Search

Playwrights crafting work from real-life sources have heightened links with both the affective subject material of such work, and the sources themselves, particularly when the life stories derived from such sources are traumatic in nature. Being drawn to and dealing with difficult individual, social, historical and political stories implies a complex writing process of reflexive iterations of responsibility to sources and subject. Such a process requires ethical sensitivity to the concept of 'truth' as an amalgam of subjectivities and attention to 'authenticity' as a complex and accurate encapsulation of that truth. Creativity demands ongoing highly conscious self-knowledge to develop and strengthen both practice and product. This essay explores the point of view and experience of an artist-practitioner working with traumatic subject matter. Drawing on theory from theatre studies and trauma studies and discussing the process and centrality of ethics in relation to creative methodology, the essay reflects on the personal impact of the making of fraught work, and the uncovering, sharing and responsible transformation of fraught stories for a wider audience. It offers an outline of this experience that is relevant for other, similar artist-practitioners and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

There has been no systematic study of Samuel Beckett's and his estate's use of copyright powers over his stage plays. Yet their copyright interventions are more than just historical or biographical details; they, and theater-makers' responses to them, constitute an integral part of the plays themselves as they exist in the public sphere. If we attend to the copyright scuffles in the right way, we will enrich our understanding of the texts. Keywords: Samuel Beckett / copyright / law / public sphere / theater, 'The pace of scripted language is slow,' one reviewer wrote about a Melbourne production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame in 2015 (Badham). '[The] stage world is distant, and stage actions repetitive [...]

During the workshopping of Foreskin's Lament at the inaugural National New Zealand Playwrights Workshop in 1980, actor Donna Akersten made a decisive dramaturgical intervention that influenced the published form of [...]

Novelist, playwright, columnist, and short story author Per Olov Enquist, one of the major and most important living Swedish authors, has written about or used German sources since his earliest [...]

The Norwegian master Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is and will remain the most important modern playwright--which is not to say there are no flaws in his work. Of all artists, playwrights [...]

As poets, dramatists, and life writers, Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) have already been much rehabilitated into the late-nineteenth-century canon, with conferences, critical essays, collected editions, and monographs [...]

In 1939, the radio-dramatist Norman Corwin broadcast two poems by Sterling Brown on a special episode of CBS's Words Without Music dedicated to 'Negro poetry.' The circumstances of Corwin's radio adaptation reveal a specific dimension of Brown's achievement as a poet of black, dialect that is difficult to apprehend on the printed page: the poetry's own constitutive relation to the media-ecological conditions of its making. Brown's poems can be said to resist the exclusionary terms of midcentury network broadcasting precisely insofar as they bear the latent traces of prior encounters with mass media. Formulated with regard to Brown and Corwin, the concept of latent remediation offers a means ofgrasping how a technologizedsoundscape can materially transform the formal protocols even of poems never destined for the airwaves. Keywords: Sterling Brown / radio / poetry / dialect / media, At 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, January 15, 1939, radio listeners tuning in to their local CBS affiliates enjoyed the seventh installment of Norman Corwin's Words Without Music, a new sustaining [...]

Irene Morra. Verse Drama in England, 1900-2015: Art, Modernity and the National Stage. Series editors Patrick Lonergan and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Critical Companions Series. London, Bloomsbury, 2016. 304 pages. [...]

The preservation and promotion, the propagation and rehearsal of the value of one's ancestors is the surest way to a full and productive life August Wilson (1) August Wilson considered [...]

In 1911, Susan Glaspell was 'disentangling herself' from her native Iowa and preparing to move to New York City, where her fellow Davenporter and future husband George Cram Cook would [...]

The great English actor, David Garrick, grandson of French Huguenot refugees, resurrected Shakespeare's works and assured his immortality by organizing the first Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, describing the playwright as [...]

Edward de Yere, 17th Earl of Oxford, died on June 24, 1604. To our knowledge, there was neither public recognition of his death nor notice made in personal letters or [...]

Few early modern English dramatists have been as critically maligned as William Percy (1570-1648). His six extant plays have received only infrequent attention, and even when scholars have analyzed his [...]

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]

Hong Kong, a borrowed place where her stories are always narrated by others. Theatre, a mediated platform where theatre makers look for ways to voice out their concerns and at the same time, audiences who expect to hear resonance of their lives and times. Theatre makers should never forget that the mission of live drama is to unfold realities through creative expression, images and ideas. This task is a never-ending mission for playwrights in Hong Kong. This article provides an overview of Hong Kong’s contemporary theatre life through two basic perspectives: the work of young playwrights and the impact of venue policy on the present development of local performing arts.