Play Narratives Research Articles

Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre EthanMordden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre Ethan Mordden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.To use his own phrase, Ethan Mordden really Knows Stuff (xi). He is such genial genius that even when he wears us out with detail, we never doubt the authenticity of his facts or the aptness of his perceptions. Indeed Mordden lavishes on the musical the kind of treatment it deserves-big, bold, and boisterous.His survey opens almost three centuries ago with The Beggars Opera (1728), whose staging first wedded plot to song. This new style was further shaped by comic operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, zany musical comedies of Offenbach, highly structured minstrel shows, burlesque farce, and fairytale extravaganzaseach adding its own flavor to what Mordden calls the First Age. In the Second Age, beginning around 1900, musical plays borrowed more sophisticated song and dance from vaudeville revues, most spectacularly Ziegfeld's Follies. Meanwhile, Victor Herbert's productions gave rise to the important score. Mordden discusses Herbert's seminal The Red Mill (1906) one act at time to illustrate how play's narrative can be expressed through songs. Mordden's precise and sensuous description of music and staging makes us feel as if we're in the first row on opening night.Although these early chapters may be fascinating, they can't fully escape an antiquarian feel. Happily, Mordden's prose and gusto catch fire when he celebrates the Third Age, beginning in the 1920s. Finally we get to savor guru's pronouncements about an era with which we are fondly familiar. In the older operetta, music told the story; in the new musical comedy, like No, No, Nanette (1925), the script tells story that is enhanced by song. Quotable phrases abound in this section: sequels don't work (132); Gershwin composes a chowder of whorehouse piano and Puccini (154); Ethel Merman commands the stage with her psychotronic personality (134). Mordden gives us the insider's lowdown on everything from Showboat to Titanic, from Porgy and Bess to Wicked, from West Side Story to Nine. He is nimble tour guide, pointing out the essential and challenging the obvious. Each chapter packs the clout of book. Mordden draws on his meticulously researched volumes about the Broadway musical from the 1920s to the 1970s and about luminaries like Flo Ziegfeld, Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, and Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. …

Dingo, Monster, Rabbit, “I”: Personal and Cultural Meanings in Sand Stories by a Young Girl, Central Australia

The unified experience of culture and self appears writ large in children’s play stories, appearing in the inseparability of the interpersonal and intrapsychic. Through the ethnographic analysis of five sand stories (graphically illustrated play narratives) by a young Aṉangu girl in Central Australia, this essay illustrates the significance of spontaneous meaning making within the process of the acquisition of the collective symbolic system. Culture is shown to inhabit the child’s inner world as she is actively incorporating significant interpersonal experiences into her egoic self, while at the same time giving new expression and life to collectively instituted themes and motifs. Drawing selectively on concepts from developmental psychoanalysis, the essay pays special attention to her efforts of social-emotional adjustment to a life crisis—a time of prolonged separation from mother. Stepping aside from the hermeneutic approach to particular play situations, it concludes with reflections on the cultural dimension of internalization, suggesting that in Aṉangu lives, the human foundational exchanges between the intrapsychic world and external reality in infancy and early childhood are valorised as cultural capacity into old age.

Romanian Children’s Representations of Negative and Self-Conscious Emotions in a Narrative Story Stem Technique

This research uses children’s story-stem play narratives to investigate dimensions of negative emotional expression. Fifty-one Romanian children between 6 and 11-years old participated in the study. Children’s narratives were coded for three basic negative emotions and five self-conscious emotions. Parents completed a general questionnaire for demographic data and the amount of time they spent with their children. Differences were found for frequencies of negative emotional representations in relation to the specific story-stems in which they occurred. Girls were more likely than boys to enact in their narratives guilt feelings coupled with apology following some wrongdoing. Children who spent more time with parents enacted significantly less anger and fear. Simultaneous expressions of multiple negative emotions were observed in the narrative responses of these middle childhood-aged Romanian children. While findings should be viewed with caution, owing to the small and homogeneous sample, new directions for future research with this assessment method are indicated.

Multiple legitimacy narratives and planned organizational change

This article explores the cultural narratives through which members of organizations define legitimacy during prolonged periods of change. We view legitimacy work as a cultural practice and interpretive process that takes the form of organizational narratives. We show how the shifting configurations of internal power relations shape both the choice and the meaning attached to the varied legitimacy narratives. We investigate the construction of legitimacy through a longitudinal case study based on participant observation of Gamma, a government Research and Development (R&D) organization, during a process of intense change. We provide theoretical insights into the construction and deconstruction of the legitimacy by analyzing the narratives in play during a process of planned change. We claim that legitimation narratives not only evolve in accordance with functional need or, in a sense, that older narratives give room to newer, more updated or relevant narratives, but also that multiple narratives are used by different organization actors alternately and interchangeably as part of internal contestation over legitimation of change.

Using cross-cultural, intergenerational play narratives to explore issues of social justice and equity in discourse on children's play

Discussion of children's play in international and diverse communities requires careful consideration of social, cultural and political contexts impacting children's lives, as well as recognition of the complexities revealed when these variables are identified and analysed. Using diverse conceptual frameworks represented in the research literature on play – traditional developmental, sociocultural, human rights and poststructural – we analyse examples of children's conceptions about play and retrospective interviews about adults' play memories drawn from two research studies. As a result, we illuminate tensions that exist in global discussions of children's play. Using the goal of improving social justice and equity in children's lives as a foundational framework guiding our analysis and discussion of children's play, we suggest that concluding what is in the best interests of children involves learning to engage in difficult conversations where tensions, complexities and contingencies are objectively and openly explored.

Gender Differences in Elaborative Parent–Child Emotion and Play Narratives

Reminiscing about the past is an everyday activity that has implications for children’s developing memory and socioemotional skills. However, little research has systematically examined how mothers and fathers may differentially elaborate and engage their daughters and sons in reminiscing. In this study, we asked 42 broadly middle-class, highly educated U.S., mostly Caucasian mothers and fathers from the same families, living in the southeastern U.S., to reminisce about a happy, sad, peer conflict, parental conflict, playground and special outing experience with their 4-year-old child. Narratives were coded for parental styles of cognitive elaboration and joint engagement. Results indicated that mothers are both more elaborative and engaged with children than fathers are, especially about negative emotional and positive play experiences. Thus, mothers appear to be helping children recount and understand their personal past more than fathers, and specifically, in working through difficult emotions that may facilitate emotion regulation skills.

The Mediasport Interpellation: Gender, Fanship, and Consumer Culture

This paper considers how mediated sport’s promotional culture works to hail us in interlinked gender, fan, and consumer identities. The paper draws on findings from a recent series of studies to illustrate how an emergent dirt theory of narrative ethics helps move beyond Althusser’s notion of ideological hailing to understand the dynamics of power and contraints at play in strategic sporting narratives that stereotype men and women and their roles as fan and consumer. The discussion focuses on the dynamics of narrative hegemony and the prospects and limits of social change in the ethics that undergird sport-related narratives in consumer culture.

The Impact of a Natural Playscape Installation on Young Children's Play Behaviors

This mixed-methods study focused on environmental affordances and play behaviors during a shift from a traditional to a natural playscape in an early childhood setting. Researchers examined how well the playscape attracted and held children's attention in cooperative, constructive, nature, and locomotor play. Analysis of pre- and post-installation time-sampling observations, field notes, and interviews with children revealed more complex play narratives post-construction, highlighting the importance of intentionally designed natural playscapes to promote development. A playscape feature's attracting power and holding time revealed relationships between play types and sand and water, the role of loose parts, accessible materials, and carefully designed pathways that expanded play narratives across the playscape.

Doll Play Narratives About Starting School in Children of Socially Anxious Mothers, and Their Relation to Subsequent Child School-Based Anxiety

Child social anxiety is common, and predicts later emotional and academic impairment. Offspring of socially anxious mothers are at increased risk. It is important to establish whether individual vulnerability to disorder can be identified in young children. The responses of 4.5 year-old children of mothers with social phobia (N = 62) and non-anxious mothers (N = 60) were compared, two months before school entry, using a Doll Play (DP) procedure focused on the social challenge of starting school. DP responses were examined in relation to teacher reports of anxious-depressed symptoms and social worries at the end of the child's first school term. The role of earlier child behavioral inhibition and attachment, assessed at 14 months, was also considered. Compared to children of non-anxious mothers, children of mothers with social phobia were significantly more likely to give anxiously negative responses in their school DP (OR = 2.57). In turn, negative DP predicted teacher reported anxious-depressed and social worry problems. There were no effects of infant behavioral inhibition or attachment. Vulnerability in young children at risk of anxiety can be identified using Doll Play narratives.

Pretend play processes and anxiety: Considerations for the play therapist.

This study investigated the effect of anxiety on play processes in 43 first-, second-, and third-grade children. Using a mood-induction procedure, this study compared processes in play among children randomized to an anxious or neutral mood-induction procedure. Children were assessed using the Affect in Play Scale pre- and post-moodinduction. In addition, this study examined relationships between pretend play processes and self-reported state and trait anxiety levels using the State Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children. Findings demonstrated a significant negative relationship between baseline state anxiety level and organization of the play narrative. Consistent with previous research, children in both conditions significantly improved on multiple play scores over time. Although pretend play processes were not significantly affected by condition assignment, further analysis with a more sensitive measure of affect in play revealed a significant interaction between state anxiety and condition assignment on the amount of positive affect expressed in play. Results indicate that play processes can improve with time and greater state anxiety may impact organization and affective processes in play. Implications for play therapy are discussed in terms of the potential impact anxiety has on play processes.

The Eyre Affair de Jasper Fforde : une expérience de critique amusante

In his intertextual and metatextual novel, J. Fforde does not propose a specific, coherent interpretation of Jane Eyre: his parody is more an “amusing critical experiment”, a playful narrative in which Charlotte Brontë’s romance is brought to life in a way that allows every reader to deal with such critical issues in Jane Eyre as point of view, the controversial ending and the creation of characters.

Being kitties in a preschool classroom: maintaining group harmony and acting proper in a female peer-culture play routine

This study examines how young girls construct emotional themes in their peer-culture play routines and rituals in the daily life of a preschool classroom. This research is part of a larger eight-month ethnographic study of one preschool classroom. The data selected and analysed in this article are taken from a focused six-week theoretical sampling of five female preschool children's play. Micro-level analysis of the data (field notes, videotaping, video revisiting and interviews with teachers and students) revealed how children's peer-culture and emotional themes were socially constructed through a specific play narrative that centred on five females being ‘kitties’. A closer look at one group member named Mary uncovered emotional themes that centred on acting proper and group harmony. Females used their peer-culture and emotional themes to hold group members accountable, resolve conflict and appropriate society's emotional display rules. These data reveal the social–emotional ‘work’ of children and the role of peers in childhood socialisation.

Strange concepts and the stories they make possible: cognition, culture, narrative

In this fresh and often playful interdisciplinary study, Lisa Zunshine presents a fluid discussion of how key concepts from cognitive science complicate our cultural interpretations of literary phenomena. From Short Circuit to I, Robot, from The Parent Trap to Big Business, fantastic tales of rebellious robots, animated artifacts, and twins mistaken for each other are a permanent fixture in popular culture and have been since antiquity. Why do these strange concepts captivate the human imagination so thoroughly? Zunshine explores how cognitive science, specifically its ideas of essentialism and functionalism, combined with historical and cultural analysis, can help us understand why we find such literary phenomena so fascinating. Drawing from research by such cognitive evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists as Scott Atran, Paul Bloom, Pascal Boyer, and Susan A. Gelman, Zunshine examines the cognitive origins of the distinction between essence and function and how unexpected tensions between these two concepts are brought into play in fictional narratives. Discussing motifs of confused identity and of twins in drama, science fiction's use of robots, cyborgs, and androids, and nonsense poetry and surrealist art, she reveals the range and power of key concepts from science in literary interpretation and provides insight into how cognitive-evolutionary research on essentialism can be used to study fiction as well as everyday strange concepts.

"Go [expletive] a girl for me": Bivalent Meaning, Cultural Miscues and Verbal Play in Ukrainian Migrant Labor Stories

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, migrant labor has become an increasingly important source of income for workers in the southwest Zakarpattia region of Ukraine. This article explores how locally constructed meanings of migrant labor emerge through bilingual verbal play in narratives focused on cultural differences between Zakarpattia villagers' life at home and the situations and people they encounter abroad. In my analysis of jokes and humorous narratives about migrant labor gathered in the field I focus on narrators' use of bivalent and near‐bivalent words and phrases as a resource for the expression and representation of the complex relationship of villagers toward their position in the post‐socialist cultural, linguistic, and economic landscape.

Lust's Dominion and the Readmission of the Jews

This article examines recent assessments of the late-Elizabethan play Lust's Dominion with a view to developing some of the arguments about the political intentions behind its publication in 1657, during the last years of the Protectorate government. The article supports the view of Charles Cathcart that both the timing and circumstances of the play's publication allow an implicit parallel to be drawn between the usurper status of its protagonist, the ‘Spanish Moor’ Eleazar, and Oliver Cromwell. However, the article argues that the implied critique of Cromwell's government most likely has a plural rather than singular focus, and that Cromwell's support for the controversial policy of readmitting the Jews to England forms a key part of this broader critique. The play is accordingly set in the context of mid-seventeenth century readmission polemics, the publication of which reached a particular concentration in the mid-1650s, and the play's narrative themes of banishment and conflict with the non-European Other are examined for their correspondence with contemporary debate about the desirability of admitting Jews. An important consideration arising from this line of argument is that in drawing an analogy between Moors and Jews which requires to be made on ‘racial’ grounds, the play is both obviating the most contentious aspect of readmission debate (religious toleration) whilst simultaneously contributing to a developing discourse of predominantly racial Jewish difference.

Attachment Representations in a Sample of Neglected Preschool-Age Children

A number of studies (see Éthier, 1999) have shown that neglect has a deleterious impact on children's development. However, the effect of neglect on a child's internal representations of their family still needs to be investigated. The aim of this study was to examine the attachment patterns observed in a subsample of neglected children as compared with a control group, using a representational assessment method. The overall sample consisted of 74 preschool-age children, with a clinical group comprised of 39 children referred to social services because of neglect and a control group including 35 children recruited in ordinary kindergartens. Children's attachment representations were assessed with the Doll Play Narrative Classification System (George and Solomon, 1990, 1996, 2000) as well as the complementary Disorganization Scales (George and Solomon, 1998). Mothers' reports consisted of: (1) an in-house socio-demographical questionnaire and (2) the shorter French version of the Parental Stress Index (Bigras et al., 1996). Results showed: (1) a significant difference in attachment representation classifications between the neglected group and the control group even when socio-economic status and maternal stress were controlled for and (2) a significantly higher proportion of avoidant attachment classification in the neglected group. Moreover, neglected avoidant children displayed more overall disorganized markers, and specifically more frightening markers, than normative avoidant children; they also depicted their mother as being less available than normative children. These results are discussed in the light of other findings as well as on theoretical grounds.

Converging Worlds: Play, Literacy, and Culture in Early Childhood

■ This qualitative case study explores the interrelations between play, literacy, and culture by closely examining the home play activities of Letitia, a 5-year-old Chinese Canadian girl. Letitia is growing up in a multilingual, multiliterate family of three children. She speaks Chao Chiu, her first language, and English at home, is learning Mandarin in kindergarten, and took Cantonese lessons when younger. Her parents, who immigrated to Canada from Vietnam, are literate in five languages, provide a rich home literacy learning environment, and have high expectations for their child's language and literacy learning in both the short and long term. Letitia, described as outgoing, articulate, ... and very interested in books and stories (p. 5), was just starting kindergarten when the study began. Thus, the author could observe her during her transition from home to school literacy, a critical research area given the widely recognized need for bridging the two literacy environments, particularly for multilingual children. The author visited Letitia in her home weekly for more than a year, playing the dual role of researcher and participant in the child's play and allowing her to direct and control the play to help overcome the obvious imbalance in power relations. Letitia welcomed the researcher's visits, and over time, the two developed a close and trusting relationship, placing the researcher in an especially favorable position for conducting her research and coming to understand how the child used play to express her understandings of self, literacy, and the world around her. The author draws on a variety of theoretical perspectives to frame the research, including emergent literacy and social constructivism and positioning theory on the situated and culturally specific nature of literacy learning and its embeddedness in power relations and identity construction. The author joins these perspectives with observations on the relations between play and literacy, which view play as an arena for identity construction and as a form of narrative or oral storytelling. Storytelling provides a particularly rich and unique analytical lens, allowing the author to examine the play episodes as literary and social texts and to explore play, literacy, and culture as an integrated whole rather than separately, as is commonly the case. Two introductory chapters (chapters 1 and 2) discuss the theoretical and methodological perspectives that frame the work and provide indepth information on Letitia's family and home context, gleaned from observations, conversations, and the close relationships established with family members. A selection of 10 of Letitia's play narratives, reflecting the two predominant play themes, home and school, are

Intersektionalitet i voldtægtsnarrativer

The article shows how the Danish news media’s portrayals of meetings between visible minority males and ethnically Danish females have participated in constructing certain images of gender, sexuality and race/ ethnicity. It illustrates how understandings of these categories are interwoven with understandings of nationality and Danishness. The article shows how ethnically Danish females have been constructed as symbolic reproducers of the nation, and how sexual assaults against ethnically Danish women therefore have been interpreted as assaults against the nation. The article explains how this understanding has been at play in rape narratives where gender has been articulated in rape cases with white ethnically Danish perpetrators whereas race/ethnicity has been articulated as an explanation for rape in cases with visible minority perpetrators.

Playing for Time (and Playing with Time) in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

Playing for Time (and Playing with Time) in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia Enoch Brater Time moves in odd and often unfamiliar ways in Tom Stoppard's theater, and no more so than in Arcadia, which opened in 1993 at the National Theatre in London to great and much deserved critical acclaim . The playwright had already earned for himself a reputation as an adventurous explorer ofhow time might be made to work on a modern and technically sophisticated Western European stage. In Travesties, The Real Inspector Hound, Indian Ink, and the landmark play that made every theater practitioner take note, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard's surprising arrangements for the relationship between stage time and stage space are nothing ifnot profoundlyprovocative and stylistically liberating. Stoppard is clever, sometimes in his earlier works too clever by half.Yet even in those first attempts at dramatic writing he made soon after abandoning his career as a theater critic for the Bristol press,1 there was something at once hilarious and disturbing about an inquisitive mind turning its attention to the eccentricities ofmovement and meaningon abusyand bulkystage set. So much so that the appeal of his work quickly reached far beyond the specialized range of the most highly informed theater vocabulary. Physics, philosophy, iterated logarithms , Fermat's last theorem, Lord Byron, steam engines, landscape architecture , carnal knowledge and hermits all became essential parts of his newArcadian game plan.Postmodern pastiche would nowframe the ongoing debate between classicism and romanticism. As Beckett might have said (and as in fact he did say),"The rest is Ibsen."2 157 158Comparative Drama This essay aims to turn the discussion surrounding Arcadia back to thelogistics oftheproscenium,tothe specificwaytime plays on Stoppard's stage, and to suggest how his careful manipulation of theater reality alters our perception of the intersections between time present and time past. How do such integers, subject to fracture, interruption and misinterpretation , claim a dynamic life for themselves in that imaginary realm that is also known as dramatic illusion? Stoppard's rich allusive texture should clue us in to at least one thing: this writer is no mere innocent when it comes to understanding how stage space has been used before to accommodate any number ofunpredictable time signatures. His reinvention of Shakespeare's dialogue has, ofcourse,been richly celebrated, as has his retooling and refashioning of lines borrowed, sometimes with reckless abandon, from Samuel Beckett and OscarWilde. Less noted, perhaps—but not by Stoppard—is the way such playwrights have structured stage space to accelerate, decelerate, and in some cases even stop time completely. Let us reviewfor a moment what Stoppard may have learned from them. Shakespeare has always been a lively subject for Stoppard,just as he remains the usual suspect for any discussion ofhow time has been put to work efficientlyon the Western stage. Even the most famous example we might lift from The Winter's Tale, the figure of Father Time who speaks midway through the unfolding action to mark the passage of sixteen years, is nothing more than a stage device to take the play's narrative energyforward. His speech urges us to "imagine" with him what this spectacle is unwilling or unable or simply disinclined to show. Personification here is an engine of choice; this play, which includes the sudden appearance of a bear in hot pursuit of a supporting player, as well as a statue that miraculously comes to life, has in anycase made liberal use of what stage characters have been asked to do. Directors who try to trump the Bard in this regard will usually do so at their peril. The second scene ofOthello, for example, suggestively retraces the blocking ofthe first, the one in which we meet Roderigo and Iago almost naturalistically, midspeech , walking down a street in a Venice of Shakespeare's invention. How much time passes between these two scenes anyway, the second of which deftlyreplaces Roderigo with Othello as aparallel outdoor"conversation " continues? And talk of miraculous appearances: in act 1, scene 3, Enoch Brater159 Desdemona,who lodges at the (hopefullynearby) Saggitary,is called for in line 115, just before the onset of Othello's well-known speech before the Senate, only...

Playing house: A ‘sideways’ glance at literacy and identity in early childhood

Drawing on theoretical perspectives related to play and identity, play as a literary and social text, and multimodality, I present an analysis of a play narrative centred on the theme of playing house. The narrative exemplifies the interconnections between literacy and identity in the social and cultural world of a young girl growing up in a multilingual, multi-literate household in an inner-city area of a western Canadian city. The example brings to the forefront how systematic examinations of children’s play narratives have the potential to contribute to current thought on literacy learning and self-construction in early childhood. Understanding the imagined identities children portray in play may be particularly revealing in terms of understanding how they position themselves in the world.