New at Modern Drama Online - Volume 57, Number 2 / 2014

[Greenwood, Audrey]

New at Modern Drama Online<http://bit.ly/MDadv57>
Modern Drama
Volume 57, Number 2 /2014
http://bit.ly/572smd
This issue contains:
The Chronotopic Dynamics of Ibsen's Pillars of Society: The Triumph of Industrialism, or How Drama Becomes History
Erinç Özdemir
http://bit.ly/572amd
This essay aims to bring a socio-historical perspective to the current critical assessment of Ibsen's Pillars of Society, which has been largely confined to the ethical and the cultural. Combining a Bakhtinian, chronotopic analysis with a Bakhtinian / New Historicist understanding of literary texts as inevitably or deliberately informed by historical processes, the essay argues that the socio-economic/socio-historical plot in the play is the larger, as well as more determining, dramatic component and force. It posits that industrial capitalism and technological modernization are the intertwined dynamics that propel the drama from beginning to end, forming its central axis of plot in the shape of the railroad enterprise.
Ventriloquist Theatre and the Omniscient Narrator: Gatz and El pasado es un animal grotesco
Barbara Fuchs<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/?Author=Barbara+Fuchs>
http://bit.ly/572bmd
By replacing dialogue with narration, ventriloquist theatre raises central questions about its ethical and political costs, while challenging our understanding of the limits between drama and narrative. In very different ways, Elevator Repair Service's Gatz (first performed 2006) and Mariano Pensotti's El pasado es un animal grotesco [The Past Is a Grotesque Animal] (2010) redraw the boundaries between literary modes, putting characters onstage but replacing their dialogue with narrated text. Staging narration allows us to reconsider literary mechanisms to which we have largely become inured. Rendering the invisible narrator as a presence on the stage lays bare both the arbitrariness of narrative authority and its costs.
Parody, E.E. Cummings, and Uncle Tom's Cabin
James M. Cherry<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/?Author=James+M.+Cherry>
http://bit.ly/572cmd
This article examines E.E. Cummings's Tom (1935), a modern dance treatment of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin never produced, and the effect that Tom has had on subsequent stage interpretations of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Grounded in Linda Hutcheon's conception of parody as an "ironic playing with multiple conventions," the article argues that Cummings's Tom blends Stowe's narrative with modernist poetry, ballet, and African-American religious symbolism as a way to reactivate the potency of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the twentieth century and suggests that productions like Bill T. Jones's Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin / The Promised Land (1991), and the Drama Dept.'s Uncle Tom's Cabin; Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1997) followed the pattern of Cummings's Tom, by using parody and ironic juxtaposition to generate vital, new interpretations of the old story. These performances all suggest that melodrama regains its power to move audiences when presented as a part a collective memory and an intertextual, parodic narrative. The strategies of Cummings, Jones, and the Drama Dept. reveal a modern potential in the intermixture of parody and melodrama.
"A Little History Here, a Little Hollywood There": (Counter-)Identifying with the Spanish Fantasy in Carlos Morton's Rancho Hollywood and Theresa Chavez's L.A. Real
Courtney Elkin Mohler<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/?Author=Courtney+Elkin+Mohler>
http://bit.ly/572dmd
Often considered the final conquest and ultimate summation of Manifest Destiny, California holds a unique place in the American imaginary. While the popular mythology of the Spanish fantasy has served to obscure the use of violence and racialized oppression throughout the colonization of the American Southwest, traces of such struggle remain in memories of the colonized as they continue to occupy this contested space. This paper examines Carlos Morton's ensemble-based political satire, Rancho Hollywood, and Theresa Chavez's one-woman show, L.A. Real, to navigate the dynamic experience of contemporary Southern Californian racialized identity. These two pieces diverge stylistically but share an inclusive, nuanced approach to making sense of history, exploring the material and epistemological impact of historical representation on Chicana/o identity over time. Rancho Hollywood and L.A. Real counter-identify with the Spanish-fantasy heritage by rejecting stereotyping, questioning sanitized versions of Californian history, and voicing personal narratives that resist dominant regional myths and their associated racial ascriptions. Each play stages alternative versions of history that include personal experience and cultural memory; this transformative, productive approach to identity formation articulates agency over the memory of California.
"Remove Your Mask": Character Psychology in Introspective Musical Theatre - Sondheim's Follies, LaChiusa's The Wild Party, and Stew's Passing Strange
Alisa Roost<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/?Author=Alisa+Roost>
http://bit.ly/572emd
While earlier musicals, which developed popular songs, tended to focus on romance, differing backgrounds of the two members of a romantic couple, and their acceptance of each other and into a community, introspective musicals, which Stephen Sondheim pioneered after rock 'n' roll began to define popular music, often dramatize psychological layers by exploring the discrepancy between the persona a character constructs and the character's true inner self. I examine the way introspective musicals construct a paradigm of psychological growth, which usually involves characters' creating strong masks/personae to hide their authentic selves and then ultimately gaining the courage to remove those masks. By looking at the construction of personae and their eventual attempts to accept emotional vulnerability - in Stephen Sondheim's Follies, Michael John LaChiusa's The Wild Party, and Stew's Passing Strange - I explicate the way smaller, post-Sondheim musicals have shifted toward dramatizing an isolated character's emotional development.
Rethinking Sarah Kane's Characters: A Human(ist) Form and Politics
Louise LePage<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/?Author=Louise+LePage>
http://bit.ly/572fmd
The common lore of Sarah Kane scholarship is that Blasted's characters are initially naturalistic, denoting Cartesian or liberal-humanist subjectivity, and later, are determined products (i.e. "animals" or linguistic fragments). This article shows that such assumptions are erroneous. Kane's characters, Ian and Cate, are naturalistic; however, an examination of character in the naturalist theatre tradition reveals, not a fixed and autonomous agent, but an individual who is complexly organized by natural and cultural parts and founded upon a compatibilist model of mind. By reflecting upon the "conglomerate" naturalistic character articulated by August Strindberg, in his preface to Miss Julie (1888), the article shows that Kane's changing dramaturgical treatment of character reveals, not different models of self, but one hybrid individual, capable of change and self-determination. Rethinking Kane's characters, in this way, as human(ist) (but not liberal-humanist) subjects, the article brings into focus a politics for Blasted that is emancipatory: crucially, people are changeable and the human species has some capacity to determine its future.
Reviews
http://bit.ly/572gmd
Sean Carney, The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy, reviewed by Lily Cui
Leslie Atkins Durham, Women's Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century: Sarah Ruhl and Her Contemporaries, reviewed by Miriam Chirico
Siyuan Liu, Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China, reviewed by Jen-Hao Hsu
Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real, reviewed by Liz Tomlin
Vassiliki Rapti, Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond, reviewed by Johanna Malt
Liz Tomlin, Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990-2010, reviewed by Miriam Felton-Dansky
Sara Warner, Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure, reviewed by Jessica Del Vecchio
Maurya Wickstrom, Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew, reviewed by Jason Fitzgerald
Modern Drama was founded in 1958 and is the most prominent journal in English to focus on dramatic literature. The terms "modern" and "drama" are the subject of continuing and fruitful debate, but the journal has been distinguished by the excellence of its close readings of both canonical and lesser-known dramatic texts from a range of methodological perspectives. The journal features refereed articles written from a variety of geo-political points of view which enhance our understanding, both formal and historical, of the dramatic literature of the past two centuries; there is also an extensive book review section.

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