bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shaw's Comedy of Disillusionment
Authors: Garner, Jr. Stanton
Published: April 2013

A number of years ago, the New Yorker printed a remarkable cartoon, at once ludicrous and poignant. It consisted of a snowman, assembled with more eagerness than skill, stick arms propped awkwardly in its sides. Leaning slightly forward, it stared into the middle distance with an expression of alarm and despair. As the cartoon's caption explained it: 'The snowman realizes what he is."

Frozen both physically and spiritually in its icebound anagnorisis, the snowman enacts a gaze which lies at the heart of Western drama. For while drama clearly lies within what Susanne K. Langer calls "the mode of Destiny" — springing along its vectors of project and action, "always great with things to come" — it is no less characterized by those moments when forward movement halts, when the dramatic character must confront himself in the stillness and silence which uniquely characterize the theater as an artistic medium. Typically, such pauses are also moments of truth: the guiding motivation of a misperception collapses in the face of the real state of affairs, and the character must reconstruct his understanding of himself and others in light of his new realizations. Othello, driven by an increasingly blinding delusion, is brought to the point where delusion ends, in the realization of how he has been manipulated, what he has done, and how deeply it has cost him. Othello realizes - more fully and tragically - what he is, and his concluding speech reflects this insight: "I pray you, in your letters,/ When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,/ Speak of me as 1 am.”
Semiotics and Nonsemiotics in Performance
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: April 2013

In the development of his theories of "structuralist" theatre, Michael Kirby has characterized such theatre as "nonsemiotic,” a somewhat surprising claim at a time when on the one hand more and more theatre theorists are exploring the possibilities of a semiotic approach to theatre, and on the other, semioticians are increasingly looking to theatre as a particularly rich and challenging area for the exploration of their concerns. With the semiotics of theatre and of performance still in its exploratory stages, this challenge to its general applicabiliry offers an opportunity to explore some of the dimensions and implications of such analysis. The determination of whether a nonsemiotic theatre is possible, and if so, what its characteristics would be, should prove of considerable help in understanding, by contrast, some of the issues involved in the semiotic analysis of theatre.
Towards a Redefinition of Dramatic Genre and Stage History
Authors: Pistotnik Vesna
Published: April 2013

The assertion that literary readings of plays profit from consideration of the requirements and effects of staging has become one of the recurrent commonplaces of dramatic criticism in the past two decades. Even those critics unwilling to pursue the theatrical approach have felt obliged to emphasize the "incompleteness" of their readings. This belief has also prompted a proliferation of stage histories , that is, studies of different lengths and forms - essays, books, academic theses - which deal with plays in performance in descriptive and/or analytical terms. In this article, I propose to explore the rationale behind the taken-for-granted validity of stage-orientated readings for literary criticism, and to argue that it is the operative notions of drama as a genre which have been instrumental in constituting and maintaining the hegemony of text over performance.2 I also intend to examine this new emphasis on the performance dimension and its implications for the status of stage history , which is usually seen as a subordinate activity expected to provide illustrative and supportive examples for the readings of literary criticism. Since this article was initially prompted by the generally low regard for stage history within academic circles, and developed as a result of my own dissatisfaction with the current practices of stage historians, I should finally like to suggest how, in my opinion, this sort of work might establish itself as a discipline with its own specific field of inquiry, methodologies, and tools of analysis.
The Classical Heritage of Modern Drama: The Case of Postmodern Theatre
Authors: Pavis Patrice
Published: April 2013

Whoever wishes to evaluate the classical heritage of modem drama is confronted from the beginning with the problem of defining notions which are either deliciously imprecise or archaic. This all too attractive opportunity tempts us to unravel the ambiguities attached to every one of these tenms and to test their paradoxical meanings and semantic richness. For it is only by playing on these words, using the negative dialectic dear to Theodor W. Adorno, that we can unblock certain contradictions and shake up some old habits. Each of these notions recalls its opposite, or at least a corrective or a different point of view that relativizes its meaning.
The Reverse View: Greece and Greek Myths in Modern French Theater
Authors: Pavis Patrice
Published: April 2013

We have been using Greek drama as if Greece had never existed. That modern theater, from Racine to H61derlin, T.S. Eliot and Sartre, is replete with allusions, tacit or overt, to Greek drama, is beyond discussion. Even Brecht, who craved for only a political theater reflecting the concerns of the present, and whose notes on Sophocles' Antigone Beck and Malina applied to a Living Theater performance of Greek tragedy. sees Antigone as an international heroine defying Creon's formal edicts. Although geared towards maximum expressivity, twentieth-century theater, from Dada to Artaud, Grotowski and Paradise Now, cannot shake its debt to the myth of Greece. I am saying the myth of Greece and not Greek myths, because I am quite agreed with those who point to the survival of characters: Antigone, Electra, Orestes; to the use of plots basically unchanged since the fifth century; to a revival of the various agones between the heroes — and say that some of the forms of Greek tragedy survive in modern drama. And yet repeated use of basic plots, with only minor changes, cursory reference to the gods, even cries and silences, all that is not enough to warrant an actual reference to ancient Greece.,
On Maeterlinck Reading Shakespeare
Authors: Hays Michael
Published: April 2013

The notion of linking Maeterlinck with Shakespeare is hardly a new one. It might even be said that this idea was an integral part of Maeterlinck's earliest reception as a dramatist. Reviewing a copy of his first play, La Princesse Maleine (1889), Octave Mirbeau, after proclaiming the work a masterpiece and the author immortal, concluded his panegyric with the following lines: "In short, M. Maurice Maeterlinck has given us the work of this age most full of genius, the most extraordinary and most simple as well, comparable and — shall I dare say it? — superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare ... On the other hand, when Maeterlinck's friend Gerard Harry submitted his English translation of the play to Heinemann's, the reader for that publishing house described the playas the most appalling plagiarism of Shakespeare he had ever seen (Halls, p. 26). In response to Mirbeau's extravagant praise, and no doubt in order to defend himself against further accusations of plagiarism, Maeterlinck quickly began referring to the playas a mere "Shakespitrerie," thus admitting his use of Shakespeare and a desire to put this association behind him.
Hofmannsthal's Electra and Its Dramatic Models
Authors: Mueller Martin
Published: April 2013

Electra was Hugo von Hofmannsthal's first major success on the public stage. The play was first perfonned at Max Reinhardt 's Little Theatre in Berlin on October 30, 1903. On November 10, Hofmannsthal wrote to his brother-in-law that it had had a great success with three editions out of print, twenty-two adoptions by public stages, and a noisy reception from the press, partly enthusiastic, partly hostile. Electra kept its place in the repertoire. Some years later, Hofmannsthal authorized a Japanese club to perfonn it in Japanese and casually referred to perfonnances of his play on "hundreds of stages" (Briefe, II, 385). Today, Electra survives chiefly in acut and slightly altered fonn as the libretto of Strauss's opera.
Stoick Seneca
Authors: Rosemeyer Thomas
Published: April 2013

To begin with, two brief segments from the speeches of a Senecan hero. My translation of the excited Latin is approximate; it lacks the ashlar tightness of the Senecan tirade. A convincing modem translation of Seneca into English does not yet exist. Here are the words of Thyestes, engrossed in his dreadful banquet. The first segment is spoken in ignorance of what his body has taken in; the second comes after he has been enlightened by his brother Atreus.
"The Irresistible Calling": The Idea of Vocation in Ibsen
Authors: Leland Charles
Published: April 2013

In a letter written on November 23, 1874, Henrik Ibsen, then living in Dresden, suggested to his publisher Frederik Hegel in Copenhagen that "the twenty–fifth anniversary ... of my debut as an author" be commemorated with a new edition of "Catiline, a drama in three acts, which was the first book of mine to be printed." Ibsen agreed with the critics who thought that this play "contains the germs of a good deal that has since come to light in my poetry .'" Hegel lost no time in acceding to Ibsen's request, and Ibsen quickly completed a revised edition of his play, which was published in March 1 875.
"The Cure is Removal of Guilt": Faith; Fidelity and Fertility in the Plays of Peter Nichols
Authors: Foulkes Richard
Published: April 2013

In 1969, two years after the successful London production of his first stage play A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Peter Nichols and his wife, Thelma, visited their friend artist Francis Hewlett in Cornwall. Hewlett was suffering from the intestinal syndrome called Crohn's Disease. Conventional medical treatment having failed, Hewlett had turned to John Layard, by then nearly eighty, described by Nichols as "an old witch-doctor," but in fact a published anthropologist and psychologist and sometime friend of W.H. Auden, who described him in The Orators:
Anatomizing an Insurrection: Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars
Authors: Schrank Bernice
Published: April 2013

Set in the slums of Dublin before and during the Easter Rebellion of 1916, Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars dramatizes a world descending into chaos. What has not been accomplished by poverty is achieved by the insurrection: the immediate dangers of battle accelerate the physical and spiritual decay inherent in tenement life. O'Casey takes the view in The Plough that the Nationalists, by shooting at the people and by provoking the shelling and occupation of Dublin by the British, are responsible for turning the difficulties of slum existence into impossibilities.
Book Reviews
Authors: Salter Denis , Fischer Eileen , Mericale Patricia
Published: April 2013

Renate Usmlani, Michel Tremblay, reviewed by Denis Salter

Jan Kott, The Theater of Essence, reviewed by Eileen Fischer

Rita Stein And Frledhelm Rickert, eds, Major Modern Dramatists: Vol. I, reviewed by Patricia Merivale
Valle–Inclan's The Dragon's Head: Symbolist Fairy Tale and Satyr Play
Authors: Nicholson David
Published: April 2013

In his essay, "On Fairy–Stories," Tolkien defines the genre as one that creates believable imaginary worlds that have a quality of enchantment, what he calls "arresting strangeness." This special quality is evoked in fairy tales by their. marvelous objects, creatures, and events: magic is the basic defining characteristic of the fairy world. To this definition Tolkien adds the proviso that "if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself.”
Salvador Espriu's Idea of a Theater: The Sotjador Versus the Demiurge
Authors: Cocozzella Peter
Published: April 2013

Dramatic literature has made a substantial contribution toward the impressive resurgence that Catalan culture has manifested since the Renaixenfa of the early nineteenth century. N ames like Frederic Soler, alias Serafi Pitarra (1839-1895), Apel.les Mestres (1854-1936), Santiago Rusiftol (1861 - 1931), Ignasi Iglesias (1871-1928), Adria Gual (1872-1943), Angel Guimera (1874-1924), and JosepMaria de Sagarra (1894-1961) attest to the halcyon days of a tradition which, despite the vicissitudes and dire circumstances of more recent times, persists among a select group of Catalan men and women devoted, against all disheartening odds, to a theater conceived and enacted in their native language. To be sure, the existence of an authentic Catalan theater in the second half of the twentieth century can only be described as precarious; it has survived only by virtue of strenuous effort. During the last four decades only a few plays written in Catalan have reached the printer's shop and even fewer have attained an ephemeral run on the boards.
Christian Historical Drama: The Exemplariness of Murder in the Cathedral
Authors: Von Rosador Kurt Tetzeli
Published: April 2013

Whatever may be deemed necessary to define it, the inclusion of historically documented characters or events, the authenticity of its subject-matter, the presentation, as Coleridge demanded, of the audience's own past,' or what have you, historical drama will embody and convey a concept of history. This seems inevitably so. Since all drama exists in time, it will , explicitly or implicitly, make statements about the nature of time, its progression and direction, and thus about history. Yet to call all drama historical because of that were to use a comprehensive and therefore meaningless label. Further restrictions are needed, if "historical drama" is to he usefully employed as a generic term in literary criticism. Two such restrictions suggest themselves: the first, that the play's concept of history must be presented through historical matter either known or established as such; the second, that this concept is to be communicated through theatrical and rhetorical means shaped by it and therefore expressive of its very essence. If these limiting conditions are adhered to, subject-matter and audience expectation, literary form and the fiction of historicity, can be seen as interdependent, and the history play emerges as a dramatic sub-genre with its very own formal and thematic properties.
Opening the Eyes of the Audience: Visual and Verbal Imagery in Juno and the Paycock
Authors: Thomson Leslie
Published: April 2013

Near the end of Juno and the Paycock, Mary says, "My poor little child that'll have no father!" Juno comforts her, saying, "It'll have what's far betther — It'll have two mothers.” Given what we have seen of the men in the play, our initial inclination might be to agree with Juno; however, to do so would be to join the characters in their delusions and to ignore the realities with which O'Casey confronts us. To encourage his audience to see Ireland, and the world, realistically and dispassionately, O'Casey creates a complex pattern of verbal and visual imagery which should prompt our awareness of the sad truths his characters, even Juno, do not see. Through the play this imagery reinforces the message conveyed in the final tableau: that in a world where Boyles and Joxers prevail, two mothers may be relatively "better" but nothing has changed, nor will it, because the delusions and their causes remain.
Book Reviews
Authors: McGuiness Arthur , Simard Rodney , Chaudhuri Una , Brater Enoch , Harrop John , Page Malcome
Published: April 2013

Robert G. Lowery ed., A Whirlwind in Dublin: The Plough and the Stars Riots, reviewed by Arthur E. McGuinness

Susan Valeria Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama, reviewed by Rodney Simard

Jeanette L. Savona, Jean Genet, reviewed by Una Chaudhuri

David Self, Television Drama: An Introduction, reviewed by Enoch Brater

Tony Dunn ed., Gambit: Howard Barker Special Issue,, reviewed by John Harrop

Sidney Howard White, Alan Ayckbourn, reviewed by Malcome Page

Michael Billington, Alan Ayckbourn, reviewed by Malcome Page
Old History And New: Anachronism In Caesar And Cleopatra
Authors: Reinert Otto
Published: April 2013

THE SHAW THAT BORES today is yesterday's imp, the red beard, the twinkle in the eye, the puppeteer of paradoxes that turn back upon themselves. We have found the playwright inside the iconoclast, the Shaw apart from the the author of Shavianism. The task for current Shaw criticism is the final synthesis: the demonstration that the iconoclasm, so far from being a dismissible burden on the play, is vital to it.
Anderson'S Winesburg And The Hedgerow Theatre
Authors: Wentz John
Published: April 2013

SHERWOOD ANDERSON ASPIRED to be a playwright for over twenty years, but one half-forgotten volume, Plays: Winesburg and Others, contains all he ever published for the stage: The Triumph of the Egg, adapted by Raymond O'Neil from Anderson's story; Mother, suggestive of episodes in the Winesburg tales, though the characters have been given different names; They Married Later, an original; and Winesburg, Ohio, with which the present study is concerned. All but Winesburg are short one-acters.
Eliot And Kierkegaard: “The Meaning Of Happening” In The Cocktail Party
Authors: Hanzo Thomas
Published: April 2013

SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED to Harry; it has brought him back to Wishwood, and it has made him passionate, reiterative, and inscrutable. He would like to tell his story, but does not yet know it fully himself. Agatha knows what the story is not and what in general Harry will do: “What we have written is not a story of detection,/Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation” (p. 275). The chorus intones its own complaint at the end of the play: “We do not know what we are doing” and “We do not know much about thinking” (p. 291). We ask with them, we whose lives like Gerald's are “a continual impact of external events” (p. 234), “What is the meaning of happening?” (p. 291). Violet appeals to Amy, “What has happened?” (p. 286). Everyone wants to know: some realize the ‘unimportance of events,’ some do not; but those who know ‘what has happened,’ like Harry, apparently cannot reveal it, and pass in and out of the lives of others mysteriously, without regard for event or consequence. Are they about their Father's business?
The Case For Harlequin: A Footnote On Shaw's Dramatic Method
Authors: Mayer David
Published: April 2013

IN 1950, the year of Bernard Shaw's death, no less than three major plays by Shaw and a bill of three of his one-act plays were performed by professional companies in London's West End. In the same season there were no revivals of French farce or nineteenth century melodrama, and, despite the existence of more than a dozen theaters suitable for the staging of musical comedy, only three Christmas pantomimes were offered. To the theater historian and Shavian scholar alike, the above statistics reflect a problem, for as Shaw's plays become fixed in the repertoire of dramatic classics, plays and styles of production likely to have influenced Shaw are disappearing, some vanishing entirely, some playing to smaller audiences yearly. Time is working against the historian who would like to compare Shaw's plays with theatrical forms which constituted the popular theater of nineteenth century Ireland and England, a milieu wholly familiar to Shaw and obviously a major influence upon his work.
The Progeny Of Atreus
Authors: Hanzeli Victor
Published: April 2013

THE ABSURDITY OF IWMAN LIFE, this appalling experience of freedom incarnate, is the very source, perhaps the only genuine source of tragedy on stage at all times and in all cultures. The gratuitousness of our existence has always been realized as being in opposition to what every one of us feels to be true: the fundamental freedom of and our. total responsibility for our actions.
Book Reviews
Authors: Leyburn Ellen Douglass , Barthelme Marilyn , Dahlstrom Carl
Published: April 2013

David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J. M. SYNGE, 1871-1909, reviewed by Ellen Douglass Leyburn

Gennaine Bree, CAMUS, reviewed by Marilyn M. Barthelme

Jean-Jacques Bernard , “MON AMI LE THEATRE”, reviewed by Simone Dosmond

Walter H. Sokel, THE WRITER IN EXTREMIS, EXPRESSIONISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMAN LITERATURE, reviewed by Carl E. W. L. Dahlstrom
Peer Gynt And The Idea Of Self
Authors: Arestad Sverre
Published: April 2013

Peer Gynt very probably will always be thought of as Ibsen's greatest work. Certainly, it is his most national and also his most universal drama. A great deal has been written about this poetic drama, and with so complex a work there are of necessity differences of view and differences of emphasis among the critics. I believe, however, that some of the differences of interpretation might well be reconciled if Peer Gynt were studied in relation to Ibsen's other “will” plays, if attention were given to the play's structure, and, above all, if its rich symbolism were considered as an integral part of the play's composition and not just as extraneous decoration or embellishment. The distinction that Ibsen makes between the Gyntish Self and the true Self attains clarity only when the symbolism has been elucidated. It is the true Self, not the Gyntish Self, that carries the principal theme of the play. I believe there will proceed from this approach to Peer Gynt an unequivocal statement of what Ibsen intended to convey in it.
Waiting Is All
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2013

POPULAR reviewers of Waiting for Godot echoed the verdict of that polished playwright, Jean Anouilh, that “Nothing happens,” and even the most perceptive critics have insisted upon the undramatic texture of the play. Eric Bentley, for example, finds no “situation in movement,” and Edith Kern entitles her article on Godot “Drama Stripped for Inaction.” In the play itself, Cogo complains, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!” But close examination of the text reveals that, far from succumbing to the imitative fallacy-bore the audience to convince them of life's monotony-Beckett sets up a tension between surface stagnancy and dramatic development, a tension which gives rise to a major meaning of the tragicomedy.
Book Reviews
Authors: Charpentier Christian , Ellen Sister Francis , Sokel Walter , Shattuck Charles
Published: April 2013

Jean-Louis Barrault, NOUVELLES REFLEXIONS SUR LE THEATRE, reviewed by Christian Charpentier

Joseph Chiari, THE CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THEATRE. THE FLIGHT FROM NATURALISM, reviewed by Sister Francis Ellen

H. F. Garten, MODERN GERMAN DRAMA, reviewed by Walter H. Sokel

Martin Esslin, BRECHT: THE MAN AND HIS WORK, reviewed by Charles H. Shattuck
The Psychoanalyzing Of Eugene O'Neill
Authors: Nethercot Arthur
Published: April 2013

It took the critics a long time to make up their minds about Eugene O'Neill-perhaps because it took him so long to make up his mind about himself. The fact that even by the year of his death it was impossible to pick any single play of his and assert that it was a "typical" play may help to explain the uncertainty. For if one were to say that The Hairy Ape is a typical O'Neill play, there would be Beyond the Horizon to contradict him; if one were to choose Strange Interlude, Ah, Wilderness! would refute him; if The Great God Brown, then where would Marco Millions fit into the picture?
Mourning Becomes Electra And The Prodigal Electra And Orestes
Authors: Weissman Philip
Published: April 2013

OFF BROADWAY, this season, a striking psychological portrait of a modem Orestes has been created by twenty-four year old Jack Richardson. His play, The Prodigal, based on the original House of Agamemnon legend, recreates the spirit of Athenian times.

In the fifth century B.c., a middle-aged Athenian could have seen during his lifetime the original productions of Aeschylus', Euripides', and Sophocles' plays based on this legend. Today a middle-aged New Yorker could have seen the original productions of two great modem psychological dramas based on the same legend, Mourning Becomes Electra and The Prodigal.

The Prodigal is as reflective of today's generation as O'Neill's play mirrored the mood of the preceding generation. For both O'Neill and Richardson are clairvoyant spokesmen of their respective eras. The late twenties and early thirties were imbued with the new discoveries of Freud. Man's fate and destiny were reshaped and re-evaluated by artists as well as scientists in the context of this new knowledge. O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra succeeded in such an undertaking. In his working notes on this play, O'Neill commits himself to create a drama in which he can "give modem Electra figure (Lavinia) in the playa tragic ending worthy of character." He wanted to convey "a modem tragic interpretation of classic fate without benefit of gods-for it must, before everything, remain [aJ modem psychological play-fate springing out of family life."
Eugene O'Neill And Light On The Path
Authors: Alexander Doris
Published: April 2013

EUGENE O'NEILL did not become a mystic overnight. As a young man he was always drawn to the writers and philosophers who spoke of large forces beyond individual lives. Conrad's awareness of “mystery” was, in part, what fascinated O'Neill in The Nigger of the Narcissus; the vision of individuals swept relentlessly about by “the will to live” was what drew him to Schopenhauer. He himself spoke often of the ecstasy he felt when, at the age of eighteen, he discovered Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra in Benjamin Tucker's bookstore. However, for a long time after he had discovered Conrad and Schopenhauer, and even Nietzsche, Eugene O'Neill was still by no means a confirmed mystic. At Harvard in 1914-15, he thought the materialist philosophers and writers as interesting as the mystics. A classmate found him hesitating, philosophically, between Marxian socialism and Nietzschean individualism. A year later he had made his choice; once and for all time he aligned himself with the mystics and individualists. The catalyst that set off his final choice was a single slender book-that, and the man who believed in and presented him with that book.
O'Neill's Dreamer: Success and Failure
Authors: Klavsons Janis
Published: April 2013

FOG, an early play by Eugene O'Neill, written in 1914 and later discredited by the author, depicts the rescue of two shipwrecked men. One of these men, the Poet, the mere sound of whose voice is "unobtrusively melancholy," who is "sick and weary of soul and longing for sleep," at first welcomes the chance to go down with the ship. Then, however, he discovers a woman and a child who need help, saves them, saves himself, and believes that his "past unhappiness is past." The woman and her child, however, die, and when another ship finally picks up the men, the Poet's "face is drawn and melancholy as if he were uncertain of the outcome of this unexpected return to life." His optimistic detour ends, and he remains under the spell of death. In A Touch of the Poet a former officer in Wellington's army, years after battle victories and a considerable comedown in status, still lives with uniform and Byron's poems. Finally forced to prove himself and to defend his honor, he challenges the rich offender but is given a beating by the offender's lackeys and is exposed, as he admits, 'like a rum-soaked trooper, brawling before a brothel on a Saturday night." Joyful music welcomes him into the common crowd; nevertheless, the act seems "a requiem for the dead." Again, a detour ends.
The Road To Ruin: The Beginning Of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey
Authors: Shawcross John
Published: April 2013

IN HER RECENT, excellent study Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension. (Rutgers University Press, 1958), Miss Doris Falk has indicated the recurrence of psychological motifs throughout the works of the greatest of America's playwrights. It is hoped that further publication will fully analyze the interwoven biographical content which culminates in Long Day's Journey Into Night. Yet Miss Falk, perhaps taking seriously O'Neill's offhand classification of his one "comedy" as a sentimental interim, has dismissed Ah, Wilderness! as falling outside both tragic tension and biography. Examination of this play, originally labelled a play of reminiscence, alongside the crushing Long Day's Journey, however, abrogates such dismissal and refocusses the "comedy" as a "play of old sorrow." Despite the pitfalls which biographical interpretation sets up, this paper will show that Ah, Wilderness! is unquestionably a play of biographical import depicting that time of adolescent innocence which all men pass through just before they are rudely made aware that life can be a bitter experience, that their heroes are not so untarnished as they seemed in their youth, and that a long journey down a road to ruin awaits some before tears and blood exculpate their dead.
Dialogue in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill
Authors: Falk Signi
Published: April 2013

'WHEN ye kin make com sprout out o’ stones, God's livin' in yew!" says flinty old Ephraim Cabot, the father in Desire Under the Elms (1924). Nina in the nine-act trilogy, Strange Interlude (1926, 1927) says, "Strange Interlude! Yes, our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electric display of God the Father!" These two quotations might be taken as samples of the difference between O'Neill's natural idiomatic dialogue of the early plays and the grandiose rhetoric that became habitual in the later ones. Ephraim Cabot's line comes out of his own experience and belongs to him, whereas Nina is only the mouthpiece of the playwright.
Desire Under the Elmes, A Modern Tragedy
Authors: Winther Sophus
Published: April 2013

MANY CRITICS OF O'NEILL have commented on Desire Under the Elms as marking a turning point in his development as a dramatist. Some have seen it as O'Neill's expression of extreme violence represented in brutal characters who exemplify "greed, lechery, incest, adultery, revenge, murder." O'Neill " ... declared them good, and sanctified them." This . emphasis on all forms of violence and human degradation is the critical counterpart of popular public revulsion which reached its height in Los Angeles where the whole cast of the play was arrested, tried and convicted of giving a public performance of a play that was "mere smut, and filth ... , morbid, lewd and obscene." From this psychological approach the critic and the public indicate that in this play O'Neill had made a new departure into the lower depths of the psyche. They find it false, revolting, and since it sets its approval on bestiality, it deserves the moral condemnation it receives.
The Second MLA Conference On Modern Drama
Authors: Wentz John
Published: April 2013

THE SECOND CONFERENCE ON MODERN DRAMA met Tuesday, December 27, 1960, at the national meeting of the MLA with about forty people in attendance. Professor Robert C. Shedd of Ohio State University acted as chairman and Professor John C. Wentz of Rutgers University as secretary. The program consisted of a brief business meeting, a report by Professor Walter H. Sokel of Columbia University on needs and opportunities for further research in Expressionist drama, a report by Professor Edwin Engel of the University of Michigan on recent O'Neill criticism and needs for further work on O'Nelli and his plays, and a panel discussion of "On the Newness of the New Drama," a paper by Professor R. J. Kaufmann of the University of Rochester.
The "Discovery Scene" in Billy Budd
Authors: Goldsmith Arnold
Published: April 2013

IN 1952, writing in the Pacific Spectator, Tyros Hillway made a surprising statemeIlt about Professors Coxe and Chapman's dramatic adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd. According to Mr. Hillway, ... the final interview between Billy and Captain Vere could not have been what Coxe and Chapman make of it; for they have Billy going to his doom bewildered and still appalled by the fact that he must suffer. In the book, on the other hand, he has clearly come at this point not only to an understanding of his fate but even to a willingness to accept it. As for the exact words used by Captain Vere in explaining matters to Billy, Melville, indeed, leaves us in ignorance.

Not only do I disagree with Mr. Hillway, but I also feel that the exact opposite is true: in the play, Billy Budd is no longer bewildered when he climbs to his death, and he has finally recognized his tragic flaw. In fact, Coxe and Chapman have made Billy a kinetic character, whereas Melville's is static. In the novel there is no evidence to support the statement that Billy ''has clearly come at this point to an understanding of his fate." On the contrary, when Billy forgives Captain Vere, he does so out of the same blind ignorance and naivete that have characterized his short life.
The Drama of De Filippo
Authors: Maurino Ferdinando
Published: April 2013

AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II the plays of Eduardo De Filippo, a Neapolitan writer, began to attract not only the audiences and readers in Italy but also those abroad. Eric Bentley and Lander MacCintock wrote briefly on him; and a few years ago Thornton Wilder stated that De Filippo was his favorite contemporary dramatic author. Previously De Filippo had been known mainly as a comic actor whose plays were considered as vehicles for his acting. In fact, when in 1955 Theatre Arts devoted an issue to the Italian theater, he was treated chiefly as an actor. This is, however, no longer the case. After reading and studying his drama, one may well believe that a new voice and a great playwright has arisen. The maschera of a new Pulcinella has fallen, and the humor has turned to grave considerations of. the problems of life, not only in Naples but also in the universe. As Pirandello forsook his Sicilian characteristics in favor of universal concepts, and as Di Giacomo left the Neapolitan environment for a wider world, so De Filippo progressed from presentations of local Neapolitan foibles to profound reflections on man's problems.
The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill
Authors: Nethercot Arthur
Published: April 2013

IN THIS SURVEY of the reputation of O'Neill as a psychoanalytical drama~ tist during the quarter century from about 1925 to about 1950, as reflected in the relatively brief treatments allowed in play and book reviews, in magazine articles, and in chapters of books on larger subjects, it should have become rather painfully evident that the majority of his critics felt that his capture by the school of "modem psychology," conscious or unconscious, had not, with some provocative exceptions, eventuated in his improvement as a playwright. But few of these critics had the space or perhaps the desire to go at all comprehensively into the subject. Only one critic between Miss Sparrow in 1930 and Mr. Engel and Miss Falk in the fifties took the trouble to do so. In two sections in his 1941 book, Intellectual America, entitled "The Primitives" and «The Freudians," but especially in the latter, Oscar Cargill offered some new and well-developed ideas on the presence of psychoanalytical material in O'Neill's plays. In the case of The Great God Brown he broke with the run of Freudian critics in maintaining that "Jung, rather than Aeschylus, illuminates" the play.
Suddenly Last Summer: Williams and Melville
Authors: Hurt James
Published: April 2013

THE NEW YORK CRITICS accorded Tennessee Williams' long one-act play, Suddenly Last Summer, a confused reception when it was originally produced in New York. Though practically all of them praised the craftsmanship of the play, its content was generally written off as merely more Williamsian sexual sound and fury, signifying nothing. The theme was reported by one critic as being "the difference between coldly sane brutality like the mother's and passionately insane brutality like the birds' and the murderers'," while another called it “the iniquity of the truth not told, festering." Harold Clurman, in The Nation, even professed to see in the play an allegory of the original production of Orpheus Descending. The play is a product, he said, of "the author's experience, suddenly last spring, with the critics.” It is my thesis that the theme of the play may be clarified by taking as a starting point the Melville allusion in the first scene and tracing its implications through the play. This study, I am convinced, will show that the concern of the play is with neither the failure of Orpheus Descending, nor the iniquity of hiding the truth, nor the contrast between "natural" and "unnatural" evil, but with the very Melvillian problem of the nature of the universe, in this case, the universe of sex.
Theatertheater/Theaterspiele: The Plays of Thomas Bernhard
Authors: Eisner Nicholas
Published: April 2013

Because of the concentration on illness, madness and death in his work as a whole, Thomas Bernhard and his work have until recently often been classified — and dismissed — as nihilistic, without further thought being given to the matter. As can be seen from a reading of any of Bernhard's texts, whether prose or drama, nihilistic is a suitable, but nevertheless incomplete, classification of this product. It is incomplete because the ease with which the nihilism is perceived leads one to suspect that it is perhaps a facade covering something else and that Bernhard might well be a poseur, "a literary figure excelling in brilliant but destructive artistry using nihilism as an expedient" rather than a "true nihilist who bases his beliefs on valid data about the world surrounding him," as A.P. Dierick has suggested. And, from a similar perspective, Martin Esslin has observed that, as far as Bernhard's plays are concerned, although the themes are the same as those of his prose works , there is an atmosphere of ambivalence about them. This, combined with certain changes in style resulting from the move from prose to drama, produces what Esslin calls "a strangely disturbing effect" and leads one to question the grimness and nihilism which otherwise dominate. This is especially so when one considers the complexities and ironies of Bernhard's work, which are more fully developed and thus more easily perceived in his plays than in his prose works. However, it seems to me that although Esslin pinpoints an essential element of Bernhard's plays he does little more than observe that the audience willingly subjects itself to a stream of ridicule from Bernhard. This would make Bernhard simply an aggressive and cynical writer. In performance, however, his plays have a sly, humorous air about them which belies this conclusion.
Book Reviews
Authors: Parkin Andrew , Leland Charles , Laughlin Karen , Jacobs Barry , Schlueter June , Gale Steven , Hinden Michael , Innes Christopher
Published: April 2013

James Simmons, Sean O'Casey, reviewed by Andrew Parkin

Robert G. Lowery And Patricia Angelin, eds. My Very Dear Sean: George Jean Nathan to Sean O'Casey, Letters and Articles, reviewed by Andrew Parkin

Thomas Postlewait, ed.,William Archer on Ibsen: The Major Essays, 1889-1919, reviewed by Charles Leland

Helene Keyssar, Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays a/Contemporary British and American Women, reviewed by Karen Laughlin

Elizabeth J. Natalle, Feminist Theatre: A Study in Persuasion, reviewed by Karen Laughlin

Lisa-Lone Marker and Frederick J. Marker, Ingmar Bergman: Four Decades in the Theater, reviewed by Barry Jacobs

C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-CemuryAmerican Drama, Volume Two: Williams/Miller/Albee, reviewed by June Schlueter

Leslie Kane, The Language a/Silence: On the Unspoken and Unspeakable in Modern Drama, reviewed by Steven H. Gale

Judith E. Barlow, Final Acts: The Creation o/Three Late O'Neill Plays, reviewed by Michael Hinden

George Rowell and Anthoony Jackson, The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre ill Britain, reviewed by Christopher Innes
Book Reviews
Authors: Parkin Andrew , Fisher James , Kalson Albert
Published: April 2013

Mary C. King, The Drama of J.M. Synge, reviewed by Andrew Parkin

Joel Schechter, Durov's Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre, reviewed by James Fisher

Martin Green and John Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot: The Cammedia dell' Arte and the Modern Imagination, reviewed by James Fisher

Elizabeth Swain, David Edgar: Playwright and Politician, reviewed by Albert E. Kalson
Sam Shepard: Theatrical Power and American Dreams
Authors: Rabillard Sheila
Published: April 2013

The plays of Sam Shepard present some peculiar difficulties. There appears to be a wide split between the early and the later works, one that Shepard himself acknowledges. In an interview published in 1974, he announced that he was now trying for less flash and fewer mythic figures; in 1980 he told Robert Coe that, although he had thought character a "corny idea," he was now becoming interested in it "on a big scale"; True West (1980), he told one interviewer, was the frrst of his plays he could watch, night after night, withoutembarrassment3 This division is reflected in the response to Shepard which is in itself problematic: the plays before Curse of the Starving Class (1977), especially when they first appeared, were generally received with a good deal of bafflement even from the directors who presented them; the later plays have enjoyed much wider acceptance, but some of the popular response seems to be directed not so much to the plays themselves as to a cliched patina enveloping Shepard and the dissolution of the American Dream. The second, and related, difficulty lies in the power Shepard exercises over an audience, a power that may well make the spectator uneasy . For the early plays can strike one as somehow meretricious, mere show-biz, a collection of coups de theatre floating untethered by character, plot, or theme; while the later plays, with thcir apparently more conventional and realistic anchoring, hold the spectator with a force that one can scarcely attribute to themes so readily reducible to cliche. How does Shepard take his audience so violently? Is one merely being "taken"?
Strindberg's Gustav III: The Player King on the Stage of History
Authors: Wikander Mathew
Published: April 2013

Strindberg's interest in Sweden's Gustav III, founder of the Swedish Academy and both the Royal Opera and the Royal Theatre, began in 1882 with the Royal Theatre's plans to celebrate its centenary by presenting two of Gustav's plays. "Since Herr Josephson altered the program for the festival in September so that it became an ovation for instead of a protest against Gustav III and his so-called creation," he wrote in a letter to Josephson , "I am prevented in every way from participating, since I have, in two special forthcoming works, made a fool of both this king I despise and his 'Creation.'" The young playwright's hostile portraits of Gustav III in The Swedish People and of the Royal Theatre in The New Kingdom did indeed soon follow . Twenty years later, Strindberg presented his Gustav III to the Royal Theatre; "It cannot be right," declared the censor, Nils Bonde, "to slander on this stage the great patron and progenitor of the Royal Theatre," and the play was rejected. The rejection of Gustav III was more a response to Strindberg's notorious baiting of the Swedish Academy than an objection to the play itself. For in the intervening years, Strindberg's attitude towards Gustav III had become considerably more complex. What the play presents is not the derision and anger of the young Strindberg, but rather an attempt on the part of the mature Strindberg to see Gustav III and his theatre from a perspective governed by the researches into history which he would soon publish as "The Mysticism of World History" in 1903. Far from being a satirical attack upon Sweden's player-king, Gustav III offers a serious critique of the problems of acting and action in the theatre and in the world.
The Discipline of the Theatrical Sense: At the Hawk's Well and the Rhetoric of the Stage
Authors: Worthen William
Published: April 2013

"I have but one art," Yeats wrote at the opening of the Abbey, "that of speech.” Yet throughout his career in the theater, Yeats sought to master the critical relationship between poetry, speech, and acting. While "theatre business" often involved him in a "drawn battle with the drama," Yeats remained fascinated — as his own "tendency to pose" may suggest — by the role of poetry in the "discipline" of the "theatrical sense." This tension between the poetic text and its performance is dramatized by Yeats's most challenging plays, the "plays for dancers”
"Looking for sense … ": The Spectator's Response to Beckett's Come and Go
Authors: Laughlin Karen
Published: April 2013

Like many of his plays, Beckett's Come and Go elicits polarized responses from its viewers. At one extreme are those who respond with frigid silence - either a baffled but respectful silence or a much more hostile refusal to give the play serious consideration. From the opposite pole, though, comes a contrasting response of extreme volubility, expanding this brief "dramaticule" into multiple pages of critical commentary. To some extent, the following essay demonstrates this latter tendency. But rather than elaborating on my own specific responses or proposing yet another interpretation of the playas a whole, this study begins with the question of how it is that Come and Go provokes such diverse reactions on the part of its readers, spectators, and critics. Through the analysis of this specific example, it further seeks to demonstrate the usefulness of a reader-oriented criticism for our understanding of the nature of the dramatic work and its complex interaction with its audience.
Magical Subversions: The Master and Margarita in Performance
Authors: Rzhevsky Nicholas
Published: April 2013

Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is informed by a number of familiar modem conceits of magic. The novel includes social-political nuances reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Mario and the mountain, ethnographic and mythological ones appropriate to Garcia-Marquez's and Carpentier's realismo magico, and meta-literary elements which appear in Tzvetan Todorov's study of the fantastic. Out of this broad range of meanings, two in particular are of interest to Bulgakov. The first is the modem literary condition in which, as noted by Todorov (following Sartrel, "the fantastic becomes the rule, not the exception." In the texts of Gogol and Kafka, we have come to appreciate, the traditional hesitation authors create for readers between "reality" and the supernatural is absent. Instead of even vaguely possible explanations we are offered fictions in which noses jump off faces and protagonists become insects as a matter of course (without benefit, moreover, of the saving explanation that could be provided by allegory). The Master and Margarita, it seems to me, follows a similar pattern in making magic and the supernatural not titillating possibility but the rules of the literary game itself. The second sense of magic important for Bulgakov is its primary theatrical mode. Woland is the leader of a talented group of actors, indeed of a superb vaudeville troupe complete with trained cat, and it is their supernatural talents and powers of persuasion which act as narrative catalysts and create the fictional rules at issue.
At the Deathbed: Edward Albee's All Over
Authors: Schvey Henry
Published: April 2013

The deathbed scene, where the dying person says his parting words to a group of assembled loved ones and friends, has a long and distinguished history in Western literature and the visual arts. Treatments of the theme naturally vary greatly through the ages and are determined by the attitude of a particular historical period toward the subject of death itself. Thus, medieval paintings on the death of Lazarus emphasize what Johan Huizinga calls the "great primitive horror of death" according to which "Lazarus, after his resurrection , lived in a continual misery and horror at the thought that he should have again to pass through the gate of death." In Renaissance canvases, such as Poussin's Testament of Eudamidas, the deathbed scene, in which the dying man is surrounded by his family and friends, suggests triumph over death by means of the loved ones who will survive him.