New at Modern Drama Online - Modern Drama 57:3, Fall 2014

Tue Sep 23 15:03:55 EDT 2014

New at Modern Drama Online<http://bit.ly/MDadv57>
Modern Drama
Volume 57, Number 3 /2014

This issue contains:
Mouthing Off: The Negativity of Monologue in Mac Wellman's A Murder of Crows
Julia Jarcho
http://bit.ly/MDonline573
This article examines how monologue functions in the work of American playwright Mac Wellman, focusing on his 1992 play, A Murder of Crows. Many of the features that mark Wellman's work as "experimental" are already familiar to readers of canonical modernist and postmodern dramatists, like Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Nevertheless, attending to Wellman's language can challenge a pervasive tendency in theatre studies: the consensus that monologue, particularly in contemporary or postdramatic theatre, is fundamentally a form of heightened communication with the audience. Engaging arguments by Hans-Thies Lehmann and other scholars, the article argues that A Murder of Crows uses monologue to withdraw from the co-presence of the theatrical audience. Defiantly solitary, this kind of monologue resists communication in the present, turning theatre into the site of a utopian protest.
Stage Freight: Labour and the Representability of Capitalism in Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers
Alisa Sniderman<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/?Author=Alisa+Sniderman>
http://bit.ly/MDonline573a
This article discusses Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers and the play's representation - and management - of labour. A dark drama about starvation and labour exploitation, Hauptmann's play paradoxically involves costly logistics and an excessively large cast. The text of The Weavers creates the challenge of its staging, and the arduous relationship between text and production is central to Hauptmann's exploration of human labour. The Weavers dramatizes the exploitation of wage labour, the ideology of the work ethic, and the conflict between labour and capital. In doing so, Hauptmann's labour drama grapples with what Fredric Jameson has called "the representability of capitalism." Looking closely at the relationship between Hauptmann's text and its staging, throughout its production history, this article argues that The Weavers explores the problem of representing labour in the theatre and reveals the signs of labour that capitalist culture seeks to conceal.
"High and Aloof": Verse, Violence, and the Audience in Djuna Barnes's The Antiphon
Alex Goody<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/?Author=Alex+Goody>
http://bit.ly/MDonline573b
Djuna Barnes's last play, The Antiphon, has been subject to a variety of readings that emphasize its autobiographical resonances, its unperformability, or the incoherence that resulted from the editorial interference of T.S. Eliot. There has been no major staging of this play in English since its publication in 1958, and this, along with the archaic language and verse form that Barnes uses, pose the biggest challenge to understanding the dynamics of the play. The article argues that Barnes stages revenge, abuse, violence, and theatricality in her play in negotiation with traditions of Renaissance and modern theatre and with an acute sense of the tensions between literary and popular entertainment. In this way, the article demonstrates how Barnes's play interrogates the role and culpability of the audience as witness and demonstrates the importance of recovering The Antiphon for the canon of twentieth-century drama.
The Historical Edge of Irony: Marco Millions and Its Chinese Adaptations
Zhu Xuefeng<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/?Author=Zhu+Xuefeng>
http://bit.ly/MDonline573c
This article historicizes the playtext(s) of Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions (1927) as a satire on America and contextualizes its adaptations in semi-colonial and "postcolonial" China, to examine how irony functions across time and across cultures. In the first part, I investigate the play's poetic resistance to American Orientalism and its ironic failure to transcend the Eurocentric discourse it criticizes. In the second part, I examine the play's trajectory on the Chinese stage from 1929 to 2009, arguing that these adaptations, as transideological, "postcolonial" irony, embodied the polyphony of Chinese Occidentalism and wrote back to the divided self of modern China. The ironic Marco Millions and its Chinese adaptations provoke the audience to rethink history and rewrite reality, also providing a site for critics to reconceive the complementary relationship between Orientalism and Occidentalism. Thus, this minor O'Neill play of the 1920s has acquired historical significance and contemporary relevance.
Beyond the Marilisse and the Chestnut: Shattering Slavery's Sexual Stereotypes in the Drama of Ina Césaire and Maryse Condé
Emily Sahakian
http://bit.ly/MDonline573d
In the French Caribbean, sexualized stereotypes have been imposed upon women's bodies since the time of slavery. While the "Marilisse" stereotype figures Caribbean women as treacherous seductresses, the "Chestnut" makes them passive sufferers, who must accept infidelity and abuse from men. In this article, I argue that two plays by French Caribbean women writers juxtapose their main characters' speech with their bodies to expose the contradictory ways in which the system of sexualized subjection inherited from the time of slavery continues to impact French Caribbean culture and literary production. Dramatizing four women's everyday experiences during a major anticolonial revolt in 1870 in Martinique, Ina Césaire's Fire's Daughters [Rosanie Soleil] subverts the stereotype of the Chestnut by carving out new roles for revolutionary women. With the use of irony, Maryse Condé's The Tropical Breeze Hotel [Pension les Alizés] exposes how the stereotype of the Marilisse ensnares a Guadeloupean woman living in Paris in the 1980s. In their final scenes, Césaire and Condé deploy vodou ritual and ironic alienation, respectively, to recast the female body of slavery's legacy, refiguring Caribbean female experience through performance.
Salesman in Abu Dhabi: The Geopathology of Objects
Kevin Riordan<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/?Author=Kevin+Riordan>
http://bit.ly/MDonline573e
In Theater Mitu's Abu Dhabi production of Death of a Salesman, most of the parts were played by physical objects. With their meticulous attention to the material relationships onstage, Mitu reveals how Salesman - and modern drama, more generally - moves and is made to move unevenly in the global repertory. Spurred by this production, the article puts into conversation the recent critical discourses on global theatre and performing objects. Global studies of theatre, as they accumulate their examples, tend to distance themselves critically from individual performances as performances. The study of performing objects, in a sense, checks these more sweeping critical tendencies by reminding us of the obstinate materiality, contingency, and strangeness of live theatre. In its defamiliarization of a familiar tragedy, Mitu's Salesman negotiates this methodological difference and illuminates the physical ways that performance moves onstage and off, and both in and out of our critical gaze.
Reviews
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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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