Centre Of Drama Research Articles

Theatrical Adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in Iran: The Intellectual and Modernity in Akbar Radi’s The Decline

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRamin FarhadiRAMIN FARHADI is a PhD candidate in Drama at Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, the University of Manchester, UK. He has research expertise in Anglo-American Theatres, Global Shakespeare, Modern European Drama, and Film Studies. His current research is the critical examination of gender, politics, and civil dissidence in Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations in contemporary Iranian theatre within the context of censorship and conservatism. E-mail: ramin.farhadi@postgrad.manchester.ac.ukNotes1 According to Mirsepassi (2000 Mirsepassi, Ali. 2000. Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 19), the term enlightenment signifies the “universal and normative standards of human behavior and ethics based on a rational, democratic, and humanist model of society”. Enlightenment includes notions and ideals centered on human value and happiness, such as tolerance, liberty, knowledge acquisition, self-consciousness, and the rule of law. Since the turn of the twentieth century, Iranians have adopted the same conception of the foregoing term due to their experience of living under undemocratic governments. The reflection and promotion of enlightenment and its notions can be seen in modern Iranian drama, in which there has been emphasis on truth, self-awareness, and rationalism in the theaters of Akbar Radi and Gholam-Hossein Sae’di in particular (Zahedi 2006 Zahedi, Farindokht. 2006. Henrik Ibsen and Iranian Modern Drama: Reception and Influence. Oslo: Oslo Academic Press. [Google Scholar], chs. 1 & 5).2 In the late nineteenth century Iran, many Iranian academics and scholars, who had their qualifications from European academic institutions, began to negotiate the principles of modernity and democracy in Persia (now Iran). Their pro-democratic movement resulted in the occurrence of the Constitutional Revolution in 1906, which established the first parliament in the country, restricted the Shah’s power, and introduced radical changes in different sectors and fields in politics, social life, education, literature, and legislation. The Revolution was finally defeated when Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar put an end to the rule of constitution and bombarded the parliament with canons in 1908, with the support of Russian and British governments. To read the full account of the Revolution and its rise and fall, see Ansari 2016 Ansari, Ali (Ed.). 2016. Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906: Narratives of the Enlightenment. London: Gingko Library. [Google Scholar].3 For detailed information regarding the theater and cinema adaptations, and stage productions of Ibsen’s plays, including An Enemy of the People, consult the following link: https://ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/pages/search4 Originally a biological and agricultural term, domestication or domesticization in adaptation theory refers to the process of localizing the source text to conform to cultural traditions and meanings of the local audience (Bickley and Stevens 2021 Bickley, Pamela, and Jenny Stevens. 2021. Studying Shakespeare Adaptation: From Restoration Theatre to YouTube. London: Bloomsbury.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Through domestication, the adaptor may transfer the cultural meanings of the original work to the new audience and environment, making the source text more familiar and understandable.

The Challenges and Predicaments of Doing Embedded Fieldwork in Sociology: Shifting Roles of a Researcher in the Study of Social Compliance Audit

This paper seeks to recount the challenges and predicaments of doing fieldwork in the discipline of sociology with the central focus on ethnographic techniques of data collection. The paper is based on the specific challenges encountered by the researcher while doing the study of Social Compliance Audit (SCA). This paper draws from two bouts of fieldwork; each very different from the other. My first encounter is with the practice of SCA as a graduate of sociology, working in the corporate sector as a social compliance auditor. My second as a scholar enrolled for PhD program researching on social compliance audit. The two locations offered very different vantage points of enquiry. As an auditor, my brief was laid out; a given whose protocols I had to follow. SCA was a known and necessary entity for the managerial staff in the garment industry. As a PhD scholar I realized it was virtually unknown in the academic community of sociology, even within studies on labor. There are two clear challenges that I faced while conducting fieldwork for my PhD. One, that SCA was relatively unfamiliar as an object for sociological enquiry. And two, the predicaments of doing qualitative research on sites and people who had their own ideas of how SCA ought to be studies. Here, the field encountered is analysed as a method of knowledge production and the ethnographer is placed at the centre of drama.

Making Knowledge/Playing Culture

(A project of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto) This article discusses the 2017 festival-based undergraduate course, “Theatre Criticism and Festival Dramaturgy in the Digital Age in the Context of Globalization—A Cultural-Comparative Approach” as a platform for experiential learning. The course, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, and based on principles of our Digital Dramaturgy Lab, invited a small group of undergraduate students to critically investigate two festivals—the Toronto Fringe Festival and the Festival d’Avignon—in order to engage as festival observers in criticism and analysis of both individual performances and festival programming/event dramaturgy. We argue that site-specific modes of experiential learning employed in such a project can contribute in meaningful ways to, and expand, current discourses on festivalising/festivalization and eventification through undergraduate research. We focus on three modes of experiential learning: nomadic learning (learning on the move, digital mobility), embodied knowledge (learning through participation, experience, and feeling), and critical making (learning through a combination of critical thinking and physical making). The article begins with a brief practical and theoretical background to the course. It then examines historical conceptions of experiential learning in the performing arts, including theoriesadvanced by Burnet Hobgood, David Kolb and Ronald Fry, and Nancy Kindelan. The importance of the festival site is then discussed, followed by an examination of how the festivals supported thethree modes of experiential learning. Samples of student works are used to support this analysis.

All Astir

All Astir Mary K. Bercaw Edwards The title of this column, “All Astir,” refers to what is going on in the Melville world. As I write this, however, not much is astir. The whole world is shuttered because of COVID-19. Conferences, dramatic productions, and research have been cancelled. Most American universities have switched to online classes for the rest of the spring semester. Yet the beginning of the year was not so inauspicious. The American Repertory Theater mounted a “World Premiere Musical Moby-Dick,” written and composed by Dave Malloy, at the Loeb Drama Center in Boston that ran December 3, 2019, through January 12, 2020. Everything about the production was impressive, including its length of 3 hours and 25 minutes. The tickets were sold-out long before most Melville scholars (including this writer) had a chance to buy one. Andrea Shea of WBUR called the show, “Crude, Hilarious and Deep” (December 11, 2019). “In the re-imagining,” she notes, “Malloy and director Rachel Chavkin set out to emulate the sprawling form of ‘Moby-Dick.’” Carolyn Clay, also of WBUR, calls the musical “as passionately and quirkily unwieldy as the novel” (December 13, 2019). Although he begins his review, “Call me Exhausted” after “205 riveting, infuriating, audacious minutes,” David Gordon goes on to write that the musical is “all unapologetically Malloy, encompassing intelligent lyrics, soaring melodies, and polyrhythmic sounds used to mirror the communication style of whales. There’s no theater composer writing today whose work is as thrilling to me as his” (“Dave Malloy’s Moby-Dick Musical Is a Whale of a Time,” December 31, 2019, <https://www.theatermania.com/boston-theater/reviews/moby-dick_90373.html>). The musical, writes Jed Gottlieb of the Boston Herald, “aims to put America and its struggles on the Pequod with Ishmael, Queequeg and mad Captain Ahab. The piece turns over issues the so-called New World has wrestled with in the 170 years since Melville wrote the novel” (“ART reimagines ‘Moby-Dick’ as musical party with a message,” December 5, 2019). Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe, brings the musical back to Melville, calling it “an ambitiously conceived and superbly executed musical, if occasionally self-indulgent,” then adds, “Heaven knows what Melville—an onstage bust of whom silently observes the proceedings—would make of this creation” (“A captivating ‘Moby-Dick’ that ripples through time,” December 12, 2019). [End Page 105] Jennifer Baker, who directed the Twelfth International Melville Society Conference in New York last June (2019), was fortunate enough to see the production. She writes, “I thought it did a marvelous job of ‘reckoning’ with the book (it is subtitled a ‘musical reckoning’), particularly the philosophical and non-narrative chapters. I was also impressed by how much of the language is woven into the dialogue and songs. The writer obviously knew the book well.” Natasha Hurley won the Hennig Cohen Prize for “Acquired Queerness: The Sexual Life and Afterlife of Typee.” The Cohen Prize Committee writes: The Melville Society is pleased to announce that this year’s Hennig Cohen Prize for the year’s best chapter or essay on Herman Melville goes to Natasha Hurley for “Acquired Queerness: The Sexual Life and Afterlife of Typee,” chapter 1 of her monograph Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Hurley’s fresh and methodologically innovative analysis situates Typee’s publication and circulation as a paradigmatic instance of “acquired queerness”—a phenomenon that occurs when sexual details accumulated in the text interact with shifting dynamics of circulation and reception across time. Hurley argues that, just as Typee accumulates missionaries’ accounts of sexual perversion in the South Pacific, the novel’s own descriptions of queer attachments between men become recirculated in later writings—such as Charles Warren Stoddard’s South Sea Idyls—that helped produce the conditions of perceiving queerness. Blending formalist analysis with queer theory and reception history, “Acquired Queerness” illuminates “how it is that queerness becomes legible through the proliferations of sexual language that take place when . . . social groups and writers cohere through acts of reading texts; when one author cites another in an effort to produce a new frame of reference through a consolidation of...

Making Knowledge/Playing Culture: Theatre Festivals as Sites of Experiential Learning

(A project of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto) This article discusses the 2017 festival-based undergraduate course, “Theatre Criticism and Festival Dramaturgy in the Digital Age in the Context of Globalization—A Cultural-Comparative Approach” as a platform for experiential learning. The course, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, and based on principles of our Digital Dramaturgy Lab, invited a small group of undergraduate students to critically investigate two festivals—the Toronto Fringe Festival and the Festival d’Avignon—in order to engage as festival observers in criticism and analysis of both individual performances and festival programming/event dramaturgy.

“The artifice of eternity”: The Wanderings of Oisin and the Byzantium poems

ABSTRACTYeats’s poetry and drama centre on conflict, and crucially, on the clash between the mortal and the eternal. In this essay, I focus on the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin foreshadows and informs the treatment of eternity in Yeats’s later Byzantium poems. The Wanderings of Oisin explores the intensity of human longing for the eternal despite our time-bound nature, prefiguring his later impassioned though analytical Byzantium poems. Although the Byzantium poems seem initially to glorify eternity at the expense of human life, this essay traces the complexity of Yeats’s desire. Previous criticism has understated the extent to which Yeats’s poetry actively resists the siren song of eternity. The Byzantium poems problematise the eternity that they seem to desire, and this article reveals them as inflected by the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin questions the value of the eternal realm in the light of mortal heroic values. The “intensity, solitude, defeat” of the artist are inevitable, but there is a victory of sorts won from the poet’s deliberate inability to commit to any version of the eternal that preclude his own power and humanity. Yeats’s poetry runs the gamut between versions of desire that express an overweening desire for resolution even as they retain their resistance to any single pure state of being, if any such state is possible.

A Study on Yoo Chijin's View of the Theater from the Drama Center Theater

A Study on Yoo Chijin's View of the Theater from the Drama Center Theater

한국연극연구소의 드라마센터에 대한 연구

한국연극연구소의 드라마센터에 대한 연구

B for Badan, Blessed, and (B)othered: The Counter-Sacred in the Iranian Theatre of War

Research Article| October 01 2018 B for Badan, Blessed, and (B)othered: The Counter-Sacred in the Iranian Theatre of War Marjan Moosavi Marjan Moosavi Marjan Moosavi is an Iranian-Canadian PhD candidate and instructor at the University of Toronto's Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. Her professional work is rounded out with dramaturgy, dramatic translation, and sessional work as an instructor. Her articles on Iranian dramaturgy and diasporic theatre are published in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, TDR, New Theatre Quarterly, and Critical Stages. She is the Regional Managing Editor of the Iran section for TheTheatreTimes.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ecumenica (2018) 11 (2): 28–45. https://doi.org/10.5325/ecumenica.11.2.0028 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marjan Moosavi; B for Badan, Blessed, and (B)othered: The Counter-Sacred in the Iranian Theatre of War. Ecumenica 1 October 2018; 11 (2): 28–45. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/ecumenica.11.2.0028 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressEcumenica Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2018The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

Malnutrition surveillance among refugee children living in reception centres in Greece: a pilot study.

The health of asylum seekers is of cardinal importance for the future health of Europe. The aim of the present cross-sectional study was to assess malnutrition prevalence among refugee children living in reception areas in northern Greece. A total of 192 refugee children (1-18 y old), inhabitants of the refugee reception centres in Drama and Kavala, were evaluated for acute and chronic malnutrition according to the WHO growth standards and charts. In the total sample, 13.0% of the participants had at least one form of malnutrition, the prevalence of underweight was 7.8% and stunting affected 7.3% of the children. Moreover, a greater proportion of adolescent girls from the Drama centre (38.5%) demonstrated at least one form of malnutrition compared with the children in Kavala (p=0.046). Girls demonstrated an increased prevalence of malnutrition compared with boys, while children <5 y of age appeared more vulnerable. The present data underscore the necessity for malnutrition screening among refugees in order to have an early assessment of their nutritional status and address the direct and root causes of this substantial problem.

Desacralizing Whispers: Counter-Conduct in the Iranian War Theatre

The commemoration of sacrifice and martyrdom in the Iran–Iraq war led to dissemination of the ‘sacred defence’ culture and its theatre progeny – the Arzeshi genre, which is rooted in Shi’i religious values, Persian culture, and Iranian performance traditions. In response to this, Iranian anti-war theatre practitioners have intervened through a counter-conduct theatricality made up of characters, stories, reasoning, embodied emotions, and scenic languages. A thematic and aesthetic analysis of three stagings of the anti-war play The Whispers Behind the Front Line by the prominent Iranian playwright/director Alirezā Nāderi shows that there has been a shift over two periods of time regarding ‘disguised counter-hegemonic dramaturgy’, alternative characterization, and the ethical engagements of artists with the narrative of war. In this study Marjan Moosavi shows that theatre counter-conducts have shifted since 1995 from a realist aesthetic, reflecting a specific event – the Iran–Iraq war – to a universal, abstract aesthetic practice that sees war as a global phenomenon. Marjan Moosavi is an Iranian-Canadian PhD candidate and instructor at the University of Toronto's Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. She has published articles on Iranian dramaturgy and diasporic theatre in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, TDR, and Critical Stages.

“It’s About Becoming”: Indigenating Research Practice at the CDTPS

When we are young, birthdays are a time of gratitude and celebration—gratitude for the gifts we have been given in our lives and for our lives themselves. As we age, we begin to season these rites of celebration with remembrance and reflection. And when we hit particular milestones, we (with our communities) are called upon to reflect—to take stock of the resonance of one life and its reverberations in the greater context of creation. In 2017, as Canada celebrated 150 years since Confederation, the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies (CDTPS) at the University of Toronto celebrated its own milestone and reflected upon fifty years of a life well lived. For both celebrants, this became a time to remember and celebrate great achievements and laudable moments. The months that follow these celebrations have afforded us time to acknowledge and own missteps and time to develop a plan of action for the coming years.

To Carry the Archive with Us: The Multi-Burdened Crawls of William Pope.L and Didier Morelli

In 1978, performance artist William Pope.L began his inaugural crawl through New York City’s Times Square, challenging the “urban power” that verticality, literally and metaphorically, bestows. On 11 November 2011, Didier Morelli—as part of his presentation on William Pope.L for the graduate course I was then teaching, The History of Solo Performance—crawled two kilometers from his east-side apartment to the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the corner of St. George and College Streets. Morelli wore a Québec Nordiques hockey jersey and in Québécois French recited the excerpt from Roch Carrier’s “Le chandail de hockey” quoted on the Canadian five-dollar bill. He carried with him throughout the crawl a photocopied photograph of William Pope.L. Morelli’s (re)performance, which I (re)trace through my own self-conscious path as professor and audience, serving a particularly performative archiving function that makes evident the intrinsic relationship between affect and pedagogy.

The Use of Play and Inquiry in a Kindergarten Drama Centre: A Teacher’s Critical Reflection

The kindergarten drama centre is a place where children recreate familiar play scenarios, explore new ideas and feelings, and engage deeply in learning (Schwartz &amp; Copeland, 2010). Miller and Almon (2009) suggest that play is crucial to children’s development. However, play is often contested as parents question its relevance atschool (Ashiabi, 2007) and schools focus on academic achievementand readiness (Bodrova &amp; Leong, 2003; Miller &amp; Almon, 2009). Thispaper explores the author’s learning through reflecting on the successes and challenges of a bakery centre createdin her kindergarten classroom. The bakery became an excellent vehicle for strengthening students’ literacy and motor skills through play, but the impact varied greatly across students in the class. Further, assessment and planning enhancements to the bakery were significantly restricted by constraints on the time and attention the author could devote to them due to the dynamic classroom environment. The bakery also led to a rethinking of the learning agenda in the classroom.

Enabling performance: dyslexia, (dis)ability and ‘reasonable adjustment’

Since 1995, dyslexia has been labelled a ‘disability’ and included in the Disability Discrimination Act. In the Act, and subsequent revisions (2001, 2005) educational institutions and employers have a duty to make anticipatory ‘reasonable adjustments’ to reduce disadvantage. Despite evidence of good practice in drama schools and the industry, a number of core values, policies and practices that disable dyslexic learners remain. This article argues that dyslexic learners who have access to robust support and inclusive practice models will foster a positive identity, enabling them to become active and independent professionals. The first section grounds the discussion of dyslexia provision in an information processing model of cognition and disability theory. The second section identifies a number of underlying assumptions, training systems and practices which are disabling to dyslexic learners. The third section details examples of good practice, including study skills support and reasonable adjustments at Drama Centre London and Central School of Speech and Drama and institutional policy at the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama. It also reflects upon the relationship of existing training methods. The article concludes by providing a summary of best practice for use in audition, training and rehearsal contexts.

Directing musical theatre: Spectacles, radical interpretations and nostalgia – an interview with Nikolai Foster

Nikolai Foster is one of the most exciting directors of his generation. He initially trained at the Drama Centre London and then under Michael Grandage at the Crucible in Sheffield. Nikolai has been director on attachment at the Sheffield Crucible, the Royal Court Theatre and the National Theatre Studio. He is currently Associate Director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds and has directed more than 40 productions, including radical interpretations of classics and a plethora of musical theatre works (Annie, Aspects of Love, Flashdance, Assassins and A Chorus Line). Here, Foster talks to George Rodosthenous about directing musical theatre, his influences, the importance of training, the megamusical spectacles and how ‘we are inherently afraid of taking risks in this country’ when it comes to new British musicals. He describes himself as ‘an interpretive artist’ and argues that ‘[i]n Europe, the director is much more of a creative force which places the director’s complete and absolute vision for a play on top of it, whether it fits or not’.

The Donkey Show , and: Sleep No More , and: Best of Both Worlds (review)

Reviewed by: The Donkey Show, and: Sleep No More, and: Best of Both Worlds Tom Fish The Donkey Show Presented by American Repertory Theater at Club Oberon. Ongoing since August 21, 2009. Conceived by Randy Werner and Diane Paulus. Directed by Diane Paulus. Costume Design by David Woolard. Set Design by Scott Pask. Lighting Design by Evan Morris. Sound Design by David Remedios. Resident Direction by Allegra Libonati. With (original Cambridge company) Heather Gordon (Mia, Oberon), Rebecca Whitehurst (Tytania, Sander), Cheryl Turski (Dimitri, Vinnie 1), Erin McShane (Helen, Vinnie 2), Jason Beaubien (Dr. Wheelgood), Tom Fish (Moth, Fairy), Mike Heslin (Mustardseed, Fairy), Eric Johnson (Peaseblossom, Fairy), Cameron Ono (Cobweb, Fairy), Samson Kohanski (DJ), Steven DeMarco (Doorman), and Susannah Hoffman (Disco Girl). Sleep No More Presented by Punchdrunk in association with American Repertory Theater at The Old Lincoln School, Brookline, Massachusetts. October 8, 2009–February 7, 2010. Devised by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. Co-directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. Design by Felix Barrett. Choreography by Maxine Doyle. Sound Design by Stephen Dobbie. Costumes by David Israel Reynoso. With Phil Atkins (Duncan), Hector Harkness (Malcolm), Geir Hytten (Macbeth), Vinicius Salles (Banquo), Robert McNeil (Macduff), Thomas Kee (Porter), Sarah Dowling (Lady Macbeth), Alli Ross (Lady Macduff), Conor Doyle (Witch), Stephanie Eaton (Witch), Fernanda Prata [End Page 403] (Witch), Careena Melia (Hecate), Poornima Kirby (The Second Mrs. De Winter), Tori Sparks (Mrs. Danvers), Alexander LaFrance (Bellhop), Annie Goodchild (Annie Darcy), Hayley Jane Soggin (Elsie Price), Sogdiana Azhibenova (Speakeasy Bartender), and Robert Najarian (Man in Bar). Best of Both Worlds Presented by American Repertory Theater at the Loeb Drama Center. November 21, 2009–January 3, 2010. Book and Lyrics by Randy Weiner. Music by Diedre Murray. Co-written and directed by Diane Paulus. Scenic Design by Riccardo Hernandez. Costume Design by Emilio Sosa. Lighting Design by Aaron Black. Sound Design by Brett Jarvis. Music Direction by Michael Mitchell. Dramaturgy by Ryan McKittrick and Beck Holden. With Gregg Baker (Ezekiel), Jeannette Bayardelle (Serena, Daughter of Joy), Mary Bond Davis (Violetta, Daughter of Joy), Sebastien Lucien (Mamillius), Brianna Horne (Rain), Nikkieli DeMone (Camillo, The Bear), Lawrence Stallings (8-Ball, Tariq), Cleavant Derricks (Sweet Daddy, Narrator), and Darius de Haas (Maurice). Fluorescent nightclub lights swirled about as the popular ’70s anthem “Ring My Bell” thumped on the speakers. I stood on a silver box overlooking a crowd of gyrating club-goers. A woman at least four decades my senior pressed against my scantily clad, glitter-enveloped body. Suddenly, she threw back her head, closed her eyes, and as though transported to the disco days of her youth, exclaimed, “I haven’t had this much fun since the real thing!” The setting of this bacchanal frenzy was not a Cambridge nightclub, but Club Oberon, the site of a loosely adapted Midsummer Night’s Dream entitled The Donkey Show, a revival of the original 1999 production which ran for six years off-Broadway. This production would mark Diane Paulus’s directorial debut as the newly appointed Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater (ART), and the first installment of “Shakespeare Exploded,” a series of three loose Shakespeare adaptations built to revitalize the local theatre scene while redefining the way the Boston public experiences Shakespearean production. I was privileged to play a part in Paulus’s project as Moth, one of Tytania’s four disco-dancing fairies in The Donkey Show. As an insider to the ART, I developed a unique understanding of how the aesthetic and operation of “Shakespeare Exploded” worked. Rather than judge the merit of these shows, I will take this opportunity to explore how each of these productions created unique forms of theatrical engagement between the performer and spectator. [End Page 404] Click for larger view View full resolution Rebecca Whitehurst as Titania dances with an audience member on the bar in the American Repertory Theater’s production of The Donkey Show, directed by Diane Paulus. Photo by Marcus Stern. [End Page 405] In The Donkey Show, this unique type of theatrical exchange began before the audience had even entered the club. On the street outside the theatre, a red rope was set up outside the entrance and a doorman checked off audience members...

Thinking about the Theatre—and Theatre Critics: An Interview with Robert Brustein, Conducted by Bert Cardullo, New York City, July 2008

{ 220 } \ Thinking about the Theatre— and Theatre Critics An Interview with Robert Brustein, Conducted by Bert Cardullo, New York City, July 2008 Robert Brustein (b. 1927) is an Ameri­ can theatre critic, producer, and teacher. He was educated at Amherst College, where he received a B.A. in 1948, and Columbia University, where he received an M.A. in 1949 and a Ph.D. in 1957. After teaching at Cornell University, Vassar College, and Columbia, he became dean of the Yale School of Drama in 1966, serving in that position until 1979. It was during this period that he founded the Yale Repertory Theatre. In 1979, Bru­ stein left Yale for Harvard University, where he founded the Ameri­ can Repertory Theater and became a professor of English. He served for twenty years as director of the Loeb Drama Center at Harvard, where he also founded the Institute for Advanced Theater Training. He retired as artistic director of the Ameri­ can Repertory Theater in 2002 and now serves as founding director and creative consultant. As the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre from 1966 to 1979, and of Ameri­ can Repertory Theater from 1980 to 2002, Brustein supervised over two hundred productions, acting in eight and directing twelve. Robert Brustein has been the theatre critic for the New Republic since 1959, and he is the author of fifteen books—a number of them collections of his writings for that magazine. Twice winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism—in 1962 for his reviews in Commentary, Partisan Review, Harpers, and the New Republic; and in 1987 for Who Needs Theatre: Dramatic Opinions—Brustein is the only person to have received this award more than once. He was elected to the Ameri­ can Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999 and in 2002 was inducted into the Ameri­ can Theatre Hall of Fame. { 221 } An Interview with Robert Brustein bert cardullo: Could we begin at the beginning, as it were, when you started out as a critic? robert brustein: Yes, of course. When I started writing criticism in the 1960s, I was part of a prominent community—Eric Bentley, Harold Clurman, Kenneth Tynan, Walter Kerr, Richard Gilman, Stanley Kauffmann, and Susan Sontag. It was an amazing group. Everybody wanted to write theatre criticism in those days. Eric Bentley had a profound influence on me when I was a young, evolving intellectual. He was one of the few in our time who took theatre seriously as a genuine art form and not simply entertainment, although it must be that, too, of course. I read his books religiously and scoured the New Republic for his reviews. He was my idol, as it were, and he stimulated me through his work to go into theatre criticism. I can certainly attest to the impact that Bentley’s Playwright as Thinker had on me. I had been a student at the Yale School of Drama for a year in 1948. I was appalled, actually, at the fact that we would end our experience of watching a play, and we’d talk about the acting, we’d talk about the directing, we’d talk about the technical work, we’d talk about the lighting, talk about the management , but we would never, ever, talk about the play. I found in Bentley’s book a testimony to this fact. When I got to Yale, we read plays in synopsized form, and the way we responded to the plays was to say how many characters, how many sets, where it’s placed, what the particular period is, but we never, ever talked about the play. To come upon this book, and to read what Bentley had to say about the intellectual content of plays,the artistic content of plays,the way that playwrights influenced each other, the various styles and contrary but nevertheless unified approaches to the theatre that one found from the nineteenth century to the present time, really had an untold influence on me, and this man’s name became magic to me. I also just recently thought, in preparing for this interview, that I would look back over the book, and came across some passages...

The Singapore Arts Festival at Thirty: Going Global, Glocal, Grobal

The Singapore Arts Festival celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2007, an appropriate milestone for taking stock of the country’s premiere cultural event. Under the leadership of Goh Ching Lee since 1999, the festival has sought to carve out a distinctive identity that is Asian and cuttingedge, while providing a model for other arts festivals in the region. By programming international work and commissioning Singaporean work that is slick, glossy, and easily transferable across cultural and geographic boundaries, the festival may be pointing toward a future in which the work circulating at international festivals assumes a form and content that is, in the words of George Ritzer (2007), increasingly “grobal,” that is to say global and accessible, but increasingly devoid of content and removed from any concrete or stable cultural, political, or social context. William Peterson is a senior lecturer and director of the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and has published widely on theatre, politics, and religion in Singapore, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Philippines.

&lt;i&gt;The King Lear Project: A Trilogy&lt;/i&gt; (review)

The King Lear Project: A Trilogy Presented by the Singapore Arts Festival at the Drama Centre Theatre, Singapore. June 11, 2008. Directed by Ho Tzuy Nyen. With Remish Panicker (King Lear), K. Rajagopal (King Lear, Gloucester), Gerald Chew (King Lear, Edgar), Crispian Chan (Fool), Oon Shu An (Cordelia), Brandon Fernandez (Kent, Cornwall), and others. The King Lear Project: A Trilogy is series of plays that dramatize the processes of staging Shakespeare's Lear. The first play opened on June 11 in conjunction with the annual 2008 Singapore Arts Festival at the Drama Centre Theatre. Headed by local filmmaker and director Ho Tzu Nyen, and producer Fran Borgia, the project performed the difficulties and complexities of staging what many critics believe to be Shakespeare's most unstageable tragedy through three components of fictional Lear production: an audition (Lear Enters), rehearsal (Dover Cliff--The Conditions of Representation), and post-show discussion (The Lear Universe). Since the plays were performed over three consecutive evenings, this review is by no means exhaustive, but attempts to highlight the distinguishing traits of each play to give unified sense of the overall production. The opening set of Lear Enters was minimal and modeled after typical audition scene. The actor-cameraman took the stage with about dozen actor-stagehands, who busied themselves with white hollow-cube structures that were rearranged conveniently according to the instructions of the crew, director Kaylene Tan, and her assistant Elizabeth Tan. A large screen in the background magnified the expressions of those speaking in the foreground. The first candidate to audition for the role of Lear was Remesh Panicker, and like the other hopeful Leafs that followed, he was given full creative control over his audition. There was, however, one restriction: he must choose to audition as 1) god-Lear, 2) madman-Lear, or 3) Everyman-Lear. Panicker chose the first, and with his court in place for the audition, god-Lear announced his darker purpose. Panicker portrayed an especially convincing depiction of god-Lear, and his gestures and speeches conveyed distinct courtly presence. Lear faithfully followed the script until Kent (Brandon Fernadez) was dismissed for defending Cordelia (Oon Shu An), at which point Panicker was asked to explain why he chose to play god-Lear. Every man, he claims, have a little divinity in them. When the audition was officially over, Kaylene Tan took the spotlight centre stage; she asked: What do you think? Initially, her question appeared to be directed at the audience, but she was in fact addressing her producer, Paul Rae, who was seated in the stalls with the audience few rows away from the stage, and visible only by spray of light that illuminated him in an otherwise dark theatre. More interestingly, he was practically invisible to the members of the audience in the balcony; they could only hear his voice, soft-spoken, soothing, yet keen in his opposition to Panicker's interpretation of Lear. Rae played the role of producer, but his mindful, philosophical responses to Tan and his position in the stalls marked him as the mouthpiece of the scholarly community and the audience. He paid no attention to Panicker's acting skills; instead, he voiced only his criticism of the idea of god-Lear. Lear, he contended, cannot simply be reduced to godlike figure. He is too complex, too fragile, and too weak to command the stage as his exclusive and sole privilege. After Rae offered his insights, the lights went out, and the second audition began; this cycle--audition, justification, and judgment--was repeated throughout Lear Enters. Madman-Lear, played by K. Rajagopal, wore only floor-length loincloth. He entered prancing, twirling, howling, and laughing madly with his royal procession. His choice prop was long black rope, attached around his protruding belly on one end, and held like leash by his royal fool (Crispian Chan) on the other. …