bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Laying Blame: Gender and Subtext in David Mamet's Oleanna
Authors: Goggans Thomas
Published: April 2013

"The Bitch Set Him Up" — that's what Daniel Mufson thought the working title of Oleanna could have been, after he appraised the critical responses to the play's 1992 New York production, adding that "one can expect few other reactions when Carol is such a viper." Marnet's presentation of the conflict between a professor and his female student is marked by ambiguous discourse, troubling physical contact, and subsequent charges of sexual harassment. Mufson found, in the seventeen reviews of the play he considered, two typical responses: some critics, including John Lahr, seem to defend the play's political message because they "[loathe] what Carol represents," while others, Elaine Showalter among them, lament the construction of a play which "targets a woman as an ugly representative of the group that challenges the white masculine ruling class." Each condemns Carol, some feeling that Mamet went too far in creating such a harridan in order to support his misogynistic views. As Deborah Tannen wrote, "we don't need a play that helps anyone feel good about a man beating a woman." Mufson shares Tannen's view, remarking that "Oleanna's aesthetic merit, if it has any, has become parenthetical to its Polemics.” Significantly, none of these reviewers seems to have found any justification for Carol's actions. Mufson mentions "the annoying little problem. that one of the two characters in Oleanna is a cardboard cut-out, a nightmarish phantom conjured by the paranoid fantasies of a patriarchy peering over a cliff to see ... egalitarianism." He quotes approvingly Tannen's observation that Carol is "all surface: just a stereotype that audiences can join in hating," and David Richards's remark that Oleanna is "rigged" so that its action "slips out of control without our really understanding how or why.” Mufson also cites John Simon, who voices three possible interpretations: "Was [Carol's] near imbecility in Act One ... an elaborate act of entrapment? Or is she a genuine idiot savant whom the Group has coached in some fancy lingo? Or is Mamet simply playing fast and loose with authorial responsibility?"
"It's only a paper moon": The Paper Ontologies in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire
Authors: Kolin Philip
Published: April 2013

Paper, as product and inscription, is a proleptic dramatic force, Blanche's as well as Stanley's signifier, and Williams's own signature in A Streetcar Named Desire. Speaking of Belle Reve, Blanche DuBois immediately conjures up papers: "There are thousands of papers, stretching back over hundreds of years .... " One gets the same impression of an endless stream of papers underlying the convoluted histories comprising the Streetcar script. Perhaps no other Williams play is so implicated in the physicality, temporality, and psychology Of paper as Streetcar. Some of the papers are legal documents, visible and objective; others are invisible yet no less empirical, evidentiary and binding; and still others are occluded, imprisoned within the play. Almost every major signifier in Streetcar is (de)constructed out of paper — mortgages, foreclosures, directions, letters, poems, telegrams, newspapers, appraisals, songs, even moons. And these papers exist in various stages of (de)composition and in various colors. There are love letters "yellowing with antiquity," poems, a book of "colored comics," legal papers pressed into an envelope, a flimsy "colored paper lantern," an even more insubstantial "Kleenex" billet-doux, a "red stained" swatch of butcher's paper, Blanche's dialect notebook, and assorted slips and scraps of paper, some of them no larger than a bus ticket and others more ominous than a lettre de cachet. Ultimately, Streetcar itself, which incorporates all these documents, is a paper script (or series of scripts) seeking ownership.
Realism and the Female Subject in Jacqueline Rudet's Basin
Authors: Redondo M. Susana
Published: April 2013

Despite the diversity of dramatic and theatrical practices in western theatre during the last decades, realism still appears to have a dominant role, particularly in mainstream circles. The strictly codified nature of this theatrical practice has been defined and challenged by scholars and theatre practitioners. Catherine Belsey, for instance, develops for the novel a theory on classic realism which also applies for the theatre. In a much quoted passage, she argues that "[c]lassic realism is characterized by illusionism, narrative which leads to closure, and a hierarchy of discourses which establishes the 'truth' of the story." In the theatre, illusionism is served by various aspects of representation: costumes, set, props, lights, acting style, and so forth which purport to imitate "reality."
Breaching the Body's Boundaries: Abjected Subject Positions in Postcolonial Drama
Authors: Tompkins Joanne
Published: April 2013

As postcolonial countries and regions around the world travel the endless path towards decolonization — specifically the re-evaluation of power relations established by imperialism — theatre continues to be a site where the colonizer/ colonized binary can be manipulated to disempower imperial inscriptions. Such devices as strategic silence. story telling, music and song, costume, and the tactical manipulations of time and space offer ways of articulating in dislocated colonial subjects what David Attwell terms "notions of identity [that] are always positional, contingent, liminal, and dialogic." A contingent, liminal identity is, for a colonized subject, a useful tool for manipulating power relationships and relocating one's self in a subject position(s) of one's own choosing. This manipulation and relocation of an imperially imposed identity is, of course, part of the ongoing agenda of colonized subjects across the former British Empire, including settler colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, in some contexts, South Africa), the occupation colonies (Africa, the West Indies, India, South and South-East Asia), and "colonies" that do not fit comfortably into either category, such as Ireland.
Re-Imaging the Black Woman's Body in Alexis DeVeaux's The Tapestry
Authors: Splawn P. Jane
Published: April 2013

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

Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, A History of Scandinavian Theatre, reviewed by John Lingard

Alice Griffin, Understanding AUhtor Miller, reviewed by Jan Balkian

Ronald H. Wainscott, The Emergence of the Modern American Theatre 1914-1929, reviewed by Michael Vanden Heuvel

Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage, reviewed by Karen Shimakawa

Geoffrey Wansell, Terence Rattigan: A Biography, reviewed by Anthony Jenkins
"Greeks bearing gifts": Athol Fugard's Orestes Project and the Politics of Experience
Authors: McMurtry Mervyn
Published: April 2013

On 24 March 1971, in Cape Town, Athol Fugard presented Orestes, an experiment in the essence of performance and the essence of existence: notions of justice and injustice, freedom and non-freedom, being and non-being, expressed in sixty to eighty minutes of imagistic action, the silence interspersed with non-verbal sounds, snatches of song and only three hundred words of spoken text. Orestes redefined Fugard's conception of dramatic process and theatrical product and signified an aesthetic that was to infonn alternative playmaking in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. He wrote that he "superimposed, almost in the sense of a palimpsest," a contemporary incident on a mytho-dramatic source. Critical response ranged from acclaim to bewildernnent; the majority found the links between the two stimuli tenuous. Thirteen years after the production, Fugard admitted that he still did not fully understand their relationship. This article aims, with caution then, to suggest how various dramatic, historic and philosophic sources created the links between his stimuli and how the palimpsest functioned in the perfornnance of this counter-hegemonic. "genuinely mythopoetic experience."
Elfriede Jelinek's Nora Project: Or What Happens When Nora Meets the Capitalists
Authors: Kiebuzinska Christine
Published: April 2013

The distinguishing feature of the creative output of the contemporary Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek is the unmasking of the illusion perpetuated by misreadings of canonical texts. In her play Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stutzen der Gesellschaften. written in 1979 as a reflection upon the centennial of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House, Jelinek superimposes a strong materialist feminist reading on a range of contemporary issues: the demythification of canonical texts that adhere to the fictions of everyday life, the continuity of patriarchal structures in capitalist market economies, and the limitations of utopian individualism in feminist myths. Jelinek recognizes that a critique of the appropriation of Ibsen's classic simultaneously necessitates a demystification of the modes of representation most successful in the dissemination of ideologies. In her deconstruction of Ibsen's A Doll’s House, Jelinek transposes the action of the play to reveal "what happened after Nora left her husband and met the pillars of societies."
Sometimes More is Less: Fellini's Otto e mezzo to Kopit's Nine
Authors: Zinman Toby
Published: April 2013

We are beset by self-defeating translations from genre to genre, suggesting not only a dismaying lack of originality but a failure to recognize that most art is medium-specific, and that to try to dislodge a work from its nature is likely to deform if not destroy it. Recently the movies have come out in a stubborn rash of Jane Austen and Henry James adaptations, while in another direction, many contemporary plays have appeared unsatisfyingly on the screen, purportedly widening the audience for drama but in fact only proving what "they" — that non-theatregoing public — thought they knew all along: theatre is boring and pompous and slow. What other conclusion could the uninitiated come to having seen the cinematic versions of Mamel's Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo (despite the most attractive casts imaginable), or For Gillian on Her Thirty-Seventh Birthday, or Love! Valour! Compassion! or Marvin's Room? with many more on the way: Master Class, The Designated Mourner, The Substance of Fire, Bent, Dancing at Lughnasa, Rent, Chicago and Fences. If the motives fueling this high-risk adaptation impulse are money and popularization, then the most peculiar decision is to take genre translation in the opposite direction, from screen to stage where both audience size and profits diminish radically. Recent experiments in this fad for adaptation include Victor/Victoria, Paper Moan. Big and Cooley High, among a number of others; the most artistically successful is probably Sondheim's A Little Night Music adapted from Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night.
Book Reviews
Authors: Leland Charles , Taub Michael , Bak John , Dicenzo Maria , Demastes William , Reid  , Thomas Alan , Johnson Stephen , Fischer Eileen
Published: April 2013

Harry G. Carlson, Out of Inferno: Strindberg's Reawakening as an Artist, reviewed by Charles Leland

Edward R. Isser, Stages of Annihilation: Theatrical Representations of the Holocaust, reviewed by Michael Taub

Anne Fleche, Mimetic Disillusion: Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Realism, reviewed by John S. Bak

Randall Stevenson & Gavin Wallace, eds., Scottish Theatre Since the Seventies, reviewed by Maria Dicenzo

Susan Harris Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art, reviewed by William W. Demastes

Nicole Boireau, ed., Drama on Drama: of Theatricality on the Contemporary British Stage, reviewed by J.M. Reid

Charles Lamb, Howard Baker's Theatre of Seducation, reviewed by Alan Thomas

David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and the Double Counsciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910, reviewed by Stephen Johnson

Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson, reviewed by Eileen Fischer
Valle-Inclán: The Mirroring of the Esperpento
Authors: Johnston David
Published: April 2013

Every year, on World Theatre Day, a leading Spanish playwright is elected to drape a white scarf round the statue of Ramón Maria del Valle-Inclán, which stands on one of Madrid's main thoroughfares, the Paseo del Prado. It is a simple ceremony, emphasising the special place held by Valle in that process of the rehabilitation of the neglected figures of the past, which has been the principal saving grace of the theatre of post-Franco Spain. Here was a dramatist who declared himself as "outside the theatre," who insisted that he wrote his plays without a thought for whether they were performable or not, and much of whose work, for nearly forty years after his death in 1936, was condemned to almost inevitable silence. But a swirl of recent productions of his plays, both inside and outside Spain, along with dramatisations of the odd novel, have belatedly confirmed Valle-Inclán’s reputation on stage as one of the most innovative of twentieth-century playwrights.
Moscow Stations: From Novel to Play
Authors: Mulrine Stephen
Published: April 2013

First published in the West in 1973, Venedikt Yerofeev's novel MoskvaPetushki now has an assured place in the canon of modem Russian fiction. At one extreme, it has been compared to Gogol's Dead Souls in miniature, and at another, to Kerouac's On the Road without the marijuana, but the critical consensus is that it precisely maps the spiritual wasteland of the Brezhnev years — what Russians refer to as vremya zastoya, "the period of stagnation" — with great charm and wit, in a highly personal idiom. Yerofeev himself called the work a "poem," and while that might be overextending the genre, its emotional range, from deep despair, through ironic detachment and black comedy, to ecstatic joie de vivre, readily invites the term "lyrical," while its range of allusion — biblical, historical, political, literary — suggests the epic.
Moliere in North America: Problems of Translation and Adaptation
Authors: Edney David
Published: April 2013

When the task of translating a difficult text seems too daunting, I sometimes think of a remark made by drama teacher Charles Werner Moore: talking to an acting class about the difficulties of making Shakespeare intelligible, he said: "We don't have the advantage of being able to do it in translation" (my emphasis). This encourages me to see the translator's work not as a pale imitation of something superior but as a creative endeavour in its own right. The following reflections come from my experiences with Moliere's plays over many years as spectator, reader and translator. Referring both to my own practice and to that of other translators in three areas — humour, verse and updating — I shall show that modem North American audiences and theatre people do not see the French playwright as their counterparts in France do and that translators are partly responsible for this different perception, which has led to the creation of a distinctively North American Moliere.
Twice Translated Texts: Beckett into English and Chaikin into Theater
Authors: Cohen Ruby
Published: April 2013

"Hate thought of rereading it for translation and massacre but suppose I must." Samuel Beckett included this sentence in a letter that he wrote me on January 20, 1973. He expressed the same sentiment in other letters to other people; yet he continued over the years to translate from French into English or vice versa, imposing upon himself his own “I must." In Beckett's translations scholars have ferreted omissions, additions, discrepancies and outright changes from the originary language. Following in their traces, I will first comment on Beckett's writerly translation of Textes pour rien to Texts for Nothing; then I hazard glimpses into Joe Chaikin's actorly adaptation of the English texts for performance in the theatre.
Northern Ireland: Our Troy? Recent Versions of Greek Tragedies by Irish Writers
Authors: Teevan Colin
Published: April 2013

It is, perhaps, only after one has written something that one begins to see not only one's own personal motivations for doing so, but also the broader social environment and forces that contributed to the making of the text. In 1994 I undertook a translation and, ultimately, an adaptation of Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. At the time I had a variety of personal reasons for choosing this particular text — not least my attraction to both Iphigenia's notorious change of mind, and the equally notorious suspicions concerning the authorship of certain passages in the text we know as Iphigenia in Aulis. The first gave me a great dramatic character, the second allowed me the freedom to play with the structure of the text. However, it was only after completing my version that I began to see those broader social forces that I and my text had been subject to, and through this I began to see the relationship of recent versions of Greek tragedies by Irish writers to recent developments and debates in Irish history.
Silesian into Scots: Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers
Authors: Findlay Bill
Published: April 2013

It is commonplace in British theatre to find translations described as "translated by," "adapted by," "in a version by," or "from the original by." Such credits can be appropriately descriptive but they are also often used in an interchangeable and inexact manner. This is a reflection of the pragmatic attitude toward theatre-making that is characteristic of British theatre, where, so far as translation is concerned, the finished script is more important than preoccupations about the process of achieving it. It is a reflection, too, of the reality that there are relatively few playwrights who are fluent in a given foreign language, so theatres often supply a literal translation from which the commissioned writer fashions a performance script. The word "translation" therefore tends to be used in a relaxed and semantically loose manner in British theatre.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Pottie Lisa
Published: April 2013

The primary objective of the annual bibliography is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of dramatic literature, and, to a lesser extent, of theatre history. The bibliography includes all playwrights who lived past 1899 (plus Becque and Büchner) and influential theatre figures other than performers, Reviews, reprinted books (unless the edition has been corrected or updated), unpublished theses, graduate student periodicals, and publications of letters or diaries are generally excluded. The bibliography does not include publications of original texts of plays or translations. The annual bibliography also serves as a supplement to Charles Carpenter's Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism, 1966- 1980: An International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press, 1986) and Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism, 1981-1990: An International Bibliography (University of Toronto Press, 1996).
A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer (1958)
Authors: Parker Brian
Published: April 2013

Any attempt to sequence the manuscript evidence behind Suddenly Last Summer must be even more tentative than previous stemmata for The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof because not only are extra drafts for the play sure to surface in the next few years (as with the other plays), but the evidence for Suddenly Last Summer also presents problems of its own.

Like the other three plays, Suddenly Last Summer shares the difficulties of Williams's obsessive rewriting and accretive mode of composition. His habit was to work by the intuitive "feel" of a situation rather than by a detailed outline, compulsively typing new drafts at great speed, then revising by hand, often independently, on the many working carbons or mimeograph copies he made for each draft; constantly fidgeting with details but, more characteristically, rewriting in larger scenes or whole acts, then fitting various sections of separate drafts together experimentally like mosaics. During rehearsals, tryouts and even Broadway performances he would continue vigorously "workshopping" his scripts in response to suggestions from his actors and director, often continuing to revise (as in this case) after a play had been favourably reviewed, was already in print, and had been released as a very successful movie. Moreover, he rarely dated drafts, frequently returned to material from superseded versions (so that there is never a simple, straight line of development to trace) and had a habit of mixing revised pages with pages from earlier drafts that needed no change, then collecting the various stages of discard together into large undifferentiated piles.
Book Reviews
Authors: Trojanowska Tamara , Van de Water Manon
Published: April 2013

Halina Stephan, Transcending the Absurd, reviewed by Tamara Trojanowska

Birgit Beumers, Yury Lyubimov at the Taganka Theatre 1964-1994, reviewed by Manon Van de Water
The (Un)Represented Fragmentation of the Body in Tennessee Williams's "Desire and the Black Masseur" and Suddenly Last Summer
Authors: Saddik Annette
Published: April 2013

When the film version of Suddenly Last Summer premiered in 1959 starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, Tennessee Williams was highly critical of the way in which it handled the cannibalism motif. He objected to the film precisely because the director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, chose to represent the act of mutilation on the screen "realistically," whereas Williams felt that it must not become visible but function only as the central metaphor of the film. Williams has repeatedly described Suddenly Last Summer as an "allegory," claiming that "[i]t was about how people devour each other in an allegorical sense."
The Mise en Scene of the Non-Euclidean Character: Wellman, Jenkin and Strindberg
Authors: Erickson Jon
Published: April 2013

Mac Wellman, in his 1984 essay "The Theatre of Good Intentions," acerbically critiques the contemporary state of American theater in regard to its "manipulation of emotion," the predictable formal structure of its "realism," its explain[ing] away" of evil through continual recourse to an aesthetic of "good intentions," and its conception of a "rounded" character, which he calls the "Euclidean character," because of its " intense symmetr[y]." While I have certain problems with some or the claims about character made in the essay, it does respond insightfully and truthfully to the solipsislic and sterile stale of a feel-good theater devoid of ideas. My primary purpose here is to show how Wellman's theories of character and dramatic mise en scene, especially as they arc exemplified in the work of Len Jenkin, have a formal precursor in the work of August Strindberg. In the process, contrast and critique will necessarily play a part.
J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and the Culture of Western Ireland under Late Colonial Rule
Authors: Devlin Joseph
Published: April 2013

In the difficult political and cultural environment of nationalist Ireland under British control, John Millington Synge travelled to the west coast and came upon a pre-industrialized, oral culture that was fast disappearing. His decision to chronicle this culture, in his drama and prose, arose from a deep sympathy with and appreciation for the western peasantry and their way of life, and this attitude affected his work in many different ways, most obviously in his unvarying preference for source material from rural Ireland, usually rural western Ireland. Although this predilection appears obvious from the works themselves. and has been commented on since their first performance or publication, one important instance of Synge's use of the matter of the west has remained completely unnoticed. The Playboy of the Western World, Synge's most important play and one of the most celebrated Irish plays ever written, has its origin in a well-known European folktale then popular in the west, "The Brave Little Tailor." The plot of the play, as well as its theme, main characters and tone, all arise directly from this source, and Synge's use of this popular oral art form has important implications for his relation to the peasant culture he had come into contact with and made the basis of his art. The west of Ireland was then undergoing severe stress arising from colonial and economic factors, and old ways of life were fast giving way. Thus the adaptation and dramatization of "The Brave Lillie Tailor" into The Playboy of the Western World is an act not only of cultural homage, but also of preservation.
Jean-Claude Grumberg's Holocaust Plays: Presenting the Jewish Experience
Authors: Pocknell Brian
Published: April 2013

Now in his fifties, Jean-Claude Grumberg can be considered one of France's foremost dramatists. Having made his mark early on with Rue (1968), Amorphe d' Ottenberg (1971) and Demain unefenetre sur rue ... (1974), he rapidly acquired a reputation for being able to treat dark, violent subjects with a touch of humour, and since these beginnings he has continued to meet with critical acclaim and considerable public recognition. The winner of the critics' prize for Dreyfus (1974), he went on to win the coveted Moliere prize for best new play for L'Atelier (1979) and again for Zone libre (1991). These are the works Ihat form his trilogy of Holocaust plays, and it is a rare distinction for a dramatist who writes on this difficult and disturbing question in France to attract such accolades. His work has given further exposure to a subject that is a part of the consciousness of OUT times, and one of the merits of his achievement is that it creates another, living tribute to those who were the victims. The national theatres of France, including the Comedie Française, the Odeon, the Theatre de la Colline and the Criee at Marseilles, now perform his works, and they attract some of France's most talented directors: Jacques Rosner, Jacques Lassalle and Gildas Bourdet. Research in the universities is beginning to take his output into account; David Bradby gives some interesting insights into the structure of his work; Michel Corvin and Marie-Alice de Beaumarchais both accord him a prominent place in their writing on French theatre; Robert Skloot more recently gave a brief consideration to L' Atelier in his study of theatre of the Holocaust. This play is currently a text prescribed for the baccalaureat program in France, an indication that critical interest in the playwright's work is growing.
From "Horse Opera" History to Hall of Mirrors: Luis Valdez's Bandido!
Authors: Wattenberg Richard
Published: April 2013

Luis Valdez's approach to theatre production and dramaturgy has changed considerably since his early work with El Teatro Campesino. As the leading theatrical voice for the Chicano movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, Valdez focused on raising the social and cultural consciousness of Chicano farm workers and Barrio dwellers through performances, often of an agitprop nature; however, beginning in the mid-seventies, Valdez began a new phase of his career with El Teatro Campesino — a phase which Jorge Huerta has described as "the infiltration of the regional theaters."
Epiphanic Transformations: Lou Andreas-Salomé's Reading of Nora, Rebecca and Ellida
Authors: Markotic Lorraine
Published: April 2013

Epiphanic Transformations: Lou AndreasSalome's Reading of Nora, Rebecca and Ellida LORRAINE MARKOTlC It is now we1l over a hundred years since the publication of Lou AndreasSalome's Henrik Ibsen's Female Characrers (Henrik Ibsen's FrauenGesralren,), and it is over a decade since the book was translated into English (as Ibsen's Heroines); yet Andreas-Salome's study of Ibsen's dramas has scarcely been acknowledged by most Ibsen scholars - which is not to say that it has had no influence upon Ibsen scholarship. Indeed, the lack of explicit reference to the book is somewhat striking. Clearly, Andreas-Salome's rcading of Ibsen is now less startlingly original than it once was: since her time, Nietzschean notions of subjectivity have gained popularity, Freud has elaborated Oedipal desi re and incest guilt and Betty Friedan has explored the problem that has no name. Still, Andreas-Salome's work deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. and it is perhaps even more convincing now than it was when she was "ahead of her time."
Mattogrosso: The Postmodernist Stage in Brazil
Authors: George David
Published: April 2013

period (1985 to the present), a phenomenon which has received little attention outside Brazil. Part of the problem is this: non-Brazilian scholars appear to have bonded with those artists who fell victim to repression in the 1960s. So pervasive is this trend that a vacuum, an empty stage, has been created, as if there were an unstated assumption that theatre in Brazil thrives only under dictatorship. It is an illusory vacuum, and the stage now resounds with a multitude of voices. The most controversial theatrical voices of the post-dictatorship period, and the subject of this article, are the postmodernism encenadores, auteurs in the mold of Robert Wilson.
How Old is Dr. Rank?
Authors: Otten Terry
Published: April 2013

Although virtually no Ibsen scholar would claim A Doll House as Ibsen 's best work, the play has stubbornly remained a staple on the modem stage; it is in all likelihood his most performed and anthologized drama. One reason for its frequent revivals is unquestionably its historical significance. Theatre historians have long used the cliche that when Nora slams the door at the end of the play, she announces the beginning of modem drama. Furthermore, from its beginning it has been defined as a feminist document, despite Ibsen's often quoted remarks to the Norwegian League for Women's Rights that "Whatever I have written has been without any conscious thought of making propaganda .... I am not even quite clear as to just what this women's rights movement really is." In disregard of Ibsen's disclaimer, feminists have long laid claim to the work; and the influence of feminist theory since the late 1960s has secured its prominence as a feminist text.
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: Suzan-Lori Parks and the Shared Struggle to Perceive
Authors: Frieze James
Published: April 2013

The thinking of Mr. Sergeant Smith, would-be hero of the fourth and final section of Suzan-Lori Parks's Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, is wishful in the extreme. He has, after all, been waiting what seems like an eternity for the Commander to honour him with that vague. but distinctly noble thing: a Distinction. Waiting for the Distinction is also the chief preoccupation of Mrs. Smith and of their children, Buffy and Muffy. The family's waiting is far from passive. In anticipation of Mr. Smith's homecoming, they clean the house, and especially father's desk. They discuss the clothes that the girls should wear for the big welcome, settling for "perm press [ ... ] polka-dotted [ ... ] swisses". They pore over the letters that Mr. Smith sends them, searching for clues as to when the Distinction will be awarded. Though the official purpose of examining the letters is to ascertain how much favour father has managed to curry with the Army, their analysis is also driven by an unofficial purpose: to determine how much daddy is thinking of each member of his family.
The Drama of Lynching in Two Blackwomen's Drama, or Relating Grimke's Rachel to Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun
Authors: Gourdine Amgeletta
Published: April 2013

This discussion rests on the premise that Black women's drama manifests the consequences of a reality, both lived and textual, of interrelated racial and sexual oppression. Generally, I argue that through the genre of drama, blackwomen expose the encoding of racial subjugation in the gendered text of black male experience, particularly the historical text of physical and tropological lynching. In the discussion that follows, the word "drama" refers to drama as a literary genre, while the word "drama" refers to a specific dramatic strategy in Angelina Weld Grimke's Rachel (1916) and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1958).
"It Seems Queer": The Censorship of Her Wedding Night
Authors: Hauck Christina
Published: April 2013

"[H]owever vile, however filthy however degrading .... vice so long as it is presented in terms of the strong man's over-sexuality and the frail woman's yielding to his dominance, is approved, unthinkingly accepted and consequently is not banned. When, however ... you have a plot which depends not on the over-sexuality, but on the under-sexuality of a man ... the play is considered improper and is banned!" So British sexologist, birth controller, social commentator and historian, translator, poet, novelist, and playwright Marie Cannichael Stopes assesses the Lord Chamberlain's refusal, in 1923 and 1924, to license for public performance her autobiographical play, Vectia. Ultimately attributing the censorship of her play to men's refusal even toconsider a woman's point of view, Stopes asks, "how many other serious plays by women have been destroyed before ever they came into being?" Her question is not merely rhetorical; it is literally unanswerable. Yet recent feminist excavations of the rich and vast body of work by women do confirm that women's writing has been subjected to various forms of censorship, Including, most insidiously, that of critical neglects. This paper will contribute to the project of recovering lost texts by women through a discussion of an unpublished one-act play, Her Wedding Night (1917), by a previously undiscovered woman playwright, Florence Bates. This account of the circumstances surrounding. and the justification for, the post-production censorship of this one act comedy in August 1917 not only supports Stopes's claim that the Lord Chamberlain's office banned representations of male sexual inadequacy as a matter of principle, but also deepens our understanding of the meaning of "sexual impropriety" as understood by the Lord Chamberlain and adds an important new dimension to studies in British stage censorship.
"Swapping Stories About Apollo and Cuchulainn": Brian Friel and the De-Gaelicizing of Ireland
Authors: Boltwood Scott
Published: April 2013

Having spent thirty years writing about contemporary and historical Ireland in such plays as Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), The Freedom of the City (1973), Faith Healer (1979), and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Brian Friel has been celebrated as this generation's "Irish" dramatist. Indeed, his works have enjoyed unrivaled success both in the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland throughout his long career. Nonetheless, Translations (1980) is rightly considered a watershed in his career — a play that transported its author from the ranks of Irish popular culture to those of the twentieth-century canon.
Angels in America as Medieval Mystery
Authors: Montgomery Benilde
Published: April 2013

Although highly praised in the popular press when it first appeared and officially canonized soon thereafter by Harold Bloom, Tony Kushner's Angels in America has now come under the scrutiny of critics of a more suspicious gaze. Among these less than enthusiastic critics are the notorious Arlene Croce, who, if only indirectly, includes Angels as an instance of "victim art"; Leo Bersani, who finds the play "muddled and pretentious"; and David Savran, who unravels the play's ambivalences to show not only that it is seriously at odds with its own apparent intentions, but that its immense popularity can be accounted for in the way it supports the "binary oppositions" of the status quo and thereby implicitly supports the Reaganite agenda that it would otherwise subvert. More positively, however, Savran also notes that "the play deliberately evokes the long history of Western dramatic literature and positions itself as heir to the traditions of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Brecht, and others." Among these others, I suspect that an important tradition to which Kushner is also the heir is that of the medieval mystery cycles. To read Angels in America in the light of this tradition may help dispel Savran's suspicion that Kushner is as much the victim of Enlightenment categories as are his political enemies.
Matter and Spirit in The Seagull
Authors: Reid John
Published: April 2013

At the end of the most recent National Theatre production of The Seagull (1994) in London, the lights faded to leave a single spot tightly focussed on the outspread wings of a disconcertingly large, yet elegant, stuffed seagull. It was clear that, for the sake of theatrical closure, a symbol had landed. But the audience seemed distinctly unclear about how to react. It was embarrassed by the director's assumption that it could do something with this object, make it mean more, rescue it from a state of semiotic aporia. It was a fine specimen of something from within the bird family, but it might as well have been an albatross. It was a theatrical false note of deafening corniness, and yet it epitomized a much deeper, common failure in recent professional productions of the play.
Maps of the World: "Neo-Jacobeanism" and Contemporary British Theatre
Authors: Boon Richard , Price Amanda
Published: April 2013

In 1986, the Royal Court Theatre in London premiered Howard Barker's version of Thomas Middleton's tragedy Women Beware Women. Accompanying publicity material credited the play as jointly authored, and indeed its first three acts were almost entirely Middleton's; Barker's contribution consisted of his own, original, concluding sequence. What struck many at the time was the seamless transition between Middleton's work and Barker's, a transition achieved despite a separating history of over 350 years and without recourse on Barker's pan to parody or even, except perhaps in its most formal sense, pastiche. In thematic concern, form, and style, there seemed an absolute confluence of interest between the theatre of the Jacobeans and that of one section, at least, of modem British theatre. Contemporary dramatists' awareness of the use that may be made of historical models to articulate their own critiques of modem society may be traced back almost to the beginnings of the revolution in post-war British drama and is not, of course, confined to reference to Jacobean theatre alone. But the work of John Webster, Cyril Toumeur, Middleton et al., and indeed the "darker" plays of Shakespeare, seem to have offered a particularly potent source of inspiration. One thinks especially of Edward Bond's Lear (1971), a landmark in contemporary British theatre. Perhaps more significantly, the explosion of activity on the Fringe from the mid- 1960s to the early 1970s, work often driven by despair and outrage at what was seen as an increasingly corrupt, inept, and ruthless establishment, found voice in subject matters and forms that, albeit for the most part unconsciously, echoed those of Jacobean antecedents.
Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun
Authors: Bernstein Robin
Published: April 2013

When Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959, the vast majority of white critics praised the play's "universality." One reviewer wrote, "A Negro wrote this show. It is played, with one exception, by Negroes. Half the audiences here are Negroes. Even so, it isn't written for Negroes .... It's a show about people, white or colored .... I see ‘A Raisin in the Sun' as part of the general culture of the U.S." The phrase "happens to be" appeared with remarkable frequency among reviews: the play was "about human beings, who happen to be Negroes'" (or "a family that happens to be colored"); Sidney Poitier played "the angry young man who happens to be a Negro.”
Through the Minefield of Ideologies: Brecht and the Staging of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder
Authors: Hasche Christa
Published: April 2013

It is a widely acknowledged fact that director Wolfgang Langhoff's acceptance of the plan to found a studio theatre — first called "Helene Weigel," later renamed "Berliner Ensemble" — at his Deutsches Theater was a chief reason for Bertolt Brecht to settle down in Berlin after his years of exile. The Berliner Ensemble provided him with the opportunity to test his theoretical concepts about drama and to experiment with his and other playwrights’ plays in the course of theatrical practice. In Berlin. Brecht struck a harsh note in his criticism of the political and historical situation in the post-war Gennany to which he had returned. His main points were "that Germany ha[d] not yet realized the dimensions of the crisis it finds itself in" and that dialectic was being employed merely as a "magic Jack-in-the-box, a conjuring trick," which "arrests the flow of things, turning them into inflexible matter." In short: "bloody awful times."
Brecht in Italy: Aspects of Reception
Authors: Böhme-Kuby Susanna
Published: April 2013

The reception of a literary work — like that of any other aesthetic phenomenon — is determined by specific historical and cultural conditions. Between the two World Wars, the recognition of contemporary German literature in Italy was hampered by the different political conditions existing in the two countries. Before that time, and certainly no later than the Risorgimento, the tradition of German-Italian cultural relations, vis-a-vis contemporary literary practice. was distinguished in large part by mutual indifference, if not outright aversion. Fascism and the continuation of nineteenth-century Italian cultural traditions had blocked access to the avant-garde movements of the Weimar Republic to such an extent that even reputable literary connoisseurs such as Bonaventura Tecchi and Mario Pensa failed to take note of Expressionism.
Elements of American Theatre and Film in Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle
Authors: Lyon James
Published: April 2013

If one ventured to accept as autobiographical a poem Brecht wrote shortly after reaching New York City in 1943, one might conclude that the great stylist's first impression of Broadway was one of disappointment. Entitled "The Son's Report" ("Bericht des Sohnes"), the poem describes how, upon reaching the city his father had described as "the most beautiful," the son sets out from the train station in search of the famous street. After asking someone where it is, he is told he is standing in it!
In the Jungle of the "Antropöfagos"
Authors: Ellis Lorena Balensifer
Published: April 2013

When dealing with the reception of literature outside its land of origin, it is natural to reflect on how the text is read and understood by an audience of a different culture, living in a different time zone, with a different climate, and speaking a language diffe rent from that of the author. What changes in this transfer of literature between cultures? How is the reader affected when exposed to a text from an alien culture? What role does the previous experience of the reader play in his understanding and interpreting of the text? There are many questions. and even more answers. While what follows will inevitably touch upon such questions, I shall for the most part leave the discussion of reception theory to the experts in the field, concentrating rather on a practical summary of Bertolt Brecht's reception in the Brazilian theatre, with special attention to indigenous theories of anthropophagy — what might be called cultural cannibalism.
Clever Blokes and Thick Lads: The Collapsing Tribe in Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark
Authors: Gleitman Claire
Published: April 2013

When A Whistle.in the Dark premiered in London and later in Dublin in 1961 and 1962, its critical reception placed Tom Murphy in an exalted pantheon. Like Synge, O'Casey, and Joyce before him, Murphy discomfited his English audiences and enraged his Irish ones by endorsing Yeats's lament, in "September 1913," about "Romantic" Ireland. Emphatically, A Whistle concurs, it's "in the grave." In fact, Murphy's characters have found Ireland so sepulchral that most of them have abandoned it entirely, in search of better fortune on English shores. Not surprisingly, the results are bleak. Like Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! (which premiered just three years later in 1964), A Whistle depicts emigration as a delusory promise that only gets you, as the song says, "right back where [you] started from." But what distinguishes A Whistle from Philadelphia is Murphy's unflinching portrait of a class-based destiny that serves, ironically, to unite those age-old enemies, England and Ireland. In A Whistle, class becomes an inescapable fate pursuing Murphy's Carneys as they flee Ireland and try to remake themselves on British soil. But the Carneys are doomed to remain intractably alien, regardless of the island on which they pitch their tent. This is because, in Murphy's acerbic judgement, England and Ireland dole out economic and social success with an identical, parsimonious discrimination.
The Common Good: The Hare Trilogy
Authors: Pattir David
Published: April 2013

In 1987, David Hare attended the Church of England's General Synod, "with no other motive but curiosity"; as he later put it, he "had the vague suspicion that priests pretending to be politicians might present [him] with an entertaining spectacle.” The visit, however, proved to be very much more than merely entertaining; it provided the impetus for a large-scale project that would occupy him for the next five years — a trilogy of plays (Racing Demon, which dealt with the Church; Murmuring Judges, on the British legal system; and The Absence of War, which assessed the electoral performance of the Labour Party).
Foreman FOR Every MAN: Pearls for Pigs
Authors: Leib Ethan
Published: April 2013

In Lava, a Richard Foreman play, Foreman's own voice says, as if he is talking to himself, "I understand you're looking for an excuse for a lot of fuzzy thinking." Foreman tries to deflect criticism of his thinking by admitting that his work relies on the revelatory possibilities of contradiction: he does not need to resolve the paradoxical world in which he lives. But we must ask whether Foreman's acknowledgement of his "fuzziness" really absolves us of scrutinizing him. My view is that it does not. In this paper I shall rigorously trace Foreman's thinking, despite his desire that we refrain from thinking too hard about his "message" and despite his wish that we should occasionally abandon "mental rigor" for the sake of allowing ourselves to experience inspiration.