bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Book Reviews
Authors: Mitchell P. , Wahlgren Erik , Groff Edward , Waggoner George
Published: April 2013

Gustav Adolf , by August Strindberg, reviewed by P.M. Mitchell

August Strindberg, The Saga of the Folkungs. Engelbrekt, reviewed by Erik Wahlgren

Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, Funk and Wagnalls Company, A Theatre in your head, reviewed by Edward Groff

Arthur H. Nethercot, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant, reviewed by George Waggoner
A Note on Perception and Communication in Beckett's Endgame
Authors: Brick Allan
Published: April 2013

INTRODUCING HIS STUDY of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Richard M. Eastman comments: "Beckett belongs with such authors as Proust and Kafka for whom the deadly isolation of individuality precludes communication in terms of conventional surface."! Having made this general classification of Beckett, Mr. Eastman offers an admirably circumspect analysis of Endgame itself, demonstrating that Beckett's theme of isolation is emphasized by the work's ultimate incomprehensibility as a unit. And certainly the critic is to be commended for resisting all temptations to restrict the play to anyone frame of meaning- not Bonamy Dobrees interpretation of it as a morality play, not even his own discovery that "the play has many features of a chess game in its last phase." Yet, without attempting to erect the meaning or "key" to Endgame, we may see that, on at least one important plane, it is specifically concerned with how man's attempts at perception and communication relate to his assurance of individual existence. Its emphatic pronouncement is that whereas "individuality precludes communication in terms of conventional surface" it is only in terms of conventional sudace that communication takes place; and thus individuality, contingent upon communication, is dissolved.
The New Open-air Drama in France: Rediscovery and Renascence
Authors: White Kenneth
Published: April 2013

IN 1924, Jacques Copeau, seeking new ways to repurify the drama in France, was weary of plays performed in confined theaters before limited strata of spectators. He asked a close associate, Leon Chancerel, to rediscover "the beautiful sites of France, places of architectural nobility totally impregnated with a long history offering to the imagination and skill of a dramatic creator the opportunity for renewal and aeration, as well as a way to meet and commune in seasonal dramatic celebrations-exactly as in ancient Greece and in the medieval epoch." In such noble sites, Copeau told his friend, it was possible to rebuild "the true, authentic theater of the people."
Experiment and Vision in Ionesco's Plays
Authors: Eastman Richard
Published: April 2013

INTRODUCING HIS STUDY of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Richard M. Eastman comments: "Beckett belongs with such authors as Proust and Kafka for whom the deadly isolation of individuality precludes communication in terms of conventional surface." Having made this general classification of Beckett, Mr. Eastman offers an admirably circumspect analysis of Endgame itself, demonstrating that Beckett's theme of isolation is emphasized by the work's ultimate incomprehensibility as a unit. And certainly the critic is to be commended for resisting all temptations to restrict the play to anyone frame of meaning- not Bonamy Dobrees interpretation of it as a morality play, not even his own discovery that "the play has many features of a chess game in its last phase." Yet, without attempting to erect the meaning or "key" to Endgame, we may see that, on at least one important plane, it is specifically concerned with how man's attempts at perception and communication relate to his assurance of individual existence. Its emphatic pronouncement is that whereas "individuality precludes communication in terms of conventional surface" it is only in terms of conventional sudace that communication takes place; and thus individuality, contingent upon communication, is dissolved.
Translation and Adaptation in the Contemporary Drama
Authors: Knepler Henry
Published: April 2013

GENERAL RULES for the translation of literary works have to be so general that their usefulness becomes questionable. The literary genre, the time of writing, the relationship of the languages involved, and other factors provide too many variables. It is possible, however, to set standards for groups of works which are sufficiently homogeneous in kind or purpose to permit reasonably specific definitions.

The contemporary drama of Western culture constitutes such a group. The importance of its transfer from one language to another needs no discussion. But apart from its importance it also presents interesting and complex problems, for in the drama, more so than in any other literary form, prominent consideration has to be given to matters not connected with the verbal transfer of the work from one language to another. The reason for the presence of these extralinguistic components is that the drama is a communal experience which transcends the realm of written material.
The Theater of Albert Camus
Authors: Reck Rima
Published: April 2013

ALBERT CAMUS' EXPRESSION of "tragedy in modem dress" portrays men struggling with the emotional and psychological facts of alienation by means of man-made justice. Caligula (from the play of the same name, written in 1938, first performed in 1945), apprehending the alienation inherent in the human condition, exercises absolute power to match the absurdity of the world, inevitably to find the same terrible face of self-separation in his own mirror.1 Martha, Jan, and their mother, in Le Malentendu (1944), murder and misunderstand in a search for self-definition under "the injustice of sky and climate." The Plague divides the men and women of L'Etat de siege ( 1948) from their own dignity and, in the end, from their lives, by exercising a justice as logical and inhuman as Caligula's; and the terrorists of Les ]ustes (1949) attempt to redeem the myth of absolute justice with their lives, sacrificing the relative truths which alone are available to man. Those who seek self-identity fail to recognize the futility of such a task in an absurd universe. Those who deal in justice misunderstand the "pathos of distance" between mankind and the good.
Benavente on Shakespearean Characters
Authors: Schwartz Kessel
Published: April 2013

BENAVENTE, INFLUENCED by Shakespeare in many of his dramas,l has also written extensively on various Shakespearean problems such as acting, staging, and the like.2 Benavente fancied himself an expert on all matters pertaining to Shakespeare. He quotes constantly and often dogmatically from Shakespearean texts: ''The rest is silence. This does not signify the remainder as many translators of Shakespeare have understood it; the rest means . . . repose which meaning it still has in English and it was so used almost exclusively in the time of Shakespeare.” Even numerology interested him. He commented that Shakespeare's birth date, 1564, has digits totaling 16. Twice sixteen equals 1616, the date of Shakespeare's death, which fact impressed Benavente greatly to judge by the number of times he refers to it (O.C., XI, 174; O.C., XI, 70; O.C., XI, 297; O.C., IX, 697).

When Benavente visited Stratford on Avon, he found the general atmosphere congenial and full of "the spirit of sweet Shakespeare” (O.C., IX, 700), but he was shocked to discover that most Englishmen knew Shakespeare only superficially and then only the most popular works. He distrusted English admiration for Shakespeare as dogmatic, cold, and insincere and felt that the Shakespearean spirit was neither very English nor very Protestant (O.C., IX, 1028).
The Prelate and the Pachyderm: Rear Guard and Vanguard Drama in the French Theater
Authors: Pronko Leonard
Published: April 2013

IT HAS BEEN CUSTOMARY to divide the theaters of Paris into three groups. The Boulevard traditionally produces fluffy plays of pure entertainment, and is primarily interested in commercial success. A second group includes the subsidized theaters, the Comedie Frangillse and the Theatre National Populaire, devoted to the dramatic classics, both ancient and modem. The last group produces serious plays by modem authors, either in the philosophical, poetic, or avant-garde vein. It is sometimes called the avant-garde theater, sometimes the literary.

Such a division today is highly artificial, for the large plush theaters of the Boulevards have frequently forgotten commercialism and turned to the plays of serious thinkers like Sartre or Camus, while the Comedie Frangaise has sometimes been led astray into the facile fields of frothy and insubstantial commercial comedy. Moreover, since the reforms effected by Andre Malraux a year or so ago, the purposes of the subsidized theaters have been more clearly defined, and through the experimental theaters placed under the direction of Jean-Louis Barrault and Jean Vilar, a helping hand has been extended to young writers exploring new ways of dramatic expression.
The Vultures: Becque's Realistic Comedy of Manner
Authors: Wooton Carl
Published: April 2013

RENRY BECQUE'S THE VULTURES, although important in the early development of modem realism, seems to be, for the most part, a forgotten play, or at least one that has received little critical attention in America. Its inclusion in John Gassner's, A Treasury of the Theatre, in an English translation by Freeman Tilden, however, is likely to make it a familiar play, at least to undergraduate students. It is, perhaps, of value then to examine some of the assumptions made concerning the nature of the play and how well they fit the work as art. In an introduction to the play, Gassner writes of the characters as believing that, "their social conduct and sentiments are norms of the social level on which they live and thrive." He notes that although Becque has employed the slice-of-life technique of the realist, the play does not belong to the naturalistic school of Zola and his other contemporaries in the French theater. Indeed, as Gassner points out, Becque removed himself from Zola's brand of naturalism when he wrote in his own preface to The Vultures: "I have never entertained much liking for assassins, hysterical and alcoholic characters, or for the martyrs of heredity and victims of evolution." Becque's intent was to portray reality as he saw it, to be completely faithful to the nature of the language, the thoughts and the actions that the characters would exhibit if they could be seen operating within the real society Becque was mirroring on the stage.
Recent Developments and Problems in the Study of German Expressionist Drama
Authors: Sokel Walter
Published: April 2013

THOSE WHO ARE NOW ENGAGED in the study of German Expressionist drama are very fortunate. They possess an excellent guide to both the primary sources and the critical writing in their field, Claude Hill and Ralph Ley's The Drama of German Expressionism: A GermanEnglish Bibliography (University of North Carolina Press, 1960). It is difficult to overestimate the practical value of this bibliography. It lists all the plays written by sixteen major Expressionists and all the books, articles, dissertations, and reviews in both German and English that bear in any way on the Expressionist drama. The bibliography includes general investigations of modem literature as well as works devoted to literary Expressionism as such and monographs on individual Expressionist playwrights. The Hill-Ley bibliography is especially helpful to the student of comparative literature since it lists all English translations of German Expressionist drama with publication data. The student is furnished with a time- and energy-saving device of great importance since he can now find at one glance what Expressionist plays were published in English at any given time.
A Scene from an Unpublished Version of Frank Wedekind's Lulu-Tragedy
Authors: Wedekind-Biel Kadidja
Published: April 2013

THE STORY OF LuLu as known from Frank Wedekind's two plays Earth-Spirit and The Box of Pandora was originally written as one play in five acts, beginning with the scene in the painter's studio where Lulu's picture is painted, and ending in a London garret where she is murdered by Jack the Ripper.

In the later versions-the ones which were published-the author made changes which are mainly a sort of heartbreaking and desperate compromise with the moral and theatrical standard of his time. Wedekind was not the man to whom making a compromise would come easily. Consequently, by this unfortunate procedure the meaning of the original creative idea was well-nigh obliterated.

Since after the completion of the original version, several scenes, particularly in the last act, were objected to as unproduceable, the author decided to take the play apart. He took the first three acts, and he wrote a new act to precede the one which now is the last act of Eart-Spirit. To this play in four acts he wrote a prologue. The title "Earth-Spirit" is taken from the Greek Gäa, another name of Pandora.

Pandora.
The Shallows of Modern Serious Drama
Authors: Caputi Anthony
Published: April 2013

EVERYONE SEEMS FIRMLY CONVINCED that these are times to try men's souls. In our great wealth we find an irresistible honesty in admitting our bankruptcy. In a world geared to feed our appetites to bursting we take a glutton's pleasure in declaring our perpetual hunger. "The world is sick," those most sensitive to the modem condition tell us; and even those who do not believe them acquiesce to the most lurid evidence of decay. For the average television fan dozing before his weekly sample of serious TV drama just as for the research physicist keeping up with the latest Faulkner novel, tales of boy scouts turned savage, of Moms and Dads locked in degrading conflict, of schoolteachers and public servants caught in unspeakable corruption, of heroes crushed by a secret cowardice have become commonplace. We need no Gertrude Stein come back from the dead to tell us that this, too, is a lost generation; we ask only for fresh proofs of its lostness, new, progressively more electrifying analogues of its enervating desperation. Vladimir Nabokov's nymphets, Tennessee Williams' cannibals, and Samuel Beckett's ash cans for parents are no more than we feel we need. Fame and fortune await him who can top them.
Charles Rogers: Late Victorian Provincial Playwright
Authors: Flory Claude
Published: April 2013

A DECADE AND A HALF AGO Allardyce Nicoll in authoritatively summarizing Victorian drama noted that in the last half of the nineteenth century "dramatic productivity" exceeded "in quantity that of any corresponding period of the past." In attempting to list all of the autho rs and plays in Great Britain in the last fifty years befo.re the innovation of motion pictures, he counted so.me 3,000 playwrights and found himself "burdened with more than 20,000 titles." Able to treat specifically only the major figures in the mo.untaino.us material befo.re him, he suggested: "Later workers may fill in such gaps as I have left." It is my purpose in this paper to write the modest, minor Charles Rogers chapter of this voluminous record, with the hopeful notion that there may be occasional items in it that theatrical historians can use to corroborate or qualify their picture of the period.
The Ibsenite Maugham
Authors: Fielding John Steward
Published: April 2013

No PLAYWRIGHT IN HISTORY has so pleased the general public of his day as has W. Somerset Maugham. His commercial success has been truly fabulous, bringing him millions. On the other hand, no playwright of equal popularity-and ability-ever met with the condescension and outright hostility from critics and students of the drama as has Maugham.

It is true that he has not been without his supporters; such persons as Sir Desmond MacCarthy and St. John Ervine have praised him highly. Possibly it was his commercial success itself that led critics to assume, as Richard Aldington once pointed out, "that a writer who has continued to delight large audiences all over the world for several decades must be ephemeral and in some unspecified way unworthy of 'serious consideration.” Glenway Wescott, in Harper’s Magazine, observed that the booming market for whatever Maugham wrote made critics doubly disrespectful of his merits, so much that they became what Wescott aptly called "anti-fans." The result of this lack of critical approval has been that Maugham's dramatic work has received little attention in currently available surveys of twentieth century drama. Only one book has been devoted to a study of Maugham as a playwright: Paul Dottin's superficial Le Theatre de Somerset Maugham.
Edith Wharton and The House of Mirth: The Novelist Writes for the Theater
Authors: Loney
Published: April 2013

ALTHOUGH PERIODIC GRUMBLINGS from some critics, such as Yvor Winters, have intimated that writing for the theater is perilously close to literary prostitution, a number of American authors have not been able to resist the lure of seeing their fiction transformed into flesh and blood on the stage. Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Henry James, and William Dean Howells were all impelled either to dramatize their own novels or to write original works for the theater. Unfortunately for both the authors and the theater, disappointment has frequently been the reward of such efforts.
A Week in Dublin
Authors: Moseley Virginia
Published: April 2013

DURING MY FIRST WEEK IN IRELAND, I have been overwhelmed by the magnificent vitality of current dramatic production that I have seen in Dublin as well as read about in numerous periodical accounts concerning county festivals going on all over the island. I find little evidence, at least in the dramatic medium, of the paralysis that crippled Joyce's Dubliners. Rather there is everywhere apparent the spiritual regeneration he envisioned as potential, especially in his "two-sighted" story "The Dead."

Remarkably, my introduction to Irish theater was Tennessee Williams' new play, You Touched Me, presented by the Gas Company Players of Dun Laoghaire, a suburban theatrical society of surprising ability. Donald Windham's re-vamping of this American drama to suit British audiences was stirringly acted by these "professional" amateurs.
Theater in Paris
Authors: Kourilsky Francoise
Published: April 2013

THE NUMBER OF PLAYS PRESENTED, and the uncertainty and hesitation of last season's theater in Paris, make it difficult to give a clear survey of the whole. Many plays were presented, the productions were often strikingly rich and original, and yet in few instances was anything really decisive created. It seems that the gap which has been evident in recent years between a rich and varied development of scenic writing and a petrifaction of properly dramatic writing, still exists, and that the expectancy of a new and growing public, recruited in Paris by such producers as Jean Vilar, or in the provinces by Roger Planchon, Jean Daste, and many others, has not been met.
Forty Years of O'Neill Criticism: A Selected Bibliography
Authors: Bryer Jackson
Published: April 2013

No AMERICAN DRAMATIST has been the object of so much critical attention as has Eugene O'Neill. The following Checklist is in no sense an attempt to encompass the entire canon of this criticism. It is rather a selected compilation which seeks to present the most significant articles, books, and book sections written about O'Neill between 1920 and 1960.
Bernard Shaw On The Tightrope
Authors: Morgan Margery
Published: April 2013

SINCE HIS DEATH, Shaw's reputation for brilliance and eccentricity has overshadowed his achievement. The iconoclast has himself become a favourite target for critical abuse, often inadequately based. He is still generally accepted as the chief figure in British drama at least since the eighteenth century; yet quite half of his plays are commonly dismissed as untheatrical, badly articulated, or plain silly. Some few, notably Candida and St. Joan, have been played and praised almost to death, often in the suspect belief that they are not typical of their author. To theatre audiences for the new surrealism they are liable to seem technically as old-fashioned as Robertson's Caste. Yet Shaw, as surely as Pirandello, deserves credit for shattering the old theatre of illusion and the tight structure of the well-made play to let in more life.
Christ Symbolism In Anna Christie
Authors: Mcaleer John
Published: April 2013

IN HIS SHORT STORY, "The Capital of the World," written in 1937. Ernest Hemingway uses the same pattern of Christ symbolism he was to use with such marked effect fifteen years later, in The Old Man and the Sea. Just as the old man, Santiago, while exhausting his vital force, proves himself in an unequal struggle against the sea, Paco, the youthful hero of "The Capital of the World," demonstrates his courage, though he receives a mortal hurt, manfully defending himseH in a mock bullfight. In the short story as in the novel a number of details relating to the Passion of Christ furnish a background for the events recounted. Yet Christ symbolism in American literature does not owe its first appearance to Hemingway. In nineteenth century American literature it is found in the works of Cooper, Melville, Crane, and even Harriet Beecher Stowe. It appears first in twentieth century American literature in 1919, in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Early in that work Dr. Parcival (a namesake of Sir Parcival, central hero of the Grail legend and the first knight vouchsafed a vision of the Grail), tells the protagonist, George Willard, "If something happens perhaps you will be able to write the book that I may never get written. The idea is very simple, so simple that if you are not careful you will forget it. It is this-that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. That's what I want to say. Don't you forget that. Whatever happens, don't you dare let yourself forget." This disclosure he prefaces with the assertion, "In the end I will be crucified, uselessly crucified." After thus identifying Christ as the archetype of futile human suffering, Anderson undertakes to show, by linking each of his characters in some way to Christ's Passion, how man indeed does suffer to no purpose…
Purgatory
Authors: Gaskell Ronald
Published: April 2013

THE DUALISM OF SOUL AND BODY which runs through Yeats' poetry is almost as plainly marked in his work for the theatre. At the root of his lifelong scorn of naturalism was the dislike of a religious mind for an art that denies the primacy of the supernatural. His problem, therefore, as a dramatist was to find a form that would admit this primacy without rejecting the life of the passions and the senses. This problem could emerge only gradually, as Yeats' awareness of the natural world grew to a conviction of its reality and value. In his plays this conviction is reached in On Baile's Strand. The problem, however, remains unsolved—its difficulties, indeed, only now become apparent: how to give passion dramatic expression without trapping the soul in character, and how to affirm. a world opposed at once to the supernatural and, by its naturalness, to the formality of art. Not until Purgatory are these difficulties resolved.
Pinter And Whiting: Two Attitudes Towards The Alienated Artist
Authors: Hoefer Jacqueline
Published: April 2013

Two CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH PLAYS, recently produced by the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, create in drama an image that has already absorbed poet and novelist-the alienated artist. A difficult figure to present on the stage, an artist is the hero of Harold Pinter's Birthday Party and of John Whiting's Saint's Day, both published before production, in 1957. Whiting, born in 1917, is a journalist and critic as well as playwright, and has been active in such organizations as the Arts Council of Great Britain and the League of Dramatists. Pinter, born in 1930, spent twelve years as an actor in provincial repertory companies. Both dramatists are well known in the English experimental theater, and it is the Actor's Workshop which introduced them to American audiences.
Willy Loman's Brother Ben: Tragic Insight in Death of a Salesman
Authors: Bettina Sister
Published: April 2013

IN THE TIlIRTEEN YEARS since Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman had its spontaneous Broadway success, critics have often cited as a deficiency in it the lack of tragic insight in its hero, Willy Loman. He never knew who he was,"says his son Biff at Willy's grave; and by a like judgment critics can substantially discount the play's tragic claims. But Biffs chonc commentary on his father, like many other very quotable remarks in the scene of Willy's "requiem," is not quite true. Willy did struggle againstself .. knowledge-trying not to know "what" he was; but he had alwaysasuperh consciousness of his own individual strength as a "who." "I am not a dime a dozen!" he shouts in the play's crisis; "I am Willy Loman . .. !" And it is this very sense of his personal force and high regard for it which qualify him as a hero.
The Conflict of Wills In Shaw's Tragicomedy
Authors: O'Donnell Norbert
Published: April 2013

IN ONE OF IDS PLAY REVIEWS written in the 1890's, Bernard Shaw outlines the crises in the life of a play which will never become “dated." First of all, he says, a play inevitably dates in its costumes and manners. If its conception of moral problems is sufficiently profound, it will survive this test, only to be confronted much later perhaps centuries later-by another day of judgment. On this day the question will be whether or not its portrayal of the "instincts and passions" of humanity is valid enough for it to take its place as an “antique classic" in an era in which its ethical assumptions have ceased to compel assent.
The Square Root of Ibsen
Authors: Vowles Richard
Published: April 2013

THE ESSENCE OF IBSEN is elusive and indefinable, and even more so the quintessence of Ibsen; but the square root is quite another thing. Because it is simultaneously plus and minus, it resolves all disparate elements in a profound and empirically acceptable ambiguity. So thinks J. W. McFarlane, Professor of Scandinavian at the University of Durham in Newcastle, and if ever a man had the opportunity to discover the square root of Ibsen it is Professor McFarlane, who is translating and editing the Oxford Ibsen, the first scholarly edition of a Scandinavian author to appear in English in our time or any time. Professor McFarlane approaches Ibsen with a rich knowledge of Norwegian backgrounds, as is evidenced by his critical volume, Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian Literature, which immediately preceded volumes V and VI of the Oxford Ibsen, the only two volumes yet available. Rather than make a firm line of demarcation between the two projects, I should prefer to consider first McFarlane the critic, wherever the criticism may appear, and then McFarlane the editor/ translator.
Book Reviews
Authors: Lesage Laurent , White Kenneth , Dickinson Leon
Published: April 2013

Leonard Cabell Pronko,The World Of Jean Anouilh, reviewed by Laurent Lesage

Thomas Bishop, Pirandello And The French Theater, reviewed by Kenneth S. White

by Walter J. Meserve ed.,The Complete Plays Of W. D. Howells, reviewed by Leon T. Dickinson
Stoppard's Arcadia: Research, Time, Loss
Authors: Kramer Prapassaree , Kramer Jeffrey
Published: April 2013

The implicit scorecard runs something like this: on the one side is the prelapsarian world — Arcadia, Eden — linked to the ordered, geometric gardens of the Age of Enlightenment, dominated by Euclidean forms, the product of confidence in reason bred of the triumph of the Newtonian world view, a confidence which finds its apogee in Laplace's boast that all future events in this perfect, deterministic, clockwork universe would be perfectly transparent to an observer of sufficient knowledge and acumen, and that even the past could in principle be recaptured. In opposition to this is the fallen world, linked to the new "picturesque" gardens of the dawn of Romanticism, with their attempts to capture natural forms, product of that loss of faith in reason and order which seems vindicated by the breakdown in the Newtonian clockwork discerned in the laws of thermodynamics and in chaos theory, which open up a world of randomness and decay in which perhaps neither past nor future will be there for us — all beginning with a carnal embrace, and devolving into academic disputes.
Some Defining Characteristics of Australian Aboriginal Drama
Authors: Carol Denis
Published: April 2013

In the past two decades, the Aboriginals comprised less than 2 per cent of the Australian population, but their artistic contributions to the newly emerged "multiculturalism" have been during this time out of all proportion to their numbers. The 1967 referendum, which marked the end of the "protection" and "assimilation" eras, gave Aboriginals voting rights and "limited self-management," and it also marked the resurgence of Aboriginal culture.
Coming Out in The Room: Joe Orton's Epigrammatic Re/Vision of Harold Pinter's Menace
Authors: Coppa Francesca
Published: April 2013

What interests me is Orton's evocation of the Telegraph reader: the events of Ruffian are not "realistic" but journalistic. The "truth" he is insisting upon is not to be found in reality, but in the newspapers; not in anything resembling "life", but in a certain kind of text. And, in fact, this is the crucial fact of Orton's work — its evocation of texts and textuality, its acknowledgment of the part language plays in creating the world. Orton's understanding and manipulation of that language is at the center of his plays; it is, roughly speaking, what his plays are about.
The Daughter's Double Bind: The Singleparent Family as Cultural Analogue in Two Turn-of-the-Century Dramas
Authors: Lingard Lorelei
Published: April 2013

It may seem surprising how frequently single-parent families are found in plays written at the tum of the twentieth century. The number of plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Strindberg, and Shaw that involve single-parent families is remarkable, particularly as the issue of single parenthood itself rarely surfaces in the action. But upon examination, we can see how these fictional families often reflect the social dynamic of their era. As we encounter Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler, Peer Gynt, the Prozorov sisters, the children of Mother Courage, Grusha's son, Miss Julie, and the daughters of Heartbreak House, the effect of the single-parent family is an important but implicit part of the action. These plays are not "about" the particular dynamics and politics of the single-parent family; indeed, the family make up seems almost accidental, not essential to the plot. It is, however, a critical part of the symbolic structure of the play.
Three Tutorial Plays: The Lesson, The Prince of Naplesand Oleanna
Authors: Walker Craig Stewart
Published: April 2013

If the discovery that the tutorial relationship provides a rich field for dramatic conflict must be ascribed, the credit probably belongs to Jakob Lenz, whose play, Der Hofmeister or The Tutor (1774), was a sort of grotesque contemporary reworking of the Abelard and Heloise story. Yet despite that early start, the idea seems to belong more typically to the late twentieth century, when the explosion of information had made the tutorial relation more central to cultural continuity. The question of how to think about one's relation to society had then become more complex, interwoven as it was with the question of one's capacity for absorbing the modem diffusion of human projects, and consequently the intermediary tutor had become as seemingly indispensable to the age of information as the priest had been to an earlier age. This paper examines the degree to which the parallel structures of three late twentieth-century plays featuring students and teachers, Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson, George F. Walker's The Prince of Naples, and David Mamet's Oleanna, are used to dramatize three distinct moments of cultural tension.
Nostalgic Rapture: Interpreting Moral Commitments in David Hare's Drama
Authors: Su John
Published: April 2013

A deep, if problematic, nostalgia for the Great Britain of World War II suffuses the work of British playwright David Hare. Susan Traherne's exuberant cry at the end of Plenty, "There will be days and days and days like this," exemplifies Hare's troubled nostalgia: the promise of social equality and national renewal with the war's end presented as the final memory of a fragmenting psyche. Hare identifies himself both personally and artistically in terms of World War II: "I was born in 1947, and it makes me sad to think that mine may be the last generation to care about this extraordinary time in English history .... I must also, if I am honest, admit that the urge to write about it came ... from a romantic feeling for the period." Such a sentimental stance is interesting considering the importance Hare's work places on political engagement in the present. Hare's plays directly or indirectly examine how the post-war promise of "Plenty" did not materialize as the unity against Hitler during the war failed to translate into unity in reconstruction during peace. Characters in Hare's drama seek something to which they can commit themselves even as they desperately stave off fears that their institutions are no longer worth the commitment. Neither the contemporary political Right nor Left offers the sense of mission shared across class lines during the war. Within this context the nostalgic past offers a mode of interpreting the present, a source for the moral framework Hare's characters find so lacking in British society. This nostalgic framework demands faithfulness or constancy to a vision of the past against a contemporary world given to expediency. Individual moral action is determined through emulating role models of the longed for past. The crucial question. however, is to what extent can a nostalgic vision of a Britain that perhaps never was provide a moral structuring principle allowing the possibility of right action in the present; more pointedly, can a moral response prove an adequate solution to what Hare has cast as political problems?
What is a Birth Astride a Grave?: Ohio Impromptu as Zen Koan
Authors: Kundert-Gibbs John
Published: April 2013

When, after the approximately ten minutes of static, nearly motionless monologue which comprises Ohio Impromptu, we hear R pronounce "Nothing is left to tell," it is quite apparent that in this, one of Samuel Beckett's last plays, the author has taken yet another step toward the zero point of "lessness" (to use his own term) to which he had been striving in his late works. In previous plays like Footfalls, we can see a "winding down" of motion and interaction as May and V begin with dialogue and fairly consistent movement, only to (d)evolve into monologue, then silence and stillness in the final blank tableau. In Ohio Impromptu, however, the playas a totality apparently eliminates nearly all motion and interaction between characters. Two characters, owning only the titles Land R, simply sit, R reading a story from a "worn volume" of two other, implicitly related characters who eventually sit and read from a "worn volume" themselves. In this quiet, "Noh-like" play, the only motion and interaction we see for most of the play are L's knocks on the table at which they sit, which cause R to repeat the last sentence from the book he reads.
Nowhere Man and the Twentieth-Century Cowboy: Images of Identity and American History in Sam Shepard's True West
Authors: Williams Megan
Published: April 2013

He appears from nowhere. Kicking up dust on the edge of some border or frontier, he walks out of the desert with a long, bowlegged stride. Or he drives into a neon motel parking lot with a pickup truck and a gooseneck trailer. It doesn't particularly matter where he comes from. Odds are he will disappear again. His name is Travis, or Eddie, or Lee, or Sam, and he walks into the late twentieth century as Sam Shepard's recreation of the American Cowboy. For thirty years, critics have attempted to attach meaning to Shepard's plays and films. They have tried to place this man, this matinee idol who describes winning the Pulitzer Prize as being "like news of a terminal illness ... something to get through so you can move on," in literary and dramatic history. Some critics, like Herbert Blau, have seen Shepard as a recorder of a lost American Dream and of the "deficiencies of our [national] theater." Others, like David Savran, have found in Shepard "a critique of fundamental dramatic relationships."
Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race
Authors: Piggford George
Published: April 2013

Houston A. Baker, Jr. has rightly observed that "the radical chic denizens of Bohemia [and] the casual liberals of the academy" have never recognize, LeRoi Jones 's/Amiri Baraka's achievement as a playwright and a poet because his "brilliantly projected conception of black as country — a separatl and progressive nation with values antithetical to those of white America — stands in marked contrast to the ideas set forth by Baldwin, Wright, Ellison and others in the fifties." That is, according to the integrationist politics that continue to dominate discussions of race in the United States, what we might in the 1990s call the "African-American problem" is indeed seen as the, African-American's problem to examine and solve, not the white's. Baraka's Black Power political agenda, which perceives the United States as a society at least as black as it is white, a country built on "oppression and destruction," stands in marked contrast to the general integrationist bent of American racial politics. The call to revolutionary action inscribed into his drama demands a rethinking of both the American social system and the ways that it is typically examined in the generally liberal critical discourses of the predominantly white academy.
Beyond Poststructuralism: Theory of Character, the Personae of Modem Drama, and the Antinomies of Critical Theory
Authors: Richardson Brian
Published: April 2013

During the past few years, a new character type seems to have been added to the traditional figures of the miser, the femme fatale, and the braggart soldier. I am referring to the figure of the socio-Iinguist who specializes in cross-cultural or (cross-gender) miscommunication. As Deborah Tannen has pointed out, such characters have recently appeared in Wayne Wang's film, Chan Is Missing, Glen Merzer's play Taking Comfort, and David Carkeet's novel, The Full Catastrophe.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Pottie Lisa
Published: April 2013

The primary objective of the annual bibliography remains unchanged in this issue, which 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 BUchner) 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).
Misrepresentation and Miscegenation: Reading the Racialized Discourse of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire
Authors: Crandell George
Published: April 2013

Audiences and readers familiar with the plays of Tennessee Williams recognize immediately in the voice, the inflection, and the idiom of characters such as Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, and Big Daddy Pollitt, a language variety that distinguishes the South from other regions of the United States. What is no less obvious, but seldom noted, is the apparent absence of African American voices from this otherwise realistically depicted discourse community.
Visions of the Sightless in Friel's Molly Sweeney and Synge's The Well of the Saints
Authors: Upton Carol-Anne
Published: April 2013

Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel and The Well of the Saints by John Millington Synge, though separated by almost ninety years in their composition. bear a number of remarkable similarities. Not surprisingly, both plays are set in rural Ireland — Synge's in "[s]ome lonely mountainous district in the east of lreland," a harsh yet mystical place, and Friel's in the now familiar "remote Ballybeg" of Donegal, a symbolic borderland of north and south.
The Failed Words of Brian Friel
Authors: Krause David
Published: April 2013

I want to begin by talking about words and how they are necessary on the page in order to succeed on the stage. In the summer of 1994 Redmond O'Hanlon, a lecturer at University College, Dublin, joined the chorus of Irish critics who had attacked the Abbey Theatre's recent revival of The Doctor's Dilemma as an illustration of how the excessively "wordy" Bernard Shaw might be more of a bore than a genius in the theatre. "Words, words, words," Dr. O'Hanlon was reported as saying in the Irish Times of 20 July 1994 when asked why Shaw's supposedly dated plays have remained a valid subject for academic study if not for stage production: "Traditionally," he said, "academics find it very hard to deal with a text as a performance text. They prefer to approach it as a literary text and therefore Shaw has plenty for them. They are terrified of the notion that a play text is a very incomplete thing, and that it's just a scenario for a performance. Most academics can't deal with that. They prefer words that can stand up on their own, far away from the stage."
God and the Owls: The Sacred and the Profane in Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers
Authors: McDonough Carla
Published: April 2013

Adrienne Kennedy has commented about her 1965 work The Owl Answers that it is her favorite play, even though it has been overshadowed by the 1964 work Funnyhouse of a Negro. She has also quoted Joseph Papp as commenting that Owl is her best-written play. Despite Kennedy's interest in the play, and its own merits, Owl has not received as much attention as has her breakthrough play Funnyhouse, although it treats similarly provocative issues of gender, race, and identity. Except for Robert L. Tener's discussion of it, Owl is usually treated in passing in conjunction with several of Kennedy's plays, such as Funnyhouse. A MovieSlar Has 10 Star in Black and While, Lesson in a Dead Language, A Rat's Mass, or the play with which Owl was originally coupled for performance, A Beast StOlY. The most extensive critical examinations of Owl thus far, besides Tener's, have appeared in articles by Elin Diamond, Susan E. Meigs, Rosemary Curb, and Kimberly Benston, and book chapters about Kennedy by Marc Robinson and Linda Kintz. Most of these discussions note the mergings and fracturings of identity (or of "identification," as Diamond discusses) within the characters of this drama. While Kintz examines the effects of "the myth of purity" on Clara's subjectivity, Benston discusses Kennedy's style of theater, its use of symbolism and its "psychological mode," especially in regard to its effects on the audience. For those readers/viewers already familiar with Funnyhouse, it is immediately clear when examining The Owl Answers that it explores some of the same terrain in that the main character, a young woman, is tom between conflicting desires for acceptance in the white world and her mixed-racial heritage. Curb sums up the duality of the fragmented identity that torments Clara in Owl as being that between the Virgin Mary self and the Owl self, where the owl represents "her black, African, Negro side and her evil, sensual, bestial female side."
Brechtian Sexual Politics in the Plays of Howard Barker
Authors: Gallant Desmond
Published: April 2013

Bertolt Brecht's impact on the contemporary vision of theatre is widespread. This includes American feminist theatre, which has identified its development with Brechtian methodology — "Individual playwrights, feminist theatre groups, and other women who have assumed leadership roles in the contemporary theatre have linked their work with Brecht's in a variety of ways” — and contemporary German playwrights such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose "place in the line of haters of traditional theatre can be seen in his affinity with early Brecht," and Heiner Müller, Peter Hacks, and Helmut Baierl, who Rolf Rohmer says could be considered as "Brecht's disciples" whose "style and method of playwriting were — however individual and different — unmistakably Brechtian." Brecht has shown himself to be most influential, however, with regard to British playwriting. Many British playwrights working today show at least some sign of having been swayed by the waves and ripples of Brecht's theatrical armada. Whether it be in structural design, political ideology, or social philosophy, and whether it be conscious or subconscious, the effect Brecht has had is clear.
The Sense of an Ending: The Representation of Homosexuality in Brendan Behan's The Hostage
Authors: Adams Ann Marie
Published: April 2013

Critics have long pondered the effectiveness of The Hostage's denouement. Brendan Behan obviously needed the secret policemen to enter the fray and cause the senseless death of the sacrificial Leslie, but why did he specifically use Rio Rita, Princess Grace, and Mulleady as an ironic deus ex machina? As Bert Cardullo notes, many critics see this constructed ending as "cheap" — "cheap in the sense that it suddenly negates the homosexual relationship between Grace and Rita, out of which the playwright has got much theatrical mileage, and cheap in the literal sense that it removes the need to hire extra actors to portray the police." While the economics of this recycling cannot be denied, it would do a disservice to the text to claim that the constructed ending "negates" Grace's and Rita's relationship. If anything, the chaotic close more clearly delineates Grace's and Rita's proclivities as well as lengthening the "mileage" the author got from this theme. Like many other "closet dramas" of its age, The Hostage, through its very use of homosexual characters, serves to reinforce many common tacit assumptions about homosexuality, as well as to foreground the nature of its practitioners.
Book Reviews
Authors: Nadon Daniel-Raymond , Deeney John , Foulkes Richard , Northof Anne , Cocalis Susan
Published: April 2013

Nora M. Alter, Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage, reviewed by Daniel-Raymond Nadon

Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, reviewed by John F. Deeney

Michael R. Booth and Joel H. Kaplan, eds., The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, reviewed by Richard Foulkes

Finlay Donesky, David Hare: Moral and Historical Perspectives, reviewed by Anne F. Northof

Michelle M. Mattson, Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Construction of a Political Aesthetic, reviewed by Susan L. Cocalis