bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Adah Anthony , Fitzpatrick Elizabeth
Published: April 2013

Exactly seven years ago, Modern Drama devoted a special issue to Postcolonialism. That issue, edited by Ann Wilson, was concerned with origins of "postcolonialism" as an offshoot of what had until that time generally been called "Commonwealth literature." Ann Wilson already cautioned against the "fashionableness" of postcolonial theory in academic journals by trying to name it. In that difficult task, she accurately identified various asymmetries (political, economic, and historical) amongst experiences to which the term "postcolonial experience" might be applied. Consequently, she argued, the scholar's "vigilant attention" must be paid not only to the "thematic preoccupations" of the writer, but more importantly, to the "condition[sl under which the work is written." Postcolonial theory as a critical model is necessarily, therefore, shot through with relations of power. The achievement of Wilson's volume was the production of essays that astutely challenged the "critical orthodoxies around postcolonial theory," orthodoxies that bypass asymmetries by treating the postcolonial condition as a "discursive effect" that enables grand recits. A significant blind spot in that project, however, and a common critical lapse within the field is to pay little or no attention to the limits on dissemination and accessibility (including enabling pedagogical tools) that circumscribe the circulation of postcolonial texts and their producers. And if there is one playwright whose works exemplifies this tendency it is Wole Soyinka, who forms the focus of this special issue. We hope, in editing this volume, not only to ameliorate this significant lacuna but also to open up other spaces within postcolonial theatre theory and critical practice.
Soyinka and the Canon's Mouth
Authors: Slemon Stephen
Published: April 2013

Like the other essays brought together in this special issue of Modern Drama, this article originated in the remarkable conference on "Wole Soyinka and Contemporary Theatre" organized by Anthony Adah, Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, and Leslie Katz at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama, University of Toronto, in October 2001. I found the conference exhilarating, but also challenging, and this for two reasons. The first is that the conference brought together a host of distinguished scholars with genuine expertise in Yoruban, or Nigerian. or West African literary and intellectual cultures, and in the perfonnative arts. I, on the other hand, am not a "Soyinka" scholar: I have little familiarity with any of Soyinka's several African, or African-American, or African-diasporic, or theatre-studies constituencies. My disciplinary training is in a field that, at least for the moment, calls itself postcolonial critical studies: scant training, indeed, for the big stage of this conference. The second reason that I found the conference challenging has to do with a point of structural asymmetry.
Masked Discourse: Dramatic Representation and Generic Transformation in Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests
Authors: Garuba Harry
Published: April 2013

The criticism of African drama began as an imported discourse? As such, it lacked an adequate vocabulary of descriptive, analytical, and conceptual tools to account for the traditional plays and performances that serve as the primary generic base for contemporary drama in Africa and, in some instances, the African diaspora. From the very beginning, therefore, African dramatic criticism has depended on a hodgepodge of concepts from European models and other concepts and analytical tools from the disciplines of (colonial) anthropology and (early post-independence) sociology, which more often than not missed the point because they ignored the dramatic conventions and structural forms of the indigenous dramatic genres of theatre practice.
Whose Theatre, Whose Africa? Wole Soyinka's The Road on the Road
Authors: Jeyifo Biodun
Published: April 2013

In this article, I explore the question of whal happens when African literary and dramatic texlS travel. Using the example of one of the major works of Wole Soyinka's corpus, The Road, I pose the following question: In what resides the "Africanness" of African literary and dramatic texts, and how does this "Africanness" fare when African texts travel? In other words, I explore how the markers, signs, and codes of "Africanness" are read, decoded, reconfigured, and, above all, appropriated when African texts travel. Although the three ins lances of "traveling" that I shall explore in the staging of The Road all took place outside Africa, I wish to emphasize that both the practical and the theoretical implications of my observations and reflections in the article also apply to the "traveling" of African literary and dramatic texts within the African continent. Although I shall presently give a fuller elaboration of the term "Africanness" and why I make it so central to my observations and analyses in this article, it is perhaps useful to stale here that in deploying this term here, I am drawing upon and also expanding on the sense in which one can talk of social realities, practices. texts, discourses, and expressive codes that are "Canadian," "Cherokee," Chinese," or "Central American" — without thereby implying that what are specifically "Canadian." "Cherokee:" "Chinese," or "Central American" in objects and practices so designated cannot be found in other parts of the world. Given this widespread common-sense approach to social identification, why the extrapolation and scrutiny of the "Africanness" of a play written by an African playwright should become the subject of an academic article is precisely the point of departure for this essay.
Book Reviews
Authors: Phelan Peggy
Published: April 2013

Herbert Blau, Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett, reviewed by Peggy Phelan

Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon, reviewed by Peggy Phelan

Les Essif, Empty Figure on an Empty Stage: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation, reviewed by Peggy Phelan

John Leeland Kundert-Gibbs, No-Thing is Left t0 Tell: Zen/Chaos Theory in the Dramatic Art of Samuel Beckett, reviewed by Peggy Phelan

Lois Oppenheim, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett's Dialogue with Art, reviewed by Peggy Phelan

David Pattie The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, reviewed by Peggy Phelan
Exilic Perspectives: Introduction
Authors: Jestrovic Silvija
Published: April 2013

Volumes could be — and indeed have been — written on the state of exile and its various dramatic and theatrical renderings, starting with the foreigners and excommunicated personages of Greek tragedies, continuing with works by Shakespeare, Calderon, Schiller, Buchner, and, more recently, Joyce and Brecht. Today exilic theatre and drama is further explored and re-shaped, not only through an intertextual dialogue with theatrical predecessors, but also through the contemporary experience of displacement, exile, and mass migration.
Sycorax Revisited: Exile and Absence in Performance
Authors: Ping Chin Woon
Published: April 2013

This essay uses my play Psycho Wracks as a point of departure from which to explore exilic dimensions of postcolonial experience and discourse. It also investigates the possibilities of feminist performance practices as countercanonical approaches that are both critical and recuperative. In creating the play Psycho Wracks, based on the figure of Sycorax, I was not so much interested in rethinking The Tempest or extending understanding of Shakespeare (though, as discussed later, certain postcolonial and feminist interrogations of his work were relevant to my aims) as I was concerned with abstracting and meditating upon her character as a trope and a springboard for allusive, parodic, and ironic creation.2 Rewriting Sycorax, I was primarily focused on resurrecting the exiled feminine or the exilic consciousness of the banished subaltern female, an endeavor built on a meditation upon absence, literal and symbolic. Mulling over the implications of her "difference" and her history (or lack thereof), I began imagining the possibility of speaking through and for her in performance. Numerous issues and questions concerning her genealogy, subjectivity, characterization, iconicity, and significance coalesced for me around one central question: what would she say, were she to stage a return?
Stages of Emergency: The Casualties Union
Authors: Davis Tracy
Published: April 2013

In the spring of 1941, during the latter days of the London Blitz, St. Andrew’s Convent School in Leatherhead, seventeen miles southwest of Charing Cross, was badly damaged by a parachute mine. The nuns evacuated, turning the ruined building over to the county. The mine exploded in the bend of the elbow-shaped building, leaving “a mixture of totally destroyed, unstable but shorable and secure ruins”. In these ruins, Surrey established a Rescue School, where civil defence workers went to practise techniques for safely extricating victims from bombed-out structures. Squads came down from London and surrounding regions to become proficient in handling ropes and tackle, shoring up dodgy debris to allow workers access and victims egress, and extricating stretcher cases from precarious positions. The school’s superintendent, an engineer who in peacetime inspected the county’s bridges, routinely laid down in the rubble and observed students’ proficiency as they extricated him from beneath collapsed walls and out of cellar basements. Eric Claxton later admitted, “I pretended a nonchalance I did not always possess that their knots were properly formed when they hoisted me out from a third storey window opening! It made them more careful and gave them confidence to feel that I had faith in them”
Book Reviews
Authors: Dolan Jill , Peck James , George-Graves Nadine , Nelson Robin , Garner Stanton , Schneider Rebecca , Clemons Leigh , Krasner David
Published: April 2013

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, reviewed by Jill Dolan

Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf, Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook, reviewed by James Peck

Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay, The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance, reviewed by Nadine George-Graves

Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf, eds., Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890–1950: A Critical Anthology, reviewed by Robin Nelson

Michael Huxley And Noel Witts, eds., The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, reviewed by Robin Nelson

Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama, reviewed by Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, reviewed by Rebecca Schneider

Spencer Golub, Infinity (Stage), reviewed by Rebecca Schneider

Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre, reviewed by Leigh Clemons

Ian Watson, ed.,Performer Training: Developments across Cultures, reviewed by David Krasner

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Approaches to Acting: Past and Present, reviewed by David Krasner
Antigone's Bodies: Performing Torture
Authors: Carlson Marla
Published: April 2013

Can torture be represented onstage without repeating and reveling in the violation of the victim? After reviewing some of the negative answers to this question, this article examines the more positive alternative presented by two treatments of the Antigone legend: Griselda Gambaro's Antigona Furiosa, and The Island, by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. By focusing spectator attention on the body of the actor (as distinct from the character) and by refusing to give the tyrant a body of his own, these two plays allow spectators to derive pleasure from the actor's performance of pain without rendering that pleasure sadistic.
"The Future of Old Trinidad": The Performance of National Cultural Identity in Two Plays by Derek Walcott
Authors: Stevens Camilla
Published: April 2013

In the postcolonial dialogue regarding the invention of a cultural tradition in the Caribbean — a region inhabited almost entirely by ancestral exiles and therefore a place perceived by some to be lacking origins or history — the processes of cultural and racial hybridization have been the subject of much debate. Derek Walcott, the St. Lucian born poet and dramatist, has negotiated these issues in his creative works for over five decades. Since the 19505, Walcott has worked to develop a West Indian theatre by founding the Little Carib Theatre (later known as the Trinidad Theatre Workshop), a company that developed a unique style of West Indian performance, and by writing plays that draw on European literary models, as well as on Asian and African forms. Walcott's literary project articulates what he terms a hybrid, "mulatto" aesthetics that reflects the Caribbean, a cultural crossroads that has synthesized components of dissimilar cultures. Walcott's position is a nuanced one, for his hybrid aesthetics work to deconstruct Eurocentric and nativist oppositions, just as they refuse to erase differences by promoting a reductionist and unproblematic syncretic West Indian identity. Walcott's art is thus well known for resisting the master discourses of colonialism and nationalism that tend to produce totalizing representations of postcolonial collective identity, and it creates a space for understanding the interplay among the many practices and discourses that organize Caribbean identities.
Brian Friel and the Scene of Writing: Reading Give Me Your Answer, Do!
Authors: Germanou Maria
Published: April 2013

Brian Friel's thoroughgoing concern with the nature of language has been attributed to several factors: his need to investigate the means of his own art; his political and cultural investment in a language inextricably bound up with Ireland's colonial history; and the impact on his work of Martin Heidegger's and George Steiner's views on language. In Friel's oeuvre, language is the field where all the practices that constitute the social totality and the self take place, so that narratives and discourses about ourselves and the world are constituted by language. Within this context of Heideggerian linguistic epistemology, Friel focuses on a language that is inventive, unstable, and speculative in its relation to reality, a sense of language as a slippery, ambiguous, and polysemous signifying system fully investigated in another of Friel's principal sources, George Steiner's After Babel (1975). Written language specifically is always defined by virtue of its untrustworthiness in conveying the reality to which it refers, a situation that has led to the conclusion that in Friel's work, "[w]riting and failure go hand in hand". The scripting of reality leaves a lot to be desired, since each act of writing leaves something that escapes writing. The "same" event is approached from different perspectives, constructing various contradictory, provisional, or interested narratives, a theme illustrated in several of Friel's plays, including Living Quarters (1977), The Aristocrats (1979), and Making History (1988).
"What Is Carnal Embrace?" Learning to Converse in Stoppard's Arcadia
Authors: Sternlieb Lisa , Selleck Nancy
Published: April 2013

Is Tom Stoppard too clever, too erudite, and too much of a show-off? Students who have puzzled their way through his discussions of chaos theory, fractal geometry, and the second law of thermodynamics in his play Arcadia may stumble again during the following exchange:
Space and the Geographies of Theatre: Introduction
Authors: Tompkins Joanne
Published: April 2013

This issue examines the fundamental element of theatre that is perhaps most consistently overlooked. Theatre can succeed without lights, props, and even, in Samuel Beckett's 1969 play, Breath, an actor, but it cannot exist without space: there must be a location, a venue of some sort in which theatre can occur or, rather, take "place."
Ambient Space in Twentieth-Century Theatre: The Space of Silence
Authors: Wilcox Dean
Published: April 2013

The concept of space as an element of theatrical presentation is as old as the medium itself. Space has been consistently engaged and manipulated: from the natural space that surrounded the earliest Greek theatres; to the dispersed space that typifies medieval performance; to the containment and control of illusionary space in the Renaissance culminating in the "fourth-wall" realism of the modern era. While the expression of space may vary in the above examples, one thing remains constant: a superimposition of textuality onto spatiality in which the inherent qualities of the space are subsumed by the locating force of the narrative. The natural world in the Greek performance is easily linked to the exterior of Agamemnon's palace, the fragmentary quality of performance in the Middle Ages conveys a secluded spot where Abraham intends to sacrifice Isaac, the interior of a banquet hall is magically transformed into a city street, and the familiar proscenium arch theatre becomes the home that Nora inevitably escapes
The State of This Place: Convictions, the Courthouse, and the Geography of Performance in Belfast
Authors: McKinnie Michael
Published: April 2013

It has become almost axiomatic in theatre history and criticism that space is a fundamental concern of theatre practice. It has become equal1y axiomatic in Irish theatre history and criticism that the nation has been a central preoccupation of Irish theatre practice, and of those critics investigating that practice. If these two axioms hold true broadly (and it is important not to diminish the differences within research investigating such concerns), it is also the case that they have not yet been tested against each other. To historicise the inscription of space in Irish theatre practice is to encounter the disciplinary limits of the geographic imaginary of theatre studies writ large, and the political imaginary of Irish theatre studies.
Dancing Other-Wise: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Utopia in Rae Kyung Lee and Dancers
Authors: Hamera Judith
Published: April 2013

The utopian potential of perfOlmance can be located in moments of communilas that bind performers to audiences and audience members to one another. But it can also be found in the daily mechanisms -the rhetoric and the rituals — that produce performance in specific communities. In the community I examine here, utopian performatives are practices of everyday life as much as, perhaps more than. final products. Moreover. the rhetoric and rituals that set these practices in motion within the community are metaphysical: non-hegemonic, non-doctrinal, but metaphysical and even mystical nevertheless. This essay explores the productive intersections of metaphysical and utopian performatives in the daily routines of an internationally renowned multi-ethnic urban contemporary dance company: Hae Kyung Lee and Dancers.
"Something Better than This": Sweet Charity and the Feminist Utopia of Broadway Musicals
Authors: Wolf Stacy
Published: April 2013

From the bitter, painful, almost parodic strip of Ethel Merman's spectacular star turn in Gypsy in 1959 to the onstage nudity and frank sexuality of Hair in 1969, the American Broadway musical in the 1960s experienced a seismic transformation of style, content, and form. As the United States became an increasingly wealthy global power; as it expanded its involvement in the Vietnam War; as it witnessed the rise and then the fall of its hopes for the future in the figures of John F, Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; as it struggled to provide African-Americans and women with an equal place in society, the most American of cultural forms was radically altered, too. According to Gerald Mast, "The American musical, a more conservative and retrospective cultural medium than rock music or cult movies, was also on the move — away . from stories and toward self-consciousness, away from variants within a stable form and toward an exploration of its forms and its past"
Wildean War: Politics of Fins-de-siecle Spectatorship
Authors: Schiavi Michael
Published: April 2013

The centenary of Oscar Wilde 's t897 release from prison saw an explosion of drama and film that marched the playwright from professional and romantic glory to inexorable ruin. During the late spring and summer of 1998, New York theatre-goers had their pick of Wildean diaspora. At the West Village's Minetta Lane Theatre, Moises Kaufman had already spent more than a year putting Wilde through his juridical paces in Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997). Uptown at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre, film buffs could ogle a thoroughly butch Wilde in the person of Liam Neeson, mouthing the suicidal inventions of David Hare's The Judas Kiss (1998). Wildeophiles on a budget could catch Stephen Fry's star-making tum in Brian Gilbert's film Wilde (1998).' And any Yank who had missed the London premiere of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love (1997), in which a shattered Wilde carpe diems A.E. Housman on the River Styx, had only to await the play's transfer to Lincoln Center and Broadway's Lyceum Theatre (2001 ).
"Before" and "After" in Stoppard's Arcadia
Authors: Scolnicov Hanna
Published: April 2013

The title of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, seemingly unconnected with its plot, provides the most important clue for the reading of the play. Arcadia is the neoclassical cultural site par excellence. By choosing to call his play by that name, Stoppard places his work within a rich tradition of art works in various medial by various artists, from Virgil to Poussin and beyond. Some of these works are explicitly alluded to in the play; others are referred to only obliquely. The title positions this very modem drama within an almost infinite line of backward-looking, neoclassical regressions, hearkening back all the way to classical antiquity. In what follows, I provide an intertextual and intermedial reading of the play in relation to this environment of ideas and works on the landscape of Arcadia. Arcadia not only is the implicit focus of many of the discussions of landscape gardening in the play but also serves as the unseen vanishing point of the play's theatrical space, and the et in Arcadia ego motif is finally discovered to provide a model for the plot.
Tom Stoppard: In the Russian Cour
Authors: Nadel IRa
Published: April 2013

Tom Stoppard doesn't know Russian but that hasn't limited his fascination with the country and its writers. He devotes his trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, made up of Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage, to thirty-five years of nineteenth-century Russian history and the formidable radicals, from Herzen to Marx, associated with it. An epic trilogy, The Coast of Utopia summarizes Stoppard's long-standing concern with social justice, moral responsibility, and personal freedom — and the inability to fully achieve them.
Book Reviews
Authors: Filewood Alan , Robb David , Pearce Wes , Nield Sophie , Auslander Philip
Published: April 2013

Elizabeth Schafer and Susan Bradley Smith, Playing Australia: Australian Theatre and The International Stage, reviewed by Alan Filewod

Katrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany, reviewed by David Robb

Brigit Haas, Modern German Political Drama 1980-2000, reviewed by David Robb

Natalie Rewa, Scenography in Canada: Selected Designers, reviewed by Wes D. Pearce

Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/Scape/Theater, reviewed by Sophie Nield

Gavin Carver and Colin Beardon, eds., New Visions in Performance: The Impact of Digital Technologies, reviewed by Philip Auslander
"Besides the Obvious": Postcolonial Criticism, Drama, and Civil Society
Authors: Merriman Victor
Published: April 2013

This paper is a reflection on the proposition that, in Irish theatre criticism, some important aspects of civil society in Independent Ireland are written to the margins of public consciousness, if not written out altogether. I begin with some remarks on Independent Ireland (1922-present), on colonialism and its aftermath, nationalism, subjectivity, human agency, and the state. I consider the condition of contemporary theatre criticism — both journalistic and academic — and offer a view as to its implications for the art form, drama, and society in Ireland, as the cultural mutations of globalisation elaborate in the early years of the twenty-first century.
Irish Theatrical Celebrity and the Critical Subjugation of Difference in the Work of Frank McGuinness
Authors: Cregan David
Published: April 2013

Frank McGuinness is one of the most successful Irish playwrights of his generation, yet little critical attention had been paid to what seems to be the unique and most challenging aspect of his writing: his di verse representations of gender and sexuality. McGuinness' plays fit neatly into the Irish theatrical tradition in their comparable narrative choices and their traditional literary techniques; however, his work most radically diverges from the drama of his predecessors in the distinctive and diverse ways he approaches character development through thematic narrative. Where other Irish playwrights have engaged topics ranging from politics to psychology, none have dealt with issues of gender diversity and sexual "deviance" as consistently as McGuinness. In a unique way, McGuinness communicates theatrical narratives employing the traditional conventions of the Irish stage, representing stories set in the much-cherished location of the Irish country kitchen, as in Dolly West's Kitchen (1999), or traditional family-based drama of The Bird Sanctuary (1994). But in an interesting twist, he includes and often conveys these narratives from the perspective of individual types never so fully or continually represented on the Irish stage: homosexuals.
Historicising Is Not Enough: Recent Developments and Trends in Irish Theatre History
Authors: Pilkington Lionel
Published: April 2013

Arguing in favour of Ulster regionalism - an advocacy movement that sought to use the idea of a distinct "Ulster" culture so as to naturalise the recently established and highly contested six-county unit of Northern Ireland - David Kennedy advances the idea that Irish Catholics "take naturally to the theatre." That "Gaelic stock" are those for whom "the heightened traffic of the stage is hardly to be distinguished from the vivid emotional experiences of everyday life" is not a new assertion. Whether to act the mick, to indulge the blarney, or to engage in periodic acts of spectacular insurgency, Irish culture regularly conveys an impression that it is peculiarly theatrical, and yet lacking the discipline of the theatre as an institution. As with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary's fourth definition of the word Irish — "Irish in character or nature; having what are considered Irish characteristics; specifically, used of seemingly contradictory statements" — Irishness sometimes denotes a kind of refractory logic that seems to have all the gratuitousness and the intransitivity of the theatrical.
Re-reading Stephen Sewell’s Traitors: Ideology and Gender in “the Australian Play”
Authors: Ley
Published: April 2013

My primary focus in this essay will be on Stephen Sewell’s Traitors, a (re-)reading that highlights its relations with two other, better-known plays by Sewell, The Blind Giant Is Dancing and Dreams in an Empty City, all produced in a period from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. But I shall insert that discussion into a consideration of issues affecting the problematic topic of “the Australian play,” issues such as cultural hegemony, corruption, gender, and ideology. For part of that broader context. I shall draw from contributions made to Harold Love’s remarkable The Australian Stage: A Documentary History, published in 1984, in the middle of the period to which those plays of Sewell belong.
Conversion Tactics in Terrence McNally’s and Paul Rudnick’s Gay Gospels
Authors: Eads Martha Greene
Published: April 2013

In their 1995 essay “‘Preaching to the Converted,’” Tim Miller and David Román respond to the charge that gay and lesbian dramatists write strictly for insiders already sympathetic to their political and artistic positions. Focusing in particular on queer community-based productions, Miller and Román challenge those who assume “queer artists to be didactic and queer audiences to be static” (173). While they do not deny queer productions’ particular appeal for insider-audiences, Miller and Román employ a provocative analogy to compare the coming-out process to an ongoing religious commitment. Defining their “converted” as the “identifiable critical mass of queers who together compose a congregation of people converted into believing in the necessity of queer identities and communities, culture and politics,” they assert that individuals within that group must remain “open to a series of conversions” (177, 178). Queer theatre, they argue, functions much as church services do, enabling participants to sustain their conversions by renewing their sense of identity and motivating them to act out of that identity
“Loyal to the Truth”: Gary Mitchell’s Aesthetic Loyalism in As the Beast Sleeps and The Force of Change
Authors: Russell Richard Rankin
Published: April 2013

This essay examines two plays by Mitchell, As the Beast Sleeps (1998) and The Force of Change (2000), to understand how these works steadfastly depict intensely complex personal and political loyalties in impoverished Protestant communities.
Colchester’s Legend on Stage:The Emperor Constantine by Dorothy L. Sayers
Authors: Harbus Antonina
Published: April 2013

When Dorothy L. Sayers was asked to write a play for the Colchester Cathedral Festival (part of the Festival of Britain) of 1951, she took the opportunity of using Colchester’s favourite legend concerning the town’s patron, St Helena. This legend was an obvious choice for Sayers: not only was Helena important for her legendary discovery of the True Cross, she was also claimed by Colchester as a local girl. Most importantly for Sayers’ purpose, this legendary Helena, as the daughter of Old King Cole, conferred British ancestry on her son, Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome.2 The festival play, which Sayers called The Emperor Constantine,3 exploits the local legend specifically to tie Constantine to Colchester and thereby to justify situating the origins of her story on home soil. But once the play is underway, the familiar legend is relegated to the background so that Sayers’ real interests – fourthcentury ecclesiastical history and Christian theology – can take the spotlight. Now that the fourth volume of Sayers’ letters has been published, the dramatist’s passionate attitude towards her subject matter and personal involvement in staging this ambitious and complicated play have come to light and can be examined in the context of her strategic use of the legendary tradition by which Colchester lays claim to Helena.
Reimagining Political Community: Diaspora, Nation-State, and the Struggle for Recognition
Authors: Wang Ban
Published: April 2013

In current discussions, diaspora is associated with population movement, the expansion of world markets, advances in communications technology, and flows of capital and labour. The diasporic spread of people seems to move in tandem with the decline of the nation-state as a dominant political system.1 Evelyn Hu-DeHart has linked the rise of diasporic conditions and sensibility in Asia to the expansion of trade and markets. Chinese businessmen and professionals, for instance, seem to be riding the wave of the diasporic boom. As economic tigers and dragons, the overseas Chinese are poised to enter a free-floating, prosperous orbit of trade and growth. Shedding their national identities and “freely” crossing territories, they “identify first with their co-ethnics wherever they are rather than submit to the hegemonizing claim of exclusive citizenship demanded by a single country or nationstate”. With flexible citizenship, unanchored to a specific national community, Asian diasporics take great strides in uprooting themselves, trotting the globe, and in times of vulnerability, resorting to families and kin and to a wide-ranging network of personal and professional connections.
Dancing on the Hyphen: Performing Diasporic Subjectivity
Authors: Farah Laila
Published: April 2013

The dispersal of peoples and their intimate journeys across increasingly transnational and fluid borders requires new dialogic spaces across and through which we must become familiarized in order to make clear the conditions emerging for diasporic communities. “[T]he term ‘diaspora’ means a scattering in a literal sense [… and] a realignment and resettlement is an impossibility” (Singleton 228). These conditions can be fraught with the traumatic events and experiences that are often the result of the excessive pressure of capital flows, although not all movement is a response to such motivations. As Evelyn Hu-DeHart asserts, “Modern transnational migration is inextricably linked to the forces of global capitalism, as capital and labor move, and are moved, constantly across borders”
Afterword: Brief Meditation on Diaspora Studies
Authors: Hu-Dehart Evelyn
Published: April 2013

In bold letters, staring out of the page of a recent New York Times Sunday Business Section, is the headline “The Drexel Diaspora.” The so-called diaspora named in this story concerns the acolytes of once disgraced, now rehabilitated, investment-bank Drexel Burnham Lambert’s legendary junkbond trader Michael R. Miliken, whose high-risk and illegal activities led the company into bankruptcy fifteen years ago. Miliken went to jail, while his innocent devotees were “swept up in the Drexel diaspora,” that is, scattered across the financial landscape, fending for themselves (Anderson; emphasis added). Today, in early 2005, they have all landed on their feet in good jobs on Wall Street, while Miliken, since his conviction barred him for life from the stock market business, has relocated to Los Angeles and reinvented himself as a philanthropist.
Book Reviews
Authors: Dharwadker Aparna , Tatlow Antony , Clark Keith , Nelson Jeanne-Andrée , Masson Catherine , Tait Peta , Pankratz Annette , Sauter Willmar , Moeschen Sheila , Thompson James
Published: April 2013

Nandi Bhatia, Acts Of Authority/Acts Of Resistance: Theater And Politics In Colonial And Postcolonial India, reviewed by Aparna Dharwadker

Loren Kruger, Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics And Performance, East And South, reviewed by Antony Tatlow

Harry J. Elam, Jr., The Past As Present In The Drama Of August Wilson, reviewed by Keith Clark

Christopher Bigsby, ed., The Cambridge Companion To David Mamet, reviewed by Jeanne-Andrée Nelson

Kenneth Krauss, The Drama Of Fallen France: Reading La Comédie Sans Tickets, reviewed by Catherine Masson

Maria Shevtsova, Dodin And The Maly Drama Theatre: Process To Performance, reviewed by Peta Tait

Robert Cross, Steven Berkoff And The Theatre Of Self-Performance, reviewed by Annette Pankratz

Ric Knowles Reading The Material Theatre., reviewed by Willmar Sauter

Petra Kuppers, Disability And Contemporary Performance: Bodies On Edge, reviewed by Sheila C. Moeschen

Thomas Fahy And Kimball King, eds., Captive Audience: Prison And Captivity In Contemporary Theatre, reviewed by James Thompson
SuperGaming: Ubiquitous Play and Performance for Massively Scaled Community
Authors: McGonigal Jane
Published: April 2013

A design imperative for social software engineers, game developers, network designers and all the other architects of digital community: more, more, more.

Why more?
Out of the Box: Performance, Drama, and Interactive Software
Authors: Burrill Derek Alexander
Published: April 2013

During the period of preemptive gossip leading up to the 2002 Academy Awards, a bustling debate erupted around Anthony Serkis’ digitally enhanced portrayal of the subhuman character, Gollum, in the film Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Serkis’ performance was digitally recorded using motion capture and CGI technologies that mapped his actions and facial movements (the actor’s voice was not adjusted or enhanced) into a software program to which digital graphic elements were added. The ensuing performance was sufficiently hybridized that Serkis’ status as live actor/referent seemed to fall into question, so much so that his inclusion as a possible nominee for Best Supporting Actor became a conundrum for the Academy. The debate circulated around whether Serkis’ performance could be considered “live” (regardless of the long history of analog and digital editing and “adjusting” in film acting production). Was Serkis present enough in the performance? At what point is something too digitized? If something is partially digitized, what of its ontology, its presence? Can someone (or something) perform, in the traditional sense, in the digital?
“Genuine Negroes and Real Bloodhounds”: Cross-Dressing, Eugene O’Neill, the Wooster Group, and The Emperor Jones
Authors: Monks Aoife
Published: April 2013

When Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones was first performed in 1920, it was hailed as an important landmark for the representation of race on the American stage. For featuring a central black character and for actually casting a black actor to play the role, O’Neill and his work were seen to be radically progressive in an era of widespread blackface minstrel practice on the stage. O’Neill’s play – which tells the story of Brutus Jones, an African American Pullman porter who escapes from a chain gang and becomes the emperor of a Caribbean island – was hailed as a masterpiece for its expressionist investigation of the complexities of race and identity. O’Neill offered his white audiences a sympathetic and powerful African American protagonist, played by a black actor at a time when the representation of blackness on the stage was reserved for whites in blackface. O’Neill’s place in the history books as an important figure in the history of African American emancipation seemed a sure thing.
Fixing the TV: Televisual Geography in the Wooster Group’s Brace Up!
Authors: Bell Phaedra
Published: April 2013

According to Fry’s theory, performance was already functioning inside the larger environment of t he televisual when t he Wooster Group first staged Brace Up! – their version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters – in 1991. Indeed, the Wooster Group had already taken some aspects of the televisual into account in previous works. Against claims that these works were apolitical, Philip Auslander argues, in his landmark defense of their work, that their previous performances, particularly L.S.D., made political contributions by miming what he calls “the flow of mediatized culture”. Televisual flow “can be disorienting,” Auslander explains in his reading of Raymond Williams’ concept.
The TGarden Performance Research Project
Authors: Wei Sha Xin
Published: April 2013

Five years ago, I described this vision of TGarden to my companions in the Sponge and FoAM networks of artists and engineers. Many popular imaginaries condensed around this dream, and it became a project into which at first four and eventually over twenty-five artists and engineers poured heart, body, and craft. As the set of creators shifted, the vision refracted according to the interests and professional biases of the creators, until the dream of the TGarden responsive play space materialized as an installation-event called TG2001, which we exhibited in ten cities over five generations of work in the three years from 2000 to 2002.
Book Reviews
Authors: Mason Jeffrey , Aronson Anold , Davis Peter , Paredez Deborah , Mackerras Colin , Bratton Jacky , Moody Jane , Kosuge Hayato , Farfan Penny , Saltz David
Published: April 2013

Christopher Bigsby, Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, reviewed by Jeffrey D. Mason

Stephen J. Bottoms, Playing Underground: A Critical History Of The 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement , reviewed by Arnold Aronson

Bruce A. Mcconachie, American Theater In The Culture Of The Cold War: Producing And Contesting Containment, 1947–196, reviewed by Peter A. Davis

Diana Taylor, The Archive And The Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory In The Americas, reviewed by Deborah Paredez

Claire Conceison, Significant Other: Staging The American In China, reviewed by Colin Mackerras

Brian Singleton, Oscar Asche, Orientalism And British Musical Comedy, reviewed by Jacky Bratton

Kerry Powell, ed., The Cambridge Companion To Victorian And Edwardian Theatre., reviewed by Jane Moody

Ian Carruthers And Takahashi Yasunari, The Theatre Of Suzuki Tadashi, reviewed by Hayato Kosuge

Sidonie Smith And Julia Watson, eds., Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/ Image/Performance, reviewed by Penny Farfan

Gabriella Giannachi, Virtual Theatres: An Introduction, reviewed by David Z. Saltz
Performing the Edwardian Ideal: David Mamet and The Winslow Boy
Authors: Morra Irene
Published: April 2013

When The Winslow Boy, with screenplay and direction by David Mamet, premiered in 1999, critics scrambled to account for Mamet’s uncharacteristic choice of subject and setting. Variously termed a costume piece (Null), Merchant- Ivory fare (Macnab), and an Edwardian drama (James 22), the film was consistently noted to be far removed from Mamet’s apparently typical “hideand- seek scenarios featuring characters who fire off tough-guy, staccato dialogue at machine-gun velocity” (Sipe) or “lowlifes and con men, gamblers and thieves” (Ebert). Although Mamet himself acknowledges that the film marks a “departure,” he qualifies that observation with the statement that he is departing only “from some of [his] other work” (qtd. in Graham 231). Indeed, while critics in one breath note the vast difference between the subject of The Winslow Boy and that of Mamet’s films and plays, they tend to search for and ultimately assert a thematic or linguistic emphasis consistent with that of Mamet’s work. That similarity has been seen to lie in the film’s apparent interest in “whether an offscreen crime really took place” (Ebert), in its use of “trademark” Mamettian ellipses and overlapping dialogue (Kelleher), and in its dissection of assumed social and domestic values (McIntire-Strasburg).
Resistance to Exile by Girls and Women: Two Plays by Abla Farhoud
Authors: Forsyth Louise
Published: April 2013

In the plays and novels of Québec writer Abla Farhoud, human space is always fragmented, circumscribed, and exilic: one is here, but one cannot fail to be elsewhere as well, in the mind, if not in the body. This article examines Farhoud’s representation of exile in two plays — Les filles du 5–10–15¢ and Jeux de patience — as it materializes in the female characters’ experiences of exclusion, alienation, and loss.
JudyLee Oliva’s The Fire and the Rose and the Modeling of Platial Theories in Native American Dramaturgy
Authors: Stanlake Christy
Published: April 2013

The appearance of two landmark publications in 1999 aimed to bring Native American theatre to a larger audience: Seventh Generation (D’Aponte) and Stories of Our Way (Geiogamah and Darby) became the first mass-marketed anthologies in the United States to publish collections of Native American plays by various Native authors. These publications were quickly followed by the critical reader, American Indian Theater in Performance (Geiogamah and Darby), and Keepers of the Morning Star (Darby ), the first anthology of Native women’s theatre to be published in the United States. Together, these four publications mark a shift in theatre studies.1 As Native American drama moves from local audiences to national and international circles of readers and viewers, the need arises for critical frameworks capable of addressing the unique aspects of Native dramaturgy. Significantly, the critical approaches developed for Native theatre challenge theatre studies. One example of how Native American plays extend the boundaries of theatre studies is in spatial approaches to theatre, where Native American playwrights add new perspectives to the very complicated discussion of identity and place.
The Prompter’s Box: Toward a Close Reading of Modern Drama
Authors: Ackerman Alan
Published: April 2013

A sense of the struggle of language with itself forces a certain liberation in interpreting texts that seems to some to go beyond the apparent evidence of their words … [T]o understand serious writing will precisely require us to question what a text asserts in order to arrive at the conviction that we are covering the ground gained in what its words actually contrive to say.
Book Reviews
Authors: Colborn-Roxworthy Emily , DiCenzo Maria , Giles Steve , Young Stuart , Bank Rosemarie , Murphy Brenda , Parker Brian , Baugh Cristopher
Published: April 2013

Mary F. Brewer, Staging Whiteness, reviewed by Emily Colborn-Roxworthy

Maggie B. Gale and Vive Gardner, eds., Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance, reviewed by Maria DiCenzo

John J. White, Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory, reviewed by Steve Giles

John Tulloch, Shakespeare and Chekhov in Performance and Reception: Theatrical Events and Their Audiences, reviewed by Stuart Young

Charlotte M. Canning, The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance, reviewed by Rosemarie K. Bank

Dorothy Chansky, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience, reviewed by Rosemarie K. Bank

Enoch Brater, ed., Arthur Miller’s America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change, reviewed by Brenda Murphy

Tenessee Williams, Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays, reviewed by Brian Parker

Tennessee Williams, Candles to the Sun, reviewed by Brian Parker

Arnold Aronson, Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography, reviewed by Christopher Baugh
Violent Obsessions: Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Discourse of Terrorism
Authors: Diala Isidore
Published: April 2013

Quite apart from the revelation of the awesome might of the contemporary terrorist infrastructure and the vulnerability even of a superpower, the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States have raised, with burning urgency, political, moral, ethical, and religious questions about terrorism. Crucial distinctions have been suggested between “terrorist organizations” and legitimate “liberation movements,” distinctions which only illustrate a conflict in definitions: ideological or religious persuasions as well as complex webs of allegiances and sympathies still play important roles in our categorizations of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, the (Real) IRA, the Basque Separatist Movement ETA, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, November 17, and others. And not only have the strategies of these organizations been recently reappraised, but some of the groups themselves have (at least theoretically) sought to modify their images by minimizing civilian causalities. Moreover, the U.S.-led onslaught against al- Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the even more controversial liquidation of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq have also raised questions about whether some uses of violence are more morally objectionable than others.
Between Colonial Past and European Future: Identity Crises in Recent Portuguese Drama
Authors: Ferreira Carolin Overhoff
Published: April 2013

National Identity Crises and Portuguese Contemporary Drama Two of the most interesting Portuguese plays of the 1990s are preoccupied with the representation of adolescents and the way in which they try to construct their identities: Universos e Frigorificos [Universes and Refrigerators] (Pires) and De miragem em miragem se fez a viagem [From Mirage to Mirage] (Pessoa). Although there are only very few studies on contemporary Portuguese drama, the young authors of these dramas can be considered promising examples of a new generation of dramatists. Carlos Porto mentions Carlos Pessoa next to other recent and noteworthy authors like José Jorge Letria, Hélio de Correia, Francisco Pestana, and Abel Neves. Porto’s claim that Pessoa is gaining in importance has proved correct, since the plays that he usually produces and directs with his company A Garagem / The Garage, founded in 1990, are being shown at all the important Portuguese national theatres and cultural centers and have also been published. The career of Jacinto Lucas Pires, who only started out in 1997, has progressed remarkably, as the staging and uncommonly quick publication of his plays confirm.