bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Strindberg's Secondary Text
Authors: Tornqvist Egil
Published: April 2013

Some fifty years ago Roman Ingarden launched his important distinction, with regard to drama, between Haupttext (primary text) and Nebelltext (secondary text). By primary text Ingarden means everything in a play that is verbalized on the stage, i.e., the dialogue; by secondary text that which is verbalized only in the drama text, i.e., the stage and acting directions.
"What's It Going To Be Then, Eh?": The Stage Odyssey of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange
Authors: Hutchings William
Published: April 2013

Since its publication in 1962, A Clockwork Orange has remained Anthony Burgess's best-known and most controversial work, distinguished not only by his stylistic virtuosity in creating the polyglot, pun-riddled teenage slang in which the novel is written but also by the vividness of the violence-wracked dystopian society within which Alex , the book's narrator and protagonist, thrives. Yet even within the tradition of disaffected adolescent narratorl protagonist/anti-heroes — ranging from Huckleberry Finn to Holden Caulfield to Smith in Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner —- Alex is decidedly an extreme and appalling case: the leader of a teenage gang, he is a thief, a mugger, a convicted murderer and rapist, who frankly and unrepentently describes even his most heinous deeds and dares to assert the essential humanity that he shares with the readers, whom he addresses repeatedly as "my brothers." Rife with theological implications about the Christian doctrine of free will, filled with anti-authoritarian and anti-behaviorist satire, and prophetically accurate about the urban violence that would ever-increasingly characterize subsequent decades, Burgess's novel is among the most prescient works of the pnstmodern era — and one of its most outrageous. With its clear agons, its moral conundrums, and the added advantage of its numerous and notorious scenes of sex and violence - which would parricularly help to assure its box-office appeal — A Clockwork Orange was soon recognized as eminently adaptable for the screen and/or for the stage. Controversy has accompanied every version of the work that has been presented, and the various strategies used in the course of its transformations from page to screen to stage raise issues that are germane to all studies of such adaptations.
"The Writing on the Wall": Novelization and the Critique of History in The Iceman Cometh
Authors: Eisen Kurt
Published: April 2013

These remarks suggest O'Neill would be at cross-purposes in the American history cycle he was about to start writing. He was attempting a monumental fusion of the novel and the drama, a summation of modern history from the American and French Revolutions to the present. However, the cycle lacked a central mediating consciousness, a novelistic narrator figure whose reflections and inner struggles could give a vital coherence to the action of the various plays. In The Iceman Cometh, composed in 1939 as Europe stood on the brink of war, O'Neill achieves a more effective novelistic drama, as well as the critique of modern history which the cycle could generate only cumulatively and episodically.
Gone Fission: The Holocaustic Wit of Don DeLillo
Authors: Zinman Toby Silverman
Published: April 2013

Don DeLillo's best-selling novels are witty and erudite and full of such breathtakingly new information that he sometimes seems anthropologically clairvoyant — and, sometimes, they are laugh-out-loud funny. Because he is known primarily as a fiction writer, I will try to establish the themes and the images that span his nine novels before I address the ways these same themes and images inform his two plays, The Engineer of Moonlight' and The Day Room, partly because the fiction is the dominant geme and partly because it is always interesting to see if and how an author can jump genres. I take Beckett's caveat to heart: "If we can't keep our gemes more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down. The problem becomes additionally interesting because DeLillo's first play is, it seems to me, essentially nondramatic, while The Day Room achieves its geme brilliantly.
Blizintsy/Dvojniki Twins/Doubles Hapgood/Hapgood
Authors: Zinman Toby Silverman
Published: April 2013

Tom Stoppard's play, Hapgood, is full of twins: British and Russian, real and imaginary, overt and covert, nominative and designative (i.e., Joe and joe), psychological and biological. In the duplicitous world of theatre, where actors double – and triple – themselves, twinning is crucial. In the duplicitous world of espionage, where agents double – and triple – themselves, twinning is crucial. The plot turns – and turns again – on two sets of twins who are double agents, on twin sets of secret information, on twin scenes. But one important set of twins the audience/readers of the play may not know about, no matter how attentive to the plot's complications they are, is Elizabeth Hapgood's historical twin (and thus a "sleeper" of quite another variety), Isabel Florence Hapgood, who lived from 1850 to 1928.
Book Reviews
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: April 2013

Enoch Brater, ed.,Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, reviewed by Ann Wilson
One for the Road, Mountain Language and the Impasse of Politics
Authors: Silverstein Marc
Published: April 2013

One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988), Harold Pinter's most recent works for the theatre, represent the dramatist's most overtly political work to date. Dramatizing and directly confronting the audience with the oppressive and authoritarian operations of state power, these dramas have been greeted by reviewers as signalling a shift in Pinter's writing from what Martin Esslin terms "the highly private world of his [earlier] plays" to a concern with charting the more public terrain of the political arena. It would be extremely reductionistic, however, to base a judgment of what constitutes political art solely on a consideration of manifest content. Examining Pinter's dramatic oeuvre from The Room (1957) through Mountain Language, we discover less an emphasis on that "highly private world" that Esslin posits as the defining characteristic of the "Theatre of the Absurd" than a focus on the mechanisms of domination and marginalization, the social construction of gender and sexuality, and the ideological status of such "state apparatus" as the family a focus, in other words, on fundamentally political issues.
Book Reviews
Authors: Fisher James , Morrow Laura , Garner Stanton , Diamond Thea , Gordon Lois , Lamont Rosette , Thomas Alan , Cross Clare , Zatlin Phyllis , Fisher Eileen , Leland Charles , Jenkins Anthony
Published: April 2013

Robert Leach, Vsevolod Myerhold, reviewed by James Fisher

Anthony S. Abbott, The Vital Lie: Reality and Illusion in Modem Drama, reviewed by Laura Morrow

Michael Issacharoff, Discourse as Perormance, reviewed by Stanton B. Garner

Kimball King ed., Sam Shepard: A Casebook, reviewed by Thea Diamond

Enoch Brater, Why Beckett, reviewed by Rosette C. Lamont

Linda Ben-Zvi, Women in Beckett, reviewed by Lois Gordon

David Ian Rabey, Howard Barker: Politics and Desire, an expository study of his drama and poetry. 1969-87, reviewed by Alan Thomas

William Hutchings, The Plays of David Storey: A Thematic Study, reviewed by Clare Cross

Nicolás Kanellos, A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940, reviewed by Phyllis Zatlin

laurence Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, reviewed by Eileen Fisher

Brian Johnson, Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama, reviewed by Charles Leland

paul Delaney, Tom Stoppard: the Moral Vision af the Major Plays, reviewed by Anthony Jenkins
O'Neill, Nietzsche, and Cows
Authors: Weiss Samuel
Published: April 2013

One of the oddest moments in O'Neill, certainly for city dwellers, occurs in Part II, scene 2 of Desire Under the Elms, when the patriarchal Ephraim Cabot poignantly tries to explain himself to his wife Abbie, whose mind and desire are concentrated on her stepson Eben in the adjacent bedroom. Ephraim, who desperately desires a son worthy of the farm he has built up by his "sweat 'n blood," turns to Abbie in a vain effort to be understood, to explain his "hardness," his following God's will in building a flourishing farm out of rocky soil by sheer persistence and strength that rejected the "easy" way and built a stone wall of misunderstanding between him, his wives and sons. And all the time he "growd hard" and "kept gittin' lonesomer." To overcome his lonesomeness he took a wife, then another. Both died and neither "knowed" him nor understood his God-driven hardness and what the farm meant. Nor did his covetous, "soft" sons, who hated him. And in his bitterness, he set out that spring to heed the voice of God "cryin' in my wilderness, in my lonesomeness," to seek and find. The result was his marriage to Abbie to whom he "clove ... in my lonesomeness" and his joyous dream of a son who will grow up to be like him.
Writing as a Process of Performing the Self: Sam Shepard's Notebooks
Authors: Grant Gary
Published: April 2013

Writing and theatre are for Sam Shepard a "home" where he brings the adventures of his life and sorts them out, "making sense or nonsense out of mysterious impressions." From the collection of his personal papers housed in the Mugar Library at Boston University, it becomes evident that with his writing Shepard keeps a watchful eye on the condition of his consciousness.
Book Reviews
Authors: Carnicke Sharon Marie , Savona Jeannette Laillou , Sidnell Michael , Lamont Rosette , Styan  , Schuler Catherine , Fuegi John , Fischer Eileen , Zinman Toby Silverman , Reilly John
Published: April 2013

Benjamin 8ennett Theater As Problem: Modern Drama and its Place in Literature, reviewed by Sharon Marie Carnicke

Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, reviewed by Jeannette Laillou Savona

Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, reviewed by Michael J. Sidnell

Estelle Manette Raben, Major Strategies in Twentieth Century Drama: Apocalyptic Vision, Allegory and Open Form, reviewed by Rosette C. Lamont

Richard C. Beacham, Adolphe Appia, reviewed by J. L. Styan

Richard C. Beacham, ed.,Adolphe Appia: Essays, Scenarios, and Designs, reviewed by J. L. Styan

Nick Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage, reviewed by Catherine Schuler

Pia Kleber and Colin Visser, eds., Re-interpreting Brecht: His Influence on Conemporary Drama and Film, reviewed by John Fuegi

Elizabeth Eright, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation, reviewed by Eileen Fischer

Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in performance, reviewed by Toby Silverman Zinman

Peter Norrish, New Tragedy and Comedy in France. 1945-70, reviewed by John H. Reilly

Anne Ubersfeld, Vinaver dramaturge, reviewed by Rosette C. Lamont
Trading Art(s): Artaud, Spies, and Current Indonesian/American Artistic Exchange and Collaboration
Authors: Foley Kathy
Published: April 2013

In 1990—91 as part of the Festival of Indonesia, a government to government exchange of the arts, a wealth of Indonesian performance toured American cities. Over the same eighteen-month period there were an equivalent number of collaborative productions mounted by Indonesian directors, writers, choreographers, and U.S. groups (Keith Terry and I Wayan Dibia's Body Tjak in San Francisco and Arifin C. Noer's Ozolle with students from the University of California at Santa Cruz), which followed the earlier collaboration between Putu Wijaya and Phillip Zarrilli in the mid-eighties. In some cases cultural roles were reversed, as at the San Francisco and Los Angeles museums where Larry Reed performed Balinese Wayang Parwa (shadow theatre) under the auspices of the Festival, while Indonesian artists were showing their avant–garde batik paintings in the foyer. P.T. Barnum's museum of curiosities has finally been subverted. The Americans are the primitives, and the Indonesians are the moderns!
Japanese Theatre from the 1980s: The Ludic Conspiracy
Authors: Rolf Robert
Published: April 2013

Twentieth-century Japanese theatre grew out of attempts to create a new Japanese theatre befitting the new Japan. As was the case with the immense socio-economic reform Japan undertook in the late nineteenth century, the model for the new theatre was the West, specifically the works of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Gorki, and Ibsen. By the late 192os, what came to be known as shingeki (literally, new theatre) had produced a significant body of artists and works. The new theatre was intellectual in tone and lacked a popular audience. Much of it was characterized by a socialist realism that used the stage for the exploration of socio-political issues. Another strain of the new Western-inspired realistic theatre sought a psychological and lyrical complexity in the vein of the works of Chekhov. Even with the upheavals brought about by World War II, this state of affairs lasted into the 1960s.
Text Creation and Performance: A Kabuki Perspective
Authors: Brandon James
Published: April 2013

All artistic expression via the living stage, which in English we imprecisely call theater, or drama, or both, is created through interaction between performance and text. In this brief essay, I would like to suggest some special ways in which newly written dramatic text in Japanese kabuki is structured, channelled, preformed, determined, influenced by theatric and extra-theatric performance "codes." By theatric performance codes I mean those systems of performative, artistic expression used by the actor primarily and also by the musician and dancer — voice, bodily movement and dance. rhythm, music, song, color. The resulting forms or patterns (kata) of performance form, on the one hand, the interpretive means for staging anyone play, and, on the ' other hand, constitute the artistic structure of the genre itself.
Creating a Kabuki Western:Revenge at Spider Mountain
Authors: Pronko Leonard
Published: April 2013

With its larger-than-life characters, frank theatricality and rich use of such antagonisms as virtue and villainy, courage and cowardice, rectitude and corruption, all often leading to an act of revenge, Kabuki seems a natural form in which to cast some of the more stylized legends and historical events of western civilization. Terrifying myths of the ancient world, heroic sagas of the Middle Ages, high adventure in the developing western frontier, all of these would lend themselves to Kabuki treatment. During twenty-five years of Kabuki productions, in addition to such Japanese classics as Narukami, Ibaraki and Gohiiki Kanjincho, the Drama Department at Pomona College has staged Kabuki versions of western classics like Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy. New pieces have also been created based on western history, literature and legend like Oedipus at Phokis, Atahualpa, Lancelot Bewitched, and Fireplay: the Legend of Prometheus. In 1977 two students and I wrote a Kabuki western that was so well received that, when we opened a new theatre in 1991 and celebrated at the same time twenty-five years of Kabuki at Pomona College it was decided to revive Revenge at Spider Mountain.
An Author in Search of Characters: Pirandello and Commedia dell'arte
Authors: Fisher James
Published: April 2013

Commedia dell'arte was the rarest of theatrical forms — a non-literary theatre that emphasized the skill of the improvising actor. Commedia actors transformed human frailty into incisive satire as they literally created a play before the audience's eyes from a simple scenario. The popularity of commedia grew over the centuries as the forms and characters it inspired evolved, supplying diverse and delightful entertainments throughout Europe's theatres. In many cultures, these commedic forms offered a style of ritualized carnival — a popular street theatre that served not only as communal fun, but also as a political instrument through its ever present satire and mockery of the powerful. This seemingly casual and lowly form of theatre became a distinctly powerful lingua franca of the imagination, connecting cultures and artists throughout Europe. Like the best and rarest forms of theatre, commedia was both spiritual and intellectual. It proved to be universally malleable and national, adapting in each country where it appeared to the needs of that cultures artists and audiences.
Weeping in the Night: Reading Beyond Language in The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Authors: McKinney Lauren
Published: April 2013

Critical readings of Bertolt Brecht's drama have fallen into a certain pattern ever since the original performances of the plays, due largely to the works' relationship to two interrelated dogmas through which they have constantly and consistently been read: his espoused Marxism and his own theory of epic drama. Either kind of reading inevitably leads to a discussion of whether or not Brecht lived up to his own articulated world view. No matter what the results, such a study by its very nature privileges overt statement over art, by assuming that the former represents a more concrete truth. To do this is to read the ineffable through the eyes of reason, a task which blinds one to the vibrant dialectic of reason and emotion that energizes some of the later plays. I will here attempt a reading of The Caucasian Chalk Circle that acknowledges Brecht's politics, or his reason, while at the same allowing the drama itself to reveal his other side, the irrational. To do this I will examine the ways in which the nonverbal elements operate in the work and how they interrogate the "rationality" of human explanations and plans.
A "Dramatic Extravaganza" of the Projected Atomic Age: Wings Over Europe (1928)
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

When a single American bomb flattened the city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing 100,000 people and leaving its imprint on the sensibilities of millions, the nuclear age began in earnest. Two days later, a New York Times columnist said that the bomb caused "an explosion in men's minds as shattering as the obliteration of Hiroshima." Since then, as poets have expressed it, we are all "on the road from Hiroshima"; Hiroshima "flows through US." But the onset of the nuclear age cannot be dermed only by the impact of a bomb. Shortly after Hiroshima (and Nagasaki), government officials and nuclear scientists set out to counter the 'bad press atomic power had received by heralding its potential benefits for mankind. A limitless supply of energy could now be made available, and this would lead to such an improvement in economic and social conditions that civilization could be transformed worldwide. Moreover, the mere existence of cataclysmic nuclear weapons might preclude full-scale war as an option of foreign policy, since other countries would surely develop them soon and since no defense against them was possible. As Bertrand Russell summed it up in 1947, "'no middle course is any longer possible' between annihilation and a utopian age of peace.”
A catch in the breath: Language and Consciousness in Samuel Beckett's ... but the clouds ...
Authors: Kirkley Richard Brice
Published: April 2013

In the latter part of his career, Samuel Beckett was increasingly attracted to television as a medium where he could realize certain dramatic ideas with a control and precision not possible in the theatre...In them he has ... Taken as a whole, Beckett's television drama does reveal an increasing concentration on the communicative force of the visual images. Yet in the teleplay, ... but the clouds. . ., the "pure coalescence of material and form" is achieved through a delicate and precise interaction between word and image. By alluding to W. B. Yeats's poem "The Tower" in both the verbal and visual levels of the play, Beckett shapes a fleeting moment of unified consciousness, making this play unique in Beckett's drama.
Book Reviews
Authors: Worth Katherine , Foakes  , Leiter Samuel , Salter Denis
Published: April 2013

John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett, reviewed by Katharine Worth

Susan Hollis Merritt, Pinter in Play, reviewed by R.A. Foakes

Lois Gordon, Harold Pinter: A Casebook, reviewed by R.A. Foakes

Jean Chothia, André Antoine, reviewed by Samuel L. Leiter

Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, reviewed by Denis Salter
"Emotional Territory": An Interview with Sam Shepard
Authors: Rosen Carol
Published: April 2013

Sam Shepard is, of course, a conundrum. He is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive practitioners of what Cocteau called "poetry of the theatre," creating a personal, concrete, physical language of the stage to be apprehended sensually. This encoder of American signs onstage is also an actor's playwright, among the most subtle and sympathetic chroniclers of characters' emotional states since O'Neill. Yet although he occasionally still produces a new play, most recently States of Shock in 1991, Sam Shepard now works primarily in prose and films. He has just completed filming Silent Tongues, a "truly different Western" about an 1870s Indian Medicine Show, which he both scripted and directed.
Shifting the Paradigm: Shepard, Myth, and the Transformation of Consciousness
Authors: Grant Gary
Published: April 2013

In every era, startling scientific breakthroughs challenge old ideas and philosophies. " 'The 1980s will be a revolutionary time,' said physicist Fritjof Capra, 'because the whole structure of our society does not correspond with the world view of emerging scientific thought’.” Humankind discovered that the world was round, that the planets circled around the sun, that matter only seemed solid. Each of these discoveries resulted in a "paradigm shift," a term introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his landmark 1962 book, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A paradigm shift indicates a change in the framework of thought, in the scheme for understanding and explaining certain aspects of reality. A paradigm shift is a distinctly new way of thinking about old problems.
Tina Howe's Secret Surrealism: Walking a Tightrope
Authors: Lamont Rosette
Published: April 2013

On April 20, 1986 Tina Howe introduced from the stage of the New York City 92nd Street "Y" Eugene Ionesco, the speaker of the evening in the series of great writers' readings from their works organized by Shelley Mason. Howe was audibly excited, having met for the fIrst time her "idol" backstage. She began on a personal note with a brief vignette: in 1960, when she spent a year in Paris, having completed her B.A. at Sarah Lawrence, she wandered one evening into a tiny Left Bank theater, La Huchette, where The Bald Soprano was being performed. "It was as if I had been struck by lightning," the American dramatist told the audience in a loud stage whisper. She then went on to communicate her reaction to the show: "The curtain went up and all hell broke loose. I had not seen such goings on since the Marx Brothers movies. The sheer outrageousness of lonesco's dramatic sense and language, the way he turns things on their head. He is often called an absurdist to me he is the ultimate realist He shows us the laxness of reality and what a pathetic time we have getting through the day. For me it's the kitchen sink dramas and the formula comedies that are absurd because they present us with stereotypes, and not the real world."
The Killer's Ancient Mask: Unity and Dualism in Shepard's The Tooth of Crime
Authors: Lanier Gregory
Published: April 2013

Those lines from The Doors's 1967 haunting rock classic, "The End," point directly toward the violence that defined the conflict between the generations during the Viet Nam era. A Killer, identified as both a Young Man and a Son, walks on down the hall to a confrontation with the Father he wants to kill, a confrontation that takes us to "my only friend, the end ... I The end of laughter and soft lies, I The end of nights we tried to die," an end that erupts in an orgasmic communion of music and violence. If even a cursory examination of rock-and-roll music reveals a structural teleology pointed toward violent rebellion, then we should suspect that a rock play like Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime will be structured around the same telos.
West's The Day of the Locust and Shepard's Angel City: Refiguring L.A. Noir
Authors: Wilcox Leonard
Published: April 2013

Angel City (1976) represents a culmination of the first decade of Sam Shepard's work. It bears the unmistakable stamp of Shepard the avant-gardist with its surreal dream structure, its creative transformations of character, and its collage construction. It exhibits Shepard's inventive engagement with popular culture, which he had developed and perfected in plays like Mad Dog Blues and The Tooth of Crime. And it brings to fruition Shepard's bizarre sense of humor with its satiric attack on Hollywood.
"A Population [and Theater] at Risk": Battered Women in Heney's Crimes of the Heart and Shepard's A Lie of the Mind
Authors: Hadicke Janet
Published: April 2013

Oft-castigated for its preponderance of family drama, American theater seems unprotestingly to cede stature to British theater, which has moved from "kitchen-sink" realism to presumably more universal and political plays. Yet the charge of lIiviality levelled against American "diaper drama" in the theater dissipates in the face of the domestic drama currently being played on the cultural stage: statistics indicate that "An American resident is 'more likely to be physically assaulted, beaten, and killed in the home at the hands of a loved one than any place else, or by anyone else. " That many such residents are women led former U.S. Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop in 1989 to decry wife-battering as "an overwhelming moral, economic, and public health burden that our society can no longer bear" and to identify battered women as "a population at risk." Current Surgeon-General Antonia Novello. in 1992 backed a surprising American Medical Association declaration of domestic violence against women as an epidemic requiring intervention by health officials. Should they escape their kitchens for the theater, those four million women assaulted annually ·would hardly find American family plays lIivial or apolitical.
Aborted Rage in Beth Henley's Women
Authors: Shepard Alan Clarke
Published: April 2013

Beth Henley's tragicomedies study the effects of the feminist movement upon a few, mostly proletarian women in rural Mississippi, who are more likely to read Glamour than Cixous and Clement's The Newly Born Woman. We are invited to sympathize with isolated heroines whose fantasies demonstrate the difficulty of conceiving female subjectivity while entrenched in patriarchal epistemes, whose resilience is expressed in their canny, survivalist compromises with the codes of passive southern womanhood. Their compromises may be precisely located in the recurring imagery of homicide and suicide that pervades Henley's scripts.
The Unspoken Text in Hedda Gabler
Authors: Sprinchorn Evert
Published: April 2013

Before the advent of realistic drama, a playwright found no difficulty in having his characters express their inmost thoughts. Shakespeare could write soliloquies for the introspective Hamlet, and Racine could let the spectators in on Phedre's smouldering jealousy by letting her speak directly to them. But the nineteenth-century dramatist who wanted to present a photographic semblance of life on stage had to avoid the soliloquy and the aside. If the rules of the fully developed realistic drama were faithfully adhered to, the spectators had to be thought of as unseen guests, observing what happens on stage but ignored by the people up there. Since the characters onstage could not break through the fourth wall of the set, the viewer had to figure out what was going on in their minds by watching them as they engaged in the ordinary business of daily life, chatted with friends, poured tea, arranged flowers, and passed the time of day.
One Mirror Is "Not Enough" in Beckett's Footfalls and Ohio Impromptu
Authors: Hwang Hoon-Sung
Published: April 2013

In Beckett's stage world, word echoes word, sentence echoes sentence, scene echoes scene, act echoes act, character doubles character, the embedded text mirrors the enclosing text, the stage scene mirrors the auditorium, and finally the stage action echoes the mise-ell-abyme text. This "echo principle" is mentioned by many Beckett critics: James Knowlson, for example, discusses the parallelism and repetition in Footfalls, in terms of "an echo principle" that "confer[s] shape and strength on a work which inevitably appears lacking in the interest derived from conventional narrative or delineation of character."] Beckett's dramatic text thus becomes "a musical score" with a set of variations on a few specific motifs (words, phrases, characters, scenes).

Knowlson's insight, when fully developed, points to one of the most crucial aspects of Beckett's aesthetics. Knowlson's discussion of the echo principle is, however, confined to verbal and visual imagery manifested on the level of word, sentence, and character; further, his interpretation is based on a formalistic approach, which does not touch on a philosophical and cultural implication of this phenomenon.
Is There a Real Inspector Hound? Mousetraps, Deathtraps, and the Disappearing Detective
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: April 2013

When Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound opened at the London Criterion in 1968, the most obvious target for its parody was Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, playing at St. Martin's, at the other end of Shaftsbury Avenue. At that time The Mousetrap had been running at that theatre for thirteen years. Although The Mousetrap is still running (now in its thirty-sixth year) and seems unlikely to close anytime in the foreseeable future, it is taking on an increasingly anachronistic tone. The London theatre scene has changed a great deal since it opened, or for that matter since the appearance of Stoppard's ingenious parody. When The Mousetrap began its monumental run in 1955, the mystery play, or thriller, was one of the most common genres on the London stage, and only slightly less popular in New York. An average of five or six new plays of this type opened in the West End every season during the 1950s and 1960s, and during the 1950s Christie herself produced almost one per season, so that often she had several plays running at the same time.
Moscow Gold and Reassessing History
Authors: Caulfield Carl
Published: April 2013

Moscow Gold is Howard Brenton and Tariq Ali's second theatrical collaboration, after their satirical, metaphorical response in 1989 to the Rushdie affair in Iranian Nights. Moscow Gold dramatizes what its authors see as a need for a reassessment of Soviet history and Communist ideologies, but the play can also be seen as revealing a state of crisis in Howard Brenton's overview of world history and his earlier views on historical progression.
The Way of the World according to Mario Fratti
Authors: Nichols Nina Da Vinci
Published: April 2013

What roman candles and skyrockets have in common with each other and Mario Fratti's plays is a striking machinery: all take off at high speed, break into witty display, and end with a bang. Differences among his more than forty plays obviously matter more; yet a tight action and a lightning-bolt conclusion have become Fratti's theatrical trademark. Many of the one-act plays especially might be called bursts of theatre, literal send-Ups of ordinary situations, either driven by misapprehension to an extreme and exploded midair, or propelled by characters' conflicting views into an epiphanic reversal. As one result, a plot's trajectory along a line of successive revelations prevents characters and audience alike from settling into complacency. Assumptions backfire. An unforeseen tum of events blows all expectations into irrelevancy. As another result, the spectator is involved in a production of meaning continuing beyond the play's end, thereby fulfilling Fratti's Brechtian wish to influence collective choice and action. Historical forces in Fratti, however, form only a diffuse, distant backdrop for his immediate interests in social stimuli shaping behavior — say, preoccupation with sexual identity, or the wages of consumerism, greed, and self-interest coupled with a wholesale absence of affect. These supply him with dramatic occasions in which an interplay of misperceptions leads character(s) to some discovery, while stimulating the audience 's moral intelligence rather than its sympathies.
Lips Together, Teeth Apart: Another Version of Pastoral
Authors: Montgomery Benilde
Published: April 2013

When Robert Brustein pigeonholes Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart, as yet another instance of "Yuppie Realism," he fails to notice that, unlike some other plays which he consigns to this genre, McNally's play does indeed reach past the idiosyncratic and into the "public dimension" that Brustein wishes it might. Rather than write a play as "self-regarding, as self-enclosed, as unanchored as the society it depicts," McNally has anchored his . play securely in a quite public and ancient literary tradition - the pastoral. Moreover, McNally's use of traditional pastoral materials and his arrangement of them into what Thomas Greene might call "heuristic imitation" gives the play a voice that is unique in McNally's canon and rescues it from the "desultory" social thematics that Brustein abhors.
Sweeney, Becket, and the "Marina Figure" in Eliot's Modem Plays
Authors: Griffin Ernest
Published: April 2013

When Eliot began composing his four plays about modem family and social life, he still, it seems to me, had very much in mind the two characters he had created some years earlier, Sweeney and Thomas Becket. Echoes from these two characters and what they represent occur throughout the plays; at the extreme, one might say that, together, they represent man as living in the shadow of the brothel as well as the shadow of the cathedral. They suggest also a pattern of development; each play is, on one level, a version of man's troubled journey from the experiences and temptations of the Sweeney-world to the redeeming graces of the Becket-world. However, whatever our understanding or judgment of Sweeney and Becket, I think it's fair to say that they do not strike us as "familiar" or "social" figures. For example, in the plays built around them, the two "Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama" and Murder in the Cathedral, there is little that can be called "feminine" except for the women who are used by men in Sweeney's setting, and the choral peasant class in Becket's, though Becket does allow them an instinctual knowledge that is wiser than the argumentative outlook of some of his priests. The word "love" does not appear at all in the "Fragments," unless we count the use of it in the epitaph that is a quotation from St. John of the Cross, where it refers to the soul divesting itself of the love of created beings. In the Becket play, there is a reference to "love in the garden," but that is dismissed as one of the pleasures of "thirty years ago"; otherwise, love is used in relation to the Divinity.
Book Reviews
Authors: Emeijanow Victor , Worth Katherine , Williams Simon , Willinger David , Cocalis Susan
Published: April 2013

Anthony Jenkins, The Making of Victorian Drama, reviewed by Victore Emeijanow

Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, reviewed by Katharine Worth

Peter Skrine, Hauptmann, Wedekind and Schnitzler, reviewed by Simon Williams

Roland Beyen, Bibliographie de Michel de Ghelderode, reviewed by David Willinger

Roland Beyen, Correspondance Michel de Ghelderode: 1919-1927, reviewed by David Willinger

Roland Beyen, Le Rire de Michel de Ghelderode, reviewed by David Willinger

Renate Usmiani, The Theatre of Frustration: Super Realism in the Dramatic Work of F.X. Kroetz and Michel Tremblay, reviewed by Susan L. Cocalis

Ingeborg C. Walther, The Theater of Franz Xaver Kroetz, reviewed by Susan L. Cocalis
The Theatre of Punishment: David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish
Authors: Remen Kathryn
Published: April 2013

Mainstream American drama generally allows its audiences to slip into a passive role. With the exception of experimental theaters, such as the Living Theater, that rely directly on audience involvement and participation, dramatic productions tend to encourage their audiences to sit back and observe. Particularly on the Broadway stage, an audience comes with the expectation of entertainment without undue effort. The unsaid intention is to learn from the story, to watch and gather information about the characters, the plot, the themes, and to leave the theater with some distilled understanding, moral, or catharsis. If we apply Foucault's analysis of the prison system from his book Discipline and Punish, we begin to see that the theater and the prison operate in similar fashions with similar purposes: they are both "[architectures] ... built ... to render visible those who are inside ... [architectures] that [operate] to transform individuals.”
Adulteration as Clarity: Dramaturgical Strategy in Peter Nichols's Passion Play
Authors: Storm William
Published: April 2013

Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan in 1923. His immediate impetus was the canonization of Joan of Arc on 16 May 1920, during a time of power politicking hard upon the horrors of the Great War. The irony of Joan's elevation five hundred years after her death amidst forces she would have opposed but had helped put into play was too great a temptation for Shaw to resist. On a domestic level, Shaw's wife, Charlotte, too insisted upon a role in the work's progress. In the face of her husband's initial resistance, she claimed to have strategically placed books on Joan around the house where Shaw was bound to see them, read them, and thus stimulated, embark upon the play she wanted him to write. Others have explained Shaw's attraction to the figure of Joan as part of a personal religious pilgrimage, one characterized by G.K. Chesterton as consisting, in the first instance, of Shaw "running away from a religion," and in the second of his "running after one.”
Re(dis)covering the Witches in Arthur Miller's The Crucible: A Feminist
Authors: Schissel Wendy
Published: April 2013

Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a disturbing work, not only because of the obvious moral dilemma that is irresolutely solved by John Proctor's death, but also because of the treatment that Abigail and Elizabeth receive at Miller's hands and at the hands of critics. In forty years of criticism very little has been said about the ways in which The Crucible reinforces stereotypes of femme fatales and cold and unforgiving wives in order to assert apparently universal virtues. It is a morality play based upon a questionable androcentric morality. Like Proctor, The Crucible "[roars] down" Elizabeth, making her concede a fault which is not hers but of Miller's making: "It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery,” she admits in her final meeting with her husband. Critics have seen John as a "tragically heroic common man,” humanly tempted, "a just man in a universe gone mad," but they have never given Elizabeth similar consideration, nor have they de constructed the phallologocentric sanctions implicit in Miller's account of Abigail's fate, Elizabeth's confession, and John's temptation and death. As a feminist reader of the 1990s, I am troubled by the unrecognized fallout from the existential humanism that Miller and his critics have held dear. The Crucible is in need of an/Other reading, one that reveals the assumptions of the text, the author, and the reader/critic who "is part of the shared consciousness created by the [play]." It is time to reveal the vicarious enjoyment that Miller and his critics have found in a cathartic male character who has enacted their sexual and political fantasies.
In Defense of the Woman: Sophie Treadwell's Machinal
Authors: Jones Jennifer
Published: April 2013

On March 20, 1927, Albert Snyder was found murdered in his bed, beaten on the head with a blunt object, chloroformed, and strangled with a piece of picture wire. When the police arrived, his wife, Ruth, was discovered outside their daughter's room, bound and gagged. She told police she had been attacked by a tall Italian man, and claimed to have fainted when he grabbed her, remaining unconscious for over five hours. The small house had been ransacked, drawers were emptied, and Ruth's jewelry stolen. Police became suspicious when the "stolen" jewelry was found under Ruth's mattress, and when she neglected to ask after her husband they felt sure she was involved in the murder. When told he was dead, they said the tears she shed were "suspiciously few." After nearly twenty hours of questioning, Ruth Snyder confessed that, with her lover, Judd Gray, she had beaten her husband to death with a sash weight while her nine-year-old daughter slept in the next room. Later she would change her story to say that it was Gray who had masterminded the murder and that she had been unable to stop him.

Ultimately both Ruth and Gray were convicted of murder and executed at Sing Sing on January 12, 1928. Eight months after Ruth Snyder died in the electric chair, Sophie Treadwell's play Machinal, directed by Arthur Hopkins, and designed by Robert Edmund Jones, opened at the Plymouth Theatre in New York City. Increasingly, scholars and directors are "rediscovering" this play, and many consider it to be one of America's finest expressionist dramas. Most of the original reviewers in 1928 wrote that Machinal was only loosely based on the Ruth Snyder case, and this position has been quoted and accepted by contemporary scholarship. However, a close examination of that trial and the unprecedented coverage it received lead me to believe that Ruth Snyder was never far from Sophie Treadwell's mind as she wrote Machinal.
Still Looking Back: The Deconstruction of the Angry Young Man in Look Back in Anger and Dejavu
Authors: Dixon Graham
Published: April 2013

Robert Egan locates the cause of Jimmy Porter's powerlessness in "the nature of the histrionic impulse," offering an alternative to John Russell Taylor's traditional assertion that his impotence lies in "the deficiencies of the modern world." I suggest a third alternative: Jimmy Porter, and through him, the playwright John Osborne, deconstructs both his interior and exterior worlds. In Look Back in Anger Osborne places Porter outside the world and yet within it. Porter sees the limitations of playing a "normal," active role in the world and launches vicious but essentially ineffective attacks upon this world from his ironically passive position as sweet-seller. The paradoxical mixture of verbal power and practical impotence has troubled critics since the play's inception; but the recent appearance of Dejavu offers a unique opportunity to consider questions of Jimmy's powerlessness in the mirror of what Osborne has called Look Back II. As Jimmy Porter deconstructs the role he sets for himself, and as Osborne deconstructs the whole play, so Dejavu casts an ironic light upon and, perhaps, deconstructs the whole mythos of the Angry Young Man that the Osbome/Porter amalgam first provoked.
American Clocks: Sam Shepard's Time Plays
Authors: Brater Enoch
Published: April 2013

Time moves in strange ways on the contemporary American stage. In this prefabricated world the dramatic moment constantly re-sets itself: here a unity of time is more frequently experienced as a tantalizing disunity. The minute destablizes, the hour deconstructs, the beating of a clock takes its own odd-even measure for measure. This is a haunting rhythm, as Sam Shepard describes his adventurous mise-en-scene for A Lie of the Mind, "of infinite space, going off to nowhere" — in particular.
Russian Dramatist Mikhail Kuzmin and the Sexual Ambiguity of the Commedia Mask
Authors: O'Malley Lurana Donnels
Published: April 2013

The impact of commedia dell arte on the aesthetic universe of Vsevolod Meierkhol'd has long been recognized; from The Puppet Show to Magnanimous Cuckold and beyond, the imagery and artistic principles associated with commedia became for Meierkhol'd a lodestone. In his productions, the balagan or fairground puppet show would replace the restrictive codes of realism — the clown, the mask, the pratfall were his weapons against the confines of the fourth wall. But Meierkhol'd was far from the only Russian artist fascinated with commedia's mystique. Among its devotees we find dramatist and poet Aleksandr Blok, dramatist and director Nikolai Evreinov, director Aleksandr Tairov, director Sergei Eisenstein, and the dance-drama creators of the Ballets Russes. In the realm of the visual arts, a path leads back to Mir iskusstva (The World of Art), in its devotion to non-idealogical art and the rococo finery of the eighteenth century. For indeed, the Silver Age version of commedia had little to do with the improvisational troupes touring sixteenth-century Italy; rather the Russian artists created an amalgam of Carlo Gozzi's eighteenth-century Italy entwined with the nineteenth-century romanticism of Deburau's moony Pierrot and the grotesque and elegant stories of E.T.A. Hoffman.
Blind Process: Maeterlinck's The Sightless
Authors: Taggart Ashley
Published: April 2013

I intend to look at Maurice Maeterlinck's play The Sightless (Les Aveugles, I890) as a work which explores the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. Spencer was "in at the birth" of evolution, as was acknowledged in Origin of Species, and his interpretation of evolutionary ideas (he invented the phrase "survival of the fittest") had, by Darwin's own admission, a profound effect on their "originator.”
Comparative Perspectives on Gender an Comedy: The Examples of Wilde, Hofmannsthal, and Ebner-Eschenbach
Authors: Finney Gail
Published: April 2013

As almost everyone is aware, fiction and poetry have received considerable attention in feminist criticism. By contrast, until recently drama has been largely neglected. This disparity has much to do with the relative absence of women in the theater world: as playwrights and directors, women were a very minor force unlike last few decades. This stale of affairs is closely bound up with the public nature of drama, in contrast to the more private genres of novel or poem; the writer of a play normally wants to see it produced, and the difficult access to theater as a public institution intimidated women for centuries. Moreover, for the greater part of theater history women were virtually invisible even as actors. In ancient Greece, as women became increasingly important in family-life and correspondingly insignificant in the public arena, they were excluded from the stage; this practice was maintained throughout the Roman, medieval, and Elizabethan periods. Although the Italian commedia dell' arte began allowing women access in the sixteenth century the legacy of the theater as a masculine institution has been far-reaching and powerful.
Post–, "Grapes," Nuts and Flakes: "Coach's Corner" as Post–Colonial
Authors: Knowles Richard Paul
Published: April 2013

In "The Dummy," a short scene in the Rick Salutin/Theatre Passe Muraille collective creation 1837: The Farmer's Revolt, two actors playing a ventriloquist and his dummy address the crowd onstage and off in an allegorical representation of post-colonial mimicry. As the scene opens, the (pre-)Canadian colonial dummy speaks only in the voice (literally) of "John Bull — your imperial ventriloquist," mouthing platitudes and promising to cut trees and fight Yankees for England while being (literally) manipulated and having his pockets picked by the imperial puppet master. Towards the end of the scene, however, ignoring arguments that on his own he will be helpless, "a pitiable colonial," he stands independently and speaks in his own voice for the first time, rallying the crowd and introducing William Lyon Mackenzie, the radical political reformer and leader of the only class revolt in English Canada's history.