentence, "I take up my own old pen again." That this master of English style knew dramatic theory is easily shown in frequent comments in his prefaces and notebooks; that he could not put the theories into practice is just as easily shown by the collection of failures that Professor Edel's volume represents.
Imagery in the Comedies Of Christopher Fry
Authors: Roy Emil
Published: April 2013

AN INDUCTIVE STUDY of the imagery of Fry's comedies reveals a great deal about the closeness of his theory and practice, his place in the metaphysical tradition, and the workings of the creative imagination. Far from an automatic versifier, Christopher Fry is a deliberate craftsman who works by design. Although his second religious play, The Firstborn, was begun in 1938, it was not published until 1946 or produced until 1948; moreover, it has been revised twice, in 1952 and in 1958. Curtmantle was only recently produced (1961) although it was reported "in progress" ten years ago. In An Experience of Critics, Fry has sharply defined the painstaking deliberation of playwriting
Nishikigi And Yeats's The Dreaming Of The Bones
Authors: Clarke David
Published: April 2013

OF FIVE SORTS OF Noh plays, Yeats and Pound were especially interested in only one—the Noh of spirits. The direct cause of their interest in this form is that in it everything known to Western drama is lacking except the final vision or epiphany. The latter is the whole play.

The Noh plays were performed in cycles and are of a meaningful variety-the Noh of spirits being fourth. A cycle of six plays would consist of: (1) A congratulatory piece ("Shugen"), connected withreligious rite, about God's immemorial protection of Japan; (2) A "Shura," or battlepiece, which puts out devils by sympathetic magic; (3) a "female Kazura" in contrast to the male battle-piece—" ... After battle comes peace, or Yu-gen, mysterious calm, and in time of peace the cases of love come to pass;" (4) The Noh of spirits; (5) A piece "bearing upon the moral duties of man"—This fifth piece teaches the duties of man here in this world as the fourth piece represents the results of carelessness to such duties; (6) Another Shugen, praising the lords and the reign, and asking a blessing— “To show that though the spring may pass, still there is a time of its return, this Shugen is put in again just as at the beginning."