bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Book Reviews
Authors: Crow Brian , Dugan James , Gilbert Reid , Worrall Nick , Oppenheim Lois , Kobialka Michal , Rayfield Donald , Hardison Felicia , Senelick Laurence , Stevenson Mariela , Isser Edward
Published: April 2013

Helen Gilbert, ed., (Post)Colonial Stages: Critical and Creative Views on Drama, Theatre and Performance, reviewed by Brian Crow

Anton Wagner, ed., Establishing Our Boundaries: Engligh-Canadian Theatre Criticism, reviewed by James Dugan

Ric Knowles, The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies, reviewed by Reid Gilbert

Nicholas Grene, The Polirics of Irish Drama: Plays in Contex from Boucicault to Friel, reviewed by Nick Worrall

Katharine Worth, Samuel Beckett's Theatre: Life Journeys, reviewed by Lois Oppenheim

Kalina Stefaniva, ed, Eastern European Theater after the Iron Curtain, reviewed by Michal Kobialka

Robert Leach and Victor Borovsky, ed.,A History of the Russian Theatre, reviewed by Donald Rayfield

Donald Rayfield, Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov's Prose and Drama, reviewed by Felicia Hardison

David Allen, Performing Chekov, reviewed by Laurence Senelick

Vivan M. Patraka, Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism and the Holocaust, reviewed by Mariela Stevenson

Anat Feinberg, Embodied Memory: The Theatre of George Tabori, reviewed by Edward Isser
Aesthetic Prejudice in Modern Drama
Authors: Sidnell Michael
Published: April 2013

The aesthetic prejudice chiefly in question is that subordination or suppression of the performing subject that is particularly associated with realism in modern drama. It stands revealed as such not only in the staging but also in the performative elements of the verbal texts in which dramatic realism, rather paradoxically, defined itself. The incommensurability of an act of representation and a corresponding embodiment of a performing subject is often made quite obvious in the juxtaposition of modern dramas and their operatic versions, and it is a given in the aesthetics of physical theatre. In the earlier twentieth century, such aesthetic issues were so embroiled in fateful political struggles as to induce such crises of representation as those instanced here: the transmutation, in Walter Benjamin's theory, that brought with it an acceptance of didactic performance; the severe problems encountered in Marc Blitzstein's operatic and remedial transformation of Lillian Hellman's flawed aesthetic in The Little Foxes and its associated moral blindness; and the divergent theatre practices of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot with respect to speech, music, and dance. In these instances, performativity versus discourse is a critical issue, and it remains so in contemporary practice, though hardly the dangerous one that it has been in the past.
Quo Vadis? Theatre Studies at the Crossroads
Authors: Fischer-Lichte Erika
Published: April 2013

Theatre studies as an academic discipline was founded in a programmatic way, as a discipline devoted not to text but, rather, to performance. Since its very origins, it has been understood as an "interdisciplinary" subject within which many other fields of study intersect and merge: art history, musicology, literature studies, cultural history, communication and media sciences, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, economics, and law. Whether it is defined and practised as culture studies, as media studies, or as art studies, the study of theatre constitutes, by definition, an interdisciplinary field. Nearly a century after the founding of theatre studies, on the threshold of a new millennium, it makes good sense to take stock of the challenges and prospects, problems and risks facing theatre studies today because of, and in terms of, its interdisciplinary nature.
Modernism and Genocide: Citing Minstrelsy in Postcolonial Agitprop
Authors: Filewood Alan
Published: April 2013

The critical field marked by the term "modern drama" has from its earliest authorizations framed an intersection of rehearsable textuality and social subjectivity, or, as Raymond Williams famously put it in one of his earliest works, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, of "convention" and "structures of feeling". The critical texts that have guided the development of the term "modern drama" organize the problem of theatrical modernism as one of giving form to the invisible and the unconscious and, through this, enacting a fantasy of the reclaimed "real" in which revelations embodied in performance supersede the reality of the external world. In this dominant mode, most famously summarized in English by critics such as Williams and Maurice Valency (and by several generations of contributors to Modern Drama), the fundamental subject of inquiry has been the explorations of playwrights and theatrical auteurs as changing material possibilities of theatre practice enable new dramaturgies and new narratives, typically coded as "perceptions" or "insights" into subjectivity.
Oh for Unruly Audiences! Or, Patterns of Participation in Twentieth-Century Theatre
Authors: Kershaw Baz
Published: April 2013

So, to put the larger methodological issue addressed by this article into a nutshell query, In what ways can theatre, and particularly its politics, be better understood through thinking of its applause?
Transvestism and Sexual Transgression in Garda Lorca's The Public
Authors: Jerez-Farrán Carlos
Published: April 2013

Of all Federico Garda Lorca's works, The Public is one of the plays that, in the last two decades, has aroused the widest interest in scholars and the general public, both in Spain and abroad. This interest is ironic given the hostility the play met when Lorca, as was his custom, read the manuscript in 1930 to a group of close friends. It is even more ironic when one considers the hermetic nature of the play and the structural and thematic difficulties it presents. For the first time in the history of Spanish theatre, a play deals unabashedly, even defiantly, with the subject of homosexuality. Whether or not its subject matter was the reason that the play was withheld from publication until 1974, the truth of the matter is that the manuscript has come down to us in a fragmented and incomplete form; only Acts Two and Five were published in Lorca's lifetime. The play was written during Lorca's stay in New York in 1929-1930 and was finished in 1930 in Havana, where Lorca spent four months on his way back to Spain. It was not staged until the 1986/1987 season in Milan and Madrid, in a co-production involving the Centro Dramatico Nacional, Madrid, and the Piccolo Teatro di Milan, directed by Lluis Pasqual and designed by Fabia Puigserver. Two years later, the play was staged in Paris and London.
Book Reviews
Authors: Fuegi John , Kerr Rosalind , Scheie Timothy , Taylor Diana , Chambers Jonathan , Kolin Philip , Crandell George , Blood Melanie , Bottoms stephen , Fortier Mark
Published: April 2013

Carol Martin and Henry Bial, eds., Brecht Sourcbook, reviewed by John Fuegi

Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi, eds., Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition, reviewed by Rosalind Kerr,

David Williamd, eds., aborative Theatre: The Thetitre du Soleil Sourcebook, reviewed by Timothy Scheie

Jean Graham-Jones, Exorcising History: Argentine Theater under Dictatorship, reviewed by Diana Taylor

Stephen A. Marino, ed., "The Salesman Has a Birthday": Essays Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, reviewed by Diana Taylor

Susan C.W. Abbotson, Student Companion to Arthur Miller, reviewed by Diana Taylor

Brenda Murphy and Susan C.W. Abbotson, Understanding Death of a Salesman: A Student Casebook to Issues, reviewed by Jonathan Chambers

Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, eds., The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. Vol I — 1920–1945, reviewed by Philip C. Kolin

Philip C. Kolin, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, reviewed by George W. Crandell

Christopher Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights, reviewed by Melanie Blood

Gordon Rogoff, Vanishing Acts: Theater since the Sixties., reviewed by Stephen J. Bottoms

Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dashupta eds., Conversations on Art and Petformance, reviewed by Mark Fortier
Introduction: Modernism and Anti-theatricality
Authors: Ackerman Alan
Published: April 2013

Twenty years ago, Jonas Barish identified a disposition within Western culture that he termed the anti-theatrical prejudice. From the Greeks to the present, he cites instances of a bias against the expressive, the imitative, the deceptive, the spectacular, and the subject that arouses, or even acknowledges, an audience. Exposing the philosophical, moral, and aesthetic assumptions made by the enemies of the theatre throughout the centuries, his Antitheatrical Prejudice sought to fortify theatre's defenses against its detractors.

This special issue of Modern Dramo offers a critical appraisal of Barish's seminal study. While indebted to him, the collection argues that Barish's trans-historical notion both of anti-theatricalism and, by extension, of the theatre itself is in need of a number of revisions. By focusing on aspects of modem drama (including its intersections with other cultural forms), the articles that follow insist on a historical grounding of any understanding of anti-theatricalism and therefore explore various forms of a specifically modernist critique of theatre. In doing so, the collection moves beyond Barish's monolithic understanding of "the theatre" and proposes to see modem theatre as a field marked by competing, and often contradictory, impulses and developments, a field in which different theatres are engaged in a contentious struggle with one another.
Conrad's Adaptation: Theatricality and Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Walkowitz Rebecca
Published: April 2013

Conrad's dramatic adaptation of his well-known novel The Secret Agent (1907) was first performed in 1922, that watershed year for literary modernism, and it is striking in its attempts to translate the narrative's innovative theatricality into the play's literal theatre. That this translation is not quite successful is telling, for sure, about Conrad 's limitations as a dramatist, but it is rather more telling about the incompatibility between modernist conceptions of culture, which are integral to Conrad's story, and a (mostly) realist dramatic form, with which Conrad tries to replicate the novel's work. Conrad's modernist sensibility is most apparent in the play's few moments of address to its audience, in which Winnie Verlac, the secret agent's wife, looks out from the stage to affirm her spectators as participants and interlocutors. In these episodes, Winnie is reminding her audience that it knows what she knows: that it knows and she knows that her life incorporates habitual scripts and that she is conforming, against her wishes, to a melodramatic plot. From her wry comment in the first act, "Yes, I am lucky" (referring to her marriage, in which she knows she is not lucky), to her assertion late in the play, "No! That must never be!" (referring to prison or hanging), Winnie asks the audience to notice that the gestures and expectations of conventional fiction arc internal to the culture that Conrad's fiction represents.
Clown Shows: Anti-Theatricalist Theatricalism in Four Twentieth-Century Plays
Authors: Fuchs Elinor
Published: April 2013

Metatheatre is an old practice but a comparatively recent critical interest. It attained momentum among cri tics in the early 1960s, stirred partly by Lionel Abel's brief essays in Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. Abel claimed that a new dramatic "form" had arisen in the English renaissance and the Spanish Golden Age. "[T]ragedy would be replaced by metatheatre" in the theatres of Shakespeare and Calderon, Abel argued, after whom extended a lineage that stretched to Pirandello, Genet, Brecht, and Beckett. These plays had not been recognized as a distinct form, Abel said, and had no name: "I shall presume to designate them. I call them metaplays, works of metatheatre". Though the study of Shakespeare's metadrama, along with its upper-caste cousin, the dream play, has had a robust critical career, beginning even before Abel's large claim and continuing through the 1960s and 1970s, there has been little continuing effort to work out a general theory of metatheatrical dramatic form or to trace its development over time as a unified field. An exception is Richard Hornby's essay "Varieties of the Metadramatic"; Homby's primary interest here, however, is less critical than taxonomic.
Modernism and Anti-theatricality: An Afterword
Authors: Puchner Martin
Published: April 2013

Two views of anti-theatricalism emerge from Jonas Barish's Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981). According to the predominant one, anti-theatricalism is a prejudice that is inextricably woven into the very fabric of Western thought, from its Greek origins to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers of modernity. Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche, St. Augustine and Theodor Adorno, Pagan Rome and the Puritans — the most disparate philosophers apparently share one troubling flaw: their hatred of the theatre. When faced with such stubborn opposition, such a repetitive history of a prejudice seemingly untouched by the most revolutionary social, philosophical, and artistic upheavals, it is not surprising that Theatre Studies would go into a defensive mode, that exposing this prejudice would be seen as a first and necessary step to bring about its demise.
Reading, Writing, and Authority in Ibsen's "Women's Plays"
Authors: Farfan Penny
Published: April 2013

In the opening chapter of their now-classic work of feminist literary criticism The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar cite Edward Said's meditation on the etymology of the word "author," "with which writer, deity, and paterfamilias are identified", in order to establish a deep linkage between writing and patriarchal authority in Western culture. This critical insight pervades Ibsen's "women's plays,"1 for though it has commonly been suggested that the door-slam at the end of A Doll House signalled the advent of both modern drama and the women's movement, Nora's forgery of her father's signature is in fact the act of transgression that sets the drama in motion; indeed, authorship and authority are linked throughout Ibsen's "women's plays," so that acts of writing, reading, or — in Hedda's case — manuscript-burning serve to signify the female protagonists' respective degrees of critical engagement with hegemonic cultural texts that deny women status as authoritative subjects.
Book Reviews
Authors: Bank Rosemar , McLaren Joseph , Kolin Philip , Bigsb Christopher , Krasner David , Miller Tice , Cutler Mary , Blackadder Neil , Lee Carrie Kathryn , Aldama Frederick Luis
Published: April 2013

Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906, reviewed by Rosemarie K. Bank

Susan Duffy, The Political Plays of Langston Hughes, reviewed by Joseph McLaren

Robert F. Gross, ed., Tennessee Williams: A Casebook, reviewed by Philip C. Kolin

Stephen J. Bottoms, Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, reviewed by Christopher Bigsby

Leslie Kane, ed., David Mamet in Conversation, reviewed by David Krasner

Leslie Kane, Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet, reviewed by David Krasner

Gene A. Plunka, The Black Comedy of John Guare, reviewed by Tice L. Miller

James Fisher, The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope, reviewed by Mary L. Cutler

Robert Baker White, The Text in Play: Representations of Rehearsal in Modem Drama, reviewed by Neil Blackadder

Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre, reviewed by Carrie Kathryn Lee

Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back, reviewed by Frederick Luis Aldama.
Imperialistic Representations and Spectatorial Reception in Shakespeare Wallah
Authors: Bhatia Nandi
Published: April 2013

Recent scholarship has sought to revise critical claims regarding the universal and transcendental status accorded to Shakespeare in India through an examination of three important aspects pertaining to the construction and representation of the bard: first, situating the history of Shakespeare in the context of colonial power relations, scholars have shown us the reasons for the literary and cultural authority attached to Shakespeare. Alternatively, scholars have discussed the anti-colonial responses as seen, for instance, in the drama of Utpal Dutt, and in Bharatendu Harishchandra's Durlabh Bandhu (based on The Merchant of Venice), which exemplify the unique local appropriations of Shakespeare (Loomba, Gender; Jha; Trivedi; Bharucha; Singh; Green; Bhatia, "Codes of Empire"). Thirdly, critical work has focused on Shakespearean adaptations, which may or may not be oppositional but reflect the inevitable process of cultural hybridization that confounds claims regarding strict segregation of British and Indian cultural traditions. To this end, Ania Lomba's discussion of Kathakali Othello, Phillip Zarrilli's work on Kathakali King Lear, and Balwant Gargi's elaboration of King Lear as an Indian Maharaja remind us of the cultural flows and interactions resulting from Indian mediations of Shakespeare and demand that we understand that because of the historical interventions of British imperialism, both Western and Indian influences will exist on the global stage. Taken together, such scholarship has facilitated an academic mode of understanding the relationship between Shakespearean drama and Indian culture.
Caryl Churchill's The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution: Algerian Decolonizatione (Re)viewed in a Protean Contemporary Context
Authors: Lavell Iris
Published: April 2013

In 1972 Caryl Churchill wrote The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution, a stage play based on Algeria's struggle in the nineteen-fifties against the French Occupation. Many of the characters were inspired by case studies in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and the central character is based on Fanon himself. The text raises pertinent questions about the strategic application of power by oppressive political forces, the mechanisms of which are particularly visible in times of crisis, and about the forms and consequences of retaliation by oppressed peoples. Churchill addresses acts of terrorism as part of a continuum of oppression and retaliation, the dynamic of which reveals pathological behaviour in both the colonized and the colonizer. This paper explores the complications of the construction of colonizer and colonized in Hospital, complications that are too frequently ignored by contemporary history.
"Niggers Got a Right to be Dissatisfied": Postmodemism, Race, and Class in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Authors: Hanlon John
Published: April 2013

When August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom debuted in New York's Cort Theatre in the fall of 1984, it was received rather coolly by the critics, but quite warmly by its audiences. Early critical reception pigeonholed the work as an overdone piece on the problems of race in America. John Simon, the reviewer for New York magazine, wrote that what Wilson delivers in the work "is only intermittently drama, more often rousing monologues, and finally more melodramatically didactic than imaginatively satisfying." Simon concluded that, for all its strengths, the play "sorely misses the transformative spark" — he wished the playwright "[b]etter luck next time". Edwin Wilson, writing for The Wall Street Journal, observed that "There is an abundance of atmosphere and banter, and a strong racial statement, but not much of a play." After summarizing the plot, he proclaimed that "The theme of the play is racial injustice" and explained how that theme is executed; but he, like Simon, concluded that "polemics do not make a play". In its 17 October issue, Variety magazine introduced Ma Rainey's Black Bottom as yet another "tragedy of racial bigotry," and suggested that "its technical clumsiness and downbeat story make it a difficult Broadway box office proposition". Such hasty dismissals of Wilson's first Broadway production proved to be shallow and obtuse, as word-of-mouth raves generated a high volume of ticket sales and turned Ma Rainey into "the first hit of the season." The critics took a second look at Wilson and "his powerful play," which according to The New York Times was "reawakening audiences to the wonder and dimensions of drama". The production went on to be nominated for three Tony awards, including one for best play, and it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the 1984-85 season.
Introduction
Authors: Knowles Ric
Published: April 2013

The editors did not plan to publish this special issue on Canadian drama. There was no call for papers and no editorial decision to solicit contributions. The need for it was determined by the pressures of an unusual concentration of good-submissions on Canadian topics, submissions that perhaps indicate an unusually high level of activity in a field that is only now completing its first quarter-century as a discrete area of academic and scholarly activity.
A Feminist Absurd: Margaret Hollingsworth's The House That Jack Built
Authors: Derksen Celest
Published: April 2013

Theatre scholars with an interest in absurdism are likely to find the name Margaret Hollingsworth oddly out of place on a list including such canonical representatives as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and Vaclav Havel. This is particularly the case given that the playwright is a contemporary Canadian woman and a feminist. The profits of this inclusion are found in its very disjunction: to consider Hollingsworth as absurdist is at once a challenge to the male exclusivity that is a defining feature of absurdism and an argument for revitalizing absurd ism as a contemporary critical term. Indeed, I contend that much of Hollingsworth's drama draws from, and is illuminated by, consideration of absurdist technique, philosophy, and subject positions. Further, she deploys absurdism in a manner that foregrounds gender concerns and so points to the exclusion — or incomprehension — of gender as a controlling framework of meaning in the established tradition. As such, Hollingsworth's dramatic vision presents the potential for an enlivening new critical conception: the feminist absurd."
Ideology as Behaviour: Identity and Realism in The Drawer Boy
Authors: Moser Marlene
Published: April 2013

In the postmodern era, death and sickness have become metaphors for the crises of the master narratives of religion, politics, and even the idea of a “self." While some embrace the metaphor for the liberating possibilities for subjectivity it may provide (Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic being the poster child of postmodemism), others still seek to find the cure for the sickness, the cure (like the crisis) being inevitably linked to narrative. One of the most popular recent plays in Canada, The Drawer Boy by Michael Healey, provides a case study for this condition, not only because sicknes.s, narrative, and identity are intimately linked in the action of the play, but also because of the metanarratives that the play and its productions engage.
"No, the Centre Should Be Invisible": Radical Revisioning of Chekhov in Floyd Favel Starr's House of Sonya
Authors: Appleford Rob
Published: April 2013

What I find intriguing when examining Aboriginal theatre is the complex relationship between the traditional and the contemporary in this modelling of Aboriginal identity on stage. At one end of the spectrum, "traditional" Aboriginal performance, involving ritual, orality, local histories, and cultural/spiritual information, has been understood by scholars and critics as either replicating or renewing traditions of performance specific to indigenous regions and cultures.' At the other end, "contemporary" Aboriginal performance, utilizing Western theatrical techniques and exploring more overtly political themes, has been viewed in relation to global examples of performance-as-resistance by other "threatened groups". Both local/traditional and international/ contemporary definitions of performance can serve to illuminate how Aboriginal theatre resists the dominant by pointing to local or international contexts for interpretative frames. Yet, these two frames — the local/traditional and the international/contemporary — are difficult to disentangle, and bifurcate clearly hybrid modes of Aboriginal performance. For myself, as a non-Aboriginal spectator, it remains a difficult task to frame such hybrid theatre so that both the local and international contexts are taken into account. This difficulty is made plain when one examines the 1997 play House of Sonya, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya by Saskatchewan Cree playwright Floyd Favel Starr.
Remembering the Trickster in Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters
Authors: Perkins Lina
Published: April 2013

For critics of Tomson Highway's theatre, the character of Nanabush has become something of a distraction. Nanabush, the Cree and Ojibway trickster figure, plays a pivotal role in both of Highway's published plays, The Rez Sisters and its sequel, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. In conjunction with analysis of Highway's political motives, the cultural weight of Nanabush has provided almost all the material for criticism on Highway's plays. With the notable exception of Helen Gilbert, Highway's critics tend to regard his plays as venues for political protest and to read his use of Nanabush as an assertion of the values of an intact and monolithic culture. Even those who recognize other strains in Highway's writing give an inordinate amount of prominence to the trickster. William Morgan's interview with Highway, for example, contains a great deal of information that has nothing to do with the trickster, including Highway's remarks on his training as a pianist and on Greek myth and classical drama. The title of the piece, however, "The Trickster and Native Theatre," proclaims these remarks to be comparatively insignificant. Perhaps it should not be surprising that many critics focus exclusively on his use of the trickster or that they treat his use of the trickster simply as a product of his politics, given Highway's material and his statements elsewhere. Such a reading, however, oversimplifies both Nanabush as a character and the plays as a whole.
Panych and Gorling: "Sheer" Texts "Written" in(to) Perception
Authors: Gilbert Reid
Published: April 2013

In Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, Alan Filewod sees the categories nation and theatre as examples of Pierre Bourdieu's "structuring structures," those structures that "organize practices and the perception of practices" (I). He notes that these terms "share a slippage of language" that flags a "deeper conceptual intersection where the national imaginary embraces the theatrical imaginary" (x). Such speculation, tied in this case to the construct of nation, is equally compelling when related, say, to the "idea of North" in Canada, as it is by Sherrill E. Grace, or to broader issues of the theatrical genre itself as a "structuring structure" organizing perception. At the base of any such examination of genre and pertormativity are the questions of the splice between the theatrical and the imaginary, of the link between the theatrical and its institutionalization within power.
Duets, Duologues, and Black Diasporic Theatre: Djanet Sears, William Shakespeare, and Others
Authors: Dixkson Peter
Published: April 2013

Building upon Tompkins' suggestive reading of how metatheatrical devices like images of onstage rehearsal and plays-with in-plays operate counter- discursively, in much postcolonial drama, to "unfix [the] colonial authority" signified by Shakespeare, in this paper I want to examine how Sears's equally metatheatrical Harlem Duet simultaneously displaces—or exorcises Shakespeare's Othello and re-places that text with/in a chorus of other(ed) literary voices.
Afterword
Authors: Tompkins Joanne
Published: April 2013

A popular (mis)perception regarding contemporary Canadian theatre is that its origins lie in the 1953 establishment of the Stratford Festival, which continues to perform mostly Shakespeare and his contemporaries, in the appropriately named small southwestern Ontario town. It is to some extent true that the Stratford Festival, as a repository of cultural power, has dominated theatre in Canada for fifty years. The establishment of the Festival was sponsored by Vincent Massey. then Canadian Governor General, who wished to develop a recognizable location of "culture" in what was typically seen as a "young" country, even though performance in Canada dates back to 1606 and covers numerous genres and socio-political topics.
Modernity and Its Mirages: Wole Soyinka and the African State
Authors: Olaniyan Tejumola
Published: April 2013

We know that a broad and relentless interrogation of the African state constitutes the moral constant of Wale Soyinka's dramatic universe, whether he is employing the most arcane and ritualistic, or the most realistic and accessible, performance form. By the "African state" I mean both the established ruling institution and the existing social condition as a whole. This persistent critical interrogation has made Soyinka the foremost scourge of the seemingly perpetual state of anomie on the continent and those who manage and profit from it. Although this is less clearly articulated in the dramas than in Soyinka's other writings, I see the catalyst of the dramatist's huge exertions as one grand irony. a historical irony of epic proportion that serves as vast diorama: Africa as living a modernity it practically financed with its blood and toil, its human and material resources, but whose direction it is powerless to chart and whose effect it is unable to control. If the acknowledged gains of that modernity in the West — stable, orderly government, accountability between the rulers and the ruled, entrenched striving for egalitarian relations, rationalized bureaucracy and economic system, optimum management of the population — continue to elude Africa, it is not because Africa is not part of that modernity but because it is part of it unequally
The Homestead at the Exit of the Paterfamilias: African Cultural Thought after Wole Soyinka
Authors: Adeptan Titi
Published: April 2013

The core of Wole Soyinka's writing career is best described as a sustained attempt to locate African society in the twentieth-century context of the philosophy of culture. His was the immediate generation after the statements of cultural assertion that began with Claude McKay, C.L.R. James, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and the Harlem Renaissance and continued in the pronouncements of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aim Cesaire, Leon G. Damas, and Frantz Fanon. The urge to speak was also influenced by the colonial situation on the African continent,' and there was the gravamen of the crisis of apartheid in South Africa, which Soyinka has claimed time and again as one the deep motivations behind his urge to write. The most essential factor was Soyinka himself, or, more accurately, a cast of mind that had the singular gift of encapsulating cultural statements in elaborate "shrouds" and "veils" of metaphors. As considerable as his involvement with contemporary Nigerian and African politics is, the deeper motivations for even Soyinka's latter-day works, consumed so much by an overt topicality, derive from his long-standing commitment to show his theory of culture and society and the place and role of the writer/artist within it.
The Shifting Structures of Power in The Beatification of Area Boy
Authors: Olaiya Kolawole
Published: April 2013

Wole Soyinka's creative works are primarily responses to the upheavals within Nigerian society. Although he has been accused of not being "ideologically committed" and of mythologizing essentially mundane experiences by Marxist critics, his life and writings reflect his daring resistance to tyranny. His creative and critical works show his responses to sociopolitical events in Nigeria past and present — as a sustained engagement with the State and a "historical" record of the different forms and manifestations of power at different periods. Taking Africa, and Nigeria in particular, as his subject, there is a way in which his creative and critical works — in their range, content, and form — reflect the inherent relationship "between literature and its sponsoring context".
Elesin, Cuchulain, and the Kingdom: The Culture Hero's Sacrifice
Authors: Cavano A. Thomas
Published: April 2013

From the perspective of archetypal storytelling, the two Nobel Prize-winning postcolonial playwrights Wole Soyinka and W.B. Yeats tell remarkably similar stories in their plays The Death of Cuchulain and Death and the King's Horseman. This article will examine the common ground between these two plays and propose that as the goals of the two playwrights coincided, so did their plots, characters, and imagery.
Dramatizing Atrocities: Plays by Wale Soyinka, Francis Imbuga, and George Seremba Recalling the Idi Amin Era
Authors: Olaogun Modupe
Published: April 2013

Idi Amin, who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979, was not the only dictator noted for atrocities. In Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, men of the proverbial iron fist rose and fell, to be replaced by others: Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea, Emperor Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic, Sergeant Samuel Doe in Liberia, General Siad Barre in Somalia, Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda, Hissene Habn, in Chad, General Sanni Abacha in Nigeria, and so on. From other parts of the world, a roll call of some of the most notorious regimes would take in Cambodia's Pol Pot (Soloth Sar), Chile's Augusto Pinochet, Romania's Nicolae Ceaucsescu, and Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic. The atroc ities associated with these rulers include torture and mass murder. The reoccurrence of such atrocities makes them seem almost banal. In representing atrocities, how can plays convey the full impact and implications of what has happened without succumbing to sensationalism? How can playwrights provoke a deep response from an audience, emotional and intellectual, rather than repulsion?
Book Reviews
Authors: Chauduri Una , Srinivasan Priya , Smith Brian , Little Edward , Smith Brian , Fox Ann , Chemers Michael , Kerr Rosalind , Gross Robert
Published: April 2013

Helen Gilbert, ed., Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology, reviewed by Una Chaudhuri

Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins, Women's Intercultural Performance, reviewed by Priya Srinivasan

Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus, ed., Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance, reviewed by Brian Smith

Eugene Van Erven, Community Theatre: Global Perspectives, reviewed by Edward Little

Augusto Boal, Hamlet and the Baker's Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics, reviewed by Brian Smith

Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein, ed., Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture, reviewed by Ann M. Fox

Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination, reviewed by Michael M. Chemers

Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance, reviewed by Rosalind Kerr

Herbert Blau, The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theatre, 1976-2000, reviewed by Robert F. Gross
Introduction to Reza Baraheni's "Exilic Blindness: The Unwritten Autobiography of a Dramatist in Paris Posthumously Dictated to a Friend"
Authors: Mackay-Bennett Joanne
Published: April 2013

Reza Baraheni was born in Tabriz, the capital city of the province of Azarbaijan, Iran, in 1935. He was educated in Iran and Turkey and was awarded a doctorate in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Istanbul. Widely known as a poet, Baraheni has played an instrumental role in the establishment of modern literary criticism in Iran.
Exilic Blindness: The Unwritten Autobiography of a Dramatist in Paris Posthumously Dictated to A Friend
Authors: Baraheni Reza
Published: April 2013

or the presence of the Soviet occupation of my hometown, Tabriz, during the Second World War, two images come immediately to my mind, both of them reflected on a white wall from a tube of light coming from an army truck parked in the comer by the neighbourhood mosque. We were six or seven years old and had just snuck out of the mosque to watch shapes moving on the wall. The first was a ridiculous combination of a hat, a bow lie, a pair of jumping-up-and down eyes, a tiny but agile moustache, and a kind of walk that I mimicked for the rest of my life. At the time I did not know his name.
Afterword: Theatre and Exile
Authors: Ambros Veronika , Couture Danielle , Meerzon Yana
Published: April 2013

Contemporary history and politics make it clear that exile is still, and perhaps more than ever, an overwhelming political, economic, and cultural dilemma. Former ideological battles have shifted only to give way to new ones. War continues to create trauma. People continue to experience exile and displacement. The performative practices and theories touched upon in this special issue of Modern Drama show how drama and theatre can explore memories. traumata, joy, and injuries associated with the exilic experience.
Book Reviews
Authors: Nelson Robert , Bennett Susan , Bean Kellie , Shepherd-Barr Kristen , De Vos Laurens , HOuston Andrew , Loiselle Andre , Osburn John , Gross Robert
Published: April 2013

Mark Fortier Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, reviewed by Robin Nelson

Peter Buse, Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama, reviewed by Susan Bennett

Lois Gordon, ed. Pinter at 70: A Casebook, reviewed by Kellie Bean

Penelope Prentice The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic 2nd ed., reviewed by Kellie Bean

John Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos, reviewed by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

Katherine E. Kelly, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, reviewed by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

Graham Saunders, ‘Love Me or Kill Me:’ Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes, reviewed by Laurens De Vos

Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, reviewed by Andrew Houston

Elizabeth Klaver, Performing Television: Contemporary Drama and the Media Culture, reviewed by Andre Loiselle

Eckhart Voigts-Virchow, ed., Mediated Drama / Dramatized Media , reviewed by Andre Loiselle

Egil Törnqvist, Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation, reviewed by John Osburn

Egil Törnqvist, Strindberg’s “The Ghost Sonata”, reviewed by Robert F. Gross
Zones of Disturbance: Staging Exile and War for Young Audiences
Authors: Klaic Dragan
Published: April 2013

The experience of exile/diaspora only infrequently addresses the issue of children and their responses to dislocation. This paper describes strategies used by playwrights and theatre directors to convey the experiences of war, flight, refuge, and exile to young audiences, especially in the countries that are spared such turmoil but serve as safe havens for those escaping protracted conflict and mass violence. The primary aim of these artists is to make young audiences aware of the injustice and violence that affects the ir peers in less privileged pans of the world. While children and adolescents are exposed daily to a heavy regimen of meaningless, arbitrary, and spectacular violence, mainly through television, and video and computer games, theatre has the ability to depict violence in a more thought-provoking and metaphorical manner. It allows time and space to outline causes and consequences, it addresses the historical context and political motivations, and, by doing so, it re-introduces a distinction among the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, This is a distinction that is often lost when mass culture turns violence into entertainment.
Re-Imagining the Emigrant/Exile in Contemporary Irish Drama
Authors: Trotter Mary
Published: April 2013

In 1897, when the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre spurred on the Irish dramatic movement by proposing "to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays", they probably had no idea how uncertain the definition of "Celtic and Irish plays" was within the nationalist community, or how hotly the question would be contested in the coming decades. But the definition which ultimately won among most theatre workers in Ireland in the first decades of the twentieth century was a theatre that would serve as, in Christopher Murray's words, a "mirror up to nation" a realist theatre that represented images of Ireland and its people counter to anti-imperialist stereotypes, and that served to develop, affirm, or critique a national identity for individuals living within the borders of the Irish nation . But for Irish playwrights working within Ireland, the desire to create images of Irish experience within the thirty-two counties almost always superseded any interest in representing life within Ireland's emigrant communities.
Odon von Horvath's Back and Forth: Teetering between Exile and Return
Authors: Malone Paul
Published: April 2013

Although the mass emigration of writers and intellectuals from Nazi Germany would at first appear a fairly straightforward historical phenomenon, the perception and reception of German exilic literature have themselves had a spotted and controversial history. The very questions of who was or was not an exile, and whether a particular work should fall under the category of Exilliteratur, have proven to be complicated by a number of factors, and further clouded by differing histories of reception in the fifty years that Germany was divided.
Unhomely Nations: Minorities and Refugees of the Subcontinental Partition
Authors: Menon Jisha
Published: April 2013

Mohan Rakesh's short story "The Owner of Rubble" begins with a melancholy moment. Abdul Gani, a frail and elderly man from Lahore, steps off the bus from Lahore with tear-stained eyes and a toothless smile. After seven years, he is again in his beloved hometown, Amritsar. He looks around him. Amritsar, "a place of wonder and surprise," is both familiar and strange. His gaze, illumined by his memory, caresses the contours of his well-loved city — the same bustling marketplace, a new cinema, a vanished neighborhood. It was seven years ago, in 1947, on a hurried and manic night, that Gani took flight from home. Where was it now? Gani inquires of strangers the identity of a place that was once his own.
How to Act Like a Woman: Professional Advice from English Actresses
Authors: Papanikolaou Maria
Published: April 2013

Tucked away in a corner of the editor's commentary page in the August 1919 issue of The Play Pictorial is an advertisement that promises a simple cure for an actress's possible bad luck in getting her break I having a successful stage career: improve personality, To do this, one only needed to get a book ("which every artiste should send for immediately") promoting the Kallone Course, a class that could teach every woman interested in a stage career how "this 'asset' [personality] can really be acquired."
Sarah Daniels’ Hysteria Plays: Re-presentations of Madness in Ripen Our Darkness and Head-Rot Holiday
Authors: Bartleet Carina
Published: April 2013

One of the most intriguing features of the oeuvre of playwright Sarah Daniels is the high incidence of female characters who have madness ascribed to them. Best known as a dramatist whose work engages with contemporary themes, primarily from a feminist perspective, Daniels writes plays that are predominantly realist and combine darkly comic humour with frequently polysemic word play. Her interest in mental illness is one that mirrors wider feminist attention to the subject and especially the identification of madness as what Elaine Showalter famously describes as the “female malady.” The concatenation between women and madness has provided fertile ground for feminist inquiry, with the labelling of women as mad seen as a manifestation of misogyny. For Jane Ussher, “the discursive practices which create the concept of madness mark it as fearful, as individual, as invariably feminine, as sickness […] [I]f madness is shameful and fearful, as it is within our current discourse, the woman is stigmatized and made an outsider” (12). The examination of hysteria’s clinicians and patients is a distinct and thoroughly examined strand of this area of feminist analysis and reassessment. In the words of Mark Micale, “From its alleged origins in the writings of ancient Egypt and Greece to present-day psychiatric writings, hysteria may be interpreted as a key medical metaphor for la condition feminine […] The wildly shifting physical symptomatology of the disease was thought by many observers to mirror the irrational, capricious, and unpredictable nature of Woman”
Mapping the Placeless Place: Pedestrian Performance in the Urban Spaces of Los Angeles
Authors: Hopkins D.J.
Published: April 2013

On 19 January 1998, a review in the Los Angeles Times began with this unequivocal lead line: “Internationally renowned theater and opera director Peter Sellars has a new show in town, but there is no evidence that he, or anyone, directed the production of ‘Los Biombos / The Screens’ at the East L.A. Skills Center in Lincoln Heights”. Following this opening salvo, reviewer Laurie Winer went on to describe Sellars’ “3 1/2-hour epic gone wrong” in no uncertain terms. Although Winer expressed some disappointment that Gloria Alvarez’s adaptation lacked the “soulful nihilism” of Genet’s original, the review dwelt especially on the acting: “The cast is populated mostly by first-time or inexperienced actors. The dialogue […] is delivered with the ‘my line, your line’ rhythms unique to amateur theatrics. After half an hour of this, anyone without friends and relatives in the large cast will be champing at the bit. Three hours later, the will to live is a gift no longer taken for granted”
Le Freak, C'est Chic: The Twenty-First Century Freak Show as Theatre of Transgression
Authors: Chemers Michael
Published: April 2013

In his 1996 article “The ‘Careers’ of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorization” David A. Gerber, a historian of disability and an outspoken advocate for disability rights, manifestly resists any historical exploration of the freak show that is not grounded in outright condemnation: …At first glance, Gerber’s disgust seems to articulate the sensible, laudable desire of most scholars to write histories that are receptive to narratives of oppression and inclusive of subaltern voices. What profit to theatre history or theory could this “barbaric legacy” have to offer?
Mother Courage and Its Abject: Reading the Violence of Identification
Authors: Solga Kim
Published: April 2013

Fifteen years ago, Elin Diamond suggested that feminist theatre theorists could learn a thing or two from Bertolt Brecht and altered the course of an industry. "Brechtian Theory / Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism" (1988) revolutionized the way many of us talk about theatre, as Diamond imagined how femini st critics might "re-radical[ize]" such commonplace Brechtian techniques as the "not-but" and the Verfremdungseffekt for our performance theory and practice; her work promptly generated a number of inquiries into the productive potential of aligning Brecht's theory with contemporary feminist concerns. Diamond's own rejuvenation was expressly theoretical; she never intended to engage the prickly problem of Brecht's own dramas and the "too many saintly mothers" peopling them. Reading her work now, with the luxury of distance, this choice comes as no particular surprise.
The Configurations of Gender in Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing
Authors: Billingham Susan
Published: April 2013

Tomson Highway (Cree, Brochet Reserve), the first Native playwright to achieve recognition in mainstream Canadian theatre and literary criticism, has opened a lot of doors for those who follow. Combining pragmatism with idealism, his work unflinchingly exposes conditions on the reserve but retains hope for positive. cross-cultural transformation. This article undertakes a close analysis of gender dynamics in Highway's second published play