New at Modern Drama Advance Online

[Greenwood, Audrey]

New at Modern Drama Advance Online<hhttp://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/120885/?Content+Status=Accepted>

The Haunted Stage of Summer and Smoke: Tennessee Williams's Forgotten Silent Film Sequences<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/r310848293135310/?p=97df27789945489b859691a64704ffc0&pi=0>
Sophie Maruéjouls-Koch
Recent re-evaluation of Tennessee Williams's late plays has brought to light another side of the playwright, an avant-garde impulse ignored by his contemporaries because it did not match his image as a poetic realist. Of course, this new Williams did not appear out of the blue; he was there from the beginning, if less conspicuous, but the weight of prejudice drove him underground. Thus, the avant-garde is most visible in the early plays, in deviations from artistic norms that did not always make it to the published versions. Summer and Smoke (1948) is a case in point. Examination of the unpublished drafts of the play reveals an ambitious project that never saw the light of day. Inspired by Erwin Piscator's Epic Theatre, Williams intended to put a screen on the stage, inviting the spectator to see differently, in a manner reminiscent of Brecht's "exercise in complex seeing." The drafts, therefore, unveil the avant-garde ideas of a playwright who never ceased experimenting with form, finally to find his true voice, a voice that resonates most loudly in the late plays.
Mac Wellman's Antigone: The Hegelian Theme<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/r7u66p80057142mx/>
Michael Shaw
Mac Wellman, the contemporary American playwright, has said that there is a lot of George Steiner's Antigones (where Steiner discusses the influence of Sophocles's play on later writers and philosophers) in his Antigone of 2000. Explicating that relationship reveals that Wellman uses this material in various ways to present a view of the world that has much in common with, and is deeply indebted to, the realist tradition in philosophy and literature. It is also made clear that Wellman's interest in these authors and this tradition goes far beyond his reading of Steiner's book. Major elements of that "Hegelian theme" are the division of the spiritual and the real realms, the division within the real realm between word and deed, the predominance of time and change, and the imperfection of the human spirit, leading to endless conflict and disaster. The self, a spiritual thing, is driven to act and encounters resistance but, in the process, proves itself - self-realization. As it proceeds in self-realization, it longs for and, on very rare occasions, succeeds in becoming one with the Absolute. Mac Wellman, true to this philosophical tradition, is a frustrated idealist.
The Philippine Komedya and the Recuperation of the Cosmopolitan: From Colonial Legacy to Cross-Cultural Encounter<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/r37j111510474412/>
Sir Anril P. Tiatco
This article critiques the komedya vis-à-vis its institutionalization as national theatre form and proposes a cosmopolitan alternative in the critique. It argues that the imposition of a nationalist perspective in the reading the form falls into the trap of territoriality and "othering" because of its Roman Catholic and Tagalog-centric orientations. The cosmopolitan critique is necessary because it embodies a middle-path alternative to the essentializing and territorializing character of popular nationalism and the anarchy of pluralism. The discussion of cosmopolitanism comes from the irony that komedya could have offered a cosmopolitan possibility when Filipino artists began its indigenization. The efficacy of this possibility was overpowered by methodological nationalism based on the hegemony of the center (The Greater Manila Area) and its central religion - Catholicism. Thus, the komedya was contextualized as a Catholic theatre form and strengthened a particular hostility against non-Catholics, especially the Muslims.
>From Laundries to Labour Camps: Staging Ireland's "Rule of Silence" in Anu Production's Laundry<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/m245235q75140320/>
Miriam Haughton
Anu Productions premiered their site-specific devised performance Laundry in the former Magdalene Laundry building on Lower Seán McDermott Street, as part of their four-part artistic investigation of this historical city centre district at the 2011 Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival. This essay will offer performance analysis of Laundry (winner of 'Best Production', Irish Times Theatre Awards 2012) and detail how the founding principles of Irish national freedom - the Roman Catholic faith and independent Irish governance - determined only certain individuals and groups were free, while others were hidden, silenced, punished, and incarcerated for life. Control of the female body existed at the heart of these national power interests, as did careful management of the family unit proper. Visibility, invisibility, free speech, individual agency, and access to political power were all tightly managed privileges in this culture of national, religious, and sexual control and overt gender discrimination.
Tragedy and Theatricality in The Island<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/417v583103514735/>
Christian Dahl
The article discusses the theoretical and generic problems of defining classical and modern tragedy vis à vis contemporary re-adaptations of Greek tragedy. It argues in favour of combining studies in reception history with the aesthetics of genre, and it does so through a re-examination of Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona's re-adaptation of Sophocles's Antigone in their famous anti-apartheid play, The Island (1973). Through the analysis of this particular play and its relation to Sophoclean tragedy, the article seeks to explain why the modern aesthetics of theatricality, which has often been invested with a potential to liberate by modern dramatists and theorists, has always been difficult to reconcile with tragic drama; more specifically it thus argues that the conflict of tragedy and play, role and player, action and play, which is crucial to the performance of The Island, has a more general relevance.


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