bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Prunes and Miss Prism
Authors: Nethercot Arthur
Published: April 2013

HAROLD E. TOLIVER, analyzing Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in his article, "Wilde and the Importance of 'Sincere and Studied Triviality'" (Modern Drama, February, 1963), makes good use of the character of the governess, Miss Laetitia Prism, as one means of demonstrating his thesis. In the process he comments, in passing, on the appropriateness of her name, or names, to her character. A closer examination of these names, however, will reveal even lower and solider strata of connotative application than Mr. Toliver has noted.
Arthur Miller: The Salesman's Two Cases
Authors: Hagopian John
Published: April 2013

A CAREFUL STUDY OF Death of a Salesman in terms of Arthur Miller's own defense of it in various articles, prefaces, and interviews leads to the conclusion that the author himself does not understand his own accomplishment-and his confusion is shared by his critics. The fact of the matter is that not only is Miller's salesman suffering from schizophrenia, but the play itself is afflicted with that disease. Most plays, like most people, have multiple facets to their personalities, but these usually function more or less harmoniously within a single integrated being. The two personalities of Miller's play do, of course, inter—relate, but they are basically different genres—a dazzlingly experimental social drama is the dominant personality, but it detracts our attention from the more important and more conventionally-made drama of a moral struggle toward insight and honest personal commitment.
Holloway on Synge's Last Days
Authors: O'Neill Michael
Published: April 2013

THROUGHOUT MOST OF HIS LIFE J. M. Synge was afflicted with delicate health. His sickly state generated in him an intensified awareness of the irony, the mystery, and the tragedy of existence. Death above all haunted his brooding thoughts to become, as we know, a recurring motif in his writing. So in his poetry, for example, he saw death emerge as his "cruel personal foe" and "chase after him with huge strides leaving in its wake a great desolation."

During his youth the more stern aspects of his mother's Evangelical Protestant faith turned him away from religion to assume instead a mask of stoic resignation when dealing with life's enigmas. This attitude apparently served him as a satisfactory way for accepting the human condition, for being reconciled to his enemy, death; it aided him, he tells us, "to put away sorrow like a shoe that is worn and muddy."
Art And Structure In Rosmersholm
Authors: Van Laan Thomas
Published: April 2013

IBSEN'S LATER PROSE DRAMA is commonly distinguished from the earlier "problem" plays by its "poetic heights," by the way in which the prosaic material "has been subdued to the purposes of poetry." Although prose continues to be the medium, the poetic quality of Ibsen's last plays is evident in their evocative and "elliptic" dialogue; their symbolic overtones of character and action; their thematic manipulation of visual and verbal symbols; and their range of vision, which, as in the final act of John Gabriel Barkman, transcends the restricting confines of the picture stage. One of the most significant aspects of this more poetic mode is Ibsen's attainment of the ambiguity which frees the great poet from "taking sides," from employing his art merely to instruct, to indoctrinate, to convince. The simply defined characters of the problem plays become the "bundles of opposite qualities" which John Northam saw as Ibsen's basic conception of his characters. "Inner complexity" of character extends, as in Rosmersholm, to a greater complexity of meaning in the whole action, and Ibsen focuses upon "the multiplicity of forces and demands to which all individuals are subject."
Modern Drama: A Selective Bibliography of Works Published In English in 1962
Authors: Shedd Robert
Published: April 2013

Modern Drama: A Selective Bibliography of Works Published In English in 1962
That Paradox, O'Neill
Authors: Falk Doris
Published: April 2013

EUGENE O'NEILL'S ACTIVE WRITING CAREER coincided almost perfectly with the span of time from World War I to World War II. In letters and interviews he showed a decent concern with these events, but simply included them in his general disgust with the self-destructive antics of the ape called man. His plays reflect little interest in contemporary history: the first World War provided a situation for the one-act play, In the Zone, and for the loss of Nina Leeds' lover in Strange Interlude, but any other war at any time would have done as well. In most of the plays O'Neill looked back at the past-either at his own or that of history. But in the very act of ignoring or rebelling against his own time, he represented it. His least successful plays are now clearly period pieces of the twenties and thirties whether he set them there or not, and others may yet come to seem so. The flood of recent biographies, however, indicates that O'Neill, the man, is very much in the present-day consciousness, and the play closest to him, Long Day's Journey into Night, seems to be the one most likely to remain with us in the future.
The Kelly Play
Authors: Willis Arthur
Published: April 2013

GEORGE KELLY BEGAN HIS CAREER in the early twenties when monochromatic realism moved onto the American stage. It was the realistic play that seized his imagination, and he has never once, in a career that reached upwards of forty-five years, ventured beyond its narrow confines. This is singular. In Kelly's heyday, throughout the twenties, American drama was a straw to every European wind that had blown and invited novelty and imitation. Other dramatists Anderson— and O'Neill, for example—who assayed the realistic play often deserted it because of its banality. The usual complaint was that literal realism stifled invention and yielded only surface impressions, like a camera.
Book Reviews
Authors: Philips William , Hogan Robert , Mendelsohn Michael , Kelson John , Wills Arthur , Frenz Horst , Frenz HorstJohn
Published: April 2013

Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher ed., O'Neill And His Plays: Four Decades Of Criticism, reviewed by William L. Philips

Constantin Stanislavsky, Creating A Role, reviewed by Robert Hogan

Morgan Y. Himelstein, Drama Was A Weapon, reviewed by Willis Michael J. Mendelsohn

R. Baird Shuman, Clifford Odets, reviewed by John H. Kelson

Paul Green, Paul Green: Five Plays, reviewed by Arthur Wills

Rex Burbank, Thornton Wilder, reviewed by Horst Frenz

1, 2, reviewed by 3

1, 2, reviewed by 3

1, 2, reviewed by 3

1, 2, reviewed by 3

1, 2, reviewed by 3

1, 2, reviewed by 3
Moral Perspective in Pirandello
Authors: Freedman Morris
Published: April 2013

PIRANDELLO IS FIRST RESPONDED TO in terms of his experimentalism, the pirandellismo which has made his name in the modem theater the counterpart of Joyce's modem fiction, or of Yeats's in modem poetry. We do not normally and easily associate him with Ibsen or Shaw, theatrical innovators also, if not so daring or so philosophical in their innovations as Pirandello. We study Ibsen and Shaw in terms of their social import, the meaning first of all of their content. Yet Pirandello's experimentalism gains its force only through his substance, the fabric of plot, theme, character; his manipulation of the conventional dramatic structure reinforces, is often identical with, his subject matter. How Pirandello says what he has to say is a good part of what he says. What Pirandello has to say is, finally, why he is worth considering at all. in other than a purely historical and technical way.
Saint Joan As Epic Tragedy
Authors: Solomon Stanley
Published: April 2013

SEVERAL OF THE CRITICAL PROBLEMS related to Saint Joan stem from the unusual nature of the play—unusual, that is, for Shaw, for in no other Shaw play do we have a predominantly tragic tone.1 In the numerous commentaries on the play, we find three key questions frequently recurring: 1) Is Joan a tragic heroine with a tragic flaw or an innocent victim of circumstances? 2) Although Joan has our sympathies throughout, why does Shaw go to such elaborate lengths to align us intellectually on the side of her opposition? and 3) If the play is a tragedy, what is the purpose of the epilogue? In dealing with the above questions, I propose to consider Saint Joan as indeed a tragedy, but a special kind of tragedy, one that encompasses an epic design. The play is as consistently tragic in tone (at least from the first third of it to the end), as it is epic in structure. We may speculate on Shaw's reasons for not using the conventional tragic structure for Joan's story, but it is perhaps more rewarding to concern ourselves with the effects that Shaw achieves by coordinating epic and tragic elements.
Book Reviews
Authors: Brie Germaine , King Walter , Gaskell Ronald , LeSage Laurent , Kelson John , Kuhn Reinhard
Published: April 2013

Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor And Martyr, reviewed by Germaine Brie

Rupert Croft-Cooke, Bosie, The Story Of Lord Alfred Douglas, His Friends And Enemies,, reviewed by Walter N. King

Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde, The Aftermath,, reviewed by Walter N. King

Michéal Mac Liammóir, The Importance Of Being Oscar, reviewed by Walter N. King

Robert Lima, The Theatre Of Garcia Lorca, reviewed by Ronald Gaskell

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942 of Albert Camus, reviewed by Laurent LeSage

James Walter Mcfarlane ed., Discussions Of Henrik Ibsen, reviewed by John H. Kelson

Leonard Cabell Pronko, Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theater In France, reviewed by Reinhard Kuhn
Naturalist Drama And Galsworthy
Authors: Scrimgeour Gary
Published: April 2013

FIFTY YEARS AGO naturalism was the great new movement in the English theater, and John Galsworthy was its dignified prophet. But yesterday's masterpieces have become today's museum-pieces, and Galsworthy's voice is stilled. If he had been a bad dramatist, there would be no critical problem, but his plays have the virtues-serious content, clear structure, interesting characters, brilliant individual scenes-that usually guarantee long life in the theater; some of his scenes, such as that of Falder's isolation in Justice, are as good now as they ever were. As a whole, however, his work has not worn well, and what astonished its first audiences now often seems pallid or melodramatic or naive. My purpose is to suggest that this lack of durability is the fault not of Galsworthy's incompetence but of his strict adherence to naturalist theory.
The Drama of Carlos SolOrzano
Authors: Dauster Frank
Published: April 2013

Among the members of the present theater movement in Mexico, Carlos Sol6rzano represents a special set of formative circumstances. A Guatemalan residing in Mexico, he has never suffered the attraction of the provinces, which has been such an important influence on most of the members of the movement. Since his first play he has demonstrated his adherence to a cosmopolitan theater, and even those works which are set in the provinces avoid narrow regionalism. This orientation is demonstrated in his work as Artistic Director of the University Theater which, despite its title, is comprised of professional people dedicated to the diffusion of the best of modern theater. Among the authors presented since its opening in 1952 are Christopher Fry, Kafka, Pirandello, Irwin Shaw, the contemporary Mexican Emilio Carballido, Sol6rzano himself, Camus (the world premiere of the revised version of Le malentendu, translated by Solorzano, as well as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ruiz de Alarcon Ben Jonson, and Musset. This eclectic cosmopolitanism is also characteristic of Sol6rzano's own work, which includes three full-length and five one-act plays. They demonstrate remarkable variety, underlining the technical versatility characteristic of Sol6rzano and, in general, of the newer Latin American theater movement.
Winterset: A Modern Revenge Tragedy
Authors: Abernethy Francis
Published: April 2013

MAXWELL ANDERSON'S recognition of Elizabethan England and the drama of that period needs little emphasis; to him the Age of Elizabeth was one of the "few mountain peaks of achievement," sharing this distinction with the Periclean Age and the Italian Renaissance. As a critic, especially in Off Broadway, a collection of critical essays, his major points of reference were the classics; and he consistently used the Elizabethans, especially Marlowe and Shakespeare, as touch• stones of greatness. And just as Elizabethan drama was a criteria for his critical opinions, so was the Elizabethan scene an influence on much of his creative writing: for the return to poetic form in Winterset; for his following the Elizabethan practice of using the past to reflect universal concepts, as Joan at Lorraine deals with the character of heroism and The Masque of Kings with the idealist in revolutionary movements; and for the subject matter of the Tudor trilogy—Anne at A Thousand Days, Mary at Scotland, and Elizabeth the Queen. Anderson's dramatic fundamentals were derived from the Greek and Elizabethan classics, and Winterset is a result of an application of some of these classical fundamentals to a modern play.
Two Plays by Billetdoux
Authors: Knapp Battina
Published: April 2013

THE CHARACTERS IN Francois Billetdoux' plays utter the faint and anguished cries of men and women whose illusions have been shattered by the brutal forces of life which envelop them. Billetdoux introduces us to human beings searching to realize their dreams and aspirations, to fix and to hold on to something solid, and by so doing, to give themselves faith in living. But these intangibles in which his characters believe and which serve to propel them onward, are too abstract and too fleeting to be satisfying. A fundamental feeling of futility overcomes even those who seemingly inhabit a contented world in which religious and political questions are never baflling.
Theatricality In The Avant-Garde Drama: A Reconsideration of A Theme In The Light of The Balcony And The Connection
Authors: Eskin Stanley
Published: April 2013

AN ASSERTIVE AND SELF-CONSCIOUS THEATRICALITY is an important aspect of Jack Gelber's The Connection, as it is of many plays which we loosely identify as "avant-garde." The average spectator arriving a few minutes early to a performance of The Connection finds, first, that the play has already started and, secondly, that he is himself participating in it. While the audience is still stumbling in, the actors are quietly taking their places on the curtainless stage. This establishes a special relationship between the audience and the play before the play ever begins, which is confirmed as soon as the lights dim and the first character speaks: he introduces himself as the producer of The Connection and immediately points to Jaybird, the author. From the start, we know that the playwright is not endeavoring to evoke a world of fiction whose significance and effectiveness depends on our ability to forget that we are sitting in a theater watching a play, but on the contrary that, far from hiding the theatricality of his medium, he is capitalizing upon it. We sense that we are dealing with the avant-garde theater. Jack Gelber puts the idea of theatricality to very special uses in The ConnectionJ but its importance can best be understood in relation to the theme of theatricality as it appears in other avant-garde plays, and particularly in Jean Genet's The Balcony.
Letter from New York
Authors: Unterecker John
Published: April 2013

It was perhaps ironical that my epiphany should have taken place in front of the building housing the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, for that company had very expensively been assembled in the hopes of providing a Cure for the mediocre playwrighting, the mediocre direction, and the mediocre acting which gives Broadway such a bad name. The new company, we were all told well in advance of its opening, would demonstrate what wonders could be accomplished if a carefully-selected group of actors and directors were allowed to work together as a unit. Before its first performances, there was a good deal of talk about the Lincoln Center company providing an American "answer" to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the British National Theatre, and the Com%eacute;die-française.
Yeats and The Two Harmonies
Authors: Ure Peter
Published: April 2013

IN FOUR OF HIS PLAYS, On Baile's Strand, The Hour-Glass, The Shadowy Waters, and The King’s Threshold, Yeats mingled verse and prose. In so doing he was contravening current opinion as well as the judgement of a very eminent authority: […]

So far as I know this matter has not been discussed in any detail in relation to Yeats, except by Dr. Denis Donoghue in his chapter on Yeats in The Third Voice (1959). It may, like other questions concerning Yeats's plays, be worth looking at again, though I am of course indebted to Donoghue's treatment of the subject.
Aubrey Beardsley's Drawing Of The “Shadows" In W. B. Yeats'sThe Shadowy Waters
Authors: Clark David
Published: April 2013

As ALLAN WADE HAS NOTED, "Late in 1896 [Yeats] sent either a version or a synopsis of [The Shadowy Waters] to Leonard Smithers, who intended to publish it with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley hoped to make six pictures for it, but Yeats has stated that he only finished one and died before he could do the rest." No one has pointed out what the illustration was like and what passage of the play it illustrated. Since the illustration does not appear in any of Beardsley's published work and since neither Yeats nor anyone else seemed to know what happened to the original, information about what it looked like would be not only interesting in itself but potentially valuable for identification should the drawing still exist in some private collection. Such information is forthcoming if one examines the Letters from Aubrey Beardsley to Leonard Smithers concurrently with the unpublished manuscripts of The Shadowy Waters.
Yeats's Purgatorial Plays
Authors: Warschausky Sidney
Published: April 2013

THREE OF YEATS'S PLAYS, The Dreaming of the Bones) The Words Upon the Window-Pane) and Purgatory) have a peculiar interest for the student of his dramaturgy. All three are ghost plays, of course, and as such form a convenient group, though this is not the primary reason why they claim our attention. Moreover, all three are unusual in that they are more pointedly occasional and more direct in their representation of recent history than are most of Yeats's other plays. Most significant, however, is the fact that it is fruitful to think of the three plays as constituting a series of experiments in the course of which a set of dramaturgical conventions is transmuted into a completely personal vehicle. The Dreaming of the Bones is one kind of Japanese Noh play, allowing for the limited nature of Yeats's understanding of the Noh. (The Words Upon the Window Pane may be regarded as a transitional stage in Yeats's treatment of the soul in purgatory.) The dramatic strategy of Purgatory is substantially different from that of the Noh, and yet Purgatory grows out of Yeats's experiences with it.
A Visit with Anne Yeats
Authors: Rose Marilyn
Published: April 2013

GENIAL AND FORTHRIGHT, Anne Yeats welcomes her visitors. She has her father's strong features and broad, deep forehead, but her laughing eyes and bright blond hair give her a distinction of her own. In the engaging clutter of her second floor studio-apartment at 39 Upper Mount Street, Dublin, birds sing in sunlit cages one is not surprised to find W. B. Yeats's daughter at home here.
Peddler And Pioneer In Death Of A Salesman
Authors: Gross Barry
Published: April 2013

ALTHOUGH MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT Death of a Salesman, the use to which Arthur Miller has put the American frontier Tradition—especially the motifs of peddler and pioneer—has not been sufficiently discussed.
The Critic As Playwright: A Study Of Stark Young's The Saint
Authors: Sommers John
Published: April 2013

PLAYWRIGHTS HAVE OFTEN TAUNTED THEIR CRITICS by declaring that no man is fit to judge what he himself has never been able to create. The critics have either ignored the challenge or have defended themselves by arguing that criticism and playwriting are two quite distinct activities and that each has its own proper sphere of operation. But the late Stark Young believed that "it is a safe method in criticism to ask to see results, to see what are the fruits of any p0- sition a critic may take himself." And in The Saint, a four-act drama produced by the Provincetown Players in 1924, he boldly put this proposition to the test. He carefully built the play according to what he believed were the fundamental precepts of the theatrical art.
The Debasement Of The Intellectual in Contemporary Continental Drama
Authors: Kuhn Reinhard
Published: April 2013

ONE OF THE STRIKING ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY THEATER is its remarkable diversity. Not only is there the theater of the absurd, as represented by Ionesco and Beckett; there is also the epic theater which has gained popularity thanks to the works of Brecht and has been perpetuated by the most recent plays of Adamov and Frisch; less well-known but equally impressive in a more subtle manner is the theater of poetic fantasy of which the plays of Supervielle, Pichette, and Schehae are such moving examples. But within this very diversity it is possible to find certain common themes which the most important playwrights of the 20th century have utilized. One of these leitmotifs is the degradation of the intellectual, who is usually presented in the guise of a professor. By juxtaposing some of the portraits which our contemporary dramatists have drawn of professors, it is possible to gain an interesting insight into the anti-intellectual spirit of our age.
Douglas Hyde's “share" In The Unicorn From The Stars
Authors: Mercier Vivian
Published: April 2013

ON FEBRUARY 12, 1908, W. B. Yeats wrote to A. H. Bullen refusing to allow the latter to include Where There Is Nothing in the Collected Edition of Yeats's works for the following reason:

Though The Unicorn is almost altogether Lady Gregory's writing it has far more of my spirit in it than Where there is Nothing which she and I and Douglas Hyde wrote in a fortnight to keep George Moore from stealing the plot. Hyde forbade me to mention his name for fear of consequences, and you must not mention it even now ...

Not until this letter was published by Wade in 1954 did Hyde's share in the first version of The Unicorn from the Stars become generally known. As late as 1936, three years after Moore's death, when all danger of his bringing a lawsuit had consequently disappeared, the malicious and delicious account of the Yeats-Moore quarrel in Dramatis Personae referred to Hyde only as "a certain cautious friend, whose name must be left out of this narrative .... " Since Yeats predeceased Hyde by many years, this is how the passage still stands in the Autobiography. I assume that Hyde was less afraid of Moore's taste for litigation than he was of offending the Roman Catholic clergy and laity of Ireland. Where There Is Nothing contains much that they would regard as blasphemous and heretical. If Yeats had revealed Hyde's share in it even in 1936, I wonder whether Hyde could have been elected President of Ireland in 1938.
The Glass Menagerie: From Story to Play
Authors: Beaurline Lester
Published: April 2013

"Not even daring to stretch her small hands out—nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." Tennessee Williams scrawled these words from e. e. cummings at the top of the last page of The Glass Menagerie sometime after finishing the one-act play that was to grow into his first successful work. The quotation suggests the gentle, elegiac tone that he tried to attain, and since the last half of the passage survived as the play's epigraph, it apparently expressed Williams' later feelings too. The fragile pathos of Laura Wingfield's life was Williams' original inspiration in his short story, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and theater audiences continue to respond to the basic human appeal of the play.
Variations On A Theme: A Study Of Exiles By James Joyce And The Great God Brown By Eugene O'Neill
Authors: Metzger Deena
Published: April 2013

THERE IS A SURPRISING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN The Great God Brown by Eugene O'Neill (1925) and Exiles by James Joyce (1914) which bears investigation. An analysis of their themes and plots reveals them to be parallel developments despite their seeming irreconcilability. Their disparity is an illusion based on the conception of each within the framework of a very different philosophic and aesthetic perspective.

Joyce's philosophic position demands the use of the dramatic emotion of stasis and the illuminating technique of "epiphany." O'Neill's position accords with the aesthetic of traditional theater and depends upon ecstasy and catharsis. These are polar positions resulting in the production of two singularly different plays representing significant variations on one theme of overwhelming contemporary pertinence.

One of Exiles' concerns is the problem of establishing and maintaining the integrity of the individual. This self-realization depends upon the renunciation of conventional modes of action and thought for a terrible freedom which will permit the individual to commit himself consciously to a desired mode of behavior.
Modern Drama: A Selective Bibliography Of Works Published In English In 1963-64
Authors: Shedd Robert
Published: April 2013

THE TWO-YEAR PERIOD COVERED in this bibliography was most remarkable for the worldwide observations of the multicentenary celebrations of towering figures in world drama and theater (Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Stanislavski). Not surprisingly, there was —except for the studies of Shaw—a slight diminution in the total number of publications concerned with modern dramatists. Among national dramas, however, the older and current French playwrights have continued to receive the most exhaustive and penetrating scrutiny.

Were it possible to include journalistic items, this bibliography would more clearly reflect the obituaries of such dramatists as O'Casey, Cocteau, and Odets who departed from the scene in 1963-1964. A more formidable prospect for this bibliography was the task of selecting the most important from the many essays evoked by Hochhuth's The Deputy; the appearance Ganuary, 1965) of Eric Bentley's The Storm over THE DEPUTY, with David Beams' thorough bibliography (pp. 237-254), eliminated the need for what was shaping up as an extremely long section here.
Book Reviews
Authors: Sokel Walter , Ginestier Paul , Heringman Bernard , Crafton Allen , Hill Claude , Hammond Geraldine , Rose Marilyn , Frenz Horst
Published: April 2013

John Willett ed., Brecht On Theatre: The Development Of An Aesthetic, reviewed by Walter H. Sokel

Aureliu Weiss, Le Theatre De Luigi Pirandello Dans Le Mouvement Dramatique Contemporain, reviewed by Paul Ginestier

William York Tindall, Lawrence Durrell, and John Unterecke, Samuel Beckett, reviewed by Bernard Heringman

John Gassner, Directions In Modern Theatre And Drama, reviewed by Allen Crafton

Herbert Lindenberger, Georg Bochner, reviewed by Claude Hill

Robert Brustein, The Theatre Of Revolt: Studies In Modern Drama From Ibsen To Genet, reviewed by Geraldine Hammond

Norberto Avila, ed., O Serj1idor Da Humanidad, reviewed by Marilyn Gaddis Rose

Kurt Schluter, Der Mensch Als Scha Uspieler, reviewed by Horst Frenz
Book Reviews
Authors: King Walter , Reardon William , Miller Jordan , Friedman Melvun , Arestad Sverre , Goldstein Malcom , Gaskell Ronald , Crafton Allen
Published: April 2013

Walter J. Meserve, An Outline History Of American Drama, reviewed by Jordan Y. Miller

Joseph H. McMahon, The Imagination Of Jean Genet, reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman

Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem, reviewed by Sverre Arestad

Gerald Rabkin, Drama And Commitment, reviewed by Malcolm Goldstein

Federico Garcia Lorca, Five Plays: Comedies And Tragicomedies, reviewed by Ronald Gaskell

Tyrone Guthrie, A New Theatre, reviewed by Allen Crafton

Herbert Blau, The Impossible Theatre, reviewed by William R. Reardon

B. C. Rosset, Shaw Of Dublin: The Formative Years, reviewed by Walter. N. King
The Glass Menagerie: From Story to Play
Authors: Holzapfel Robert
Published: April 2013

IN 1943, WHILE A STUDENT at the University of Zurich, Diürrenmatt wrote his first play, which was never published. It is referred to as both "The Button" and "The Comedy." In the final scene the main character, Adam, enters a laboratory containing a man-made machine capable of destroying the world. Adam demands that power be given back to the strongest authority—God. To his astonishment, all present agree to give up the machine, but in the process of agreement someone accidentally sits down on the control button and the world blows up. The significant philosophical features of this first dramatic attempt are the presence of an almighty God, an individual trying to do what is right, and a chaotic world that renders man's struggle absurd. Since 1943 Diürrenmatt has written eight plays and has become the major dramatist writing in the German language. Although his style and subject matter vary greatly, the point of view initially revealed in "The Button" has remained the same.
Genet's Black Mass
Authors: Zimbardo
Published: April 2013

THE TERM "theater of the absurd," because it has been misused as a blanket definition of anything new or bizarre in the theater, and because the philosophical conception "the absurd" is itself difficult, has created as many obstacles to the understanding of contemporary drama as it has overcome. Most unfortunate is the impression the term creates of homogeneity of outlook and intention among contemporary playwrights. We are led by it to yoke together writers of such markedly different sensibility as Beckett and Genet, for example. Some modern drama is indeed illuminated when we consider it in the light of existentialism's "absurd," but it comprises plays which (in the Aristotlean sense) are "imitations" of the "absurd" condition, i.e. the state of being simultaneously imprisoned in the confines of self and displaced in the universal order.
Beckett's Metaphysical Tragicomedy
Authors: Francis Rciahrd
Published: April 2013

Waiting for Godot, LIKE ALL LANDMARKS OF LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT, is a play more admired than understood. It has been interpreted in so many ways by so many critics to accommodate such a variety of theories about Beckett's work, and the state of the drama in contemporary culture, that the play stands as a Hamlet of our time. Our difficulty in understanding what Beckett has, confronted us with is, in part, our failure to recognize the significance of the genre within which Beckett is working and, in part, our failure to comprehend the real implications of the metaphysical assumptions within which the play dramatically evolves. Though some may feel that the only critical agreement about Godot is that its dramatic form scarcely exists, we must expect Beckett to take seriously the subtitle of the play, "a tragicomedy in two acts."
Becketand Honor: A Trim Reckoning
Authors: Gatlin, Jr. Jesse
Published: April 2013

JEAN ANOUILH USES THE PHRASE "The Honor of God" as the sub-title of his play Becket. In the English translation of the play by Lucienne Hill, the word "honor" appears more than twenty times, spoken by a variety of characters in a variety of situations. It is as if Anouilh were determined to explore the meaning of the word by a sort of comprehensive dramatic demonstration of what is really essential to this abstraction which so many characters in the play use so glibly.
The Boy with A Cart
Authors: Ferguson John
Published: April 2013

STEYNING IN SUSSEX is one of the lovelier small towns of England, nestling as it does among the downs. E. V. Lucas describes it as "the little grey and red town which huddles under the hill." Its church today is basically Norman with fine zigzag mouldings and the weighty dignity of the best Norman work. The nave roof is disproportionately high to the eye outside, but "when one faces the curiously chequered square tower, an impression of quiet dignity is imparted." The main street winds and rises, and its curve reveals where the heavy farmwagons once lurched as they breasted the incline. Its houses are varied with gable and roof, bow window and Tudor, red and yellow, and notable for their strange and characteristic weatherboarding; and they are as Lucas says "quaint and ingratiating." The town remains placid and unhustled, and the American Louis Jennings wrote of it, "There is plenty of time for everything in Steyning."
Personal Nomenclature In The Plays Of O'Neill
Authors: Törnqvist Egil
Published: April 2013

When a dramatist baptizes his fictitious creatures, he is not in the situation of a parent christening his own children. For the dramatist usually baptizes, not children, but grown-ups, who have developed a number of characteristic traits. Hence he can do for them what he cannot do for his own offspring: give them fitting names. Since all names have a meaning (although in some cases it is obscure or unknown even to the scholars in the field) it would seem natural if any dramatist, indeed any writer, made naming a distinctive element of characterization along with occupation, costume, gestures, etc. It is objected that the average theater-goer or reader of plays knows the meaning of but a few names, and that this inventiveness on the part of the author is consequently wasted on his public. The obvious answer to this is that some dramatists at least—and O'Neill is one of them—do not let their way of writing be influenced by the average theatre-goer.
Suddenly Last Summer As “Morality Play"
Authors: Hurley Paul
Published: April 2013

A NUMBER OF CRITICS have already pointed out that the material employed in the dramas of Tennessee Williams is offensive to many otherwise broad-minded people. After all, rape, sexual perversion, and cannibalism are not the most attractive of topics even in our post-Freudian age. Comments on Williams' work have thus confined themselves, generally, to heated discussions about his right as an artist to employ such "offensive" material; and sober analyses of his plays are therefore hard to come by. Williams' most shocking drama is surely Suddenly Last Summer; considering the material with which the play concerns itself, the fact that it has become a favorite target of Williams' attackers is hardly surprising. What is surprising (or, at least, interesting) is that Suddenly Last Summer has been misread and misviewed even by those who defend Williams' right as an artist to deal with any subject he chooses.
Form And Content In Sean O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy
Authors: Rollins Ronald
Published: April 2013

It is this period of "chassis" which provides the historical and atmospheric backdrop for O'Casey's first three dramas of lyrical realism, tragi-comedies designed, in great measure, to juggle and juxtapose the voluble and volatile Irishman's intoxication with his private and political dreams of heroic selfhood with his casual disregard of and antipathy for his grimy material milieu. The struggle between Republican gunmen and the ruthless Black and Tans influences the action of The Shadow of a Gunman, set in 1920; the guerilla warfare in the 1920's between the die-hard Republicans, who wanted Ireland free from all English control, and the Civic Guards or Free Staters, Irish police loyal to the new government of the Free State, reflects itself in the events in Juno and the Paycock; and the Easter rebellion by the Sinn Feiners and the Irish Citizen Army comprises a major portion of the action in The Plough and the Stars.
Rice: The Public Life Of A Playwright
Authors: H. Robert
Published: April 2013

IF ONE HAD TO DRAW A DIVIDING LINE between the modern drama and the old in America, the year 1914 would not be a bad choice. That year saw the first stages of a conflict which would draw the United States forever out of its cozy shell of isolationism, and in the theater that year saw the first hints of the modem American drama. A young man, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, the son of a famous actor-manager of the old school, published his first one-act plays in a now rare and valuable volume entitled Thirst. Another young man, Elmer Leopold Reizenstein, had his first play produced on Broadway, a play called On Trial.
Brecht In Neverneverland: The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Authors: Sagar Keith
Published: April 2013

RAYMOND WILLIAMS IS ONE OF OUR BEST CRITICS of modem drama. His article The Achievement of Brecht (Critical Quarterly, III, 2) is perspicacious and just except for the single paragraph in which he dismisses The Caucasian Chalk Circle. He finds the framework of the collective farm dispute "arbitrary and distracting; the issue it raises is not followed through." The stories of Azdak and Grusha he finds "again quite arbitrarily related." Azdak he sees as living out a preposterous negation of justice, "a survival from the earlier vision of anarchic paradox" who blunts the point of Grusha's story. All these faults he ascribes to "a central confusion of experience" in the play. I should like to offer here an alternative reading.
The Fetal Quality Of “Character" In Plays Of The Absurd
Authors: Feynman Alberta
Published: April 2013

THE DRAMATISTS OF THE Absurd find Man an uncomprehending being in an incomprehensible universe. They ask, along with Sophocles and Shakespeare, the awful question—Why? Why is Man here? Why is Man on earth? What role is assigned to him to play? What function fulfills Man? And they always arrive at the same answerless answer—Nothing. Nothing fulfills Man. Man is on earth for no reason at all. There is nothing for Man to do—nothing, that is. except to wait, pass time. "Man is lost; all his actions . . . senseless, absurd, useless." He may not even, like Johnson's Rasselas, go back to the "Happy Valley" to cultivate his garden. He has no garden. That is his ultimate absurdity.

Assuming, then, the fundamental absurdity of the human condition, what kind of character can a playwright conceive to represent this absurdity in concrete image?
The Mysticism of Eugene O'Neill
Authors: Pommer Henery
Published: April 2013

There are, of course, firm statements by O'Neill inconsistent with mysticism. Yet when a reporter charged him with being full of paradoxes, O'Neill asked, "What did Walt Whitman say? ... 'Do I contradict myself? Well, I contradict myself.'''4 As Sinclair Lewis recognized, O'Neill saw "life as not to be neatly arranged in the study of a scholar but as a terrifying, magnificent and often quite horrible thing akin to the tornado, the earthquake, the devastating fire." Therefore it is difficult to be certain of O'Neill's total attitude towards the world, though one part of that total was a suprarational mysticism at odds with the gloom so often apparent in the plays.
“Torn Dialogues ... Torn And Lacerated Dialogues…” Jean Vauthier
Authors: Knapp Bettina
Published: April 2013

JEAN VAUTHIER, THE DRAMATIST, does not belong to any theatrical school. He is primarily a poet who uses the theater as his vehicle to express himself. Vauthier brings to the stage dense and tortured conflicts in which his brilliant imagery, with its symbolic overtones and intricate rhythmic effects, serves to give the story its compactness and its momentum, depth, and darkness in which situations are pushed to the extreme.

To say, however, that Vauthier has not undergone the influence of theatrical innovators would be misleading. In Vauthier we see aspects of Jarry and Artaud. Like his two predecessors, Vauthier assaults his audiences: he trumpets harsh animal sounds; there are screams, whines, paroxysms of gestures, laughter, brutal and exciting explosions. Vauthier's characters frequently recall Ubu, with their puppet-like, wooden movements, their violence, and sado-masochism. At the same time Vauthier uses the stage as Artaud suggested, as a vehicle for a total, emotive experience. His intention is to break down those barriers of custom and .habit in social man; and also, the formal or traditional barriers separating actor and audience. Once the social and dramatic conventions are breached, the audience is free to engage in a complete emotional experience, brought I. about by a visceral empathy between themselves and the figures on stage.

In the four plays under present discussion Captain Bada (Le Capitaine Bada), The Character Against Himself (Le Personnage combattant), The Prodigies (Les Prodiges), and The Dreamer (Le Reveur), similar themes reoccur; the theme of the poet vis-a-vis himself, vis-a-vis women, society, God. Questions are posed in an attempt to answer anguishing problems. What is the poet's reality? How much can the poet give of himself? How much pain can he bear?
Symbol And Meaning. In Strindberg's Crime And Crime
Authors: Allen James
Published: April 2013

AUGUST STRINDBERG'S PLAY Brott och Brott, whose title is usually translated There are Crimes and Crimes but will here be translated simply as Crime and Crime, is among the better known of the author's many writings. Although it is today perhaps less familiar than The Father, Miss Julie, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata, in 1913 Edwin Bjorkman in his introduction to the play was able to make the statement that "it has, from the start, been among the most frequently played and most enthusiastically received of Strindberg's later dramas." Yet both before and since Bjorkman's comment, the piece seems to have received much less critical and scholarly attention than a number of Strindberg's other plays. Especially has there been little, almost nothing apparently, done by English-speaking writers in analysis of the play's significant symbolism, and what little has been done in the way of commentary upon theme has been either superficial or misguided.
Young Lennox Robinson And The Abbey Theatre's First American Tour (1911—1912)
Authors: Everson Ida
Published: April 2013

IN HIS VOLUMINOUS DIARY, The Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, Joseph Holloway noted, under date of August, 1911, that he had seen W. B. Yeats, "with a big dark butterfly bow arranged over his chest," standing at the corner of Nassau and Grafton Streets and waving in vain, "after the car I was in, because he wanted it to stop at the wrong place. . . . Robinson was in the car I returned home in—he sat in the corner next the door—all legs, nose and glasses. He wore a soft brown felt hat. I bid him the time of day as I sat down Be said, 'it had been a heavy shower?'—he replied 'it was' Be lapsed into silence. He had nothing to communicate to me nor I to him. His aloof manner freezes me. He apes the insolence of his master—W B Yeats—exactly. The copy is more contemptable [sic] than comic! Robinson has, I regret to say, developed into a most unlovable personality, since he became tainted by the ways of the Abbey 'bosses.'''
Red Roses for Me: Fact and Symbol
Authors: Malone Maureen
Published: April 2013

AMONG THE CRITICISMS LEVELLED AT the early plays of Sean O'Casey was the accusation that he had merely presented a factual commentary upon contemporary history. The present play is more vulnerable than most to this type of assessment, since it is bound more closely than any other to memories of his early life in Ireland and to the history taking shape there in 1913; yet, significantly, it is here more than anywhere else in his work that we are conscious of the artist raising the mass of facts to a poetic level beyond the reach of mere journalism. It is the purpose of this article to trace the historical and autobiographical foundations of the play, and to discover how this factual mass is illuminated by the dramatist's art.
Millay's Aria Da Capo: Form and Meaning
Authors: McKee Mary
Published: April 2013

SO STRONG "was the appeal of the commedia dell' arte that it has, in various guises, survived into the present."! One modern play of this type is Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo (popular with drama students despite its requirements of skillful directing, acting, and creative setting), which portrays one aspect of the human plight as an image become flesh on the stage, and which is at the same time broadly comic and deeply tragic.

Millay did not choose to write theater-poetry based on folk myth or ritual, as so many playwrights did in the twenties; neither did she write a thesis play on social reform; nor did she write an intellectual farce, in which the point is in the game of ideas. What she did write had a dash of the first, a pinch of the second, a generous sprinkling of the third, with the commedia dell' arte form as one of the main ingredients.
The Pioneers of Bertolt Brecht In America
Authors: Himelstein Morgan
Published: April 2013

Now THAT BERTOLT BRECHT IS SAFELY "in," at least in advanced American theatrical circles, it is only natural that a host of courageous pioneers in the cause of Brecht will be proclaimed. For instance, in a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, Mark Harris asserted that the San Francisco Actor's Workshop and its former directors—Jules Irving and Herbert Blau—"pioneered Brecht . . . before America had heard of him." In basing this claim on a 1956 production of Mother Courage in San Francisco, Mr. Harris was almost a quarter of a century off. The Actor's Workshop may have introduced Mother Courage to the American stage, but America had heard of Brecht many years before that.
Beckett And Expressionism
Authors: Mayoux Jean-Jacques
Published: April 2013

IT IS AMONG NORTHERN PEOPLES that imaginative creation has most often taken the Expressionist path, first in the plastic arts, and then in literature. A certain amount of light seems to impose the conviction that the exterior world exists and that bodies are bodies. In contrast, the Irish philosopher, Berkeley, elegantly formulated the theory of the absence of the perceived world .... For the Northerners, the physical corporeal objects in the work of art are not reflections of the same kind of reality; nor are they manifestations of a spiritual reality, a corresponding Idea; instead, they emanate by projection from the artist's feelings.

In literature, from Romanticism on, one can trace the transition of many kinds of realism (including Impressionism) toward what one might call meaningful hallucination, by the end of this systematic deformation. Faust or Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony herald an Expressionism which will explode differently in and outside of Germany— Strindberg and ]arry, for example. First and foremost, there must be affective surexpression, and true Expressionism emerges when that surexpression moves from the feeling subject to the objects which are evoked by strong and disturbed feelings. Thus, Jarry's burlesque Expressionism of King Ubu, with its phantasms of conflict and destruction, is parallelled by the non-burlesque Expressionism of Nights and Days, with its essential characteristic of this mode: like wishes in fairy tales, these fears, desires, and hatreds take form and become "reality," but a different kind of reality, in which every form is dedicated to deforming itself in the sense of the emotion it expresses.
GODOTOLOGY: There's Lots Of Time In Godot
Authors: Schechner Richard
Published: April 2013

Two DUETS AND A FALSE SOLO, that's Waiting for Godot. Its structure is more musical than dramatic, more theatrical than literary. The mode is pure performance: song and dance, music-hall routine, games. And the form is a spinning away, a centrifugal wheel in which the center-Time-can barely hold the parts, Gogo and Didi, Pozzo and Lucky, the Boy( s). The characters arrive and depart in pairs, and when they are alone they are afraid: half of them is gone. The Boy isn't really by himself, though one actor plays the role( s). "It wasn't you came yesterday," states Vladimir in act two. "No Sir," the Boy says. "This is your first time." "Yes sir." Only Godot is alone, at the center of the play and all outside it at once. "What does he do, Mr. Godot? ... He does nothing, Sir." But even Godot is linked to Gogo/Didi. "To Godot? Tied to Godot! What an idea! No question of it. (Pause.) For the moment." Godot is also linked to the Boy(s), who tend his sheep and goats, who are his messengers. Nor can we forget that Godot cares enough for Gogo/Didi to send someone each night to tell them the appointment will not be kept. What exquisite politeness.