Contemporary American Theater Research Articles

Seeing Deb Margolin: Ontological Vandalism and Radical Amazement

Playwright and performer Deb Margolin's contributions to contemporary American theatre over the course of her now 25-plus year career have been eclectic. In the 1980s and early '90s she performed with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver as the feminist performance troupe Split Britches, for which Margolin did much of the writing, based on the trio's improvisations and experiments. In the interstices of her work with Split Britches, Margolin built her own career as a solo performer and playwright. In her autobiographical Index to Idioms, premiered in 2005, and in conversation with Jill Dolan, Margolin addresses her process, politics, and pleasures in performance and playwrighting.

Editorial Comment

Editorial Comment David Z. Saltz In recent years, Theatre Journal, reflecting trends in theatre scholarship, has significantly broadened its scope through, among other things, an ever-increasing acknowledgment of plays originating from outside Europe and America, and a radically expanded notion of both the dramatic text and the performance event. In this context, the five essays in this general issue may at first blush seem somewhat old-fashioned: all focus on plays (in the conventional sense of the word) by American, English, or Irish playwrights, most of whom—such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, and Suzan-Lori Parks—are already highly familiar to students of theatre. Where each of these essays makes its distinctive contribution is by reframing the plays within carefully selected, rigorously defined, and richly restored contexts of performance. Archbishop Tutu, in a statement quoted in Sara Warner's essay, observes that "a person is not basically an independent, solitary entity. A person is a human precisely in being enveloped in the community of other beings, in being caught in the bundle of life." As the essays in this issue amply illustrate, Tutu's observation applies just as well to plays as to people. Thomas Postelwait has clearly articulated the intimate relationship between theatrical event and context, emphasizing that "an event and its context are, by necessity, mutually dependent conditions. Intersecting both synchronically and diachronically, the event and context participate together in an historical matrix."1 The first three essays in this issue, by Warner, Paul Murphy, and William West, exemplify attempts to reframe context synchronically, extending and deepening our understanding of the world within which the plays were originally performed; the final two essays, by Edward Kahn and Yeeyon Im, exemplify attempts to reframe it diachronically, investigating the interpretation, performance, and reception of canonical Shakespearean tragedies within a geographical and temporal context far removed from that of the plays' composition. The essays all reinforce Postle-wait's basic point that to delineate the field of events, ideas, and sociopolitical facts that constitute a performance's context is a decisive act of interpretation in itself, one that not only profoundly influences the conclusions one draws about the meaning of a play and/or its performance, but also the questions one asks—and even how one perceives the identity of the performance event itself. Suzan-Lori Parks's controversial play Venus, the subject of the opening essay, has hardly been a victim of critical neglect. The play, rooted in historical fact, revisits the story of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, an aboriginal South African woman who in the early nineteenth century was exhibited in Europe as "The Hottentot Venus." While there have been many superb critical treatments of this play, including a recent essay in Theatre Journal,2 most have analyzed it either in terms of contemporary American theatre and society—the context of its composition—or early nineteenth-century South Africa and Europe—the context of its historical narrative. Sara Warner's inspiration is to stir post-apartheid South Africa into this contextual stew. Warner observes that Venus's debut in April 1996 occurred only one day after the first South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearing (itself the focus of a recent Theatre Journal essay),3 and six years before Baartman's remains, which had been on display in Paris's National Museum of Natural History, were finally returned to South Africa for burial in April 2002. Warner designates the TRC hearings and the commemorations of Baartman's South African homecoming as "acts of interment." By contrast, she regards Venus, along with much of Parks's other work, as a "drama of disinterment": [End Page viii] "Acts of interment such as Baartman's funeral and the proceedings of the TRC are rites designed to provide closure. Dramas of disinterment, on the other hand, are aesthetic and cultural productions that insist upon a never-ending opening." Critics' failure to recognize the difference between these two projects accounts for much of the antipathy directed toward Venus. Although Venus's detractors accuse the play of gratuitously sullying Baartman's reputation and dignity, on Warner's reading the play accomplishes nothing less than Baartman's "aesthetic resurrection." Paul Murphy's essay examines...

Creating a Life on Stage: A Director's Approach to Working with Actors (review)

Reviewed by: Creating a Life on Stage: A Director’s Approach to Working with Actors Steve Knight Creating a Life on Stage: A Director’s Approach to Working with Actors. By Marshall W. Mason. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007; pp. ix + 252. $19.95 paper. Marshall Mason's new book on the craft of directing, Creating a Life on Stage, will not break any new ground. It will not spawn tomes of criticism or discount previous approaches. Mason seeks neither revolution nor revision; he is not trying to reinvent the wheel. Rather, he revives the style of memoir-cum-manual, compacting an impressive body of work into an elegant volume. Ignoring the more instructional approaches of Stuart Vaughn and Francis Hodge, Mason follows in the steps of Harold Clurman, William Ball, and Michael Bloom by first describing his approach meticulously, then interspersing the text with anecdotes from storied productions in American theatre. Although sometimes overlooked by scholars chronicling contemporary American theatre, Mason's extensive theatrical experience merits attention and study. According to Arthur Bartow in The Director's Voice, Mason's The Rue Garden (1962) was the first Off-Off Broadway play to be reviewed in the Village Voice. Additionally, he was a member of the Actor's Studio, a founder of the Circle Repertory Theatre, and a lifelong collaborator with Lanford Wilson, which resulted in plays such as The Fifth of July, Talley's Folly, and The Hot l Baltimore. For all of his efforts, Mason has been rewarded with five Tony nominations for best director, five Obie-winning productions, and the Mr. Abbott Award for lifetime directorial achievement. On the strength of this distinguished career, it is apparent that Mason would have valuable advice to share with others directing in the theatre. This desire to pass on to others lessons learned is the impetus behind Creating a Life on Stage. To frame his study, Mason issues a series of mandates that all good directors must fulfill: 1. Generate an original, inspired conception. 2. Communicate your ideas clearly. 3. Use an approach that is suited to your personality. 4. Prepare thoroughly. 5. Schedule the available time to achieve your goals. 6. Collaborate to achieve group creativity. 7. Establish a stimulating rehearsal atmosphere. 8. Make your directions as specific as possible. (9) Some might argue that there is nothing in this list of suggestions that many others haven't already espoused (see, for example, Dean and Carra's Fundamentals of Play Directing). Why read a book that's already been written? The devil, it seems, is in the details. Mason teaches us about directing not by telling us how to direct, but by telling us how he has directed. Although his dictums may at first glance appear redundant, the text teems with stories of real-time theatre problems and their solutions, moving beyond mere instruction into applicable anecdote. Mason's discussion of his typical rehearsal schedule, for example, yields tremendous insights. He reviews how, in his own practice, instead of cumulatively stringing moments together, he takes each beat (approximately fifty in his full-length example) and devotes an entire rehearsal session (three hours) to its exploration. Mason leads the company, with their lines fully memorized at the outset, collaboratively to discover the nuances of the text in a manner that utilizes actor impulses as the sole starting point. Although at times he must suggest moves and ideas, the actors in large part determine the direction and content of each rehearsal. Mason contends that in using this approach he engages both actors' creativity and personal responsibility in the role and the production. As a director whose reputation lies in the ensemble ideal, his sheer will in the pursuit of actor–director collaboration offers valuable clues to his achievements over the years. In so doing, he presents a model that other directors would do well to emulate. Owing to his proclivity and emphasis on research in rehearsal, Mason's accounts of improvisations and nontextual exercises abound with fervor and detail. From stock Spolin routines (the mirror) to intriguing connective sessions (a baby exercise in which actors who must play lovers explore each other's bodies as children), the note-taking reader might compile...

Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy (review)

critically about a play. Rush also provides samples of how his questions can reveal possible meanings by using plays that are frequently anthologized. Although in his introduction he states that a play can have multiple meanings, the examples are asserted in a fairly authoritative manner and may lead students to believe that Rush’s analysis is the de¤nitive interpretation. Perhaps the greatest weakness of this work is that Rush does not provide a summary chapter that might help readers understand how these different analytic tools might work together. Should students follow the order of Rush’s chapters, addressing structure, then proceeding to character, language, genre, and style? The text does not fully explain how these different dramatic components might in®uence each other or how students might decide relative signi¤cance . That Rush does not treat production as the ultimate goal of analysis may also make it dif¤cult for students to grasp connections between analyzing the text and bringing it to life onstage. The greatest bene¤t of Rush’s work is that he has assembled a great deal of information in one text. Additionally, his approach of “questioning the play” seems to be helpful in teaching students how to begin the analytic process. Given the differing opinions about literary and production-based approaches to script analysis, it is probably not possible for one text to treat both adequately. Instructors willing to supplement aspects not addressed in Rush’s text would likely ¤nd it a valuable resource. —KATE SINNETT St. Cloud State University \ Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy. By Felicia Hardison Londré. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. 249 pp. $28.50 cloth. As Mark Bly notes in his introduction to the second volume of the Production Notebooks: Theatre in Process (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001), there is an “astonishing dearth of documentation of the artistic process in contemporary American theatre” (xiii). Felicia Hardison Londré examines that artistic process and serves the theatre community well by adding to their resources with her Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy. Readers will¤nd a wealth of useful, practical, and insightful material about the art and craft of the dramaturgical essay, as well as invaluable archival material about theatre in the Midwest. BOOK REVIEWS { 172 } In her introduction, Londré systematically and concisely sets out three purposes for her book: ¤rst, she draws together “short pieces about plays and playwrights that have intrinsic interest”; second, through those short pieces she seeks to help “creative writers and dramaturges . . . hone their skills”; third, she provides a “survey . . . [of] the production histories of three regional not-forpro ¤t theatre companies”: Missouri Repertory Theatre, the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival, and the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival (12). This survey brings to light the concerns and values of those speci¤c audiences at the speci¤c time of her writing. At the heart of these goals is “the dramaturg’s terrible responsibility ”: the program essay. As a matter of principle, Londré makes a persuasive argument for the program essay as an art form in its own right as well as an integral part of a production . She notes that her dream for the book is for the program essay “to win acceptance . . . as an art form to be held to ever higher standards, as is the work of any maturing artist” (10). Londré insists that the essay is not intended to explain the director’s concept to an audience or to be a marketing tool to sell tickets to the production; rather, it can “challenge, provoke, delight, or otherwise stand alongside the experience of watching a play”(3). It is just one of the many options audiences have for entering into the theatrical experience. The book is divided chronologically into ¤ve sections of essays. In parts 1 and 2, Londré reveals a cultural pro¤le of the Missouri Repertory Theatre under the artistic leadership of both Patricia McIlrath and George Keathley spanning the years 1979 to 2000. Part 3 provides a sampling of essays for the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival from 1991 to 2004. Part 4 includes essays for the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival from 1993 to 2003. In part 5, she concludes with...

A Diptych of Comedy and Carnival: Alan Ayckbourn’s House & Garden

This article examines Alan Ayckbourn’s two linked plays, House & Garden, in the context of an entire career exploring the limits and boundaries of theatrical conventions. As the driving force and artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, a complex which houses two theatres – a proscenium stage and a theatre-in-the-round – the playwright/director has a flexible, state-of-the-art laboratory in which to experiment with theatrical elements which have always fascinated him. In House & Garden, Ayckbourn stretches stage boundaries in unprecedented ways by writing two plays to be performed simultaneously in two adjacent auditoria – a comedy of manners for the proscenium and a carnivalesque farce for the round. Stephanie Tucker analyzes how this unprecedented dramatic diptych exploits the possibilities of theatrical space, on and offstage, whilst appropriating elements from traditions as various as Greek satyr plays and nineteenth-century drama, and from venues as disparate as the carnival square and the drawing room. This experiment, she argues, forces audiences to re-examine preconceived notions concerning theatre’s relationship to the ‘real’ world, a theme which runs through Ayckbourn’s opus. Stephanie Tucker, who teaches at California State University, Sacramento, has published articles on various aspects of contemporary British and American theatre and is presently engaged upon a book-length study of Ayckbourn’s drama and stagecraft.

Editorial Comment: "A Black Thing"

Click for larger view Figure 1 [End Page viii] This special issue of Theatre Journal on Black Performance is dedicated toDr. Marvin Leon Sims, who died unexpectedly on Christmas day, 2003. At the time of his passing, Dr. Sims was President of the Black Theatre Network, the leading professional organization for scholars, teachers, and practitioners of black theatre, and incoming President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the parent organization of Theatre Journal. Born on 9 July 1948, Dr. Sims attained a BA from Capital University, an MA from Miami University, an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, and a PhD from Michigan State University. He taught at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign and Eastern Michigan University before becoming Head of Performance at Virginia Commonwealth University. At VCU, he taught courses on acting, directing, African American theatre history, and dramatic theory and criticism. Marvin was a leader, a colleague, a scholar, a teacher, a mentor, and a friend, whose life, wisdom, work, and infectious energy impacted so many. This special issue of Theatre Journal that investigates when, if, and how black theatre and performance constitute a particularly "black thing" celebrates Dr. Sims's spirit and his enduring commitment to black expressive culture. With these essays, articles, reviews, and reports contained, we pour libations in his honor. As I write these words in August 2005 for Marvin Leon Sims, I am very conscious of the sobering news which playwright August Wilson made public this month: that he is suffering from liver cancer and his doctors suggest that he has only months to live.1 With two Pulitzer Prizes, numerous New York Drama Circle Critics Awards, and other accolades, August Wilson has changed the face of contemporary American theatre, of black theatre, most certainly, and of black theatre scholarship as well. Wilson was the most produced American playwright in the 1990s. Already there are seven published studies of Wilson's work, including my own. With Radio Golf—which premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre on 28 April 2005, and then played at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in August and September 2005—Wilson realized his bold and ambitious, self-ascribed, dramaturgical project: to write a play for each decade of African American life within the twentieth century. While other American playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill and Ed Bullins have attempted to construct historical cycles, Wilson stands alone in having achieved this aspiration. Thus, his history cycle will live on as his enduring legacy. Relevant to this special issue, Wilson—in his theatrical life and letters, in his cycle of plays, and in his famous speech to the Theatre Communication Group (TCG) conference in 1996—explores provocatively the adage, "It's a black thing." But for Wilson this black thing is not something you just wouldn't understand. Rather, what Wilson claims through his cycle is that this is a black thing that we need to understand. We need to appreciate the endurance, the pride, the struggle, and the survival that constitute African American history and experience. Over the course of ten plays, Wilson explores the quotidian existence of ordinary black people and rights—or rewrites—African American history. As a result, his dramaturgy impacts how we think about the very construction of history. Even as Wilson considers the specifics of the African American past, his playwriting reaches beyond the particular to touch the cross-cultural. Wilson's work and his words, his spirit and special insight will continue to enrich us. When we read or view his plays, his so-called "400-year-old autobiography that is the black [End Page ix] experience,"2 when we savor his lines, we too can be renewed. These works will never stagnate, for even as they speak to the past, they resonate in the present. Fittingly, on October 17, 2005, the Virginia Theater at 245 West 42nd Street became the August Wilson Theater, and Wilson became the first African American to have a Broadway theater...

Ten Gems on a Thread

For the past ten years, I have been writing plays about Cambodia. In early 2001, I went to Phnom Penh on a playwright's residency grant from the Asian Cultural Council. During the two and a half months I was there, I did two plays with Khmer actors from the National Theatre and conducted research for a new play, Silence of God, which would be produced at the Contemporary American Theater Festival.

Jan Kott in Exile: Arden and Absolute Milan

In this essay, Allen J. Kuharski discusses Jan Kott as an exiled Polish writer best known for his essays on Shakespeare's plays, and compares and contrasts his writings with those of a variety of other Polish émigré writers, notably Witold Gombrowicz. He argues that Kott's most important contribution was ultimately as a performance theorist, in the traditions of Wyspiański and Brecht, rather than as a traditional critic or scholar, and in consequence he reached a wider readership in English and other languages than any other Polish writer. His choice of Shakespeare as a subject belied the full depth and complexity of the Polish sources (often experiential) for his readings of the plays – sources not always acknowledged in his work. Kuharski uses Kott's own syncretic, archetypal methods to interpret his life and work, explaining his position as an exiled writer via Shakespearean characters such as Duke Senior in As You Like It and Prospero in The Tempest – and, closest to the experience of the émigré, the cross-dressing Rosalind, compelled to belie herself in order to express herself. Tracing the evolution of Kott's complex existential self-definition in various phases of his life and writing, Kuharski concludes that the key to Kott's various authorial personae is the influence of the inter-war Polish writer and critic Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński. Allen J. Kuharski, Associate Editor for Theatre Journal, is the Director of the Theatre Studies Program at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, and has published extensively on Gombrowicz, Kott, and other aspects of contemporary Polish and American theatre in the US, UK, Poland, France, and the Netherlands. His translation and stage adaptation of Gombrowicz's novel Ferdydurke has been performed in various countries, winning a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001.

Creating the self in the contemporary American theatre

Combining his skills as both a professional reviewer of theatre and a literary critic, Robert J. Andreach finds himself in a position to provide coherence to what most observers perceive as an unrelated welter of contemporary theatrical experiecnes. Exploring the theatre from the 1960s to the present, he shows the various ways in which the contemporary American theatre creates a personal, theatrical and national self. Andreach argues that the contemporary American theatre creates multiple selves that reflect and give voice to the many communities within our multicultural society. These selves are fragmented and enclaved, however, which makes necessary a counter movement that seeks, through interaction among the various parts, to heal the divisions within, between and among them. In his examination of the contemporary theatre, Andreach demonstrates that the plays and the performance art of the feminist, African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American and Native American theatres are equal to the works created within the dominant Eurocentric culture. He then turns to comparable works created within the culture of what performance artist Karen Finley calls the one male god, works that reflect the breakup of an old order. He discusses the experimental theatre, which turns to the imagination to reveal the nature of the self, and concludes with an examination of recent American works, pointing out in each either the presence or absence of resolution within the divisions of self.

SOCIAL/CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: You Don't Need Four Women to Play Shakespeare: Bias in Contemporary American Theatre. Ida Prosky

SOCIAL/CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: You Don't Need Four Women to Play Shakespeare: Bias in Contemporary American Theatre. <i>Ida Prosky</i>

Contemporary American theatre

Introduction, Bruce King textual drama - women playwrights on Broadway - Beth Henley, Tina Howe, Marsha Norman and Wendy Wasserstein - Barbara Kachur not-quite mainstream male writers - John Guare, Christopher Durang and David Rabe - Dennis Carroll the new realism - articulating the double agent, David Mamet, Emily Mann, Richard Nelson - David Savran black theatre into the mainstream and August Wilson - Holly Hill David Hwang - the sound of a voice - Gerald Rabkin theatre collectives in the 1980s - Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group - Alexis Greene Lee Breuer and the Mabou mines - S.E.Gontarski other forms of theatre - beyond the broadway musical - crossovers, confusions and crisis - Glenn Loney once upon a time in performance art - Lenora Champagne Laurie Anderson - performance artist/art performer - Mel Gordon contemporary American dance theatre - Martha Clarke, Joe Goode, and Sara Shelton Mann - Ted Shank from C-R to P.R. - feminist theatre in America - Alisa Solomon further new directions - poets of Bohemia and Suburbia - the postliterary dramaturgies of Laura Farabough, Laura Harrington, and Adele Shank - Jim Carmody not/either/or but and - fragmentation and consolidation in postmodern theatre, or Peter Sellars and Picking up the Pieces - Don Shewey.

Too, Too Solid Flesh: Massage Therapy as an Effective Intervention in Actor-Training and Performance

Too, Too Solid Flesh: Massage Therapy as an Effective Intervention in Actor-Training and Performance Joel G. Fink Introduction The American theatre demands of its artists an extraordinary diversity of skills, covering an international range of form and content. In an attempt to realize existing potential and to develop new directions for growth in contemporary American theatre, certain theatres and theatre-training institutions, as well as individual teachers are actively exploring various models of nurturing environments for actor-training. In the area of movement studies, the past decades have seen an enormous expansion of actor-training beyond the traditional courses in dance and fencing. Today, it is not unusual to see course work in Alexander Technique, T'ai Chi, or Feldenkrais Lessons, as well as other methods of movement analysis and physical reeducation. This same variety and eclecticism can also be seen in vocal training, as well as work on emotional technique. Although often different in their specific approaches, most significant actor-training programs have as a goal of training, the development of the actor's personal resources into an artistic medium for the specialized communication of theatre. At both the university and the professional levels, educators and artists ask the same basic question: "How is the actor's capacity to respond to stimuli, through the mind, the emotions, the voice, and the body, influenced either favorably or unfavorably by traditional or experimental training techniques?" My experience, as both a theatre teacher and practitioner has led me to the conclusion that we often present young actors with an abundance of craft elements without adequately preparing a structure on which these can be usefully and effectively developed. In theatre education, as in all educational situations, without a learning of general principles and underlying structures, no significant and long-term learning is possible. Without such learning, actor "training" is reduced to little more than conditioned-responses, and denies the possibility of the artist as an active and responsible participant in the learning/ training process. In addition, almost all elements of civilized society work to deny emotional and intellectual expressiveness through our voices and bodies. Therefore, it is vital that we look at the essential underlying structures of the actor's craft, if we are to develop curricula that significantly affect the actor's art, and restore the birthright of "present-ness." The actor's body provides the matrix for this art and presence. 117 118 Joel G. Fink For almost twenty years I have been teaching various aspects of actor training. During that time I have worked and have observed other teachers working to integrate the varied components of acting in a way that results inboth a coherent process and product. First working intuitively, and then through research and experimentation, I found that one of the most effective and immediate means to both assess acting problems and to initiate change in an actor's working process is through that actor's body. Although this is a widely shared observation, it is disappointing that much of contemporary actor education and training still reflects a compartmentalization of craft elements that seems counterproductive to the objectives being pursued. From my point-of-view, anything labelled a "problem" in the work of the actor, is an acting problem, and must be dealt with in that context. Actors who can make expressive sounds in vocal classes, or move beautifully in physical classes, may not be able to transfer this ability into the demands of their acting studios or rehearsals. This is not to say that separate classes for separate elements of craft are not necessary. Certainly they are. It is, however, imperative that we, as teachers, find the means to make that transfer possible in the acting studio, as we encourage the integration of various craft elements into an effective (albeit highly flexible) working process. During the 1985-86 academic year, I took a sabbatical from full-time teaching in order to study massage therapy and to explore its potential as a technique for actor-training. Having taught various aspects of movement for actors, I wanted to systematically study human anatomy, physiology, and pathology from a practical and medically-oriented perspective. Based on my study and practice...

The Passionate, Personal Plays of Barrie Stavis

Barrie Stavis has chosen to devote his life to writing plays that require years of research before setting pen to paper. Once he finally begins to write, he becomes a craftsman, choosing each word and bit of punctuation with care, often going back weeks and months later to change a period here, a comma there. Stavis is the opposite of the facile playwright who can sit down at the typewriter and hammer out a scene: he will spend days, sometimes even weeks, on a speech or a few lines of dialogue. However, this exhausting attention to detail is not ultimately what determines whether his plays work or fail. Stavis succeeds to the degree that he is able to combine an artist's passion with a watchmaker's precision, because his goal is to be both passionate and precise, to render the deepest feelings of the human soul in a meticulously crafted piece of work. He tolerates neither sloppiness nor shallowness in his work or anyone else's. Obviously, Stavis could have chosen an easier way to write. He has just six plays to show for 50 years of work (he has much other writing to his credit, including two prose works based on the research he did for his plays; an oratorio; a script for television; a novel, a novella and several poems; and many articles and scholarly papers. But, as Stavis says, How am regarded will stand or fall by the plays.) And his plays, especially in the last several years, have gone so against the trend of the contemporary American theater that he has had few productions in this country. He has no regrets. How could have done anything differently?, he asks.' I couldn't. Because don't know what it means to compromise with my art. never have, never will, and that's it. anything other than at the level want to write bores the hell out of me. Writing is very difficult for me, so why do want to waste my time writing junk? To go through the agony -and writing is an agony for me to go through the agony of writing. I'll only go through that level of agony for the very top, top level of my capacity. And why does he do it? Forget about numbers of

Acrobats of the soul: comedy and virtuosity in contemporary American theatre

Acrobats of the soul: comedy and virtuosity in contemporary American theatre

Acrobats of the Soul: Comedy and Virtuosity in Contemporary American Theatre by Ron Jenkins

Acrobats of the Soul: Comedy and Virtuosity in Contemporary American Theatre by Ron Jenkins

David Mamet : une nouvelle écriture américaine

A New Kind of American Writing : David Mamet's Plays. Set in the context of the development of contemporary American Theater, David Mamet's theater is examined here from the standpoint of its writing. By his use of marginal and everyday language in a poetic way, Mamet generates a new form of American theater writing which is both vehicle and theme. He avoids behaviorist psychology ; by resorting to the theater-within-the theater, the writing-within-the writing techniques, he gives its concise, patterned and carefully-wrought language which calls upon crude vocabulary, a truly creative dimension. Beyond its surface simplicity, it refers us to the art of writing and speakind which commits both writer or speaker and addressee within a clearly specified socio-economic and cultural context : capitalist America of the 1970's and 1980's ; a chronology of Mamet's performed plays is appended.

The Theatricality of the Van-Guard: Ideology and Contemporary American Theatre

The Theatricality of the Van-Guard: Ideology and Contemporary American Theatre

R.E.: Croce: Letters from Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, Kenneth King

The absence of accurate histories of contemporary American dance, performance art and theatre and critics who have a historical grasp of the overlapping performance and art worlds has contributed to the confusion in the performance world. Critics and audiences alike have trouble deciding who's influencing who these days. Some of those artists angry enough to respond to Croce in print have forwarded their letters to LIVE for publication. The Editors

Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production by Richard Hornby

274 Comparative Drama Richard Hornby. Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977. Pp. xi + 215. $11.95. It seems only common sense to assume that a thorough critical read­ ing of the text of a play, resulting in an interpretive concept for perform­ ance, would precede any other step taken by a theatrical director in preparing a production. But anyone who regularly attends the theater, whether professional, community, or collegiate, has suffered through many performances in which the director has obviously disregarded common sense. Richard Hornby confronts this problem aggressively in Script into Performance, and he offers to any director willing to acknow­ ledge its necessity a method for “dramaturgical criticism” based on structuralist principles. Hornby identifies two misconceptions about playscripts (his term for the written text of a drama) that lead to wrong-headed productions: the “Symphony” and “Cinema” models. The symphony model assumes that a playscript, like a musical score, contains all the information needed for successful performance. This concept results in unimaginative, lifeless, traditionalist productions. By contrast, the cinema model, whose influence Hornby is much more involved in combatting, posits the idea that a playscript need be taken as no more definitive than a screenplay, which a director must expand upon, re-edit, and alter at will. When applied to classic playscripts, this cinema model often creates one of those updated “concept” productions, all too familiar in recent years, which Hornby, only slightly exaggerating, illustrates with the “nude country-western version [of Macbeth] on the moon.” He makes this particular misuse of playscripts his target throughout the book. Its first chapter bears the title “A Polemic on Contemporary American Theatre,” and a polemical vein characterizes his entire argument. Hornby, a professor of drama at the University of Calgary and a theatre scholar, has obviously waged this battle often, with considerable frustration, during his professional life. A sense of personal mission pervades his writing. And he in fact illustrates the application of his structuralist performance theories with descriptions of three plays he himself staged at Calgary. Hornby’s theories are not allied to the works of any particular struc­ turalist critic or school. They rather comprise a series of approaches to be applied to playscripts in order to discover patterns of meaning beneath their surface significance. Stressing these discovered patterns in the design of a performance subsequently leads to a valid dramatic interpretation inherent in the text rather than one imposed from without that violates the text. For Hornby “a Structuralist method of interpretation is one that 1. Reveals something hidden 2. Is intrinsic 3. Incorporates com­ plexity and ambiguity 4. Suspends judgment 5. Is wholistic.” It is not a fixed formula for use on all playscripts but a way of analyzing each one individually, an act and not a thing. To avoid the “reification” of his technique, Hornby defines it in mathematical terms as a function of each separate play. While this is a useful concept, his actual mathematical notations of these functions seem extraneous and confusing, obscuring rather than elucidating a perfectly comprehensible thesis. Reviews 275 On the whole, however, Hornby describes his methods thoroughly and clearly, convincing the reader of their worth and practicality. The last section of the book provides a rare example of theoretical and practical dramatic criticism joined in a single volume. Unlike the theory, though, the results of the practical criticism are uneven. Hornby’s approach to Shelley’s The Cenci according to its inversion of the traditional signifi­ cances of its dominant image patterns provides many stimulating insights and led, I imagine, to an impressive production. But the use of a Kierkegaardian model to explain the abrupt about-faces of characters in Ibsen’s A Doll House, while ingenious, appears to me too schematic and not wholly justified by the text itself. On the other hand, the analysis of Pinter’s Homecoming is not ingenious enough, Hornby’s interpretation, while valid, having been for the most part put into practice in the original London production. Of course the author admits that struc­ turalism is only a method of interpretation, not a formula which guaran­ tees sure-fire brilliance every time. However, since...

Contemporary American Theatre Critics: A Directory and Anthology of Their Works

Contemporary American Theatre Critics: A Directory and Anthology of Their Works