Modern Drama

Within American theatre scholarship there is a long-standing tradition of a distinction between drama, which considers the play primarily as a literary text, and theatre, which focuses upon the play’s realization on stage. The very title of the journal Modern Drama seemingly places it on the literary side of this division, and that has indeed been its primary orientation. From the very beginning, however, most notably in the including of regular reports on theatrical activity abroad, the journal showed an interest in performance as well as literary text. A much more distinct interest in performance appeared in the journal from the early 1980s onward, with a series of special issues on contemporary experimental work in the theatre. Oddly enough, however, despite a wide-ranging interest in the staging of such experimental theatre, the journal only very rarely offered essays discussing the staging of such canonical authors as Ibsen, Chekhov, Williams, and Strindberg, whose plays had been from the beginning the center of the journal’s concerns. This rather odd disjuncture may in part be due to the fact that the professional theatre in the United States offers far fewer major revivals of such authors for study than do the world’s other major theatre-producing countries or it may owe something to the long-standing assumption that “drama” refers only to plays as literature. Nevertheless, a number of recent essays in the journal, most notably one by the leading German theatre scholar, Erika Fischer-Lichte, suggest how the journal might more fully fulfill its mission by presenting more work in this important area, hitherto surprisingly unrepresented in its pages.

This article explores the impact of facial injury and reconstructive surgery on Tristan Tzara’s Dada play The Gas Heart. The European theatre of World War I saw an unprecedented number of facial injuries and other instances of physical mutilation, and their prevalence inaugurated a social crisis of appearance and representation. With its dramaturgy of fragmentation, Tzara’s play provides a theatrical field of face and defacement, figure and disfiguration. The body to which it gives voice is a body deeply embedded in its historical, cultural, and artistic moment. In its giving and taking away of faces, it reflects—and transforms—a cultural anxiety over the destruction of the human form and the claims of identity, normality, and corporeal integrity to which it has been historically subordinated. While the brilliantly re-formed, constantly changing human body that emerges from The Gas Heart stands in opposition to the normalized body posited by reconstructive medicine, Tzara’s body-in-pieces reveals the wider field of permutations and possibilities—material, subjective, aesthetic—that the shattered bodies of World War I helped open to view.

This essay analyses the play, Antígona, by Peruvian poet José Watanabe, developed in 2000 in collaboration with the actress Teresa Ralli, long-time member of the Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. The story of Antigone is retold in the aftermath of the long period of civil violence in Peru from 1980 to 2000, shaped by the armed conflict waged between the Marxist–Maoist group Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path), led by Abimael Guzmán, and the military, ultimately led by the president-turned-dictator, Alberto Fujimori. Watanabe’s Antigone is aligned with contemporary citizens searching for missing family members “disappeared” by the state or assassinated by the Shining Path; Ismene is aligned with those who did not act during the war but are invited to seek justice today.

Aristotle’s Poetics is thought to have little practical value for the student of theatre today, but its analysis of plot is a valuable tool for dramaturgical analysis. A search for peripeteia, anagnorisis, and pathos will reveal, with startling clarity, the shape and dynamics of dramatic structures, even those thought to be “non-Aristotelian.” A reading of Waiting for Godot against the Aristotelian plot structure demonstrates the enduring power of Aristotle’s plot terms.

“Opening the Windshield” argues that Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is best understood as a work of American popular culture, with a close relationship not only to realism but also to vaudeville and musical theatre. The essay identifies a core tension between the character of Willy Loman and the psychological realist style for which the play is famous. Through his indomitable theatricality, Willy resists the pressure to conform to a realist model and ends up winning the audience even as he loses his life. Reading the play in this way sheds light on the long-standing popularity of the play, its avowed Jewishness, and its place in the American literary canon.

In every narrative about the development of theatre in the United States, Eugene O’Neill is constructed as the first canonical U.S. playwright, a crusader whose plays became the cornerstone of a newly legitimized literary drama. This essay argues that O’Neill’s swift canonization was, in part, based on the effectiveness of his work in distancing itself from popular theatrical traditions, especially vaudeville and musical comedy. More important, it points out that his consecration was also linked to the playwright’s construction as a kind of post-Nietzschean saint, who does not so much believe as doubt. Although many writers and theatre practitioners of the 1920s were instrumental in this canonization, the essay focuses on two: George Jean Nathan, the most censorious critic of his age, and Barrett Clark, O’Neill’s first biographer. It analyses the success of the hagiographic discourses produced by these and many others in making the playwright a prophet of the Machine Age, the one whose spiritual agonies redeemed the American theatre.

This article examines how to approach the teaching of Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. With its powerful and haunting evocations of the Middle Passage from Africa to America, his remembrance of oppressive racial servitude, his invocation of spiritual passion in the face of overwhelming circumstances, Joe Turner is perhaps the most spiritual and non-linear piece within Wilson’s twentieth-century cycle of plays. Consequently, it offers certain pedagogical challenges. This article argues that, at its core, the play functions ritualistically, as the central figure in the action, Herald Loomis, moves from self-destruction and stagnation to liberation by taking the self-defining, racially significant, spiritual act of bleeding for himself. Wilson sets this play in 1911, a time not that far removed from slavery, in which he feels that African retentions and rituals were palpable in African American experiences. In working with this play with an undergraduate class or graduate course, the article argues, it is critical to examine with the students how ritual operates in the play, to determine the ritual action of the play, and to analyse how Africa is ritualized and how such symbolic enactments inform Wilson’s re-working of African American history during this period of the Great Migration.

This essay focuses on the relationship between George and Nick, who represent two competing but interdependent models of heterosexual masculinity. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? stages, in addition to its famous battle between the sexes, an equally urgent battle within masculinity. The verbal combat between George and Nick illustrates not only Albee’s understanding of gender as discursively constructed but also that the legendary marriage delineated in Who’s Afraid depends both structurally and psychologically on the competition between the two men. Albee presents postwar heterosexual masculinity as fundamentally competitive, a gender identity that must be proven as well as performed. The play suggests that, if competitive masculinity produces a victor, it also demands a loser. As it takes one man to prove another’s masculinity, an attentive and ultimately vanquished male audience is necessary to complete the performance. Moreover, Who’s Afraid shows heterosexual masculinity as constituted through a particular form of triangulation: George and Nick compete to see which is the better man and fitter mate for Martha.

I use C.B. Macpherson’s concept of “possessive individualism” to examine the intersecting dimensions of race, gender, ownership, mobility, domesticity, and the self in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, and José Rivera’s Marisol.