How to Study Modern Drama


Book Description







The Making of Modern Drama


Book Description

This critical exploration of modern drama begins with Büchner and Ibsen and then discusses the major playwrights who have shaped modern theater. A new introduction by the author assesses developments of recent years.




Modern Drama


Book Description

This book tells the story of modern drama through its seminal, groundbreaking plays and performances, and the artistic diversity that these represent. Exploring the new note of artistic hostility between dramatists and their audience, Shepherd-Barr draws on a range of theories and performances to reveal what makes modern drama 'modern'.




Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater


Book Description

The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.







Staging Place


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The first book-length study of the notion of place and its implications in modern drama




David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross


Book Description

The 12 original and two classic essays offer a dialectic on performance and structure, and substantially advance our knowledge of this seminal playwright. The commentaries examine feminism, pernicious nostalgia, ethnicity, the mythological land motif, the discourse of anxiety, gendered language, and Mamet's vision of America, providing insights on the theatricality, originality, and universality of the work. Although the dominant focus is on Glengarry Glen Ross, several essays look at the play against the background of Mamet's Edmund, Reunion, and American Buffalo, whereas others find fascinating parallels in Emerson, Baudrillard, Conrad, Miller, and Churchill. The book also includes an interview with Sam Mendes, the director of the highly acclaimed 1994 revival of Glengarry Glen Ross in London, conducted specifically for this collectio. A chronology of major productions and the most current and comprehensive bibliography of secondary references from 1983-1995 complete the volume.




The Absent Father in Modern Drama


Book Description

"From the Freudians to the feminists, the role of the absent or hidden father figure has played a part in narrative and cultural theory. This work presents the first full-length examination of the absent father in modern drama. It closely analyzes major works by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Williams, Miller, Shepard, Rabe, Henley, Norman, Pielmeier, Shaffer, Osborne, Churchill, and Fugard. Using the critical framework of psychological, deconstructive, and myth criticism, this book demonstrates how the consistent focus on an imposing father figure who never physically appears onstage affects the psychological, social, and metaphysical structure of major modern dramas."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved