Matthew Sturgis’s biography of Wilde challenges the pre-eminence of Richard Ellmann’s life study, correcting many of its errors, adding much that is new, and organizing Wilde’s life around factual events rather than works. Despite the book’s great merits, Sturgis’s categorical distinction between “historical” and “literary” biography may trouble some readers.
{"title":"Matthew Sturgis. Oscar Wilde: A Life","authors":"K. Powell","doi":"10.3138/md-66-2-rev8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-66-2-rev8","url":null,"abstract":"Matthew Sturgis’s biography of Wilde challenges the pre-eminence of Richard Ellmann’s life study, correcting many of its errors, adding much that is new, and organizing Wilde’s life around factual events rather than works. Despite the book’s great merits, Sturgis’s categorical distinction between “historical” and “literary” biography may trouble some readers.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49289062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:One of the hardest things to convey to present-day readers of modernist drama is the power it had to shock turn-of-the-century audiences. Defining shock as a "structure of feeling" (Raymond Williams) that was pursued in especially teachable ways by the modernist "play of ideas," this essay shares a set of pedagogical strategies for helping students to feel this shock while also reflecting on the political implications of an art committed to shock. Among these teaching strategies are two attempts to set this "terrible art" (G. B. Shaw) in new, revealing contexts: (1) comparing the modernist theater to non-theatrical practices that attach ideas to structures of feeling besides shock, and (2) pairing modernist plays that "shock" their audience in pursuit of a feminist politics with contemporary plays that "destroy the audience" (Young Jean Lee) in pursuit of an anti-racist politics. The result is not to lionize shock as a universal ideal, but to explore it as a tactic—useful in some settings, harmful in others; always distributing its benefits and its costs unevenly.
现代主义戏剧最难向当代读者传达的一点是它震撼世纪之交观众的力量。将冲击定义为一种“感觉结构”(Raymond Williams)，现代主义“思想的游戏”以特别可教的方式追求这种结构，本文分享了一套教学策略，帮助学生感受这种冲击，同时也反映了一种致力于冲击的艺术的政治含义。在这些教学策略中，有两种尝试将这种“可怕的艺术”(G. B. Shaw)置于新的、揭示性的语境中:(1)将现代主义戏剧与非戏剧实践进行比较，这些实践将思想附加到除了震撼之外的情感结构上;(2)将追求女权主义政治的“震撼”观众的现代主义戏剧与追求反种族主义政治的“摧毁观众”的当代戏剧(Young Jean Lee)配对。其结果不是把休克奉为一种普遍的理想，而是把它作为一种策略来探索——在某些情况下有用，在另一些情况下有害;总是不均衡地分配收益和成本。
{"title":"\"A Terrible Art of Sharp-Shooting at the Audience\": Teaching the Shock of Modernist Drama via the Play of Ideas","authors":"Christopher Grobe","doi":"10.3138/md-66-2-1279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-66-2-1279","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:One of the hardest things to convey to present-day readers of modernist drama is the power it had to shock turn-of-the-century audiences. Defining shock as a \"structure of feeling\" (Raymond Williams) that was pursued in especially teachable ways by the modernist \"play of ideas,\" this essay shares a set of pedagogical strategies for helping students to feel this shock while also reflecting on the political implications of an art committed to shock. Among these teaching strategies are two attempts to set this \"terrible art\" (G. B. Shaw) in new, revealing contexts: (1) comparing the modernist theater to non-theatrical practices that attach ideas to structures of feeling besides shock, and (2) pairing modernist plays that \"shock\" their audience in pursuit of a feminist politics with contemporary plays that \"destroy the audience\" (Young Jean Lee) in pursuit of an anti-racist politics. The result is not to lionize shock as a universal ideal, but to explore it as a tactic—useful in some settings, harmful in others; always distributing its benefits and its costs unevenly.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"66 1","pages":"158 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44541364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:Heralded as one of the most important voices in US theatre, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has made profound contributions to the creation of black art. Since her arrival on the theatre scene in the 1980s, Parks has challenged audiences to consider the importance of representation and unearth silences within history. Her more recent Pulitzer Prize finalist work, Father Comes Home from the Wars Parts 1, 2 & 3 (2014), continues this exploration, privileging the epic tale of an enslaved black man turned Confederate soldier in search of freedom. As an amalgamation of Parks's personal family history; the broader narrative of the black freedom struggle; and canonical epic tales such as Homer's Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Vyasa's Mahabharata, Father Comes Home… presents pedagogical challenges for instructors who must engage with ancient and modern texts and contemporary black political thought and performance traditions. Rather than replicate austere teaching practices of the past, I use the pedagogical theories of bell hooks to issue a call to foster curiosity and radical transparency as instructors guide students to a better understanding of how Father Comes Home transculturates (or reclaims) Greek mythology and tragedy within the African diaspora. In so doing, I demonstrate how Father Comes Home serves as a reckoning of the generational trauma caused by chattel slavery, summoning us all to confront racist and sexist practices that systematically disenfranchise black Americans and prevent the wider dissemination of black history and culture.
{"title":"Transculturation, Reclamation, and Adaptation: Approaches to Teaching Father Comes Home from the Wars","authors":"L. L. Forsgren","doi":"10.3138/md-66-2-1183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-66-2-1183","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Heralded as one of the most important voices in US theatre, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has made profound contributions to the creation of black art. Since her arrival on the theatre scene in the 1980s, Parks has challenged audiences to consider the importance of representation and unearth silences within history. Her more recent Pulitzer Prize finalist work, Father Comes Home from the Wars Parts 1, 2 & 3 (2014), continues this exploration, privileging the epic tale of an enslaved black man turned Confederate soldier in search of freedom. As an amalgamation of Parks's personal family history; the broader narrative of the black freedom struggle; and canonical epic tales such as Homer's Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Vyasa's Mahabharata, Father Comes Home… presents pedagogical challenges for instructors who must engage with ancient and modern texts and contemporary black political thought and performance traditions. Rather than replicate austere teaching practices of the past, I use the pedagogical theories of bell hooks to issue a call to foster curiosity and radical transparency as instructors guide students to a better understanding of how Father Comes Home transculturates (or reclaims) Greek mythology and tragedy within the African diaspora. In so doing, I demonstrate how Father Comes Home serves as a reckoning of the generational trauma caused by chattel slavery, summoning us all to confront racist and sexist practices that systematically disenfranchise black Americans and prevent the wider dissemination of black history and culture.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"66 1","pages":"179 - 202"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46831110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance charts the importance of performance to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist experiments while also demonstrating the centrality of Greek tragedy to such experiments. For these artists, Greek theatre, and Greek tragedy in particular, represents the ideal model and form with which to critique the past and renew the future.
{"title":"Olga Taxidou. Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance: Hellenism as Theatricality","authors":"G. Di Martino","doi":"10.3138/md-66-1-rev7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-66-1-rev7","url":null,"abstract":"Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance charts the importance of performance to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist experiments while also demonstrating the centrality of Greek tragedy to such experiments. For these artists, Greek theatre, and Greek tragedy in particular, represents the ideal model and form with which to critique the past and renew the future.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43123151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:In addition to his extensive body of dramatic work, Tennessee Williams also wrote several screenplays that are inseparable from his oeuvre in terms of both content and form. His plays and screenplays–which Williams himself referred to as “film plays,” indicating their hybridity–are sites where the playwright explores aesthetic possibilities that blur the line between stage and screen. Exploring similar themes, such as the oppression and suffering of women, disabled people, and queer individuals, Williams’s film plays also demonstrate his desire for new aesthetic formulations. This article analyses Tennessee Williams’s unfilmed film play One Arm (published in 1984) as a major but neglected moment in his dramatic exploration of disability and the non-normative body. As in his other writing, Williams shows in One Arm that heteronormative and ableist norms can push individuals to the edges of society by stigmatizing and pathologizing their identities. By depicting their social and cultural transgressions, Williams celebrates allegedly excessive and deviant behaviour as well as “abnormal” bodies. The article further argues that in One Arm, Williams calls attention to the importance of creating a sense of community among disabled and queer subjects for a livable crip/queer future, and he calls for allyship among these communities to overcome oppression.
{"title":"Shattering Normalcy: Disability and Queerness in Tennessee Williams’s One Arm","authors":"Duygu Beste Başer Özcan","doi":"10.3138/md-66-1-1251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-66-1-1251","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In addition to his extensive body of dramatic work, Tennessee Williams also wrote several screenplays that are inseparable from his oeuvre in terms of both content and form. His plays and screenplays–which Williams himself referred to as “film plays,” indicating their hybridity–are sites where the playwright explores aesthetic possibilities that blur the line between stage and screen. Exploring similar themes, such as the oppression and suffering of women, disabled people, and queer individuals, Williams’s film plays also demonstrate his desire for new aesthetic formulations. This article analyses Tennessee Williams’s unfilmed film play One Arm (published in 1984) as a major but neglected moment in his dramatic exploration of disability and the non-normative body. As in his other writing, Williams shows in One Arm that heteronormative and ableist norms can push individuals to the edges of society by stigmatizing and pathologizing their identities. By depicting their social and cultural transgressions, Williams celebrates allegedly excessive and deviant behaviour as well as “abnormal” bodies. The article further argues that in One Arm, Williams calls attention to the importance of creating a sense of community among disabled and queer subjects for a livable crip/queer future, and he calls for allyship among these communities to overcome oppression.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"66 1","pages":"48 - 70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43374456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Lines Between the Lines presents stage directions as tools for centring historically marginalized voices; argues for a relationship between stage directions and emotional responses; and highlights the creative potential of affective stage directions, which allow production teams and readers to imagine new possibilities still substantiated by the source play.
{"title":"Bess Rowen. The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment","authors":"Kaitlyn Farrell Rodriguez","doi":"10.3138/md-66-1-rev4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-66-1-rev4","url":null,"abstract":"The Lines Between the Lines presents stage directions as tools for centring historically marginalized voices; argues for a relationship between stage directions and emotional responses; and highlights the creative potential of affective stage directions, which allow production teams and readers to imagine new possibilities still substantiated by the source play.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41654294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This edited collection presents twenty-eight critical essays on plays by contemporary women playwrights from around the world, providing a vital resource for students and theatre professionals. The book as whole highlights plays that are engaged and intervening in the contemporary political moment, from #BlackLivesMatter to the climate crisis.
{"title":"Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris, eds. Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century.","authors":"Hannah Greenstreet","doi":"10.3138/md-66-1-rev2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-66-1-rev2","url":null,"abstract":"This edited collection presents twenty-eight critical essays on plays by contemporary women playwrights from around the world, providing a vital resource for students and theatre professionals. The book as whole highlights plays that are engaged and intervening in the contemporary political moment, from #BlackLivesMatter to the climate crisis.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47705108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance charts the importance of performance to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist experiments while also demonstrating the centrality of Greek tragedy to such experiments. For these artists, Greek theatre, and Greek tragedy in particular, represents the ideal model and form with which to critique the past and renew the future.
{"title":"Julia A. Walker. Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage","authors":"C. Warden","doi":"10.3138/md-66-1-rev8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-66-1-rev8","url":null,"abstract":"Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance charts the importance of performance to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist experiments while also demonstrating the centrality of Greek tragedy to such experiments. For these artists, Greek theatre, and Greek tragedy in particular, represents the ideal model and form with which to critique the past and renew the future.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46682418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Brecht and Tragedy gives a genealogical account of Brecht’s engagement with tragedy and uses tragedy as a lens to analyse several Brechtian works and ideas. Exhaustively researched, it is valuable both for its detailed work on Brecht and tragedy and its analysis of Brecht’s theatre more broadly.
{"title":"Martin Revermann. Brecht and Tragedy: Radicalism, Traditionalism, Eristics","authors":"E. Turley","doi":"10.3138/md-66-1-rev6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-66-1-rev6","url":null,"abstract":"Brecht and Tragedy gives a genealogical account of Brecht’s engagement with tragedy and uses tragedy as a lens to analyse several Brechtian works and ideas. Exhaustively researched, it is valuable both for its detailed work on Brecht and tragedy and its analysis of Brecht’s theatre more broadly.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43162015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:This article explores how the staging of transnational musical productions articulates changing perceptions of queer identity by considering the South Korean remounting of the off-Broadway musical Thrill Me (2007). I argue that Thrill Me reflects what Jill Dolan terms a “utopian performative” in that by watching the musical, many women spectators related to queer subjects in ways that transgressed but did not threaten the gender norms of South Korean society. Through close readings of the source and target scripts on the page and in performance, I provide an account of the origins of key contemporary South Korean musical theatre conventions and examine the commodification of queering in such theatre. In complex ways, South Korean women spectators used theatre to evade suffocating gender and economic norms as audiences were encouraged to identify with ambiguously marked gay male queerness. Their commodification of queer subjects did reinforce generalizations about marginalized identities; however, at times, the spectacularization of under-represented minorities can offer a method of survival for other oppressed gender categories.
{"title":"Thrill Me: Queerness, Spectatorship, and the Utopian Performative in South Korean Musical Theatre","authors":"Hye-won Kim","doi":"10.3138/md-66-1-1123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-66-1-1123","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article explores how the staging of transnational musical productions articulates changing perceptions of queer identity by considering the South Korean remounting of the off-Broadway musical Thrill Me (2007). I argue that Thrill Me reflects what Jill Dolan terms a “utopian performative” in that by watching the musical, many women spectators related to queer subjects in ways that transgressed but did not threaten the gender norms of South Korean society. Through close readings of the source and target scripts on the page and in performance, I provide an account of the origins of key contemporary South Korean musical theatre conventions and examine the commodification of queering in such theatre. In complex ways, South Korean women spectators used theatre to evade suffocating gender and economic norms as audiences were encouraged to identify with ambiguously marked gay male queerness. Their commodification of queer subjects did reinforce generalizations about marginalized identities; however, at times, the spectacularization of under-represented minorities can offer a method of survival for other oppressed gender categories.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"75 16","pages":"115 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41250043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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