bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Homeless Words: Field Day and the Politics of Translation
Authors: Worthen
Published: April 2013

Throughout his career, Bertolt Brecht often returned to "old plays" to explore, refine, and enlarge the scope of dialectical theater. What is perhaps surprising is that this strategy — the translation of Western classics — has remained a staple means of political critique in the theater, including theaters emerging from colonial domination. This is surprising in part because translation so readily raises questions of fidelity: translation can appear to locate resistant theater in a belated relation to dominant or hegemonic culture. Yet while translation enacts a gesture of fidelity, it also performs an act of appropriation, blurring a merely dualistic politics, particularly when verbal translation is accompanied by the transformation or hybridization of form.
"Spectacular Resistance": Metatheatre in Post-Colonial Drama
Authors: Tompkins Joanne
Published: April 2013

From its earliest history, theatre has incorporated references to its own theatricality. This self-referentiality, which has been co-opted by other genres, is a particularly important aspect of modem and postmodern novels that often rely on dramatic terminology to explain themselves. Metafictional moments are, according to Patricia Waugh, author of Metafiction: The Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, there for the sake of "play.” But drama's self-conscious moments often have much more agency and purpose than Waugh's concept of "play" implies. Hamlet's mousetrap, after all, is intended "to catch the conscience of the king." Richard Hornby's conclusion to Drama, Metadrama and Perception is that metadrama is "estranging," presumably for the audience, but this definition is also too simplistic for post-colonial plays where metatheatre's signifieds communicate much more than estrangement. This paper considers metatheatre and plays-within-plays in Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona's The Island, Louis Nowra's The Golden Age, Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, Derek Walcott's Pantomime, Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, and Renee's Jeannie Once to offer possible ways to re-read metatheatrical moments as locations of deliberate dis-location of colonial power.
Theatre and Caribbean Self-Definition
Authors: Gibbons Rawle
Published: April 2013

Derek Walcott's Drums and Colours premiered at the opening of the First Federal Parliament of the West Indies on April 23, 1958. The fact that the young poet/playwright had been commissioned by the governments of the region to write this historical drama augured well for the future relationship between the arts and the state in a new self-determining political configuration for the West Indies.
When the Cutting Edge Cuts Both Ways: Contemporary Scottish Drama
Authors: Maguire Tom
Published: April 2013

Developments in post-colonial and post-modem theory have suggested that being located on the margin in relation to a metropolitan imperial centre can become a positive and fruitful experience. Robert Nunn, for example, argues, "The margin ... is no longer the periphery but the frontier, the place of possibility." […] Such a view has two positive aspects to commend it. First, it identifies the possibilities for those on the margins, recognising that there is a potential in the creative space they occupy. Second, it helps to account for a range of realised creative projects whose existence otherwise would seem to contradict theories of the debilitating effects of colonialism. Nonetheless, there are pitfalls in applying it in practice to all post-colonial contexts. The following investigation into contemporary Scottish drama seeks to identify one such pitfall.
Lucky's Dance in Waiting for Godot
Authors: Zinman Toby Silverman
Published: April 2013

In Act One of Waiting for Godot, just before Lucky delivers himself of his famous sentence, Estragon asks if he would dance for them, and Pozzo commands. "Dance, misery!” There are no stage directions to indicate the nature of the movements which are to follow; we are told, "Lucky puts down bag and basket, advances towards front, turns to Pozzo. Lucky dances. He stops". After the cry of "Encore!" we are told that he "executes the same movements, stops". How each actor playing Lucky chooses to dance his dance must be invented for each production, the only hints coming from the dialogue which follows Pozzo's question, "Do you know what he calls it?"
Watching Over Frank McGuinness' Stereotypes
Authors: Lojek Helen
Published: April 2013

The opening of Frank McGuinness' Someone Who'll Watch Over Me at New York's Booth Theatre in November 1992, following successful runs at London's Hampstead and Vaudeville theatres, provided the first opportunity for. major American audiences to encounter the work of a playwright who has been a significant force in Irish theatre at least since his 1986 Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. Winner of such accolades as the London Standard Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the London Fringe Award, and the Harvey's Best Play Award, McGuinness has exhibited a restless creativity in works ranging from the straight realism of Factory Girls (1982) to the extravagant experimentation and expressionism of Innocence (1986). In Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, he blends elements from both extremes (and his first American character) to create what is for American audiences his most accessible play yet. And with it he has added a New York Drama Critics Circle Award to his list of prizes.
Shakespeare's "Sisters": Desdemona, Juliet, and Constance Ledbelly in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
Authors: Porter Laurin
Published: April 2013

In "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy," Richard Levin takes to task that body of feminist critics who take a thematic approach to Shakespeare's tragedies. All of them, as he sees it, insist in one way or another that "the plays are about the role of gender in the individual and in society." While he does not deny that the worlds Shakespeare presents us with are patriarchal in nature (how could they be otherwise?), he resists the feminist tendency to single out this patriarchal aspect as the fundamental cause of the tragic events. "[T]hey are necessary conditions of the action but are not in themselves sufficient to cause it," he argues. "Many of these critics seem to have confused these two different kinds of agency.”
The Scandal Maker: Thomas Bernhard and the Reception of Heldenplatz
Authors: Kiebuzinska Christine
Published: April 2013

The violent di scussions in reaction to Thomas Bernhard's ' Heldenplatz (Heroes' Square) in the Austrian press even before its opening on 14 October 1988 (as the play selected to celebrate the one-hundredth-year anniversary of the Burgtheater) were influenced by a number of factors. The Burgtheater represents a tradition rooted in the Austro Hungarian Empire, and the repertoire of the Burgtheater historically reflected that tradition. Consequently, the appointment, not too long before the commemorative celebrations, of the tradition-breaking German theater director Claus Peymann to what is considered the most prestigious and influential post in the performing arts in Austria set off heated discussions in the press about the nature and responsibility of the Burgtheater to foster Austrian culture. Peymann, who before assuming the post at the Burgtheater had been the artistic director in Stuttgart and Bochum, has a reputation of provoking the public, and as a result, criticism against Peymann focused not only on the fact that he was a "foreigner" but also on his open sympathies for the left. At the same time, Bernhard was already viewed in his native country with distaste, reflected in such invectives associated with his name as "Alpen-Beckett," "Menschenfeind" or misanthrope. and "Unterganghofer" or doom promoter, for even before the Heldenplatz scandal he had achieved notoriety in 1984 when he was charged with slandering his country's honor and insulting its citizens in his biographical novel Holzfallen (Woodcutters, 1987).
Athol Fugard and the Problematics of the Liberal Critique
Authors: Colleran Jeanne
Published: April 2013

Effecting reconciliation: such has been the subject of Athol Fugard's writing during the past decade and by extension its political project. His most recent drama reflects, as his work has always done, a moment in South African history: the crucial present moment of apartheid's dismantling, of the political process currently underway which seeks reconciliation and attempts coalition even as it allows for the continued enfranchisement of the white minority. Despite the enormous differences between what motivated the former Nationalist government to begin the rapprochement and what has always moved Fugard to write, in the perverse workings out of the recent changes in South Africa, the desire for enfranchisement and for reconciliation are shared desires, evident both in the political rhetoric which de KIerk employed and in the theatrical language Fugard devised.
Edward Bond: An Interview
Authors: Klein Hilde
Published: April 2013

The following interview with Edward Bond took place in the summerhouse located in the garden of his cottage in rural Cambridgeshire some years ago. During the interview I was overwhelmed by the author's extraordinary personality and humanity; he spoke so extensively, with great seriousness, conviction and concentration, that I hardly dared to interrupt his powerful torrent of thoughts to pose my questions.
"Homesick for Abroad": The Transition from National to Cultural Identity in Contemporary Irish Drama
Authors: Achilles Jochen
Published: April 2013

In Irish plays of the last thirty years, the supranational orientation, only occasionally noticeable in plays of earlier periods, is becoming more conspicuous. The question of cultural stasis versus progress is reformulated in terms of the related specificity and rootedness of Irish culture versus its cosmopolitan leanings and its willingness to change its identity without losing it. Whereas their predecessors either shaped or disfigured the Holy Grail of Irish nationhood, living Irish playwrights are more interested in using the stage to test such multicultural notions of identity as the one suggested by the sociologist Stuart Hall who defines it "as contradictory, as composed of more than one discourse, as composed always across the silences of the other, as written in and through ambivalence and desire."
Arthur Miller's "Weight of Truth" in The Crucible
Authors: Marino Stephen
Published: April 2013

One of the more intriguing historical events Arthur Miller included in The Crucible was Giles Corey's refusal to answer his indictment for witchcraft in order to preserve his land for his sons' inheritance. In punishment, Corey was pressed with great stones, still refusing to confess to witchery. Corey died, still in defiance, uttering as his last words, "More Weight." Miller assigns great significance to Corey's words for he uses them in Act Four at a decisive moment for his protagonist, John Proctor. In hearing about Giles's death, Proctor repeats Corey's words, as if to consider their meaning for himself. In fact, Miller intimately connects the word "weight" to the theme of the play by employing it ten times throughout the four acts. Tracing the repetition "weight" in The Crucible reveals how the word supports one of the play's crucial themes: how an individual's struggle for truth often conflicts with society.
The Space of Madness and Desire: Tennessee Williams and Streetcar
Authors: Fleche Anne
Published: April 2013

In A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Tennessee Williams exploits the expressionistic uses of space in the drama, attempting to represent desire from the outside, that is, in its formal challenge to realistic stability and closure, and in its exposure to risk. Loosening both stage and verbal languages from their implicit desire for closure and containment, Streetcar exposes the danger and the violence of this desire, which is always the desire for the end of desire. Writing in a period when U.S. drama was becoming disillusioned with realism, Williams achieves a critical distance from realistic technique through his use of allegory. In Blanche's line about the street-car, the fact that she is describing real places, cars, and transfers has the surprising effect of enhancing rather than diminishing the metaphorical parallels in her language. Indeed, Streetcar's "duplicities of expression" are even more striking in the light of criticism's recent renewal of interest in allegory. For allegory establishes the distance "between the representative and the semantic function of language", the desire that is in language to unify (with) experience. Streetcardemonstrates the ways in which distance in the drama can be expanded and contracted, and what spatial relativism reveals about the economy of dramatic representation.
Pastoral Elements in John Bull's Other Island
Authors: Nadler Paul
Published: April 2013

Like Ibsen, Strindberg, and Joyce, Bernard Shaw considered himself an exile; but unlike them, he rarely dealt in his work with his native land. Still, the relationship between Ireland and England was always of deep and personal concern to him — perhaps too much so often to be made public in his writing. In 1904, however, at Yeats' prodding, he produced John Bull's Other Island, which centers on the contrast between the English and the Irish, and which is set almost entirely in Ireland.

John Bull is the second of a series of three plays — Man and Superman (1903) is the first, Major Barbara ( 1905) the last — dealing with both spiritual and political issues. In each of these plays the main characters are changed by new environments: Tanner flees (or pursues?) the life force from England to Spain; Broadbent is transformed by his journey to Ireland; and Barbara and Undershaft visit each other's worlds as part of their spiritual searches. But in its heartfelt nostal gia for a land, its earnest love for a people, and its unabashedly lyrical language, John Bull is unique among these plays. In its seamless integration of romance, politics. and religion it is underappreciated triumph.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Pottie Lisa
Published: April 2013

The primary objective of the annual bibliography, which remains unchanged in this issue, is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of dramatic literature and, to a lesser extent, of theatre history. The bibliography includes all playwrights who lived past 1899 (plus Becque and Büchner) and influential theatre figures other than performers. Reviews, reprinted books (unless the edition has been corrected or updated), unpublished theses, and graduate student periodicals are generally excluded. Also excluded in this year's bibliography are publications of letters or diaries. The bibliography does not include publications of original texts of plays or translations. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to Charles Carpenter's Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism 1966-1980: An International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press 1986).
Oleanna: David Mamet's Power Play
Authors: Vera Yvonne
Published: April 2013

Although playwright David Mamet has stated that he began working on Oleanna before Anita Hill's testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas made sexual harassment in the workplace a topic of conversation in the early 1990s, there is no doubt that the play's timeliness was used to boost ticket sales. The play's promotional mailout, for example, announced that ticket buyers could "be among the first to take a seat — and take a Side — at Oleanna." Even Playbill's cover helped polarize responses by featuring, for the first time in the magazine 's history, two different covers for the production. One cover depicts a bespectacled man seated on a chair with a bullseye emblazoned on his chest, while the second cover pictures a female in exactly the same position.
Schizophrenia and the Politics of Experience in Three Plays by Brian Friel
Authors: Hawkins Maureen
Published: April 2013

In Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, Nancy Scheper-Hughes states that the Irish and Northern Irish have the world's highest rates of hospitalization for schizophrenia, and, to establish that these rates do not merely reflect the availability of beds for treatment, she adds that Irish-Americans and Irish-Canadians are more frequently treated for schizophrenia than are members of other ethnic groups. The highest rate of schizophrenia in Ireland, she says, is in the West of Ireland in isolated rural areas dependent on peripheral agriculture and suffering from depopulation, and the most commonly afflicted are celibate males, suggesting that all of these factors are connected with Irish schizophrenia.
Book Reviews
Authors: Parker Brian , Reinelt Janelle , Adam Julie
Published: April 2013

George W. Crandell, Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography, reviewed by Brian Parker

Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, reviewed by Brian Parker

Philip C. Kolin, ed., Tennessee Williams, reviewed by Brian Parker

Howard Brenton, Hot Irons, reviewed by Janelle Reinelt

Edward Bond, Letters I, reviewed by Janelle Reinelt

Edward Bond, Letters II, reviewed by Janelle Reinelt

Karen Laughlin and Catherine Schuler, eds., Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics, reviewed by Julie Adam
Catching the Wind in a Net: The Shortcomings of Existing Methods for the Analysis of Performance
Authors: Gantar Jure
Published: April 2013

Despite what we often like to think, academics and theatre practitionerfor the most part remain safely segregated, each on their own side of the continually widening gap between theory and practice, between reflection and creation. When actors, directors or designers venture into the realm of philosophy, as is the case with Richard Foreman's concept of "Ontological-Hysteric Theatre," their treatment of the subject is usually not perceived by the academic community to be quite as significant and methodologically coherent as when a similar problem is addressed by a "proper" scholar. Likewise, theoretical approaches to theatre such as Albert Camus's existentialist interpretation of acting in "The Myth of Sisyphus" are regularly seen as bewildering, impractical, or outright amateurish by professional directors and actors. It is certainly difficult to imagine from a purely pragmatic point of view how "complex kinemorphs" or "semiotic ostension" are supposed to be performed.
Performing Writing: Inscribing Theatre
Authors: Sidnell Michael
Published: April 2013

Vigorously contesting the Romantic, and especially Gennan, notion that drama was an essentially literary mode, independent of the theatre, Hegel argued that "inner dramatic value" was provided by the very "treatment which makes a drama excellent on the stage." He admitted that this "inner dramatic value" did not, of itself, constitute the poetic, but he averred that even plays no longer perfonned were capable of giving "perfect satisfaction" precisely because, in their time, they had been "written purely for the stage.'" But, not even Hegel himself was thoroughly convinced about the value of reading even once-theatrical plays, since he also held that it would be better not to print plays at all.
The Actor's Medium: On Stage and in Film
Authors: Silberman Marc
Published: April 2013

A comparative or contrasting approach to the role of the actor in various media would have to consider a wide spectrum of pertinent issues, including style, physical function, audience expectations, technological interventions, cultural and, historical specificity, and so forth. To grasp the implications of such an approach while evading the demands of a comprehensive study, I want to focus on a particular instance of the actor's medium: the actor's migration from the expressionist stage to the expressionist film in Germany during the late teens and early twenties of the twentieth century. By concentrating on a local "case study" from over seventy years ago, I hope to suggest that historical controversies bearing on the complex intennedial overlap between stage and film persist into the nineties.
Towards an International Theatre
Authors: Lamont Rosette
Published: April 2013

In a recent double issue of Performing Arts Journal (50/51), entitled "The Arts and the University," Bonnie Marranca, the journal's co-creator and coeditor with Gautam Dasgupta, penned a provocative survey of the numerous lacunae in theatre studies as practiced throughout the United States. Her essay, "Theatre and the University at the End of the Twentieth Century," adds up to a detailed medical examination of the body politic of various curricula. Marranca points out that theatre in America "lacks a definable epistemology." She goes on to diagnose the ills of an education which has been unable to formulate a well-established critical discourse on the history and nature of this art. Such is not the case, she declares, for Film, Literature, Anthropology, Communications and Media Studies. In her “J'accuse," Marranca calls theatre "a champion of the status quo"
Performing the Self
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: April 2013

A distinction between the identity of an actor, with his or her own personal experience and history, and the role or the character taken on by that actor, with its own experiences and history within the fictive world of the drama seems fundamental to the operations of the theatre. Among the various minimalist definitions of theatre that have from time to time been advanced, one of my favorites is from Eric Bentley's The Life of the Drama: "A impersonates B while C looks on." Simple as this formulation is, it connects two of the functions normally considered fundamental to the theatre experience, the taking on of a fictive "other" persona by the actor and the necessity of an audience. In recent years, however, a type of performance has gained prominence which seems to challenge this basic formula by collapsing into a unity two of its three terms. This is autobiographical performance — where instead of creating a character or assuming a role in a dramatic structure, the actor presents or seems to present personal reminiscence, anecdote or opinion. Here, it appears, "A impersonates A while C looks on." Such performance often challenges traditional assumptions about the relationship in theatre between the conventional concepts of character, role, and identity.
Performing Race: Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror
Authors: Reinelt Janelle
Published: April 2013

Since 1992, Anna Deavere Smith has come to public prominence in the United States as a result of two shows she has conceived and performed about events of extreme national importance involving issues of race. One event took place on the east coast, the other on the west coast, and her first performances of the respective plays opened in the geographic location of these events within a year of their origin. Thus, Smith's work has contributed to a local as well as a national dialogue and reflection on race relations in the troubled present.
Georg Büchner's Dantons Tod: History and Her Story on the Stage
Authors: Ginters Laura
Published: April 2013

Since its first production in 1902, Georg Büchner's Dantons Tod has been produced nearly three hundred times in theatres all over Germany (including the former German Democratic Republic), Switzerland and Austria. Each new generation of theatre-makers turns to the play to express (overwhelmingly) its response both to a classic of German dramatic literature and to the social and political concerns of the day; and even when such concerns are not specifically expressed, critics and audiences are very much prepared to read this into a production. This "snapshot," taken at one of the darkest points of the French Revolution, when its success is in doubt and the means of achieving it even more in question, has proved to be rich material for the German stage. The capacity for this dramatic text to be rewritten in each new production means that the play is now much more about German society at a given point in its twentieth-century history than any "objective" account of the events of the French Revolution. Many theatre-makers have returned to the play more than once in their careers, often in more than one capacity (actor. director, designer), and the chronology of productions over the last ninety-odd years often reads as a "Who's Who" of German theatre.
Shifting Through Space-Time: A Chronotopic Analysis of Peter Sellars' Don Giovanni
Authors: Smith Terry Donovan
Published: April 2013

At the 1989 FIRT/IFTR conference in Stockholm, Erika Fisher-Lichte posited that "performance analysis is still, even today, one of the most neglected areas of academic theatre research .... Just as in every analysis of a work, so in performance analysis the question of possible methods of segmentation poses one of its cardinal problems." Establishing her approach to Ralf Langbacka's Don Giovanni, Fischer-Lichte suggested several methodological procedures: "One might turn to categories provided by the poetics of drama such as character, plot, situation, space, time; or one might make segmentation according to the various sign system. …” One possible analytical approach is the "chronotope" which I will demonstrate using Peter Sellars' production of the Mozartda Ponte opera, Don Giovanni as exemplar. While segmentation generally accounts for moment-lo-moment, linear movement through the narrative, the segmentation required in considering the chronotope is vertical. That is, chronotopes are sedimentary structures that form a basis for understanding the work as a whole.
Book Reviews
Authors: Tompkins Joanne , Sperdakos Paula , Donkin Ellen , Haxo Paul , Scolnicov Hanna , Klaver Elizabeth , Worth Katherine , Page Malcom , Hinde Michael , Green Amy , Smiggel Libby
Published: April 2013

J. Ellen Gainor, ed., Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance, reviewed by Joanne Tompkins

Cynthia Zimmerman, Playwriting Women: Female Voices ill English Canada, reviewed by Paula Sperdakos

Charlotte Canning, Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A.: Staging Women's Experience, reviewed by Ellen Donkin

Stephen Lacey, British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in Its Context, 1956-1965, reviewed by Paul Haxo

Linda Ben-Zvi, ed., Theatre in Israel, reviewed by Hanna Scolnicov

Mel Gussow, Conversations With (and About) Beckett, reviewed by Elizabeth Klaver

Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning, ed., Beckett On and On..., reviewed by Katherine Worth

Albert Hunt and geoffrey Reeves, Peter Brook, reviewed by Malcom Page

Kurt Eisen, The Inner Strength of Opposites: O'Neill's Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination, reviewed by Michael Hinde

Susan Bennett, Pelforming Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past, reviewed by Amy S. Green

Amy Koritz, Gendering Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early-Twentieth-Century British Culture, reviewed by Libby Smiggel
The Stature of Arthur Schnitzler
Authors: Hill Claude
Published: April 2013

THE EVALUATION OF ARTHUR SCHNITZLER by literary historians represents a case in point for the necessity of re-examining his work from the focal summit of mid-century experiences and insights. Although the Austrian author died three decades ago and his literary stature was established as early as 1910, professors and critics have unceasingly passed judgments upon him that are as contradictory and prejudiced as they are inadequate and unsound. Once overrated and praised to the sky, he is hardly ever mentioned anymore, or, at best, is subjected to standard clichés which, however inappropriate, nobody seems to have reassessed during the last thirty years.
Theater in Spain (1960-81)
Authors: Díaz-Plaja Guillermo
Published: April 2013

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL AND MoST DISCUSSED WOR of the 1960-61 theabical season in Madrid was Las Meninas written by Antonio Buero Vallejo and directed by Jose Tamayo. It was first presented on the occasion of Velazquez' anniversary.

This work, which is based on a famous Vel3.zquez painting, has enjoyed great success and has aroused many contradictory comments. Among these comments, which come from different sources, there is general agreement that this production, like all those of this author, is worthy. of serious consideration. We shall now attempt to do it justice not only because we have high regard for the author but also because he is the most serious and the most sophisticated of our contemporary dramatists.

The comments, as we shall soon see, revolve around the possible application of a particular historical situation in the period of Philip IV to present-day Spain. Buero Vallejo achieves his goal by inventing a plot in which Velazquez himself adopts a polemical attitude which serves as a catalytic agent for the nonconformist state of mind: something like the historical conscience of his time.
The 1961 MLA Conference On Modern Drama
Authors: Knepler Henery
Published: April 2013

THE MODERN DRAMA CONFERENCE is at present poised between the informality of the small conference and the formal status of a regular MLA group. That seemed clear to the more than forty people who filled the room assigned to the Conference at the MLA convention on Thursday, December 28, 1961, in Chicago. Professor Robert G. Shedd of the Ohio State University acted as chairman of the meeting, which he opened with a series of comments and announcements. The most important was that Modern Drama will have a special Strindberg issue in December, 1962, for which Professor Shedd will be the editor. Papers must be submitted by September to receive consideration, and are especially invited on plays other than The Ghost Sonata or The Dream P1o,y; most of the papers sent in so far deal with a very small area of Strindberg's work.
Fry's Cosmic Vision
Authors: Greene Anne
Published: April 2013

THE "UNDERPLAY OF OPPOSITES" which Derek Stanford finds in Christopher Fry's plays' deserves further study. As Stanford points out, Fry's antitheses grow out of the confusion of appearance and reality, or the elusiveness of truth; and as Stanford implies, they sometimes take the form of moral dilemmas. However, the extent and complexity of this underplay have not been sufficiently explored, nor has there been a sufficient attempt to relate these dilemmas to the dramatist's view of life. This is such an attempt.
An American Tragedy As Epic Theater: The Piscator Dramatization
Authors: Wentz John
Published: April 2013

THE HISTORY OF ERWIN PISCATOR'S German dramatization of Dreiser's masterpiece, An American Tragedy, begins with one quarrel and ends with another. Separating these disputes were six years of preparation, frustration, friendship, hard work, qualified triumph, and even tragedy for the scores of people who at one time or another lent their energies to the play's creation and production. Of this cooperative enterprise the present study proposes to give some account.
Dionysus In The Iceman Cometh
Authors: Chabrowe Leonard
Published: April 2013

IN 1926, thirteen years before he wrote The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill completed Lazarus Laughed. Since a commercial production would have involved great expense on top of the text's many technical difficulties, it was the only play of his never to be done in the professional theater. The reason for both the difficulties and expense was its underlying aesthetic idea, which O'Neill had derived years before from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. There had been other influences as well. But it had been primarily through Nietzsche that he had come to understand the theater as ideally a place of religious experience, a temple where rituals were enacted celebrating the mystery of human life. In this sense the idea meant creating a drama equivalent in the modem theater to that of the Greeks in the ancient Athenian. In Lazarus Laughed he tried to realize this equivalent in wholly Nietzschean terms. Just as the ritualistic form was inspired by Nietzsche through The Birth of Tragedy, so was the philosophical content through Thus Spake Zarathustra. The result was what he called "A Play For An Imaginative Theatre."l Although it soon became obvious that the professional theater was a world apart from the "Imaginative," he apparently thought of the play for many years as the best thing he had ever done. And it seems that the writing of The Iceman Cometh in 1939 was essentially a transposition of Lazarus Laughed into an idiom suitable for the New York stage, though one which in a subtle way was no less Dionysian.
A Note On Frost's A Masque Of Reason
Authors: Leyburn Ellen Douglass
Published: April 2013

I SHOULD LIKE TO SUPPLY A NOTE on two points raised concerning Frost's A Masque of Reason by Ely Stock in his article, "A Masque of Reason and /. B.: Two Treatments of the Book of Job," Modern Drama, III (Spring, 1961), 378-386.
The Propaganda Play
Authors: Green Gordon
Published: April 2013

THE THESIS OR PROPAGANDA PLAY is a play which is written for the purpose of enforcing a particular point of view. Many critics hold that the greater dramas of the world are not propagandistic. The authors of those dramas might include contemporary material but they are primarily concerned rather with the imaginative reflection of experience. Shakespeare's history plays, for example, while they may have reflected the philosophy of the English at the time of the Tudors and an experience of the period, were nevertheless not primarily concerned with presenting a thesis.
Book Reviews
Authors: Vanderlist Harry , Wisenthall  , Auslander Philip , Bennett Susan , Knowles Richard Paul , O'Brian Anthony , Krasner David , Gainor J. Ellen
Published: April 2013

H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, reviewed by Harry Vanderlist

Stanley Weintraub, Shaw's People: Victoria to Churchill, reviewed by J.L Wisenthall

Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspective on Theater after Modernism, reviewed by Philip Auslander

John Erickson, The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art and Poetry, reviewed by Susan Bennett

Elin Diamond, ed.,Performance and Cultural Politics, reviewed by Richard Paul Knowles

Patrice Davis, ed., The Intercultural Performance Reader, reviewed by Richard Paul Knowles

Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs, eds., Theatre and Change in South Africa, reviewed by Anthony O'Brian

Margaret Eddershaw, Performing Brecht: Forty Years of British Performances, reviewed by David Krasner

Patricia R. Shroeder, The Feminist Possibilities of Dramatic Realism, reviewed by J. Ellen Gainor
A Provisional Stemma for Drafts, Alternatives, and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo (1951)
Authors: Parker Brian
Published: April 2013

Tennessee Williams was a compulsive writer and reviser. His headlong intuitive mode of composition is described vividly by Clark Mills McBurney, a St. Louis poet who shared his family's basement with Williams in 1937 for what they aptly nicknamed the "writing factory."
Strindberg's Unknown Comedy
Authors: Davy Daniel
Published: April 2013

August Strindberg's comedy Crimes and Crimes is not "unknown" because of Strindberg — the play is clearly designated "A Comedy" on the title page — but because of the virtual unanimity of critical response to the play which totally ignores this classification. Although a considerable degree of variability exists between individual shadings of interpretation, the vast majority of criticism is of one mind in taking the "dark" or "serious" manifest content of the play at face value.
A Prison of Object Relations: Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro
Authors: Barnett Claudia
Published: April 2013

Adrienne Kennedy's characters speak obsessively of their own births as well as the births — which are so often the deaths — of their children. Their monologues focus on rape and incest, miscarriage and child murders. Such preoccupations psychologically paralyze the characters, fixing them at — and regressing them to — a primitive stage in development which Melanie Klein, a psychologist of the British object relations school, calls the "paranoid-schizoid position," an infant stage which normally precedes integration. According to Klein, the life instinct and the death instinct, which are both present in the infant from birth, create a polarity of anxieties that the infant deals with through splitting and projective identification; that is, the infant learns to split external objects into representations of good and evil, projecting hopes and fears away from the subject and onto the object. In later phases, the infant learns to unify such splits and to deal with whole objects. Kennedy's characters, however, rarely reach this point of integration: they never progress beyond the paranoid-schizoid position. These characters remain prisoners of object relations, their worlds disordered by irrational, irrevocable splits.
Feminism, Metatheatricality, and Mise-en-scene in Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends
Authors: Farfan Penny
Published: April 2013

The first time that Maria Irene Fornes attended a rehearsal of one of her plays, she was amazed to be informed by the director that she should not communicate her ideas about staging directly to the actors but should instead make written notes that they would discuss together over coffee after rehearsal. This exclusion of the playwright from the rehearsal process seemed to Fornes "like the most absurd thing in the world."
Female Victims and the Male Protagonist in Vaclav Havel's Drama
Authors: Merche Jude
Published: April 2013

Vaclav Havel's recent rise to political power in the now-dissolved Czechoslovak Republic has only confined some critics' contentions that Havel's dramatic works are all basically political in origin and theme. These critics' beliefs are supported by some striking similarities in many of Havel's plays; the bureaucracies that are. often seen as thinly veiled representations of totalitarian regimes, for example, are present in or alluded to in all of Havel's major works beginning with The Garden Parry (i963) and ending with Temptation (1985). But while the existence of these bureaucratic systems and the protagonists' struggle to retain their personal identity in their dealings with such systems may suggest a political theme, they by no means limit Havel's plays to political matters. The appeal of Havel's plays in the West — especially in the United States, where threats of totalitarianism are distant — seems to suggest that these works hold within themselves something beyond their political content, something capable of capturing the attention of a large portion of the Western hemisphere.
"We're all free to do as we're told": Gender and Ideology in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing
Authors: Arndt Susanne
Published: April 2013

Ideological and feminist criticism views literature as a mode of cultural production that helps sustain the existing social relations within Western culture. Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, for example, includes literature among the "ideological state apparatuses" that reproduce and thus contribute to the maintenance of the existing relations of production. The feminist critic Teresa de Lauretis, drawing on Althusser, speaks of cultural productions such as film and literature as "technologies of gender" that elaborate and disseminate discourses actuating the social construction of gender. In her book Critical Practice, Catherine Belsey identifies "literature as one of the most persuasive uses of language" which has a strong impact "on the ways in which people grasp themselves and their relation to the real relations in which they live.”
Re-Imaging the Black Woman's Body in Alexis DeVeaux's The Tapestry
Authors: Splawn P. Jane
Published: April 2013

Whether in her short fiction works like Adventures of the Dread Sisters or in her woman-centered, collaborative play No!, poet/playwright/fiction writer Alexis DeVeaux challenges hegemonic representations of race and gender. In DeVeaux's The Tapestry, for instance, the black woman's body functions as a site of gender and cultural confrontation on at least two di stinct levels. Against the first level of contestation — that of the black woman's body as a sign of cultural and gender accommodation — DeVeaux posits a second, more pervasive imaging of the black woman's body as a signifier of strength and survival. Though at first glance, the second image seems a newer, late twentieth- century revisioning of black womanhood, in fact, as this paper will argue, it is a re-imaging of previous historical images of the black woman's body. This paper discusses DeVeaux's use of gestures and other movements (stooping, bending, leaning, etc.) within the historical context of the visual representations of black women's bodies.
Introduction
Authors: Thomas Alan
Published: April 2013

Our Special Issue on Translations might serve as a reminder that the unique internationalism of modem drama has developed from works known first to the wider world only in translation. This issue is not intended to revisit the old textual sites of origin in Scandinavia and Russia, but it does reflect some basic features relating to those origins. The act of translation is a natural activity for those working on the margins and aware of the divides. The widest and most significant divide to be crossed, it might be argued, is that between the languages of Europe and the single language of global reach today, that is, English. We are pleased to welcome to these pages new contributors to this journal, scholars, playwrights and translators, who live and work in countries on the periphery of Europe, a number at Irish and Scottish universities and colleges. From their contributions we are made aware that the translating of plays is an act of exchange, one thing being substituted for another, and that benefits flow from such commerce.
Ebb and Flow: Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea and the Possibility of Feminine Discourse
Authors: Leigh James
Published: April 2013

If you read — or even look at — the Norwegian text of Henrik Ibsen 's The Lady from the Sea, you can appreciate some of the problems with the first words. For the title there is Fruen fro havet, and fruen is invariably rendered into English as "the lady." In this way, a term that is politically, socially and culturally charged in Norwegian is domesticated (Ladies Home Journal), formalized ("Ladies and Gentlemen") and/or inoffensively biologicized (Ladies Room). For in Norwegian, ftue has a very limited range of uses and meanings: it is not "lady" (dame) and certainly not "woman" (kvinne). A dictionary will tell you that it is the equivalent of "madame" or "mistress," which — need it even be said? — is only in the sense of a title given to a married woman or one who, because of her age, should be. In another form , in fact, Frue functions as "Mrs." In its several forms, therefore, it inexorably situates the referent, Ellida Wangel, in a political, economic and social hierarchy, in a position of inequality and subordination.
Bunbury Pure and Simple
Authors: Mackie W. Craven
Published: April 2013

Sometime in late July 1894 Oscar Wilde wrote to George Alexander requesting an advance of £150 so that he might go away to write a comedy. In that letter he outlines a scenario of the play that within a month and a half would become a rough draft of The Importance of Being Earnest. In this early untitled version the names of Jack Worthing, Algernon, Cecily, Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell have yet to be invented. There is yet no play upon the word earnest and no Bunbury.

By early August, only a few days after writing to Alexander, Wilde had traveled with his family from London to the seaside resort of Worthing in Sussex, where he continued to work on the new play. In notes that quickly fo llowed and expanded upon the first scenario, Wilde had come up with a working title, The Guardian. Further, he had settled on the names Worthing and Gwendolen, had introduced dialogue expressing Gwendolen's passion for the name Ernest and had noted "Mr Bunbury — always ill —."
In the Native State/Indian Ink: Footnoting the Footnotes on Empire
Authors: Kaplan Laurie
Published: April 2013

In 1972, Tom Stoppard was the first contributor to a series of essays focusing "on the interplay, if any, between 'Doers and Thinkers.’” In his article, Stoppard, the quintessential Doer, defends the art of the play against the "pointless analysis" of Thinkers who inhabit "academic circles." Damning with no praise at all the "academic preoccupation with the creative work of other people" (emphasis added), Stoppard defines the separate spheres relegated to playwrights (that is, creative artists who work for a living) and professors. "the vast oracular Lego set of Lit Crit with its chairs and lectureships, its colloquia and symposia, its presses, reprints, offprints, monographs, reviews, footnotes and fireside chats .... "For Stoppard, "writing-about writing" is merely the "pffttzzz," not the Coke, "not the real thing," and he aims his satirical barbs at the cabal of professors who "continually acknowledge each other with endorsements or rebukes" and at the purveyors of "footnotes" and "monographs" who seek reflected fame. "[T]he habit of making undeniable but gratuitous connexions is the measles of critical diseases," Stoppard asserts.
"Change the Joke[r] and Slip the Yoke": Boal's "Joker" System in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls ... and spell #7
Authors: Splawn P. Jane
Published: April 2013

This paper examines the reinvention of Augusto Baal's “‘Joker' system," in which a central character acts as a master of ceremonies by inviting the audience to join in the action, in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and spell #7. In these two plays and others, Shange creates unique dramatic forms that convey her activism and creative vision — a vision which receives much of its vigor from her reclamation of African-American and other indigenous ritual traditions. She brings to these traditions a New World sense of hybridity as she situates herself within the world that Africans and Native peoples in the Americas made. But for Shange, the hybridity, as reflected in her work, is not simply a careful sampling of the work of other artists of color in the Americas. When Shange "change[s] the joke[r] and slip[s] the yoke," to borrow Ralph Ellison's phrase, she speaks to her recognition of difference in the work of other artists of color, even as she posits a desire for community among them in the Americas. Shange's reinvention of Argentinian theorist Augusto Boal's "Joker" system, moreover, underscores the intertextuality inherent in any work by people of color.
Will Godot Come by Bus or through a Trace? Discussion of a Chinese Absurdist Play!
Authors: Kuoshu Harry
Published: April 2013

The Bus-Stop written by Gao Xingjian and performed by The People's Art Theater of Beijing, is a Chinese lyrical comedy that emerged with a group of experimental plays in Beijing in the early 1980s. The play creates a bizarre situation of waiting, and its resemblance to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was pointed out by certain Chinese critics soon after its premiere. Since the playwright has a background in French literature, this observation came as no surprise; nevertheless, it played its role in a quickly aborted political campaign of "anti-bourgeois-contamination." A Party-authorized critic used The Bus-Stop’s re-semblance to Beckett's play to label it anti -socialist, assuming that the futile waiting in the play shows a loss of confidence in socialism a loss ascribed to contamination by "bourgeois, idealistic, egoistic world views." Although The Bus-Stop was degraded by Party authorities in the short-lived campaign, more experimental plays, one of them by the same playwright and performed in the same theatre, were staged with enthusiastic acceptance. Contrasted with the fact that massive non-participation actually aborted a political campaign under a regime whose functioning relied heavily and continually on new campaigns, the enthusiasm for the small experimental theatres testifies to an anxiety produced by such totalitarian control and a desire to move beyond it.