Search

The story of Medea's murder of her own children to gain revenge against their faithless father has been tackled from many angles by playwrights and directors from Euripides' time to the present. In recent years, due to highly sensationalized, real-life cases of mothers murdering their children, it has become fodder for sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, and feminists. Many recent productions (both original plays and directorial approaches to Euripides' original) have avoided tackling the difficult questions raised by Euripides' ending, which demands an answer to the following question: how could the gods send down a dragon-drawn chariot to rescue a woman who murdered her own children? Many contemporary authors and directors prefer to eliminate Euripides' ending in order to focus on more immediate issues, such as the psychological or social damage resulting from patriarchy, colonialism, and misogyny. After considering several such productions, this article analyzes three plays that directly tackle Euripides' troubling ending: two original scripts, by Heiner Müller and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei respectively; and a production of Euripides' original by Japanese director Miyagi Satoshi. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA. An expert on postwar Japanese and cross-cultural performance, she is also a translator, director, and playwright. The author of Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: An Introduction (third edition, Routledge, 2016), she has published over a hundred articles, chapters, and reviews. She is an Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This works examines how the dramaturgical creative act varies according to the reality of the artist in exile, whether at home or abroad, in the context of Argentina's last dictatorship (1976-1983). Our corpus examines three playwrights in exile at the time in Spain (Bortnik, Gambaro and Raznovich) and the works of two artists who considered the topic of exile while remaining in Argentina (Gris de ausencia by Cossa and Lejana tierra prometida by Halac). In turn, this allows us to consider an ontological perspective of theatre and uphold the vitality of contact between Argentina, Spain and Italy during this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that the number of roles in theatre plays has decreased over time. Playwrights seem to internalize the costs of producing plays by downsizing the number of roles. This downsizing is not a recent phenomenon: it already started a long time ago. This is not surprising, since production costs increase over time and the Baumol cost disease is obviously one of the reasons, though one cannot exclude that fashion has changed given the time elapsed between William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares and analyses factors that impact when creating a network on both online and live networking platforms, designed as spaces for artistic and critical engagement both within Africa and beyond. As I draw on the African Womens' Playwright Network as my example, I consider how we can acknowledge the materiality of the processes and relationships involved in these kinds of networks, which as Stephansen argues, also involve the making of new publics. In this analysis I particularly reflect on the impact of using Linda Tuhiwai Smith's approach to decolonising indigenous research methodologies when creating a cross-cultural network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theatre classroom is necessarily a space in dialogue with myths about the marginalisation of theatre as an art and theatre audiences as a public. It is precisely because theatre is a marginalised discipline that curricula should incorporate the processes by which the labour of theatre artists changes value and joins the mainstream; playwrights employed in television offer a relevant study of just that. How do we revise undergraduate curricula in order to substantially address this intermediality in a way that is legible for students? And where do television and theatre meet in existing theatre courses and objectives? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many U.S. regional theatres claim that gender parity factors prominently into their seasons’ show selections, women playwrights continually struggle to have their work produced. In this study, we explore the dissonance between theatre professionals’ stated intentions and actions with regard to gender parity in play selection. Interviews with theatre professionals reveal that the prioritization of organizational needs over gender inclusion perpetuates a silencing of women’s voices in American regional theatre. The inclusivity of theatres and other types of arts organizations may improve with a reanalysis of organizational structures and communication, as well as a refocusing on the organizations’ immediate communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than fifty years after the founding ofEls Joglarsand several similar events, it is time to evaluate what Catalan independent theater meant for the whole of Spanish drama and the future of theater in Catalonia. This article outlines an original route through theater companies, directors, playwrights, etc., with the aim of a retrospective drawing of a new map of Catalan theater of the 1960s and 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert D. Hume offers an empirical investigation of incomes, cost, artist remuneration, and buying power in the realm of long eighteenth-century cultural production and purchase. What was earned by writers, actors, singers, musicians, and painters? Who could afford to buy a book? Attend a play or opera? Acquire a painting? Only 6 percent of families had £100 per annum income, and only about 3 percent had £200. What is the "buying power" magnitude of such sums? No single multiplier yields a legitimate present-day equivalent, but a range of 200-300 gives a rough sense of magnitude for most of this period. Novels are now thought of as a bourgeois phenomenon, but they cost 3s. per volume. A family with a £200 annual income would have to spend nearly a full day's income to buy a four-volume novel, but only 12 percent for a play. The market for plays was naturally much larger, which explains high copyright payments to playwrights and very low payments for most novels--hence the large number of novels by women, who had few ways to earn money. From this investigation we learn two broad facts. First, that the earnings of most writers, actors, musicians, and singers were generally scanty but went disproportionately to a few stars, and second, that most of the culture we now study is inarguably elite: it was mostly consumed by the top 1 percent or 0.5 percent of the English population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exile and insile are at the core of the analysis of the dramatic works of Griselda Gambaro, Aída Bortnik and Diana Raznovich in this essay. The career of these three playwrights, the only three participants of Teatro Abierto 1981, was disturbed by the National Reorganization Process (1976 - 1983), the dictatorship by the president de facto Jorge Rafael Videla. The time of the exile -- and insile for some of them -, enables the understanding of the thematic and formal evolution in their works, as well as the study of the complicated political and social circumstances surrounding Argentinian theater in the second half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]