Project MUSE®: Comparative Drama - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Comparative Drama.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1967) through current issueLatest Articles: Comparative DramaTWOProject MUSE®Comparative Drama1936-16370010-4078Latest articles in Comparative Drama. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Recuperating (from) Disposability in the Wasteocene: Recycling Lives and Plastics in Behind the Beautiful Forevers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980942
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I remain haunted by a powerful image in the 2015 National Theatre production of Behind the Beautiful Forevers.2 The play is David Hare's adaptation of the book by Katherine Boo, a literary-journalistic account of the lives of a few of the 3,000+ people living in Annawadi, a slum adjacent to the Mumbai airport. Many living in this slum—in the book, in the play, and in the actual place—live alongside a sewage pond and make their livelihood by trash-picking in the penumbra of the airport. They are people rendered disposable by capitalism, living in literal refuse. Just prior to the moment in question, a character trying to steal scrap metal inside the airport's fences is murdered. The immediately-subsequent blackout
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358/image/coversmallRecuperating (from) Disposability in the Wasteocene: Recycling Lives and Plastics in Behind the Beautiful Forevers2026-01-30text/htmlen-USRecuperating (from) Disposability in the Wasteocene: Recycling Lives and Plastics in Behind the Beautiful Forevers2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®795282026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30"Are you Funny Enough?": Grotesque Laughter in Matei Vișniec's Old Clown Wanted and Consuelo de Castro's Walking Papers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980943
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"It's this cruel side of life which so interests me, the side that sometimes transforms us into vicious clowns, moronic clowns compelled to strut about, to perform in the great social comedy, playing into the hands of the machine conceived for the purpose of humiliating us, of dehumanizing us, of killing us. And then I believe that today, when so many of the grotesque buffoons, around the world find themselves sitting on high at the summit of power, my play about the clowns also has political connotations."Matei Vișniec, Program Notes to Old Clown Wanted, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble (2018)
"Isn't that what it's all about? The roles we're forced to play? Isn't that what life is, after all; a circus, a stage … huh?"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358/image/coversmall"Are you Funny Enough?": Grotesque Laughter in Matei Vișniec's Old Clown Wanted and Consuelo de Castro's Walking Papers2026-01-30text/htmlen-US"Are you Funny Enough?": Grotesque Laughter in Matei Vișniec's Old Clown Wanted and Consuelo de Castro's Walking Papers2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®664142026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Disappearing Fathers and Affective Withdrawal in the Neoliberal Era: Tracy Letts' August: Osage County and Mrinal Sen's Ek Din Achanak
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980944
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In Tracy Letts' play August: Osage County (2007), Beverly Weston, a washed-up poet and patriarch of the Weston family, hires Johanna, a Native-American young woman, to take care of the household and look after his wife Violet, and soon after, he disappears. The Weston family gathers at the house in the wake of his disappearance—three daughters and relatives who live far and nearby. In Mrinal Sen's Hindi film Ek Din Achanak (1989), on an evening when it rains heavily in Calcutta, Shashank Rai, a professor, steps out of his home and does not return, alarming his family. Loosely structured as family dramas, the two texts center on male intellectuals who become opaque sites of ambivalent meaning for the other
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358/image/coversmallDisappearing Fathers and Affective Withdrawal in the Neoliberal Era: Tracy Letts' August: Osage County and Mrinal Sen's Ek Din Achanak2026-01-30text/htmlen-USDisappearing Fathers and Affective Withdrawal in the Neoliberal Era: Tracy Letts' August: Osage County and Mrinal Sen's Ek Din Achanak2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®1124802026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Alumnae Theatre Company: Nonprofessionalizing Theatre in Canada by Robin Whittaker (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980945
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Robin Whittaker's Alumnae Theatre Company is something between a comprehensive history and a tribute to an important and long-standing women's theatre company in Toronto's downtown core. It takes its reader back to the organization's very beginnings in 1918, detailing along the way its various phases at the University, on the Homefront, during the Postwar period, and its various Coach House residencies. It examines the views of its main proponents, the variety of spaces it occupied, the actors—many famous—to whom it provided early opportunities, and the dramatic fare it staged. Theatre historian Moira Day calls it "an exquisitely crafted love letter to North America's oldest women-run theatre" and I could not more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358/image/coversmallAlumnae Theatre Company: Nonprofessionalizing Theatre in Canada by Robin Whittaker (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USAlumnae Theatre Company: Nonprofessionalizing Theatre in Canada by Robin Whittaker (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®129302026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life by Alisa Zhulina (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980946
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"What can theater, with its ineluctable stain of commerce, say or do about capitalism?" (16). This is the question that animates Alisa Zhulina's provocative and refreshing book, Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life, in which she examines the connection between late-nineteenth century drama—plays from the modern canon by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, etc.—and the then-emerging field of economics. Zhulina stakes a claim for the political value of the "theater of capital," what it shows us (even now) about the mutual imbrications of theatre and capital, and how it models a salutary intellectual liberalism and a self-reflexive critique of capitalism that exceeds the flaccidness of moral
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358/image/coversmallTheater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life by Alisa Zhulina (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USTheater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life by Alisa Zhulina (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®127602026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Ugly Productions: An Aesthetics of Greek Drama by A.C. Duncan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980947
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This monograph aims to convince the reader that ugliness should be recognized as central to the aesthetics and ethics of Greek Tragedy: 'Ugliness is not only a fundamental mode or practical means of Greek drama, but one of its most important products' (6). The introduction contains a rich blend of close readings from Greek tragedy and theoretical approaches which enables the reader to see clearly the application of broader theories to the ancient texts. In setting out the connections between sight, speech and the provocation of emotion on the tragic stage, Duncan shows how these modalities are interdependent in the construction of meaning and affect and encourages the reader to center ugliness in their
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358/image/coversmallUgly Productions: An Aesthetics of Greek Drama by A.C. Duncan (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USUgly Productions: An Aesthetics of Greek Drama by A.C. Duncan (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®124232026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30The Body and the Senses in Greek Tragedy by Afroditi Angelopoulou (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980949
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Afroditi Angelopoulou's The Body and the Senses in Greek Tragedy is a welcome addition to the ongoing investigation of affect, embodiment, and ancient Greek drama, complementing recent work by other scholars such as Mario Telò, Naomi Weiss, and Nancy Worman. Deeply learned, clearly written, and characterized throughout by lively, sophisticated, and insightful readings, Angelopoulou's book deserves the attention of anyone who studies and/or teaches Greek tragedy, and it promises to reward that attention with a fresh understanding of both individual plays and the genre as a whole.Angelopoulou's core claim, grounded in scholarship on embodied cognition, phenomenology, and performance, is that Greek tragedy represents
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358/image/coversmallThe Body and the Senses in Greek Tragedy by Afroditi Angelopoulou (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USThe Body and the Senses in Greek Tragedy by Afroditi Angelopoulou (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®116232026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30I Want To Die, I Hate My Life: Three Essays on Tragedy and One on Beckett by Simon Critchley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980950
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There's a gnawing sense, and you know just what I mean, that even now, this moment, at your age—how old exactly?—you're every bit the person you were when you first thought about what a relief it would be to be anyone but the person you are. All those wrong turns, all the people you've disappointed, well, you keep on wrong turning, right on disappointing. Despite your many evasions, your plotted escapes, those distant places to which you've frequently travelled, you've unhappily discovered what Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises knew all along. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. Paris, Rome, London, Alaska, that little faraway Greek isle: wherever you hide out, however far afield
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358/image/coversmallI Want To Die, I Hate My Life: Three Essays on Tragedy and One on Beckett by Simon Critchley (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USI Want To Die, I Hate My Life: Three Essays on Tragedy and One on Beckett by Simon Critchley (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®206022026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Theatrical Consciousness: the Actor's Mind in Russian Modernism by Alisa Ballard Lin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980951
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In her insightful and engaging book, Alisa Ballard Lin accomplishes several tasks. One is to survey some of the key theories about the nature of the theatre and of acting that emerged in Russia during its brilliant cultural efflorescence of the early twentieth century. If some of the figures she examines are familiar and have the status of giants in their domain (Meyerhold, Stanislavsky) others are less well-known. Gustav Shpet, for example, was a philosopher, while Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was a writer of fantastic fiction who has only recently been rediscovered and republished. The theories Lin considers all share a modernist rejection of nineteenth-century theatrical naturalism, most closely associated in Russia
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358/image/coversmallTheatrical Consciousness: the Actor's Mind in Russian Modernism by Alisa Ballard Lin (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USTheatrical Consciousness: the Actor's Mind in Russian Modernism by Alisa Ballard Lin (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®116132026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30Staging Germanness in Contemporary British Theatre by Joseph Prestwich (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980955
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As viewed from Britain, German theatrical culture has a certain aesthetic and political bent that stands at odds with the UK's own theatre heritage: dominated by left-wing directors who are unafraid or perhaps unashamed in their treatment of the dramatic text; framed through experimental acting techniques or postdramatic constellations in which the spectator-critic struggles to find meaning; featuring sets dominated by seemingly unhinged stage designs (water, sand, mud in waves); and, of course, the nudity: unabashed and all terribly Teutonic. Contrasted to the staid naturalistic productions of Britain—in which, for example, Lyndsey Turner's 2015 decision to move Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/358/image/coversmallStaging Germanness in Contemporary British Theatre by Joseph Prestwich (review)2026-01-30text/htmlen-USStaging Germanness in Contemporary British Theatre by Joseph Prestwich (review)2026-01-302026TWOProject MUSE®112112026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-30