Dramatic Production Research Articles

Producción reciente de Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda

This study focuses on the most recent dramatic production of Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, that is, on the works written during the last lustrum, a period of significant change that is intensified because of his hospitalization between 2000 and 2004 and the extended reclusion at home in between, a time in which he was practically isolated because of his illness and subjected to horrible treatments. Such changes are fundamentally stylistic, of elements of form, and are reflected above all in the emotional tone of extreme sensitivity that impregnates such texts as Sazón de mujer, Table dance, El ausente, El diván, Ahora y en la hora, El deseo, Hotel Juárez, Apaches y Cautivas .

Experiencing the ‘living moment’: Athol Fugard's directing process and the Orestes project

On 24 March 1971, in Cape Town, Athol Fugard presented Orestes, an experimental performance project in which notions of justice and injustice, freedom and non-freedom, being and non-being, were explored in 60 to 80 minutes of imagistic action, the silence interspersed with non-verbal sounds, snatches of song, and only 300 words of spoken text. Orestes signified an aesthetic which was to inform alternative playmaking in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s; the production also redefined Fugard's conception of dramatic process and theatrical product, so much so that, he claimed, there 'was no aspect of [his] work, either as writer or director' that it would not influence in his subsequent career (1974:xi).

From Script to Stage in Early Modern England by Peter Holland, Stephen Orgel

io86 Reviews holy alliance between Archbishop Rowan Williams and St Thomas Aquinas-which is whether the given medieval writer could think of the Church, founded amidst betrayal and dependent on flawed ministers, as 'acommunity both immersed in sin and yet also the divine gift inwhich [thewriter] received the sacraments' (p. 96).William Thorpe's critique of apersecuting Church 'could have opened out towards' the insight of Rowan Williams, but 'did not' (p. 97). This, tome, is a quite amazing might-have-been. Sanctifying Signs, merciless towards the 'exorbitance' of doctrines enforced at the time by the ecclesiastical hierarchy but also alert for paradoxes and divergences in the reformist position, will certainly claim a place in the burgeoning investigation of latemedieval constructions of the Church. The book's claim would be stronger but for two drawbacks. One is that at some points it is outrageously repetitive. Chapter 4 flagrantly repeats material on pp. 72, 73, and 75 from pp. 3I, 32, 49, and 46. While it is one symptom of Aers's strong personal investment in his arguments that he cultivates a rhetoric of vehement iteration, these repetitions are exasperating and might be frowned upon in a student's work. The second drawback, arising from the same high level of personal investment, is quite simply that the author seems actually to be urging-not just investigating-particular definitions of the Church and of Christ's ministry and the sacraments. GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ALCUIN BLAMIRES From Script toStage inEarly Modern England. Ed. by PETERHOLLAND and STEPHEN ORGEL. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. Xiii + 25 IPP. ?I4.99. ISBN I 4039-3343-X. For all those weary of a theatre history that fails to take account of the theatre his torian's own history and practice, this collection offers awelcome antidote. It is the first in the Redefining British Theatre History series, which brings together major practitioners in theatre history to review 'where we are and what we think we are doing' (p. xiii). Over the last half century, our understanding of early modern theatre has changed profoundly. Most significantly, there has been a shift from a playwright centred focus of the theatre to theatre as an institution-to plays as 'performances and events' as viewed from the perspective of 'audiences, actors, theatre companies, patrons, architects and designers' (p. i). While reminding the reader of just how much is overlooked when we focus merely on the texts of plays, this book argues for a quasi-compulsory rethinking of the nature of early modern theatre history as a discipline, pointing especially to the necessity for a revision of our thoughts on what constitutes evidence. Revisiting (and in some instances raising serious doubts over) time-honoured assumptions about the early modern stage, the volume yields new insights into the collaborative nature of dramatic production. The collection is organized in four parts: Questions of Evidence; Interrogating Data; What is a Play?; Women's Work. Altogether eleven essays are brought together under these headings and a truly absorbing range isprovided. Of particular interest is R. A. Foakes's discussion of the staging of Tamburlaine in relation to the archaeology of the Rose playhouse, calling for a radical revision of our understanding of public theatres. In a splendidly comprehensive challenge to the notion of the play-text as an integral whole, Tiffany Stern reveals how plays in print are 'patchworks' comprised of different elements (songs, prologues, epilogues), 'each raising the possibility of dif ferent authorship, and each capable of having other existences in other books, other places, and other contexts' (p. i66). Also suggestive isClaire Sponsler's essay on the particular problem of recognizing medieval plays in the archives. Using the example of John Lydgate's work, her fine argument is that medieval drama often entered MLR, I0 I .4, 2006 Io87 the written record in ways that erased its performative markers. Natasha Korda's authoritative narrative on the role that women performed in the networks of com merce surrounding the theatre is especially insightful. She provides the reader with an abundance of interesting factual information and cogent analysis about females in the needlework and second-hand clothingtrades who supplied and maintained the theatre company's most...

Introduction: Reading and Rereading Shaw Post-150 Years

Introduction: Reading and Rereading: Shaw Post-150 Years Heidi J. Holder MaryAnn K. Crawford In the postmodern sense of providing multiple iterations, the articles in this volume display Shaw's relevance to modern readers and audiences. The reason is partly to be found in the plays and their ideas and partly in the history of Shaw production, which brings us to an interesting divergence. On the subject of the plays, these authors find Shaw "prescient"; his ideas, "resonant." Shaw's fascination with technology, globalism, evolution, capitalism, stereotypes, commodities, and national identity makes for an easy fit with very contemporary concerns and critical methodologies. Connections and echoes emerge between Shavian theory and the ideas of such cultural critics as Theodor Adorno, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Mikhail Bakhtin, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, Albert Memmi, and Steven Vogel, among others. Such intertextuality invites us to read Shaw yet again and to do so with an ever-wider critical lens. On the other hand, the stage history of Shaw productions presents a somewhat different picture. Here, authors such as Lisa Wilde and Nicholas Williams see opportunities lost and call for the need to reread Shaw for dramatic production. There must be, they argue, a greater engagement between Shaw's plays and twentieth- and twenty-first-century social, cultural, and political issues. Both authors deal with the problem of "periodization," of Shaw's enduring association with the stage realism of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Shaw production all too rarely ventures beyond the world of the Victorians and into our own, where, these authors argue, he continues to speak to audiences. The plays clearly attract critics drawn to issues in contemporary psychology, religion, theater, politics, and culture. The volume begins with a three-piece [End Page 1] group of new "psychological" approaches—noteworthy since Shaw is at times thought quite "unpsychological." Harding, Reynolds, and Lenker reveal that psychological understanding is at the heart of the human condition and at the heart of Shaw's plays, irrespective of how socially conscious Shaw himself might have been. Understanding is neither singular nor essentialist, and the articles present three current but disparate developments in psychological as well as literary theory. Harding brings trauma theory and its concomitant posttraumatic stress disorder to reading Heartbreak House, one of Shaw's more bleak and troublesome plays, and finds it a fundamentally psychosocial study on the effects of World War I. In his reading, the play is a reenactment of the traumatic devastation felt by the British, both as individuals and as a culture. Reynolds revisits her excellent work (and book) on Pygmalion. This time, she looks at the role of language, specifically "talking," in curing psychological disorders or, at least in this case, in remedying the lack of realistic self-awareness evident in both Eliza and Higgins. Lagretta Lenker takes a somewhat opposing tack. Instead of therapy, she focuses on how psychological states are acquired: Is it "always the mother"? To find the answer in Shaw, she rereads the mother figure across plays, building on and reading against the considerable body of work on mothers and daughters. She argues that "Shaw's extensive dramatic investigation of all things maternal . . . prefigures a heretofore underrepresented area of psychoanalytical inquiry into Shaw's work—object relations theory." Guided by the theories of Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein, Lenker moves through a reading of many of Shaw's darker images of motherhood, ending by seeing Shaw's Lilith as a hopeful "pre-Oedipal" figure—a high point in Shaw's reassessment of gender roles. The piece is intriguing because given Lenker's very believable argument one cannot help but think about other plays, including those in which mothers are absent. Does Joan evidence any relationship with a mother? Dorothy Hadfield brings our attention to intertextuality, specifically to issues of retelling. She examines Shaw's rereading of his own plays, seeing in Major Barbara a re-envisioning of You Never Can Tell. Hadfield...

A dramatização no telejornalismo

Produced and narrated by Orson Welles, The War of the Worlds (American CBS network radio, 1938) has shown that panic could be caused in the streets by means of some exaggeration in the tellings. This dramatic production was, indeed, too realistic to appear to be false; besides, most of the listeners knew very little about how much journalism can borrow from worksof fiction. Both journalism and dramatic plays are deeply rooted in the French bourgeois revolution (1789) and are now coming close for the reason that TV news resort to theatrical exhibitions as a truly reliable way of attracting public attention.

A system dynamics analysis of boom and bust in the shrimp aquaculture industry

AbstractDriven by growing international demand for shrimp and stagnating catches of wild shrimp, the shrimp aquaculture industry has grown remarkably over the past two decades. Initial hopes that farmed shrimp could provide an environmentally benign alternative to over‐exploited wild stocks have, however, proven disappointing. Although global growth has been steady, the industry has experienced dramatic production crashes at national and sub‐national scales associated with severe environmental damage. From a systems perspective, the industry is prone to exceed and consume its environmental carrying capacity, resulting in boom and bust patterns of development. In this paper we describe a dynamic commodity system model built to examine boom and bust in the shrimp aquaculture industry. Experiments with the model suggest that a policy that taxes the industry and rebates proceeds to licensed producers may help shift the system toward sustainability. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Consecrated Transactions: Of Marketplaces, Passion Plays and other Nahua-Christian Devotions

Consecrated Transactions: Of Marketplaces, Passion Plays and other Nahua-Christian Devotions

23-5 ドラマ制作用高感度・高画質ハイビジョンHARPカメラの開発(第23部門 イメージセンサII)

23-5 ドラマ制作用高感度・高画質ハイビジョンHARPカメラの開発(第23部門 イメージセンサII)

The power of circulation: digital technologies and the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama

Focusing on the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama, this paper explores the way in which the fan subculture, in connection with digital technologies, has carved out alternative practices in the circulation, production and consumption of Japanese TV drama. As ‘minority audiences’ who are not targeted as the objects of capitalist interests, online Chinese fans invent spaces for Chinese transnational networking with self‐help and sharing, as a way of resisting the aloofness from marketing strategies of Japanese TV distributors in Asia. This case study reveals that the online Chinese fan clubs, the websites for downloads, pirated VCD markets, digital file conversion, and private VCD burning – all of these have linked endless networks for the digitalized circulation and consumption of Japanese TV drama. The online Chinese fans are guerrilla fighters in the politics of autonomy, network and low‐cost digital technology; they are attempting to break down time–space constraints and the official distribution hierarchy. Such fan practices shed light on the new trends of audio‐visual consumption via digitalization.

SGC activation in pulmonary hypertension

Impairments of the NO-sGC-cGMP pathway provoke acute and chronic vascular injury, including endothelial dysfunction, vasoconstriction and vascular remodeling in the pulmonary circulation. We evaluated the effects of the novel sGC activator Bay 41-2272 in three different models of acute and chronic pulmonary hypertension: 1. Ischemia-reperfusion injury induced pulmonary vascular dysfunction in isolated rabbit lungs, 2. Oleic acid induced lung vascular injury in an intact animal model and 3. chronic hypoxia induced pulmonary hypertension in mice. I/R provoked dramatic production of reactive oxygen species, acute pulmonary hypertension upon reperfusion, and increased pulmonary vascular permeability. Bay 41-2272 dose dependently reduced all three events resulting in significant organ protection. In oleic acid induced lung injury, pulmonary vasoconstriction as well as gas exchange properties of the injured lungs were beneficially influenced by the sGC activator. Finally, in chronic hypoxic pulmonary hypertensive mice, sGC activation effectively treated pulmonary hypertension and right heart hypertrophy – in part in an eNOS dependent manner – as proven by the investigations in NOS3 KO mice. In conclusion BAY 41-2272, a novel sGC activator, offers great therapeutical potential by restoration of the sGC-cGMP pathway which is impaired in different forms of acute and chronic pulmonary vasculopathy. from 2nd International Conference of cGMP Generators, Effectors and Therapeutic Implications Potsdam, Germany, 10–12 June, 2005

Television Drama in China: Remaking the Market

This paper discusses the evolution of television serial drama in China. It argues that Chinese television drama production has progressed through three periods: industrial (1958–89), market (1990–2002), and most recently interpersonal (2003 onwards). These three stages of development are in turn associated with standardised production according to state-directed formulae, outbreaks of producer autonomy, and celebration of modern lifestyles and consumer culture. The paper provides an overview of the development of drama production during these three periods, and notes a shift from ‘socialist reality’ towards contemporary popular reality.

??O Bottom, Thou Art Translated??: Directing a Bilingual Dream in the Marshall Islands

A unique production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was staged in early 2004 by students of the Marshall Islands High School, Majuro, in the Central Pacific. The play’s director, Andrew Garrod, describes the rehearsal process and performance of the play, in which the school students were supported by undergraduates from the Education Department of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, spending a term teaching in the island’s schools. The nature and worth of the learning experienced by the young actors, and their community, are considered in a context where Shakespeare and any kind of dramatic production are little known.

Lope and Tasso: The Presence of Torquato Tasso in Three of Lope de Vega's Mythological Plays

The exchange of literary ideas and techniques between Italy and Spain has been acknowledged and studied for some time. The focus of this article is on the connections between Torquato Tasso's ideas on poetic composition and those of Lope de Vega, as manifested in three of Lope's mythological plays. In Adonis y Venus, El Perseo , and El Laberinto de Creta , these links are examined in order to show that Tasso's influence is evident in Lope's plays, in addition to other literary genres into which the playwright ventured. Much work has been done on the relationship between Tasso and Lope with respect to the epic. However, less attention has been given to the role of Tasso's influences in the field of Lope's dramatic production. This article seeks to make a foray into that area. (TB)

Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Despite its importance to literary and cultural texts of resistance, theater has been largely overlooked as a field of analysis in colonial and postcolonial studies. of Authority/Acts of Resistance seeks to address that absence, as it uniquely views drama and performance as central to the practice of nationalism and anti-colonial resistance. Nandi Bhatia argues that Indian theater was a significant force in the struggle against oppressive colonial and postcolonial structures, as it sought to undo various schemes of political and cultural power through its engagement with subjects derived from mythology, history, and available colonial models such as Shakespeare. Bhatia's attention to local histories within a postcolonial framework places performance in a global and transcultural context. Drawing connections between art and politics, between performance and everyday experience, Bhatia shows how performance often intervened in political debates and even changed the course of politics. One of the first Western studies of Indian theater to link the aesthetics and the politics of that theater, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance combines in-depth archival research with close readings of dramatic texts performed at critical moments in history. Each chapter amplifies its themes against the backdrop of specific social conditions as it examines particular dramatic productions, from The Indigo Mirror to adaptations of Shakespeare plays by Indian theater companies, illustrating the role of theater in bringing nationalist, anticolonial, and gendered struggles into the public sphere.Nandi Bhatia is Associate Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.

A Bridge over Troubled Waters, or What a Difference a Day Makes: From the Drama of Production to the Production of Drama

Gluckman's paper, "The Bridge," challenged received social anthropology, initially in segregated South Africa, at the LSE, and more generally, by illustrating that professional observers and participants in social situations are profoundly mutually interinvolved with one another despite wide cultural differences. While retracing his own history within it, the present writer relates this new anthropology to the methods of modernist literature (and to changing natural science approaches) in which writers such as Joyce and Woolf, and more recent successors, revealed the culture of an epoch in the closely analyzed incidents of even a single day. They paralleled Freud's methods in psychoanalysis and the specific analyses of discrete political situations in Marx, as well as in later developments of television, film, and the visual arts. After Gluckman's move to the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Oxford, and finally Manchester, he and his colleagues and students are shown as developing this interpretive method in very varied contexts.

Regional British television drama in the 1960s and 1970s

This article considers the television drama produced by two regionally-based production centres in the 1960s and 1970s: Granada Television, responsible for Independent Television provision in the north-west of England, and BBC English Regions Drama, based at Pebble Mill in Birmingham. Granada and BBC Birmingham provide contrasting examples of regional drama production in the 1960s and 1970s, the ITV company setting out to fulfill its regional remit with representations of local culture and identities, while BBC English Regions Drama set out to commission drama from regionally-based writers, resulting in a diversity of regional representations in the dramas produced by the department. At a time when the concept of regionalism in British television seems to be at risk this is an opportune moment to look back on a period when the cultivation of regional identities in television drama was actively pursued by both the BBC and ITV.

Two 17th century Jesuit plays in Ljubljana inspired by English literature

Jesuit teachers, whose members came to Ljubljana in the late 16th century, placed great emphasis on the production and staging of the school drama. Despite the domination of religious themes, the range of its subject matter was wide and varied. The article discusses two plays which derived their subject matter from English literature, namely from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Holinshed's Historie of Britain.The texts themselves are lost, but in the case of the Holinshed-inspired work (a version of the King Lear story), a detailed synopsis has been preserved. The article examines the synopsis and the extant manuscript reports about the plays, the original English sources, and the treatment of the two works in contemporary scholarly treatises.

Review of the Performance of Death’s Jest-Book (NASSR, August 2003, Fordham University)

A stage production of this important Romantic drama had been a long time in coming. Death’s Jest-Book is Beddoes’s defining work. Conceived as a satirical investigation of human mortality in the fo...

Impediments to the Used Consumer Software Business

Computer software is a huge, worldwide industry, one in which the United States has become the dominant force. The maturation of the software industry has led to dramatic productivity gains, permitting businesses and individuals to accomplish more work with less effort. The industry's growth has depended, and will continue to depend, in large part on the ability of software producers to prevent broad, unauthorized use of their products. Well-developed markets exist for used copies of copyrightable subject matter such as books, musical recordings, and movies. Yet there is no organized market for used computer software, even though it can be, and often is, copyrighted. This paper explores the various legal and operational challenges that entrepreneurs would encounter in launching a used consumer software business. Part I of this paper describes various aspects of the U.S. software industry, including the history of the legal protection of software intellectual property, to provide background for the rest of the paper. Although several methods of legal protection are available for software, this paper focuses primarily on copyright. Part II examines markets for used copyrighted works in general. Part III analyzes the legal challenges a used software business would face, and Part IV examines business challenges including possible responses by software producers to a successful used software business. Substantial impediments to entering the used software market would make it a risky business venture, particularly if done in a manner that does not honor software producers' license agreements. Even if such a business were to litigate successfully the complex and unsettled legal issues, any substantial market success would likely provoke reactions from software producers that could thwart the business and hamper its growth prospects. Entrepreneurs must evaluate each of these obstacles carefully before investing in starting such a business.

The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Peter Lang, 2002; pp. 240 + illus. $32.95 paper.

The Undiscovered Country is a collection of essays mostly by and for the Tennessee Williams specialist—who else could write with such confidence that Williams's “instinct for finding the humor in his most intimate pain may have sprung from the natural inclinations for self-protection and self-deprecation, long known as personality traits of the playwright” (212) ? Williams's “later plays” (of the sixties and seventies) have been “undiscovered” precisely because the Williams specialist has tended to treat them with well-meaning sympathy, even defensiveness, rather than critical rigor. Each of the fifteen essays here opens with a gloomy recitation of one later play's production history and its miserable reviews, before moving on to describe the work as unfairly denigrated, and to defend Williams as the victim of his early success. Because Williams continues to experiment technically throughout his career, the writers in The Undiscovered Country are in an awkward position. If they want to say that the later plays are new, better, or even different, they have to look to the past—the very history that “traps” him. The need to view the Author as the “past” or source of the works is, as Roland Barthes saw, a modern invention that really seeks to glorify the critic. Barthes celebrated the “Death of the Author” not as an escape from critical responsibility but as a way to ensure it. What would it take to clear away the history of neglect and well-meaning phrases and to read Williams's plays differently?