bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
López Rubio and the Well-Made Metaplay
Authors: Zatlin Phyllis
Published: April 2013

Spanish author Jose López Rubio (b. 1903) was living in Hollywood, writing screenplays for Fox Films, when he started drafting Celas del aire in 1935. The work remained unfinished until 1949, opened in Madrid in 1950, and proved to be the greatest commercial success, both in Spain and abroad, of the playwright's long and distinguished career. Following staged readings by the Intiman Theatre Company in Seattle in 198 I and The Writers Theatre in New York City in 1982, the López Rubio comedy achieved its first American stage production in 1986. The translation by Marion Peter Holt, titled In August We Play the Pyrenees, fittingly opened on 5 August and ran for five weeks at the Shady Lane Playhouse in Marengo, Illinois. As one reviewer commented, "It is a wonder something so clever took so long to cross the Atlantic . ... In August We Play the Pyrenees is a perfect diversion for a lazy summer evening."
Alternative Visions of Blanche DuBois: Uta Hagen and Jessica Tandy in A Streetcar Named Desire
Authors: Spector Susan
Published: April 2013

Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the great roles for an actress in the American repertory. Blanche spends more time onstage than any other character in the play; she is also a richly complex protagonist representing both abstractly civilized and basically physical womanhood in a society that rejects any comfortable fusion of these qualities. Like Hamlet for the actor, Blanche encourages an actress to communicate her vision of the artistic temperament in conflict with a hostile environment; individual performers have been able to represent this conflict differently depending on their own sensibilities and styles. The fust two women to play Blanche were Jessica Tandy and Uta Hagen. They offer remarkable examples of the role's potential for allowing different actresses to generate unique characterizations from the same basic material.
"Bewaltigung der Vergangenheit" or "Uberwaltigung der Befangenheit" — Nazism and the War in Post —War German Theatre
Authors: Patterson Michael
Published: April 2013

Half a century after the outbreak of what Brecht was fond of calling "Hitler's war," we can look back and see that modem German playwriting was debilitated for some time by an almost obsessive if understandable concern with the recent past.
Violence and Identity in Northern Ireland: Graham Reid's The Death of Humpty Dumpty
Authors: Pilkington Lionel
Published: April 2013

Graham Reid is one of the best known and most prolific of contemporary playwrights writing of the current crisis in Northern Ireland. Moreover, Reid's early stage plays, The Death of Humpty Dumpty (1979), Dorothy (1980), The Closed Door (1980), and The Hidden Curriculum (1982), show a preoccupation with an arresting and widely accepted view of the crisis: the terrifying effect of paramilitary violence on individuals whose only relationship to the conflict is a relationship of fear. This article exantines the first and most enthusiastically received of these plays, The Death of Humpty Dumpty
Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang
Authors: Skloot Robert
Published: April 2013

In the last several years, theatre journals have given an unusual amount of attention to the politics of theatre, Modern Drama among them.' It would seem that theatre scholarship has once more turned some of its best energy to thinking about what ideologies embedded in content and detennined by form tell us about our political selves. At its simpilist, recent scholarship is providing a forum for the way in which theatre can join other disciplines in scrutinizing its received traditions and understandings with the objective of showing how theatre, in talking about itself (although, one hopes, not to itself), can reconfigure itself and its society. Hayden White's words seem apt here: "every discourse is always as much about discourse itself as it is about the objects that make up its subject matter."
"More than Just a Little Chekhovian": The Sea Gull as a Source for the Characters in The Glass Menagerie
Authors: Gunn Drewey Wayne
Published: April 2013

For nearly fifty years one of Tennessee Williams's abiding passions was his love for Chekhov. In 1979 he claimed, " I have not been subjected to any influence but that of Chekhov in my profession." Above all, he consistently praised The Sea Gull. In a letter to a friend in 1950 he called it "the greatest of all modern plays." And in his 1972 Memoirs he was willing to admit only a play of Brecht's into the same august company. Williams's infatuation began in the summer of [935 when he first read The Sea Gull, as well as The Cherry Orchard and some of Chekhov's short stories and letters. For the plays he probably read the translations of Constance Garnett available . in Modern Library. Although he did not see it, the spring [938 Theatre Guild production of The Sea Gull, using a translation by fellow Mississippian Stark Young and starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, undoubtedly drew his attention.' At the time, Williams was finishing his studies at the University of Iowa and was immersed in all aspects of theatre.
David Mamet and Ben Jonson: City Comedy Past and Present
Authors: Bruster Douglas
Published: April 2013

American critics often react chauvinistically to David Mamet's work, a response prompted, perhaps, by a perceived lack of a premier national playwright. More than one critic has revelled in Mamet's sense for Americana, echoing Jack Kroll's assessment of the dramatist as "a language playwright" whose "ear is tuned to an American frequency." And while the frequently guttural dialogue of plays like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross has drawn its share of critical censure, more often than not Mamet has been lauded for situations, characters, and speech patterns that his champions are quick to label as quintessentially American. Praise of this kind, however, tends to institutionalize his work, removing the sting from Mamet's satire as it simultaneously promotes the cultural aspect of his aesthetic achievement and disassociates itself from the brutal reality of his dramatic world.
"Coming Down in the World": Motifs of Benign Descent in Three Plays by Terence Rattigan
Authors: Gross Robert
Published: April 2013

Although Terence Rattigan first gained recognition for his commercially successful high comedies, French without Tears (1936), While the Sun Shines (1943) and Love in Idleness (1944), the postwar period showed him gaining critical and popular acclaim for realistic psychological dramas. His three greatest successes in the West End, racking up runs of over five hundred performances apiece, were The Deep Blue Sea (1952), Separate Tables (1954), and Ross (1960). All three reflect the changing identity of Great Britain in the postwar period, and address the anxieties of the theatregoing public during that era.
At the End of The Great Radical Tradition? Recent Plays by Howard Brenton
Authors: Bennett Susan
Published: April 2013

In 1983, in an interview to coincide with the premiere of his play The Genius, Howard Brenton declared that he was "a member of a smaller and smaller constituency, the great radical tradition. " Now, after a decade of Conservative government in Britain, that great radical tradition has surely seen even the possibility of oppositional theatre brought into question. A recent history of British alternative theatres called itself" something of an obituary notice too." Elsewhere, the conclusion has been that contemporary theatre is "effectively in collusion with today's ideological climate. "
Marriage, Metaphysics and The Lady from the Sea Problem
Authors: Fuchs Elinor
Published: April 2013

There has always been a Lady from the Sea problem: for a drama of the immaterial, it is too material. Allegorical/realistic, philosophical/psychological: to critics, it has always been too much of the one to be enough of the other. The task of the more recent Ibsen scholars has been to redeem the play by finding a reading that accounts for the two tones of the play, the two water levels (open sea and carp pond) of Ibsen's dramaturgical landscape. But that continues to be difficult, for no matter what reading over the past one hundred years, one thing has always bothered critics. As Henry James grumbled, and Francis Fergusson agreed nearly seventy-five years later, "one winces considerably" when faced with those dratted "pert daughters." (Fergusson staged it, and had first-hand experience that the daughters don't play.)
On the Meaning of Performance in Samuel Beckett's Not I
Authors: McCarthy Gerry
Published: April 2013

It is now commonplace to remark on Beckett's penetrating use of the dramatic medium. While critics may disagree over the significance of his effects, they are united in identifying their dependence on an exact use of the medium, and repeatedly warn the self-important director against the perils of an interpretation which distorts the means of performance. There is another side to this exigency. If the performers trust the dramatist, the apparent restrictions of his stage idiom allow an intense development of specific means of performance. They give the performer an indicator of style, the feel for "how it goes." Beckett's own widely quoted distinction between "fundamental sounds" and "overtones" encourages a critical interest in the execution of the works and in the way in which they are so intelligible in terms of an actor's physical performance, yet resistant to the explications of the critic. It may well be that the sense of "how it goes" is a good deal less impressive than scholarly hermeneutics, but as Susan Sontag persuasively argues, criticism, for its part, has not yet begun to come to terms with the sensual values of performance, and always risks distorting the meaning of works of art by divorcing sense and sensation. Among Beckett's theatre pieces none affords as intense a value to sensation as Not I.
Defining Difference: Timberlake Wertenbaker's Drama of Language, Dispossession and Discovery
Authors: Rabey David
Published: April 2013

Timberlake Wertenbaker's plays range from the domestic to the mythic within the duration of each single drama, as we witness the explosion of institutionalised terms of reference (identified with the dispossession and restriction of human potential) by public experience, and individual communication of that experience. Like Howard Barker and David Rudkin, she dramatises crises in definition and the existential compulsion to discover individual means of expression. Characteristically she locates the seeds of crisis in consequences of patriarchal-imperial impositions of definition; her plays strive towards the discovery of respect for human variety which surpasses the fearfulness of egocentricity. Individuals are challenged to perceive beyond restrictive or bloodied images of a future to discover a new personal idealism in enquiry, associated with the instinct of the child. Wertenbaker depicts paternalistic restrictions of responsibility, as manifested in the dispossession of speech as a right to selfhood, and the contrary reactions of marginalised characters, sometimes childlike in their eagerness and initial naIvete, attempting to construct and express their own senses of import and possibility in imaginative terms which, in the conclusions of her mature plays The Grace of Mary Traverse and The Love of the Nightingale, reach towards the poetically visionary in their vindications of metaphorical questings for meanings.
The Plague and its Powers in Artaudian Theatre
Authors: Goodall Jane
Published: April 2013

Artaud's essay "The Theatre and the Plague" begins with an account of a dream-vision experienced by Saint-Remys, Viceroy. of Sardinia, in 1720: [...] In "assisting" at this apocalyptic spectacle, the dreamer is essentially in the position of any audience member in the Theatre of Cruelty. He knows the dangers to which he is witness cannot kill him, but he realises too "that the will operates in them to the point of absurdity, to the point of the negation of possibility, to the point of a kind of transmutation of the lie from which you can remake the truth" and this realisation teaches him to act in defiance of destiny and tum the fatal course of events which was set according to his premonition.
Tragedy in a Postmodern Vein Ugo Betti Our Contemporary?
Authors: Arnett Lloyd
Published: April 2013

"The years: 1941-1953. The form: Tragedy. The setting: undetermined sites on the landscape of the twentieth century. The style: Symbolist-Realism. The principal dramatic technique: postmodern dissociation.

Theatre-goers of the last decade have watched the growing phenomenon of the postmodern aesthetic as it has infected the production styles of stages in New York and Minneapolis and at whatever outposts the imitators of Foreman, Schechner and Breuer can be found . As with every theatrical period, when lack of innovative writing leaves directors twiddling their thumbs or attempting avant garde productions of classics, postrnodernism has left the philistines puzzled and aficionados uncomfortable.
Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy and the Use of Music in Contemporary Irish Drama
Authors: White Harry
Published: April 2013

The late John Huston's recent (1988) film adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead clarifies the prominence of music a~ an imaginative resource in modem Irish literature. The succession of musical events contained within Joyce's story and vividly represented in Huston's film might be taken to summarize ways in which music is repeatedly drawn upon by Irish writers as a means of imagining the past and modifying the present. Joyce's use of music has, to be sure, long been acknowledged and documented, but the role of music in modem Irish literature has been otherwise little explored.' The process by which Joyce accumulates musical imagery in The Dead, for example, wherein the varied musical experiences of the story (opera, salon music, and so on) gradually narrow to the prepotent impact of The Lass of Aughrim, a ballad which explicitly encodes the central concern of Joyce's fiction in this instance, is one which may be related to other, similar processes in Irish fiction and drama after Joyce. Music attains to a structural significance on occasion in contemporary Irish literature, above all, perhaps, in the theatre. In this paper, it may prove useful to consider some ways in which this significance is attained in the work of rwo Irish dramatists who dominate the contemporary theatrical landscape: Brian Friel and Thomas Murphy.
A Novelist Finds the Bare Bones of a Play
Authors: Oats Joyce Carol
Published: April 2013

Adapting fiction for the stage is an extremely difficult task , though it's hard to say why. The written word and the spoken word are both words — aren't they?
Modern Theatre and Melville's Moby-Dick: Writing and Sounding the Whale
Authors: Kubiak Anthony
Published: April 2013

Even in a special "drama and the novel" issue, the reader will no doubt find it strange to encounter what she encounters here: in a publication devoted to modem theatre , a piece that discusses a nineteenth-century novel — neither drama, nor modern, certainly not theatre — a mere essay surfacing among scholarly articles.
Nathalie Sarraute: How To Do Mean Things With Words
Authors: Miller Judith
Published: April 2013

"How could we live if we took umbrage at every little phrase, if we didn't quite reasonably allow words, after all insignificant and anodyne, just to pass on by, if we created a huge story out of so little, out of less than nothing?" This question, posed by the chatty narrator in one of Nathalie Sarraute's meditations in L'Usage de la parole (1980), ironically underscores the focus of all of Sarraute's work, for she has spent a fifty-year writing career creating "stories" (or better, "dramas") out of what would appear to be very little indeed. At eighty-nine, with eight novels, six theater pieces, a volume of critical essays, two volumes of short prose pieces — of which her 1939 Tropismes is the best known — and an astonishing recent autobiography (1983), she can lay claim to being one of the great writers of twentieth-century France. Her works display a degree of intertexuality which is extraordinary, even in a century in which intertextuality is both an artistic and critical norm. This obsessional return especially to the same images and rhythms is meant to come to grips with the "real" drama underlying surface
Staging Writing or the Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras
Authors: Papin Liliane
Published: April 2013

Marguerite Duras's plays have been produced all over the world. She has herself directed many of them and has never ceased writing for the theater. Among the numerous other directors of her theater work. one finds the names of Peter Brook, lean-Louis Barrault and Claude Regy. Her fascination with the theater and the quality of her work are unquestionable. Yet, in her critical essays or in comments to journalists, Duras has often belittled her own stage productions and theater in general. In reference to India Song, which she originally wrote as a stage project for Peter Brook but which she then decided instead to produce as a film, she justified her choice by stating that "film is more flexible (malleable) and less burdened by the weight of the actor." For anyone interested in the relationship between performance and text. however, this very ambivalence is well worth studying and can be most enlightening. It offers a rare opportunity to observe first-hand an unfolding process through which Duras endeavors to resolve a dilemma which is at the core of contemporary reflection on the nature of "representation. Duras's constant movement from one form to another, her shifting back and forth between fiction, theater, film , radio and television, illuminates the direction and evolution of a writer who, beyond the confines of "genre," has played with the given limits of each form and pushed those limits to their extremes. In this respect, she is probably one of the most representative authors of our time, an age characterized by the blurring of clear boundaries among genres.
Sicilian Themes and the Restructured Stage: The Dialectic of Fiction and Drama in the Work of Luigi Pirandello
Authors: Paolucci Ann
Published: April 2013

When, in 1923, at the age of 56, Luigi Pirandello won European acclaim with the Pitoeff production of Six Characters ill Search of an Author (the same play that had been booed and had caused a riot at its premiere in Rome two years earlier), the Italian writer had already published six of his seven novels, several scattered volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. His reputation as a writer of fiction was already established when he turned to drama; and although he never gave up writing novels and short stories (and was to convert many of these into plays in the years that followed), Pirandello had clearly shifted his sights and direction by 1923. For the rest of his life his artistic priorities were to be focused on theater.
Book Reviews
Authors: Leland Charles , Fisher James , Parker Brian , Tailman Ken , Gerould Daniel , Bucholic Maria , Corballis Richard , Schuler Chatherine
Published: April 2013

Per Schelde and Barbara ass Leavy, Ibsen's Forsaken Merman: Folklore in the Late Plays, reviewed by Charles Leland

Eugene Van Erven, Radical People's Theatre, reviewed by James Fisher

Philip C. Kolin, American Playwrights Since 1945: A Guide to Scholarship, Criticism, and Performance, reviewed by Brian Parker

Andrew K. Kennedy, Samuel Beckett, reviewed by Ken Tallman

J.A.N. Curtis, Bulgakov's Last Decade: The Writer as Hero, reviewed by Daniel Gerould

E.J. Czerwinski, Contemporary Polish Theater and Drama (1956-1984), reviewed by Maria Bucholic

Richard Stourac And Kathleen Mccreery., Theatre as Weapon: Worker's Theatre in the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain, 1917-[934, reviewed by Catherine Schuler

Veronica Kelly, ed.,Louis Nowra, reviewed by Richard Corballis

May-Brit Akerholt, Patrick White, reviewed by Richard Corballis

Paul McGillick, Jack Hibberd, reviewed by Richard Corballis

Otrun Zuber-Skerritt, ed.,David Williamson, reviewed by Richard Corballis
Our Country's Good: Theatre, Colony and Nation in Wertenbaker's Adaptation of The Playmaker
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: April 2013

In 1988, Max Stafford–Clark, the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, approached Timberlake Wertenbaker and asked her to write a play based on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker. Wertenbaker accepted the commission, writing Our Coumry's Good' which, like its source, deals with historically based material: the penal colony in Sydney Cove (Australia) where, in 1789, a group of convicts managed by Second–Lieutenant Ralph Clark produced George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer in celebration . of the birthday of King George m. While the themes of prison, of colony and, consequently, of the English nation are common to works, Wertenbaker's adaptation is concerned primarily with theatre as a means of liberating people, because it offers them the chance to envision a future in which they are free, and of creating a community of players which serves as a paradigm for this utopian society. This focus on theatre and community marks a shift from Keneally's novel which is concerned with colony and, by extension, with relations of power which butrress the colonial enterprise. This radical shift occurs because Wertenbaker's adaptation simplifies many of the characters, most notably Ralph Clark and Arthur Phillip, the Govemor–inChief of the colony of New South Wales. In The Playmaker, Clark's and Phillip's personal relationships with the colonized – the convicts and the aboriginals – are extensions of their public roles as officers who are the agents of colonization; in Our Country's Good, both are represented as essentially good men under whose benevolent aegis the convicts produce the play, create a community and recover their humanity which gives them true freedom.
O'Neill the "Novelist"
Authors: Berlin Normand
Published: April 2013

Martin Lamm's assertion — back in 1953, the year of O'Neill's death — that Eugene O'Neill's "gift is for narrative" pinpoints an important aspect of O'Neill's dramatic art; and Larnm's belief that "the one-act plays of his youth are evocative short stories, and his mammoth dramas are half-novels," has received well-documented support from Peter Egri thirty-five years later.' Both of these fine critics, and many others in between and since. recognize the novelistic tendencies of O'Neill and suggest how these tendencies affect O'Neill's dramatic art. I wish to pursue this idea further in order to make the claim that O'Neill's novelistic impulse carried him too far away from his instinctive theatrical strengths, and that only by tempering this novelistic impulse was he able to create his finest work. One should applaud his boldness in attempting to take drama in new directions, but one should acknowledge the failure of his attempts to be a novelist/dramatist. I believe O'Neill finally recognized this failure, and by subduing the novelist in himself the dramatist of the last great plays emerged.
Reading as Theatre: Understanding Defamiliarization in Beckett's Art
Authors: Abbott H. Porter
Published: April 2013

To borrow an understatement from Charles R. Lyons, " the recited discourses in Beckett's late stage plays overpower the dramatised action." Expecting to see a play, we hear fragments of a story. The inversion of genre expectations is so insistent that part of the experience one undergoes is a genre question: Is this theatre or is it (again to use Lyons's words), "prose fiction enclosed in a theatrical conceit?" One object of this essay is to make the case that this development in Beckett's work for the stage rests on the insight that reading itself is theatrical. But my principal object is to enlarge our understanding of what motivates Beckett's way of making strange — of which the reading/theatre fusion of the late plays is a highly characteristic example — and to suggest terms in which to frame that understanding. I shall focus on Beckett's play about reading, Ohio Impromptu.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

The present annual bibliography follows the basic principles and limitations described in the June 1984 issue. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of dramatic literature and, to a lesser extent, of theatre history. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modem world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1899 (plus Blichner and Becque) and influential theatre figures other than performers. Reviews, reprinted books, unpublished theses , and graduate-student periodicals are generally excluded. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to my Modem Drama Scholarship and Criticism 1966-1980: An International Bibliography (University of
Bad Dressmakers and Well-Arranged Worlds: Fashion and Society Comedy
Authors: Kaplan Joal
Published: April 2013

Indeed, if we note that the fashion model was herself a relatively recent invention, the widespread employment of actors for advertising ends may be seen as a calculated response to the wood and wax dummies still used to display clothes in more conservative establishments.
Beyond Damascus: an Examination of Strindberg's The Great Highway as a Last Play
Authors: Able Douglas
Published: April 2013

Even a cursory reading of The Great Highway gives the strong impression that it is very consciously and deliberately written as a last play; there is a clear sense of looking, through the eyes of the Hunter, back at the past and engaging in a final attempt to make sense of what has previously been experienced.
The Hermeneutic Motion in Brian Friel's Translations
Authors: Smith Robert
Published: April 2013

"I keep returning to the same texts: the letters of John O'Donovan, Colby's Memoir, A Paper Landscape by John Andrews, The Hedge-Schools of Ireland by Dowling, Steiner's After Babel." This record of reading, from the "Sporadic Diary" which Brian Friel kept while writing his play, Translations, indicates the central place which written texts and traditions occupy in this playwright's attempt to understand his relation to the past. He could not simply translate himself back into the pre-English environment in which the play is set. His sense of place, when he visited the site of the hedge-school at Urris, the model for the school in the play, was like that of' 'the ordinary British sappers" to a "remote, bleak, desolate strip of land attenuated between mountain and sea". Objectivity and detachment are, of course, the conditions of the scientific mapping of the world. More fundamentally, however, science builds its approach over an ontological "distance" which is a permanent condition of every effort to approach the past, the world, and others. "One aspect that keeps eluding me," Friel notes, is "the wholeness, the integrity, of that Gaelic past". Friel's reading witnesses to a distance which cannot be closed.
Two Opposite Animals: Structural Pairing in Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind
Authors: Lanier Gregory
Published: April 2013

Sam Shepard has said that his work "is all experimental. Experiment, by its very nature, has to do with risk. If there's no risk, there's no experiment. And every play's a risk." Although the dramatic risks that Shepard takes in A Lie of the Mind (1985) are not as flagrantly sensational as his pyrotechnic plotting in The Tooth of Crime (1972) or as his "fractured whole" characterization in Angel City (1976), Shepard here again challenges the audience to accept his transformation of conventional fanns into new dramatic structures. In A Lie of the Mind, Shepard uses structural pairing to transmute the conventions of realistic characterization and comic reconciliation into a drama that interweaves realism and mythic abstraction in order to expose the limits of category and genre.
Forgiveness in O'Neill
Authors: Costello Donald
Published: April 2013

On 22 July I94I, in Tao House, Eugene O'Neill inscribed to his wife Carlotta, on their twelfth wedding anniversary, his dedication to the autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night. "I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow," he wrote, "written in tears and blood." "You will understand," he continued, "I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play — write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones". He italicized the word "all" so as to make it clear that he included himself, along with father, mother, and brother, among those who needed pity and understanding and forgiveness. Those three words, and the order in which he wrote them, can help us understand an important O'Neill obsession, and his final reconciliation with life and art. Indeed, in retrospect, we can see that his quest for "pity" and then "understanding" and then "forgiveness" was his lifelong search, through his art, from first play until last. Especially perhaps in first and last.
The Antecedents of American Holocaust Drama and the Transformation of Werfel's Jacobowsky and the Colonel
Authors: Isser Edward
Published: April 2013

The Holocaust is an ineffable occurrence that defies the capabilities of the human imagination. Dramatic representations of the historical catastrophe must transform, or as Adorno has said, transfigure; the terror so that it can be endured by an audience. In the American theater this is usually accomplished by the imposition of melodramatic modes upon the historical model. Sententious messages, moral exemplars, uplifting endings, and heroic sacrifices are used to bring order out of the chaos; to make the unimaginable approachable and the unbearable manageable. Lawrence Langer refers to this as the Americanization of the Holocaust, and asserts that such representations "permit the imagination to cope with the idea of the Holocaust without forcing a confrontation with its grim details."
Blackmailed by Sex: Tennessee Williams and the Economics of Desire
Authors: Bruhm Steven
Published: April 2013

STEVEN BRUHM In 1951, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer published a book entitled Washington Confidential. One of its chapters, called "A Garden of Pansies," had a dire warning for patriotic Americans: "With more than 6,000 fairies in government offices, you may be concerned about the security of the country. Fairies are no more disloyal than the normal. But homosexuals are vulnerable, they can be blackmailed or influenced by sex more deeply than conventional citizens; they are far more intense about their love-life." Now, Lait and Mortimer have two problems here which, while not particular to McCarthy's America, are epitomized by it. The first is one of anonymity: 6,000 in office, they say, and "One cannot snoop at every desk and count people who appear queer. Some are deceptive to the uninitiated." And this anonymity poses the larger threat of potential blackmail: because homosexuals have a secret, they are willing to hide it at any cost. What's worse, they may be willing to sell the goods on someone else, if the price is right. Because that price is national security, the homosexual poses a threat to 1950S cold-war America that is unmatched in that country's history.
Talk and Dramatic Action in American Buffalo
Authors: King Thomas
Published: April 2013

An ancient anomaly haunts conversation about the theatre. The commonplace assumption is that action and words are irreconcilable. One either talks or acts, and generally action is thought to be superior to talk whether in the theatre or elsewhere. From the very beginning, however, the theatre has been a place where irreconcilable opposites reach an accommodation in a paradox that is fundamental; that is, in the theatre talk is action and action is talk.
Showdown at Culture Gap: Images of the West in the Plays of Shuji Terayama
Authors: Sorgenfrei Carol Fisher
Published: April 2013

Although the popular press recently announced the "discovery" of hanbei (Japanese anti-American sentiment) and kenbei, its more virulent, gut-level version, such attitudes are far from new. Japanese intellectuals and artists have suffered from an intensely paradoxical ambivalence toward "the Other" for at least 1500 years, ever since initial contact with China forced Japan to confront conflicting attitudes of cultural superiority and cultural indebtedness. It can be argued that Japanese intellectual history is a pendulum swinging wildly between the extremes of national self-aggrandizement and feelings of inferiority.
L'Oeil Ecoute: The Impact of Traditional Japanese Theatre on Postwar Western Performance
Authors: Gillespie John
Published: April 2013

When the Portuguese Jesuit Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549 and made for Europeans the startling discovery that the Japanese were civilized and intelligent, he planted the seed of Western interest in things Japanese. Indeed, the ensuing trade between Japan and Europe gradually pried Europeans away from an unctuous attachment to their own aesthetic standards as superior, and opened the way to an appreciation of Japanese art which at times has reached passionate proportions.
Book Reviews
Authors: Jones David Richard , Copeland Nancy
Published: April 2013

Natalie Crohn Schmitt, Artists and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature, reviewed by David Richard Jones

Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, reviewed by Nancy Copeland
Sada Yacco and Kawakami: Performers of Japonisme
Authors: Chiba Yoko
Published: April 2013

The successful premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado on 14 March 1885 at the Savoy in London was symbolic of the cultural milieu at that time in two ways: it marked a culmination of Japonisme, the influence of Japanese art which had been sweeping over Western countries from the mid–186os onwards, and the beginning of a new trend in the theatre arts reflecting this phenomenon. The dramatic expression of Japonisme was an overwhelmingly comical one, satirizing and travestying the "Japan craze." The Mikado set its tone.
Modem Chinese Drama and Its Western Models: A Critical Reconstruction of Chinese Subjectivity
Authors: Yan Haiping
Published: April 2013

The formation and development of modem Chinese spoken drama in the first half of the twentieth century has been intrinsically connected with the profound social and historical transformation of China through traumatic contact with the West. The Opium War in 1840, waged by the British government upon the Chinese Qing dynasty (1644- 1912) with the purpose of making China into a market for British capitalists, led to the Treaty of Nanjing, signed by defeated China in 1842, which legitimized British encroachment upon the Chinese economy and its political sovereignty. Other imperialist powers, such as France and Germany, followed this example; and by 1900, western industrial countries had established claims in 13 out of the 18 provinces of China. Confronted with this situation, some of China's educated elite became acutely aware of the immediate dangers to the nation's survival; leading Chinese writers were forced to recognize first, the necessity to appropriate significant aspects of western science, technology, and ideas, and second, the urgent need to reform China's dynastic political system to meet the demands of self-defense. For the purpose of promoting such a national reawakening, Kunqu (a type of Chinese opera from the South), Peking Opera, and various other Chinese traditional dramatic and ballad forms were used, among other types of media, to convey a sense of crisis and embody the message of reform.
Rewriting History on China's Stage in an Intercultural Context
Authors: Sun William , Fei Faye
Published: April 2013

Mao Zedong, a proclaimed Marxist historical materialist, stated in the 1940s: "History is created by the people. But on the stage of traditional theatre the people became dregs, whereas the dominating forces were noblemen and their ladies. This reversion of history [should be] re-reversed, so that the truth of history [could be] restored." Although Mao on this occasion was commenting on the reform of traditional Chinese theatre, such as Beijing opera whose repertory is based on ancient stories, he was never enthusiastic about the western-styled modem drama — his instruction to "re-reverse the reversion of history" has been widely applied to both. While noblemen, the almost inevitable choice for protagonists in historical drama, did not vanish from the theatre as Mao seems to have hoped, their traditional images were often altered. It was only in the 1980s that some artists, daring to question Mao's official interpretations of Chinese history, began to write history plays only for their relevance to contemporary life regardless of historical authenticity. Fascinated by the western artists' free adaptations of classics and writings about history recently introduced into China, a few went even further, incorporating ancient images freely in their experimental works.
Chinese Drama after the 1989 Crisis
Authors: Mackerras Colin
Published: April 2013

Politics has a strong impact on Chinese drama. At the end of 1978 a full meeting of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) introduced the period of reform and "opening to the outside world" (duiwai kaifang) under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. In most respects the new policies led to a substantial rise in the standard of living of the people and in the quality and breadth of their culture. Even so, playwrights, artists and intellectuals continued to strain at the restrictions which the CCP still imposed on their work; and there were repressive campaigns to hold them back, for instance the "campaign against spiritual pollution" in 1983 and "the campaign against bourgeois liberalization" at the beginning of 1987, when the liberal CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang was dismissed. In general these periods of greater restriction were followed by a continued and even expanded . liberalization of the intellectual atmosphere. However, Hu Yaobang's death in April 1989 led to enormous and persistent student demonstrations, culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 3–4 June 1989. The CCP claimed to have "quelled a counter-revolutionary rebellion," meaning that it believed it would have been overthrown but for this military action: a highly implausible interpretation, but one which has to be taken seriously in the light of events in Eastern Europe later that year. The 1989 crisis has been followed by an ideological crackdown of far greater proportions than any other in the 1980s; and although the situation has eased since then, it remains very much tenser and less open than during any part of the preceding decade.
The Anthropological Gaze and the Touristic Siting of Chinese America
Authors: Moy James
Published: April 2013

While late nineteenth-century America had yet to achieve the empire of some of its European counterparts, the American desire for this Imperialist gaze is clearly manifest in American institutions of the day. This essay will focus on the effect this gaze had on representations of Chineseness in the drama of the period and subsequent re-inscriptions of these into the cinema. In this regard, I will examine the evolution of the anthropological gaze which, while denying overt connection with empire, nonetheless allowed America to claim equal status in the community of Imperialistic Western powers, but under the sign of altruism. In turn this altruistic anthropological desire enslaved the Asian subject to yield a kind of stage character befitting the imperialistic gaze, now reconstituted as American.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles , Corman Linda
Published: April 2013

The present annual bibliography follows the basic principles and limitations described in the June 1984 issue. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of dramatic literature and, to a lesser extent, of theatre history. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modern world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1899 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential theatre figures other than performers. Reviews, reprinted books, unpublished theses, and graduate-student periodicals are generally excluded. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to Carpenter's Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism 1966- 1980: An International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press, 1986).
The Structure of Illusion in Genet's The Balcony
Authors: Rosen Carol
Published: April 2013

Although in fact a brothel is more likely to resemble a nondescript rooming house than an ornate pleasure dome, popular literature favors fancy rather than reality. And the brothel, an institution of tabooed sexuality, is an especially inviting premise, promising to substantiate forbidden dreams. So in fiction, heroes have been regularly seduced into submission and then metamorphosed into creatures of degenerate lust by vile temptresses (who occasionally sport hearts of gold). The Circean nighttown episode of Ulysses may be seen as the apotheosis of this fictive standard, for in Joyce's novel the brothel suggests a modem sexual mythology.
Ionesco's Berenger: Existential Philosopher or Philosophical Ironist?
Authors: Rigg Patricia
Published: April 2013

The four Berenger plays together present a central irony in the Berenger character- he enthusiastically imagines greatness for the human race while he is ironically skeptical that humanity, with all its finite limitations, can ever experience greatness to any degree. Sometimes Berenger's hopes take the form of social aesthetics, sometimes ideological and political reforms; sometimes he expresses faith in the transcendent powers of human love, sometimes in the ultimate spiritual worth of the human soul. Berenger endorses human potential, but this endorsement is always undermined by a subtle but pervasive undermining of potential, for although we do not see Berenger fail, we do not see him succeed either. We respond, thus, to the paradox which arises out of the ambiguity of success and failure, a paradox that demonstrates quite well the combination of Romanticism and irony which specifies Romantic or philosophical irony.
Being and Non-Being: The Other and Heterotopia in Hamletmachine
Authors: Dudley Joseph
Published: April 2013

Brian W. Aldiss, in his book This World and Nearer Ones, connects the temporal fragmentation of modern consciousness with the success of the Manhattan Project and the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The advent of the atomic bomb, Aldiss maintains, was an event which developed simultaneously on both macroscopic and microscopic levels, rupturing man's philosophical conception of himself in his world. On the public (macroscopic) level. the devastation caused by the bomb's usage could be glossed over by the sweeping generalities of political ideology, while on the private (microscopic) level, individuals were now burdened with an inescapable guilt resulting from the arrival of the "atomic age" and its effects on modern civilization.
Cruelty and Affirmation in the Postmodem Theater: Antonin Artaud and Hanoch Levin
Authors: Brown Erella
Published: April 2013

The absence of a chapter on theater in several major books on postmodernism suggest that drama's place in the debate regarding the relations between modernism and postmodernism remains open. This debate, which centers on the question of whether postmodernism represents a complete break with modernism, or is merely a radicalized form of modernist trends, has apparently been taciturn with respect to the theater. And in the relatively few instances where theater is discussed, the tendency is to reassess the canon of modernist drama in light of postmodern theory, rather than to focus on new postmodern dramatic works. This situation implies that theater either has not produced major contemporary playwrights to match the fertility and diversity of modernism (Stanislavsky, Strindberg, Pirandello, Brecht, Artaud, Genet, Beckett, Ionesco, Dürrenmatt, and many more), or that we have failed to recognize within modernist theater the advent of postmodernism.
Jessie and Thelma Revisited: Marsha Norman's Conceptual Challenge in 'night, Mother
Authors: Demastes William
Published: April 2013

It has been over a decade since Marsha Norman's play ‘night, Mother was first produced (1981) and shortly after won the Pulitzer Prize (1983). During those years, feminist critics have both praised it and attacked it as a discourse on the condition of women in (post)modem society, disagreeing among themselves on whether to applaud the play's positive virtues of presenting female entrapment in a male-centered ideology or to condemn the play's defeatist resolution of suicide in the face of that entrapment. Beyond this character-based debate has arisen the equally heavily debated, more general criticism that female/feminist playwrights who utilize the realist format are implicitly permitting the feminist message to be subordinated to a restrictively dominating, male-constructed mode of presentation. While some critics challenge this position and defend Norman against the charge, others have virtually dismissed her precisely because of her format choices.
A Worm in the Wood: The Father-Son Relationship in the Plays of Sam Shepard
Authors: Schvey Henry
Published: April 2013

In his illuminating essay "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," Georges Gusdorf observes that "Confession, an attempt at remembering, is at the same time a searching for a hidden treasure, for a last delivering word, redeeming in the final appeal a destiny that doubted its own value. For the one who takes up the venture it is a matter of concluding a peace treaty and a new alliance with himself and with the world."

Implicit in Gusdorf's essay on autobiography is the notion that confessional literature is an attempt to heal a basic breach between the self and the other. Nowhere is this search for redemption more obvious than in the late work of America's most confessional dramatist, Eugene O'Neill. We know from his wife, Carlotta, that the writing of his autobiographical family play, Long Day's Journey into Night, in June 1939 was "a thing that haunted him. He was bedeviled into writing it … He had to get it out of his system, he had to forgive whatever it was that caused this tragedy between himself and his mother and father.”
An American Cowboy on the English Fringe: Sam Shepard's London Audience
Authors: Putzel Steven
Published: April 2013

"Rile 'em Cowboy," "Metaphors, Mad Dogs and Old Time Cowboys," "Renaissance Man Rides Out of the West" — these are just a few titles of British articles on the plays of Sam Shepard. The image of Shepard as cowboy has been part of U.S. popular culture for so long now that more people know the Stetson-topped, Lucchese–shod aging coverboy than know the work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Twenty years ago when this image was still new, Shepard packed up wife, child, and stereotype and moved to London, entering the ranks of literati expatriates. Like all expatriates, he took his homeland with him. As he told the editors of Theatre Quarterly after he had been living in London for a few years, "it wasn't until I came to England that I found out what it means to be an American. Nothing really makes sense when you're there, but the more distant you are from it, the more the implications of what you grew up with start to emerge.” This new-found national identity is reflected in the plays he wrote while in London, but what is equally important is that he also found a new audience.
Book Reviews
Authors: Adam Julie , Cunningham Frank , Filewood Alan , Hinden Michael
Published: April 2013

June Schlueter, ed., Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama, reviewed by Julie Adam

Mark W. Estrin, ed., Conversations with Eugene O'Neill, reviewed by Frank R. Cunningham

Marc Maufort, Songs of American Experience: The Vision of O'Neill and Melville, reviewed by Frank R. Cunningham

Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt, eds., The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, reviewed by Alan Filewood

Richard F. Moorton, Jr., ed., Eugene O'Neil's Century: Centennial Views on America's Foremost Dramatist , reviewed by Michael Hinden