bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
De-realised Women: Performance and Identity in Top Girls
Authors: Marohl Joseph
Published: April 2013

For a decade now, deliberate confusion of dramatic roles and playfulness about otherwise serious concepts of gender and history have distinguished Caryl Churchill's plays from the work of mainstream playwrights in Great Britain and the United States. For instance, six performers in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire play twenty-four different dramatis personae with individual role assignments which vary from scene to scene and are unrelated to the performers' actual sexes.
Dramatic Strategy in Christina Reid's Tea in a China Cup
Authors: Roll-Hansen Diderik
Published: April 2013

It was in the early 1980s that critics interested in Irish drama began to focus their attention on Belfast and the "quality and vigour of this resurgence in new drama out of, or about, the North." Northern Ireland, we were told, had seen a "recent accumulation of a body of work with evident roots in the crisis."
Six Characters in Search of an Author and the Battle of the Lexis
Authors: Witt Mary Ann Frese
Published: April 2013

The six characters that have given their author worldwide fame as a playwright were, from evidence of earlier sketches, originally destined for a novel, or at least in search of an author of narrative. In one of these we witness a Dr. Fileno, a character abandoned by his author, pleading with the novelist narrator to take him into his work and thus allow him to live eternally. "Tell me, who was Sancho Panza? Tell me, who was Don Abbondio? And yet they live eternally because, living seeds, they had the good fortune to find a fruitful womb, a fantasy which knew how to raise and nourish them, so that they might live throughout all eternity!" Thus Dr. Fileno defines the conditions of living as a personaggio to the narrator. Shortly after the entrance of the six characters in the play, the father repeats these same words to the director. The metaphor, inevitably suggesting to the modern reader recent advances in medical science with Cervantes and Manzoni pictured as male surrogate mothers offering their wombs to embryos somehow formed elsewhere, is a curious one. Yet this would seem to define Pirandello's concept of the personaggio: an embryonic, yet apparently fully-formed creature in search of a maternal space called "author" or "imagination".
The Carnival Motif in Pirandello' s Drama
Authors: Bazzoni Jana O'Keefe
Published: April 2013

Carnival as we now know it is a brief, merry respite from the ordinary. Celebration and splendor are its primary ingredients, along with impersonation, surprise, sensuality, and confusion. But carnival has its origins in ancient "calendrical" ceremonies and celebrations, important rituals which attempted to appease the unknown forces by which life was ruled, rituals characterized by elements of violence and terror as well as resurgence and renewal.
Rockaby and the Art of Inadvertent Interpretation
Authors: Kalb Jonathan
Published: April 2013

Eclipsed among the millions of critical words that have been lavished on Samuel Beckett is an uncomfortable and frequently avoided question: on what level can spectators be expected to understand his theater? Some critics have tried to address this issue by pointing out parallels between the dilemmas of Beckett's characters and those of his audiences, with limited success, but I want to shift the field of inquiry by discussing affinities between the actor's process of creating characters in rehearsal and the spectator's process of apprehending plays in performance. I focus predominantly on Rockaby, because Billie Whitelaw's extraordinary performance is well documented and also because there is an important article by Charles Lyons about the process of perceiving this play. Lyons's essay, which has application to Beckett 's other works as well, is to my knowledge unique in its detail concerning perception, yet strangely it does not mention Whitelaw at all despite the fact that her kind of acting figures hugely in the process described.
The Blood Knot Reborn in the Eighties: A Reflection of the Artist and his Times
Authors: McKay Kim
Published: April 2013

Twenty-four years after its first performance in South Africa, The Blood Knot re-opened on Broadway in 1985, starring the original cast of two - Athol Fugard and Zakes Mokae. The same kind of tense quiet tilled the theatre as that invoked by accounts of the original show. But the New York audience of the eighties, with thirty and forty dollar tickets, wore designer clothing, furs, or fine overcoats, and many audience members had clearly come directly from their Manhattan offices. The experience moved those viewers , however, almost as strongly as it moved the 120 people in the makeshift room in Port Elizabeth, 1961, during the play's initial performance.
“Master Harold" ... and the boys: Athol Fugard and the Psychopathology of Apartheid
Authors: Durbach Errol
Published: April 2013

In this play, dredged out of Athol Fugard's painful memories of a South African adolescence, at least one event stands out in joyous recollection: the boy's exhilarating, liberating, and ultimately transcendent experience of flying a kite made out of tomato-box slats, brown paper, discarded stockings, and string. From the scraps and leavings of the depressingly mundane, the boy intuits the meaning of a soul-life; and he responds to the experience as a "miracle.” "Why did you make that kite, Sam?" he asks of the black servant whose gift it was — but the answer is not given until much later in the play. Nor can Hally recollect the reason for Sam's failure to share in the experience of high-flying delight.
Jean Jullien's La Serenade: A Comedie Rosse Study
Authors: Klein Jeanne
Published: April 2013

Jean Jullien's La Serenade, subtitled "A Bourgeois Study," ushered in a unique French drame later labeled comedie rosse. The play opened two days before Christmas in 1887, nine months after Antoine established the Theatre Libre as the first independent theatre in Europe. Antoine wrote that La Serenade, "written with the novelty and daring of an unusual comic form, stimulated both astonishment and genuine interest .... Jullien's play clearly caused a sensation; his comedy of middle-class life is said to herald a new and original talent.” Other playwrights followed Jullien's example to the point where comedie rosse was proclaimed the "genre Theatre Libre.”
Somerset Maugham: A Test Case for Popular Comedy
Authors: Innes Christopher
Published: April 2013

Popular comedy is generally a blind spot in dramatic criticism. It may provide a basis for sociological study, but hardly lends itself to intellectual discussion and seldom offers examples of stylistic innovation. In comparison even farce attracts attention in being frequently polemic, though critics normally focus on genres that reflect their own concepts of seriousness. As a result histories of modem theatre are normally surveys of minority drama that bear little relationship to what actually occupies nine-tenths of the stage. They focus on the drama of ideas or political theatre, as offering material for thematic analysis that has a significance beyond the work itself, on experimental staging for its theoretical significance, which tends to be in inverse proportion to popularity, or on poetic plays because of their clear literary value. Although each may use comic techniques or situations, these are seen as secondary.
Modernism VS. Postmodernism: Shepard's The Tooth of Crime and the Discourses of Popular Culture
Authors: Wilcox Leonard
Published: April 2013

Postmodernism and the postmodern condition: one of the salient features of both, recent critics tell us, is the "effacement ... of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinctions between high culture and so called mass or popular culture." Such is Fredric Jameson's assessment, and in an important article on Postmodernism he adds that many of the newer Postmodernism are fascinated with the "debased" landscape of advertising, media images, motels and the commercial fabric of the superhighway strip. These Postmodernism no longer "quote" from the popular texts as Joyce and Mahler might have done; rather "they incorporate them, to the point where the line drawn between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw."
Book Reviews
Authors: Couchman Jane , Robinson Gabrielle , Cahn Victor , Paul Norman
Published: April 2013

Bettina L. Knapp, French Theatre 1918-1939, reviewed by Jane Couchman

David Bradby, Modern French Drama, 1940-1980, reviewed by Jane Couchman

David L. Hirst, Edward Bond, reviewed by Gabrielle Robinson

David L. Hirst, Tragicomedy, reviewed by Victor L. Cahn

Richard Dutton, Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition, reviewed by Victor L. Cahn

Paul Hernadi, Interpreting Events: Tragicomedies of History on the Modem Stage, reviewed by Victor L. Cahn

John Rudlin, Jacques Copeau, reviewed by Norman H. Paul
O'Neill and the Tragedy of Culture
Authors: Griffin Ernest
Published: April 2013

In 1888 two writers of genius were born in America, one a great playwright with "a touch of the poet" and the other a great poet with — perhaps it is not too unfair to say — a touch of the playwright. In this same year that Eugene O' Neill and T.S. Eliot were born, a greatly influential if not "great" English poet–critic, Matthew Arnold, died .
Freedom and Fixity in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: April 2013

One of the constant poles in O'Neill's plays is this desire for freedom, a word that has particular significance when related to the O'Neill canon. In fact, the first four definitions of "freedom" in the OED seem specifically written with O' Neill in mind: "exemption or release from slavery or imprisonment; liberation from the bondage of sin (figurative); the quality of being free or noble; and the state of being able to act without hindrance or restraint." O'Neill Freedom and Fixity in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill constantly creates personae who long to escape the imprisonment they feel within the microcosmic world of the family and the macrocosmic world of twentieth-century materialistic society; who feel the weight of sin, and desire surcease from its burden; who seek if not nobility at least a life of purpose; and who yearn to be unhindered and unrestrained.
The Iceman Cometh as Crossroad in O'Neill's Long Journey
Authors: Porter Laurine
Published: April 2013

Family is a key theme linking Eugene O'Neill's historical cycle, written in the mid—I 930s, with the autobiographical dramas which followed: The Iceman Cometh , Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and the one—act Hughie. For approximately five years before writing Iceman in 1939, O'Neill's time and energy were almost totally devoted to the cycle, a series of plays he entitled A Tale of Possessors Self—Dispossessed, which was to trace the development of America from 1755 to 1932, a span of almost two hundred years. His objective was to define the American experience by focusing upon a single family, the Melody—Harford clan, which he modelled indirectly after his own family.
Communal, Familial, and Personal Memories in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night
Authors: Raleigh John Henrey
Published: April 2013

The human memory, on one of its many levels, manifests itself in three overlapping categories: the historical and communal; the familial and social; the autobiographical and personal. At one end of the scale is the constellation of collective memories, given by one's socio-economic class, ethnic background, education, religion, the historical period of one's life, nationality, and so on. At the other end of the spectrum, in a purely private shrine in one's own unique ego, there are those individual memories that no one else, past, present or future, will ever share or know. Social-familial memories tend to connect to both categories, the public and the private. At the extremes of the spectrum there appears to be, on the communal side, an assertion: "We are what we are," and at the private end a question: "Who am I?'
Drama in Rehearsal: Arthur W. Pinero's Trelawny of the 'Wells'
Authors: Denison Patricia
Published: April 2013

Arthur W. Pinero’s Trelawny of the 'Wells' (1898) concludes with the rehearsal of a drama in the making — an image of drama in process that now seems more characteristically modern than Victorian. Yet drama in the making, in a different but related sense, has also been regarded as characteristically Victorian. Late nineteenth century British drama is often described as "drama in transition," although the connection has not often been made between drama in the process of transition and particular dramas in the process of unfolding. Yet this, I would suggest, is the source of strength of Pinero's best work, of which Trelawny of the 'Wells' is an illuminating instance.
Fantasy and Reality: Dramatic Rhythm in Death of a Salesman
Authors: Headomi Leah
Published: April 2013

The subtitle of Death of a Salesman, "Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem," as well as the title originally considered by the playwright, The Inside of His Head, already point to the play's thematic essence and major formal characteristic. Thematically, Miller's drama deals with the tension between the private inner world of the protagonist and external reality. Its principal structural characteristic consists of the integration of dramatic realism and expressionism.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

The present annual bibliography follows the basic principles and limitations described in the June 1984 issue. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of dramatic literature and, to a lesser extent, of theatre history. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modem world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1899 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential. theatre figures other than performers. Reviews, reprinted books, unpublished theses, and graduate–student periodicals are generally excluded. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to my Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism 1966–1980: An International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press).
Beyond 1984: Provocation and Prognosis in Marieluise Fleisser's Play Purgatory in Ingolstadt
Authors: Ley Ralph
Published: April 2013

Marieluise Fleisser was probably the most gifted of Bertolt Brecht's female collaborators. Long considered a minor writer of the Weimar Republic worthy of little more than honorable mention in a footnote embellishing the biography of Brecht, Fleisser was able in her last years to move out from under his enormous shadow and become one of the more celebrated literary rediscoveries of the 1970S in Germany.
Politicised Theatre: The Case of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Garbage, The City and Death
Authors: Clandra Denis
Published: April 2013

My primary object of study is the controversy which has surrounded Fassbinder's play Garbage, The City and Death off and on for the last thirteen years. I Touched off by allegations of antisemitism against the author and the various production teams which have attempted to stage it, the issue exploded into areas beyond the immediate conflict between the Federal Republic's dedication in its Basic Law to the preservation of human dignity, underscored by Germany's special responsibility to Jewish citizens, and the same Law's promise that there shall be no censorship. By the very fact and circumstances of its not being produced at this particular historical juncture, this play bas catalyzed important political discussion, most likely beyond the intentions of its author and certainly out of his control. The Garbage affair raises interesting questions about the cultural apparatus, .the function and meaning of official censorship and self-censorship, and the relationship of the theatre to politics at large. I will limit my remarks to the details of the controversy, to commentary on Fassbinder's playas written and to its performance potential. In so far as Brecht is a key to our understanding of political theatre in this century, and as he was invoked on various occasions during the debate, he is part of this story.
Müller's Cement: Fragments of Heroic Myth
Authors: Harris Max
Published: April 2013

That "Heiner Müller is the most important dramatist in the German language since the war" is, according to the German critic F.J. Raddalz, "[a] fact. .. not disputed among serious critics of literature." But it is a fact little known in North America. Cement, one of the few of MülIer's plays that has been both translated and performed on this side of the Atlantic, serves as an excellent introduction to his work. Premiered by the Berliner Ensemble in 1973, it is now recognised both as a major text in Müller's corpus and as a significant point of transition between his earlier work, owing much to Brecht and to the themes of socialist realism, and his later, more idiosyncratic and sceptical "synthetic fragments".
Book Reviews
Authors: Lamont Rosette , Black Stephen , Fisher James
Published: April 2013

John Fuegi, Bertolt Brecht: Chaos According to Plan, reviewed by Rosette C. Lamont

Pia Kleber, Exceptions and Rules: Brecht, Planchon and "The Good Person of Szechwan.", reviewed by Rosette C. Lamont

H.A. Mason, The Tragic Plan, reviewed by Stephen A. Black

Christine Dymkowski, Harley Granville Barker: A Preface to Modern Shakespeare, reviewed by James Fisher

Dennis Kennedy, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre, reviewed by James Fisher

Dennis Kennedy, eds., Plays by Harley Granville Barker, reviewed by James Fisher

Eric Salmon, eds., Granville Barker and His Correspondents, reviewed by James Fisher

Philip Roberts, The Royal Court Theatre. 1965-1972, reviewed by James Fisher
The Theatre Breeds Comedy
Authors: Kennedy Andrew
Published: April 2013

The fertile coupling of theatricality with comedy is a phenomenon often observed but seldom discussed as a proper topic of comparative criticism. Let me start with a case paradigm and show in a scene what happens, on a small scale, when a play exhibits one of its acts of breeding.
Through a Cocktail Glass Darkly
Authors: Chamberlain Lesley
Published: April 2013

The Cocktail Party is a testament to T.S. Eliot's improbable dramatic aspirations, as John Dexter's admirable 1986 production at London's Phoenix theatre showed. The piece has moved further away from realising its chief aim than when it was first staged at the 1949 Edinburgh festival, with Alec Guinness as the tyrannically compassionate Christian psychoanalyst Sir Henry Harcourt–Reilly. It has never truly been suited to pleasing a wide audience. The fact that the Edinburgh occasion drew crowds, and the production moved profitably to London and was followed by a successful season on Broadway, was surely deceptive. All three occasions owed the excess of their popularity to Eliot's living celebrity as poet and nobel laureate. In 1986, now Eliot's name has entered the museum for "difficult" poetry on A—level syllabuses, it was hard to fill more than a few front rows in the stalls, even with the most intelligent acting and attractive staging, and cut—price seats
Digging up Buried Child
Authors: Whiting Charles
Published: April 2013

Sam Shepard's Buried Child raises intriguing questions. There are a number of inconsistencies in the play. How to resolve them? What is the significance of the incest of Halie and her son Tilden? And what to make of the powerful finale? Does it announce a new beginning, as some have believed, or does it signify a continuation without change? Shepard's intentions in these matters and in many other elements of the play can be illuminated and clarified by an analysis of the manuscript. Examination reveals that it contains three different versions of Buried Child which precede the fourth and definitive one. The first three versions appear to have been written at about the same time, while the fourth is separated from the others by seven months. By closely following the evolution of the play from state to state, we can see how Shepard's mind was working, and perhaps arrive at a keener appreciation of Buried Child in its definitive form.
Writers with Dirty Hands: Howard Brenton's A Sky Blue Life: Scenes after Maxim Gorki
Authors: Boon Richard
Published: April 2013

The production in its main house by the Royal Court Theatre of Magnificence in July 1973 signalled the arrival in the established British theatre of a new generation of young political dramatists. The play's author, Howard Brenton, may in retrospect be seen as the figurehead of this second "new wave" of playwrights who have re-vitalised British theatre since '956; most important among the others are David Edgar, Trevor Griffiths, and David Hare. All emerged towards the end of the 1960s, producing work fired by contemporary political unrest and designed to reach new audiences through a Fringe theatre circuit of community halls, college venues and small avant-garde theatre spaces. Much of this early work - particularly that produced by Portable Theatre, a group founded by Hare with which all these dramatists, but especially Brenton, were associated - was fuelled by a determination to challenge the perceived assumptions and complacency of the established theatre with shows that were provocative and controversial in content and style alike. Yet each of these writers, albeit in differing ways and to some extent for differing reasons, followed Brenton into the mainstream of "official culture", working on the large public stages - subsidised and West End - or on television, or in the commercial film industry. For Brenton at least, the Fringe of the early '970S had become "a cultural cul-de-sac," the "new" audiences as sophisticated and as isolated from the rest of society as their West End counterparts. It was largely this perception that led him to turn to the large, subsidised, public theatre spaces: since '973, he has written regularly for the Royal Court, the RSC, and most significantly, for the National Theatre. For some, he has "sold out"; for others, he remains "the wolf within the gates" of the established theatre.
Eluding the Censor: From Script to Improvisation in Patetica
Authors: Unruh Vicky
Published: April 2013

With the 1985 restoration of a civilian government in Brazil, cultural historians and art critics have undertaken an assessment of the consequences for artistic expression of the widespread censorship practices characterizing the country's twenty-one year military rule. Brazilian theatre — which in the 1950S and early 1960s had for the first time achieved a sustained level of excellence in the work of accomplished playwrights such as Jorge Andrade, Alfredo Dias Gomes, Ariana Suassuna and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and in the initial activities of Sao Paulo's experimental Teatro de Arena — was the performative activity most vulnerable to the notorious Institutional Act NO.5, which abolished safeguards on freedom of expression from December 1968 until January 1979. During these years, countless dramatic works submitted for approval to federal censorship authorities were rejected outright, while others were withheld from publication, staging, and/or performance for months on end, outlawed on opening nights after substantial investments of hard work and money, or, in some cases, violently interrupted by authorities in the middle of a performance.
Ireneusz Iredyński' s Drama of Exposure
Authors: Robinson Marc
Published: April 2013

Ireneusz Iredyński made his literary debut with a short poem published in 1955, less than three years after Stalin's death , 'and on the eve of the 1956 reorganization of communist governments officially marking the end of Stalinism. It was 1956, of course, that witnessed the schizophrenia of Soviet diplomacy: a mere eight months separated Krushchev's "secret speech" condemning Stalin's crimes and the brutal quelling of the Hungarian revolution. Iredyński, born in Poland in 1939, came of age in this environment and his writing was born of its contradictions. Joining in the gradual flow of deStalinization that followed the election of Gomulka as Poland's premier in 1956, he began writing dramas of exposure that critique duplicity , chicanery, and the manipulations of those in power. Yet he remained sensitive to the fragility of all stability in Poland, and wrote from a remove of healthy skepticism. His plays express a profound mistrust, not only of the sincerity of those in power, but also of the purity and resilience of those in opposition.
The Dramaturgy of the Other: Diegetic Patterns in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World
Authors: Chaudhuri Una
Published: April 2013

"It may be hinted," wrote Synge, "[that there are] several sides to the Playboy.'" The story behind this remark (surely unmatched among authorial statements for crushing irony) is well known: the play's tumultuous premiere, the nightly riots, the .storm of journalistic abuse, the fog of swirling incomprehension. To this day the Playboy scandal "frames" Synge's great play with its irresistible sensationalism. No discussion of The Playboy of the Western World (including, of course, this one) seems able to dispense with a more or less extended rehearsal of the original critical melodrama. The result is an irony that doubles Synge's own: his very efforts to wrench the play away from the narrow perspectives that threatened to stifle it at its birth have contributed powerfully to the tenacity with which those very perspectives continue to hold it in their iron grip. Thus the play remains strongly identified with its place of origin, with Ireland, and the question of its attitude to its characters is inevitably framed within a problematic of Synge's politiconational vision. While Synge's claims of universality for his play have certainly borne fruit in many psychological and mythological readings" the figures of Oedipus, Christ, Don Quixote, etc. that are recovered from the play are invariably clothed as Men of Aran, their psycho-mythological significance mediated by their racial identity.
The Voice of Absent Love in Krapp's Last Tape and Company
Authors: Catanzaro Mary
Published: April 2013

Coupling — and its seeming impossibility — are central to the works of Samuel Beckett. That was already apparent in his critical study of Proust in 1931 where we see the full range of broken promise in the separateness and otherness which undermine agreement and accord between pairs. Beckett's thinking has always been binary: he speaks of subject and object within the scaffolding of his self—defining term, pseudocouple. In the physical impediments and emotional ruptures of the pseudocouple we find a virtual metaphysics of isolation.
Anger and the Actor: Another Look Back
Authors: Egan Robert
Published: April 2013

If we are reluctant to let go of 1956 as a convenient watershed point in the history of British theatre, we no longer tend to regard Look Back in Anger as a one-play revolution. John Osborne himself long ago pronounced it "a formal, rather old-fashioned play,'" and with the virtue of hindsight we can identify its technical affinities with the earlier dramatists whose theatre it was once thought to have obliterated: the aphoristic turns of Coward, the set-piece speechifying of Shaw, even the sentimental studies of Rattigan. Yet Look Back remains a unique play. The major revivals that have occurred repeatedly over the thirty years since its premiere have demonstrated that, removed from its early avatar as cultural rallying point, it has not lost its special energies as a theatre event.
Tom Stoppard Radioactive: A Sounding of the Radio Plays
Authors: Kelly Katherine
Published: April 2013

Tom Stoppard typifies many British dramatists in having written for the radio early in his career. The aural medium attracts the promising playwright for several reasons, not the least of which is the British Broadcasting Corporation's history of creating and promoting serious radio drama as a distinct genre. ' It has become commonplace to argue that virtually all important modem British playwrights started in radio, a far more accessible medium than the stage or screen, and one that promises the novice writer an audience that can number in the millions. 2 The practical benefits of writing for radio are fairly obvious: it requires less time and money to produce for this medium than it does for the stage or screen, which in turn minimizes the risk of financial or artistic failure. As a result, as many as six hundred new plays are produced annually by BBC radio alone3 But in addition to its accessibility, radio offers aspiring playwrights highly defined limits, both aesthetic and practical, within which to perfect their craft.
Book Reviews
Authors: Fisher James , Adler Thomas , Hart Lynda , Kolin Philip
Published: April 2013

John Peters, Vladimir's Carrot: Modern Drama and the Modern Imagination, reviewed by James Fisher

Judith J. Thompson, Tennessee Williams' Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol, reviewed by Thomas P. Adler

Philip C. Kolin, ed., Conversations with Edward Albee, reviewed by Thomas P. Adler

Mathew C. Roudane, ed.,Conversations with Arthur Miller, reviewed by Thomas P. Adler

June Schlueter and James K. Flanagan, Arthur Miller, reviewed by Thomas P. Adler

William Herman, Understanding Contemporary American Drama, reviewed by Lynda Hart

Mathew C. Roudane, Understanding Edward Albee, reviewed by Laynda Hart

David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrighls, reviewed by Philip C. Kolin
Prisoners of Their Plots: Literary Allusion and the Satiric Drama of Self-Consciousness in Chekhov' s Three Sisters
Authors: Tufts Carol Strongin
Published: April 2013

Chekhov signals his audience from the very beginning. As the curtain rises on a set divided into a "drawing room with columns, behind which is seen a ballroom," a set which is itself a stage within a stage, we see the Prozorov sisters, each dressed in a costume that is emblematic of her situation in life and her view of herself, and each fixed in the posture that will characterize her throughout the play: "OLGA, wearing the dark-blue uniform dress of a teacher in the girls' high school, is correcting student exercise books the whole time, either standing or walking to and fro. MASHA, in a black dress, sits with her hat on her knees and reads a little book. IRINA, in a white dress, stands lost in thought" . In the ballroom behind the columns, Chebutykin, an army doctor, and Tuzenbakh and Solyony, two officers of the brigade stationed in the sisters' provincial town, carry on a conversation which the audience cannot yet hear.
Brecht's Teacher
Authors: Leach Robert
Published: April 2013

When the Soviet poet and playwright, Sergei Tretyakov, went into hospital in the summer of 1937 suffering from nervous exhaustion, Bertolt Brecht urged him to get well:
The Play of Language in Ionesco's Play of Chairs
Authors: Klaver Elizabeth
Published: April 2013

If the twentieth century's concern with language and textuality could be summed up in one playwright, Eugene Ionesco would stand a very good chance of taking the distinction. Certainly, on the basis of three of his earliest plays, The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, and The Chairs, he can probably be considered the grandmaster of the metalinguistic play, for language not only forms the basis of his fictional worlds, but is held up to the light, examined, and displayed from quite a variety of angles. Although many of the linguistic concerns of The Bald Soprano and The Lesson can be recognized in the later play, The Chairs introduces a new level of complexity in what is said about language and how. The play foregrounds the problematics of language not only as discourse, but also as critical method, delving into a critique of its own ontological basis and the kind of dramatic discourse and dramatic world thus produced. Such an examination of language ends up generating critical implications for the nature of literature, both theatrical and narrative.
From Italian Roots to American Relevance: The Remarkable Theatre of Dario Fo
Authors: D'Aponte Mimi
Published: April 2013

Americans writing about theatre have been pronouncing Daria Fo's work extraordinary, whether for performance or political reasons, or for both. "For the past decade," claimed Joel Schechter in 1985, "Daria Fo has been Europe's most popular political satirist." So many theatres have included Fo in their recent seasons," wrote Ron Jenkins in 1986, "that he has become the most-produced contemporary Italian playwright in the U.S. " American producers interested in social satire seem to have become less leery of this zany Italian genius who publicly thanked his "fellow actor," Ronald Reagan, for the marvelous promotion afforded his work when the State Department denied him an American visa for several years.
Tom Stoppard: The Monological Imagination
Authors: Mackenzie Ian
Published: April 2013

The recent rediscovery and translation into French and English of Mikhail Bakhtin's writings on Dostoevsky and the theory of the novel have led to the wide dissemination of his concept of "dialogue." Few attempts have been made to apply Bakhtin 's theories to drama, a literary form that would appear to be intrinsically dialogical. This article considers the writing of Tom Stopparda dramatist who asserts that his plays work out his own dialogues — in the light of Bakhtin's principles. The article's conclusions are essentially foreshadowed in its title.
Northern Ireland's Political Drama
Authors: Maxwell
Published: April 2013

The first play about sectarian violence in the north of Ireland was St. John Ervine's Mixed Marriage (191 I). The next, or at any rate the next of note, was Sam Thompson's Over the Bridge (1960). John Boyd's The Assassin was produced at the Dublin Theatre Festival in (1960), and his The Flats at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, in 1971.
Solidarity with Solidarity: Six Polish Plays
Authors: Filipowicz Halina
Published: April 2013

The three years between the rise of the Solidarity movement in August 1980 and the lifting of martial law in July 1983 mark a critical point in Poland's postwar history, Solidarity inspired profound changes in the political, social, and cultural life, not the least of which was an unprecedented opening up of minds and voices, In that sense, the Solidarity breakthrough was indeed a revolution" a revolution of consciousness." To Solidarity's program of the Renewal, the communist authorities responded with alternating cycles of retrenchment and repression, which only laid bare the inefficacy of officially enforced solutions. The communists were eventually compelled to engage in a dialogue with Solidarity, which opened the way, in June 1989, to the first free elections in more than half a century.
The Performance of Power and the Power of Performance: Rewriting the Police State in Dario Fo's Accidental Death of
Authors: Wing Joylynn
Published: April 2013

Italian playwright Dario Fo has been exploring the radical relationship between power, violence, and comedy for the past forty years. In a wide variety of plays and performance events which feature theatrical techniques culled from the fertile traditions of his homeland, Fo weaves comedy's ancient ploys into a complex production mode featuring a type of grotesque physical paradox which he calls "black mime," in order to attack a power structure which he sees as immobile and static. In his popular 1970 piece, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, he appropriates the archetypical comic fool figure, as a "histriomaniac," in order to attack the pretensions of the police state and naturalistic theatre simultaneously. In the course of the action, illusionistic theatre is equated with the believable cover-up, and the process of theatre itself becomes the farcial mechanism upon which the unidimensional, solid front of authority is shattered by the provisionality of its own plot line.
Retreating to the Future: Brenton in the Eighties
Authors: Boon Richard
Published: April 2013

In the Spring of 1988, the Royal Court Theatre in London launched a season of work by Howard Brenton under the title "Three Plays for Utopia." The first two pieces were revivals: Sore Throats, an "intimate" three-hander in two acts, was first produced by the RSC in 1979; Bloody Poetry, a treatment of the life of Shelley, bad premiered at the Leicester Haymarket in 1984. The third was an original play on which Brenton had been working intermittently for some seven years: Greenland.As a group, the three vary enormously in subject and approach, but each marks a stage in the development of an idea that had first come to the writer during a visit made with the Joint Stock Theatre group to the 1977 Derby for Epsom Downs: that of writing a "Utopian" play. The utopianism of Sore Throats is, as I shall show, by no means its most immediately obvious characteristic: it was not until the early nineteen eighties that Brenton confronted head-on the problem of articulating what a better, more free and just way of living might be. The impulse to do so was partly born of a response to pressure from friends and critics for the dramatist - more renowned, after all, for dystopias like The Churchill Play (1974) and Thirteenth Night (1981) — "to say what I really do want, what I really mean." But it is also the case that collectively the plays represent a reaction, sometimes clear and emphatic, sometimes uncertain, to the greater pressure of social and political change in contemporary Britain. They are concerned to re-discover and re-affirm the necessity and importance of clear personal vision on the left in the face of an apparently solid right-wing government and an opposition that continued fragmented and inward-looking. At heart, their subject is the self, and its power to survive, adapt, and transform. Each play in its own way attempts to answer the question that flickers across the minds of many characters in earlier work, a question that is most clearly put in Thirteenth Night: "How can we keep the richness of dreams, yet be fully awake?"
Ola Rotimi: "Humanity as my Tribesmen"
Authors: Banham Martin
Published: April 2013

la Rotimi lives somewhat in the shadow of his fellow Nigerian dramatist, the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. But while Soyinka commands international respect and admiration, Rotimi's reputation within Nigeria, both as playwright and director, is unsurpassed. Born in 1938 of Yoruba and Igbo parents (a significant cross-community. parentage in terms of Rotimi's committed stance against the destructive elements of tribalism) Rotimi was educated at the prestigious Methodist Boys High School in Lagos, and then in the USA, with degrees from Boston University (B.F.A.) and Yale (M.F.A.), where between 1963 and 1966 he was Rockefeller Foundation Scholar in Playwrighting and Dramatic Literature. Like many other contemporary Nigerian playwrights (Omotoso, Osofisan, Clark-Bekederemo, Sofola, Sowande, Lakoju, etc.) Rotimi works from a base in university teaching, in his case from the universities of Ife and Port Harcourt. His first play, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, was written and produced at Yale in 1966 (and published by OUP in 1977). It is a light-hearted satire which shows alertness to the ridiculous posturing of politicians and some sense of the menace that lurks behind the farce. It is also very "modem" in its ideological stance, with women's role in contemporary politics given considerable emphasis. Rotimi's reputation was established, however, with three major dramas he both wrote and staged following his return to Nigeria in the autumn of 1966 — The Gods Are Not to Blame (produced at the first Ife Festival of the Arts in 1968), Kurunmi (second Ife Festival, 1969) and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi (fourth Ife Festival, 1970). These three plays will be discussed briefly in order to give some insight into Rotimi's methodology and concerns, leading to a fuller discussion of two important later works, If (first performed University of Port Harcourt Theatre, 1979) and Hopes of the Living Dead (first performed University of Port Harcourt Theatre, 1985.)
A Place with the Pigs: Athol Fugard' s Afrikaner Parable
Authors: Colleran Jeanne
Published: April 2013

In a span of three years, Athol Fugard directed the world premieres of his two most recent dramas at the Yale Repertory Theatre: in 1984 he staged The Road to Mecca, and in 1987 he produced and acted in A Place with the Pigs. Mecca has been extraordinarily well received; after being performed at Yale, it played at Britain's National Theatre in 1985, atthe Charleston, South Carolina Spoleto Festival in 1987, and on Broadway in 1988. As the fourth major New York production of the decade, the success of Mecca confirmed, in the words of one critic, Fugard's "standing as the greatest active playwright in the Englishspealdng world ."
Variations of Temptation — Vaclav Havel's Politics of Language
Authors: Goetz—Stankiewicz Marketa
Published: April 2013

When approaching a play by Vaclav Havel, a critic or commentator is bound to have certain preconceptions. He knows that Havel is one of the most famous "dissidents" of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, that none of his plays has been performed in official theatres there, that he has been harassed and imprisoned several times during the last dozen years. (In 1979—1983 he was incarcerated for four years; in early 1989 he was imprisoned again, after being charged with "incitement".) Despite all tbis (or is it because of it?), his eloquent politico—philosophical essays as well as his plays have been translated into and performed in many languages. Here, critics are bound to argue, we obviously have a literary figure whose life and writings are so closely interwoven with the political situation in his country that we have a ready—made package—deal guide to the interpretation of his works. Journalists, reviewers, and academic commentators have seemed to follow this obvious approach and discussed Havel's writings largely as the direct outcome of what he has been observing in his own society. The "dissident playwright"label has stuck hard and fast to Havel's image. But does it do him justice? In this essay I propose to peel off the label and let the reader decide whether he wishes to stick it back on again after — and if — he or she has read my remarks.
Book Reviews
Authors: Zeifman Hersh , Parkin Andrew
Published: April 2013

Esther Harriott, American Voices: Five Contemporary Playwrights in Essays and Interviews, reviewed by Hersh Zeifman

Mikhail, E.H., The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections, reviewed by Andrew Parkin
The Role of Ariane Mnouchkine at the Theatre du Soleil
Authors: Kieernander Adrian
Published: April 2013

In the early days of the Theatre du Solei! it was frequently pointed out with some surprise by commentators that Ariane Mnouchkine was extraordinary in being the only notable woman theatre director in France. After twenty-four years the French media have now grown accustomed to the idea of Mnouchkine as a director, even though this acceptance seems in most cases restricted to Mnouchkine personally rather than to the idea of women directors in general — there remain very few prominent female directors in the French theatre. The focus of much media attention has now switched from astonishment at the fact of a female director to a recurrent questioning of what are perceived to be contradictions and paradoxes in Mnouchkine's work and position within the company, implying that her role as director within a collective is a betrayal of her egalitarian principles.
A Serious City Comedy: Fe-/Male History and Value Judgments in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money
Authors: Muller Klause
Published: April 2013

Caryl Churchill's recent play, Serious Money, has been a great success both with the supporters of the City of London and those who are highly critical of the financial world. Financiers, brokers, jobbers and arbitrageurs came in droves to gleefully watch their life presented on the stages of, first, the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea and then the Wyndham Theatre in the West End of London in 1987-88. Various newspapers and magazines have puzzled over this interesting social and theatrical phenomenon, but no satisfactory explanation for the play's broad appeal has yet been offered. Questions have been raised concerning the audiences' responses, such as whether people are blindly dancing on a volcano, or whether we are confronted with a postmodernist variety of conscious indulgence in one's own sins. Perhaps, however, the playwright is just doing her traditional job by putting the shortcomings of her time and society on the stage to be mocked at and laughed about. Churchill's play is deliberately called a "City Comedy," after all , and it begins with an excerpt from Thomas Shadwell's The Volunteers, or the Stock-Jobbers of 1692.
"Think what you are saying": Verbal Politics in the Early Plays Of Handke and Kroetz
Authors: Malkin Jeanette
Published: April 2013

Peter Handke and Franz Xaver Kroetz have, as both will readily admit, very little in common. If anything, they occupy opposite ends in the spectrum of contemporary German dramaturgy and, with each successive play, seem to move further apart. Handke's abstract subjectivity has in recent plays (such as Vber die Dörfer, 198 I ) deepened into neaI mysticism. Kroetz, on the other hand , has moved from sub-proletarian naturalism to , more recently, an almost cinematic depiction of middle-class moral styles (as in Furchl und Hoffnung der BDR, [984). Handke is a private person, an individualist with an aversionto labels, systems, and political affiliations. His critical acclaim has always been greater than his popularity and some of his best writing has been done in the novel, rather than the dramatic genre. Kroetz is a highly prolific and populaI playwright (and actor). Much produced, often interviewed, he is outspoken, polemical, politically engaged, a one-time member and even spokesman of the German Communist Party (KPD).
The Essential Continuity of Sean O'Casey
Authors: Innes Christopher
Published: April 2013

There is a general assumption behind almost all critical approaches to Sean O'Casey's work, which deserves examination, if only because it is so common. Despite Denis Johnston's assertion in 1926, the year of The Plough and the Stars, that O'Casey's first three plays are increasingly poetic in dialogue and .expressionistic in form, the Dublin trilogy is almost invariably held up as an example of naturalism. Equally, all his theatrical output from the 1934 production of Within the Gates, whether labelled expressionist or fantasy , is seen as the stylistic antithesis of the early plays. Biographic reference is used to support this: O'Casey's move from Ireland to England after the Plough riots is taken as the sign of a radical departure in subjeci matter. To some critics his 1928 break with the Abbey theatre gave him the liberty to explore new dramatic forms. To others it shows limitations that come from writing without the practical discipline of stage production, resulting in flawed language and abstract characterization. In both cases, The Silver Tassie, as the immediate cause of O'Casey's break with the Abbey, is considered an amalgam of opposing styles, signalling the transition from one to another.
Book Reviews
Authors: Garner Stanton , Fisher James , Zinman Toby Silverman , Brink Andrew , Morrow Laura , Demastes William , Schuler Catherine
Published: April 2013

Beltina L. Knapp, The Reign of the Theatrical Director: French Theatre, 1887-1924, reviewed by James Fisher

Enoch Drater, Beyond Minimalism: BeckeN's Late Style in the Theatre, reviewed by Toby Silverman Zinman

Bennett Simon, Tragic Drama And The Family: Psychoanalytic Studies From Aeschylus To Beckett, reviewed by Andrew Brink

Gna A. Plunka, Peter Shaffer: Roles, Rites, and Rituals ill the Theater, reviewed by Laura Morrow

Adrienne Kennedy, People Who Led to My Plays, reviewed by Toby Silverman Zinman

Gabriel Miller, Clifford Odets, reviewed by William W. Demastes

Michael Kirby, A Formalist Theatre, reviewed by Dr. Catherine Schuler

Rosemary Poutney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Becken's Drama. 1956-76, reviewed by Stanton B. Garner Jr.
"The Curve Itself" in Jumpers
Authors: Thomson Leslie
Published: April 2013

The metaphysical concepts suggested by curves and the circles they imply govern the network of interrelated visual and verbal images in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers.