Project MUSE®: Modern Drama - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Modern Drama.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1958) through current issue (with gaps in vols. 5, 8, and 12)Latest Articles: Modern DramaTWOProject MUSE®Modern Drama1712-52860026-7694Latest articles in Modern Drama. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Jackie Sibblies Drury and the Violence of Repetition
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983434
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When I saw Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview at Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) in Brooklyn in 2019, a remount of its Soho Rep premiere a year earlier, spectators entered the auditorium to a rousing pre-show soundtrack – music from Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston, among others – to which anyone of a certain age could (and in fact did) sing along as we waited for the show to start. Given its obvious curation, song after song by iconic Black artists, something about the playlist's easy familiarity, its winking invitation to sing or hum along, even to dance in our seats, felt like a trap for a certain segment of the audience. The woman next to me, around my age, also white, took the bait, tapping her feet and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallJackie Sibblies Drury and the Violence of Repetition2026-02-24text/htmlen-USJackie Sibblies Drury and the Violence of Repetition2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®921792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24(Re)Playing Kidwell and Sheppard's Underground Railroad Game
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983435
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Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R. Sheppard's Underground Railroad Game marks a notable entry in the broad category of plays that dramatize the vast, improvisatory network of freedom fighters connected with African Americans' struggle for liberation during the nineteenth century. It stands apart from many other historical dramas as a work of devised theatre, a diverse and influential tradition that can be somewhat definitionally elusive. As scholar-practitioner Telory Arendell defines it, devising comprises an array of methods for generating performance material for which "no script exists before a company makes their work" (2). Kidwell & Sheppard1 originally developed Underground Railroad Game with Philadelphia-based
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmall(Re)Playing Kidwell and Sheppard's Underground Railroad Game2026-02-24text/htmlen-US(Re)Playing Kidwell and Sheppard's Underground Railroad Game2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®827972026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24Family, Community, Country, and Race: The State of the Nation Plays of Roy Williams and Clint Dyer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983436
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In this article I discuss four plays by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer that comment on the State of the Nation from a Black British perspective. In Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (2002), Williams illustrates the complexity of race relations and the intersection of racism, nationalism, and class within English working-class communities. Williams and Dyer's Death of England trilogy, written many years later, uses the creation of a mixed-race family as a metaphor for a multiracial England struggling into existence. In so doing they trace the complexity of influences on its creation. In addition to personal characteristics, they include community, changing demographics, capitalism, politics, class, gender, and ethnicity.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallFamily, Community, Country, and Race: The State of the Nation Plays of Roy Williams and Clint Dyer2026-02-24text/htmlen-USFamily, Community, Country, and Race: The State of the Nation Plays of Roy Williams and Clint Dyer2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®843222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24"A Leasing of Bodies": Race, Medicine, and Radical Care in Jamie Lloyd's Revival of Lucy Prebble's The Effect
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983437
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The cover of the Methuen Drama print edition of Lucy Prebble's 2012 play The Effect portrays a ghostly image of a human brain, divided along its two cerebral hemispheres. While it looks like the image of the brain is etched in glass, it also resembles MRI imaging that renders the interiority of the human body in black and white. The cover image is a striking reminder, like the events in The Effect, of our biological embodiment – that our emotional experiences do reside in the brain, but they also affect our lived experiences. In The Effect, two volunteers participating in a drug trial seem to be falling in love, but they are unsure whether the feeling is real or an effect of the experimental antidepressant they are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmall"A Leasing of Bodies": Race, Medicine, and Radical Care in Jamie Lloyd's Revival of Lucy Prebble's The Effect2026-02-24text/htmlen-US"A Leasing of Bodies": Race, Medicine, and Radical Care in Jamie Lloyd's Revival of Lucy Prebble's The Effect2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®820112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24Out of Place, Out of Control: Transgression in Pearl Cleage's Bourbon at the Border and Flyin' West
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983438
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Since her emergence in the 1980s with puppetplay (1981) and Hospice (1983), Pearl Cleage (1948–) has consistently explored themes of gender and race in her plays and established herself as a prominent Black feminist playwright. She has also been notably concerned with place. Although she has identified herself as a Southern writer, Cleage was in fact born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and raised in Detroit, Michigan. When asked about her roots in the South, Cleage explains, "[A]ll my grandparents are Southern. When people in my family talk about where they came from, they always talk about Alabama. I came to Atlanta in 1969 and I've been here ever since" (Cleage et al. 124). But place is about more than just
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallOut of Place, Out of Control: Transgression in Pearl Cleage's Bourbon at the Border and Flyin' West2026-02-24text/htmlen-USOut of Place, Out of Control: Transgression in Pearl Cleage's Bourbon at the Border and Flyin' West2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®604152026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24Feminism, Dramaturgy, and the Contemporary British History Play by Rebecca Benzie (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983439
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In her study of recent historical dramas in England, Rebecca Benzie directly challenges Aleks Sierz, who remarked in Rewriting the Nation (2011) that such plays "are costume dramas with little relevance to today" (64). To the contrary, Benzie argues in Feminism, Dramaturgy, and the Contemporary British History Play that these historically focused works not only speak to contemporary concerns but also provide critically important new perspectives on received narratives. Benzie observes that "British culture remains obsessed with history," and that some dramas currently engaging this preoccupation with "well-known or marginalized stories from the past" pose important "questions of truth in historical representation"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallFeminism, Dramaturgy, and the Contemporary British History Play by Rebecca Benzie (review)2026-02-24text/htmlen-USFeminism, Dramaturgy, and the Contemporary British History Play by Rebecca Benzie (review)2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®102482026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production and Supply Chain Capitalism by Michael Shane Boyle (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983440
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Tracing circuits and networks has proven a popular method in performance research, as scholars follow performers' planetary journeys to attend to an often-postnational world. Yet the movement of people forms just a small portion of the networks of transit that have transformed global modernity: largely, what we transport are material commodities shut in metal boxes. These too, as Michael Shane Boyle shows in his remarkable first book, have become central to contemporary art, theatre, performance – and not coincidentally, capital.The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production and Supply Chain Capitalism theorizes how two stories relate: the postwar turn to new infrastructures of commodity transport in order to seek out
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallThe Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production and Supply Chain Capitalism by Michael Shane Boyle (review)2026-02-24text/htmlen-USThe Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production and Supply Chain Capitalism by Michael Shane Boyle (review)2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®98452026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24The Dybbuk Century: The Jewish Play That Possessed the World ed. by Debra Caplan and Rachel Merrill Moss (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983441
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S. An-sky's play Der dibek (The Dybbuk) is the most famous Yiddish play of all time. Based on the East European Jewish folk belief that someone who was wronged in life could come back after death to possess the body of a living person, An-sky's modernist intervention into the dybbuk lore was to craft a tale of thwarted love. Debra Caplan and Rachel Merrill Moss, editors of The Dybbuk Century, compare The Dybbuk to "a Romeo and Juliet steeped in the supernatural" (5). Kept apart by class divides and premature death, wealthy bride Leah and her dead lover Khonen are reunited when Leah invites him to attend her wedding to another man, at which event Khonen possesses her body as a dybbuk, a wronged spirit demanding
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallThe Dybbuk Century: The Jewish Play That Possessed the World ed. by Debra Caplan and Rachel Merrill Moss (review)2026-02-24text/htmlen-USThe Dybbuk Century: The Jewish Play That Possessed the World ed. by Debra Caplan and Rachel Merrill Moss (review)2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®89252026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage by Elizabeth T. Craft (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983442
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At the center of Times Square, in the heart of New York City's storied Theater District, there stands a statue of only one theatrical figure: George M. Cohan, the early twentieth century's star-spangled "father of musical comedy" (1). Despite this conspicuous, singular honor, however, even the most diehard devotees of the American musical stage would be hard-pressed to say much about Cohan that was not presented in the 1942 Hollywood biopic that shares its name with this book. And though Cohan wrote and co-wrote upward of forty stage plays and musicals – in addition to producing, directing, and starring in them – only his early musical comedy Little Johnny Jones (1904), featured at length in that film and teed up
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallYankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage by Elizabeth T. Craft (review)2026-02-24text/htmlen-USYankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage by Elizabeth T. Craft (review)2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®89292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre by William A. Everett (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983443
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While scholarship on early twentieth-century musical theatre has increased in recent years, it still pales in comparison to the attention given to the musicals from the 1940s and beyond that make up the bulk of the repertory still performed today. The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre by William A. Everett contributes to expanding the historiographical timeline.Many music genres and historical periods have their acknowledged landmark years, and Everett's monograph joins a sort of subgenre of books about them. In the realm of music, The Year that Made the Musical follows in the footsteps of Hugh MacDonald's Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year (2012), E. Douglas Bomberger's Making
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallThe Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre by William A. Everett (review)2026-02-24text/htmlen-USThe Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre by William A. Everett (review)2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®78812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis: Vichy, Algeria, the Aftermath by John Ireland (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983444
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In this wide-ranging study, John Ireland assembles a series of thought-provoking and admirably informed essays that capture resoundingly the contributions and paradoxes of several quite disparate twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone playwrights. What these artists have in common and what primarily interests Ireland is their thematic focus on – even in some cases obsession with – two of the more horrendous and hidden (or rather, strategically forgotten) events of the relatively recent French past: how, during the Holocaust, France's Vichy regime facilitated the Nazi's "Final Solution" and how, during the Algerian war for independence from French colonization (1954–1962), France used systematic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallTheater, War, and Memory in Crisis: Vichy, Algeria, the Aftermath by John Ireland (review)2026-02-24text/htmlen-USTheater, War, and Memory in Crisis: Vichy, Algeria, the Aftermath by John Ireland (review)2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®88902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24The Theatricalists: Making Politics Appear by Theron Schmidt (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983445
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Theron Schmidt's The Theatricalists: Making Politics Appear has stepped up to bat in the ongoing debate on theatre and theatricality and performance and performativity. Playing, spiritedly, for "Team Theatricality," Schmidt makes a compelling case for the role of theatricality as a method of making politics visible in contemporary theatre. In a study that moves between performance festival favorites from 2002 to 2016, his argument centers not on where performativity fails but rather on what the mechanics of theatricality can do when challenged or stretched, ultimately arguing that "[w]hen we start to see and name the conditions that make action possible, the possibility of different action – that is, politics –
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallThe Theatricalists: Making Politics Appear by Theron Schmidt (review)2026-02-24text/htmlen-USThe Theatricalists: Making Politics Appear by Theron Schmidt (review)2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®98622026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24Aesthetics of the Dramatic Art: Theoretical Dramaturgy by Otakar Zich (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983446
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Published in Czech in 1931, Aesthetics of the Dramatic Art: Theoretical Dramaturgy is an important example of something rare: systematic, integrated, synthetic theorizing about theatre – that is, inductively developed dramaturgical theory derived from empirical (but not historical) evidence. Besides being an academic, Zich was both a creative artist (opera composer) and a theatre reviewer, so his experience was broad and deep, matching his equally expansive training in mathematics, logic, aesthetics, and musicology. In short, he was not the kind of specialist we would recognize today in any of these fields. For this reason, his theory resembles nothing we would recognize today, and therein lies its value. (That
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/302/image/coversmallAesthetics of the Dramatic Art: Theoretical Dramaturgy by Otakar Zich (review)2026-02-24text/htmlen-USAesthetics of the Dramatic Art: Theoretical Dramaturgy by Otakar Zich (review)2026-02-242026TWOProject MUSE®97312026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-24