Search

In adapting the nineteenth-century melodrama The Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins both satirizes Boucicault’s racial assumptions and emulates his aesthetic principles to produce a meta-melodrama, a play that at once celebrates and critiques its own form while providing a stinging indictment of racial attitudes in the twenty-first century. This essay draws on both the published script and audience responses to Soho Repertory Theatre’s two stagings of the play in 2014 and 2015 gleaned from reviews, blogs, and interviews. The contemporary context and cross-racial casting of An Octoroon ironize and adapt the meaning of Boucicault’s play, making it appropriate for the twenty-first century. Through his use of italicization, Brechtian quotation, the new contemporary dialogue he writes for the slave characters, and his shocking updated sensation scene, Jacobs-Jenkins induces his audience to question their own and each other’s racial reactions even as they are caught up in the play.

Mary Luckhurst. Caryl Churchill. Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. xiv + 208. $39.95. Caryl Churchill has been writing plays for half a century, during which time she has constantly experimented with dramatic form. Equally, as Mary Luckhurst amply demonstrates in Caryl Churchill, her plays have always responded to new social, political, and cultural challenges, especially as they affect women and those who have been marginalized or oppressed. Luckhurst's division of her book into chapters that focus on Churchill's work decade by decade and her focus on one play in production for each decade illuminate both Churchill's changing style and the enormous range and versatility of her work. She never writes the same play twice. In part 1, "Contexts," Luckhurst provides an overview of Churchill's plays in relation to her life, her thought, and the critical and historical contexts in which her work has been received. She notes the well-known influence on Churchill of Brecht and of second wave feminism but concludes that while "Churchill's significance to the development of feminist political theatre is unmatched," her work is also informed by "science, ethics, war, terror, climate change and masculinity" (24). Of particular interest is Luckhurst's discussion of an essay Churchill wrote in 1960, when she was only twenty-two: "Not Ordinary, Not Safe: A Direction for Drama?" In this essay Churchill attacks the new wave of Royal Court realistic drama by male dramatists such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Arnold Wesker and calls instead, in Luckhurst's words, "for a utopian quest to explore socialist agendas in ways that provoke change" (12), using "experimental" forms and language, such as "juxtapositions of song, prose and poetry, a spectrum of emotional moods and the cumulative effects of powerful stage pictures" (13). Luckhurst demonstrates that throughout her career Churchill has followed her own agenda. In part 2 Luckhurst begins by reviewing Churchills early work, mostly radio plays, of the 1960s, and also her six little-known plays for television written between 1972 and 1981. Typical of the political topicality of these plays is The Legion Hall Bombing (1979), a documentary drama about a boy accused without evidence of planting a bomb in Northern Ireland. Churchill took her name off the credits after the BBC censored some of its content. Luckhurst's discussion of Churchills stage plays of the 1970s begins with a helpful account of The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution (1972, finally produced in 2013), based on the writings of Algerian psychiatrist and political activist Frantz Fanon, whose "complex self-knowledge" Churchill admired; the play dramatizes "the colonised victim's dilemma of complicity" (50). Analyses of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and Vinegar Tom (1976) follow. Luckhurst is very good at providing succinctly historical information that is essential to our understanding of Churchill's carefully researched plays: for example, concerning the English Civil War and the various religious and political movements that inform Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Given Luckhurst's care in providing such instructive background material, it is unfortunate that in her discussion of Vinegar Tom she focuses on Churchill's reliance on Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's polemical and essentialist Witches, Midwives and Nurses, which ties the play to 1970s feminism, and omits to mention at all Churchill's use of Alan Macfarlane's Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, which underpins the play's still-relevant socialist understanding of the economic dynamics at work among different kinds and conditions of individual women. Luckhurst does offer a critique of her chosen "key" production for the decade, Cloud Nine (1979), suggesting that from the perspective of more recent views about gender, it may have become "a history play" as the "relation between biology, gender identity and sexual orientation is no longer assumed to be straightforward" (80). …

At the end of Chekhov's The Three Sisters Olga says, "In time we shall pass on for ever and be forgotten. Our faces will be forgotten and our voices and how many of us there were." (1) This has not happened. So powerful are the shades of Olga, Masha, and Irina that, whatever their later names may be, theater audiences will always remember that there were three of them. In Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart (1979) their names are Lenny, Meg, and Babe; in Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig (1992) they are Sara, Gorgeous, and Pfeni; while in Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Break of Day (1995), April, Tess, and Nina are erstwhile sisters in feminism and longtime friends. In Yorkshire playwright Blake Morrison's We Are Three Sisters (2011), more curiously, they are Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte. (2) Henley's, Wasserstein's, and Wertenbaker's plays transpose Chekhov's characters and some of the motifs and themes associated with them to new times and places while ignoring the original dramatic situation and most of the Chekhovian dialogue. Morrison's play, by contrast, despite depicting historical individuals who are well known in their own right, parallels Chekhov's in considerable detail. Except for one brief additional act, Morrison uses the structure, character types, and themes of Chekhov's play as well as numerous echoes of its dialogue and stage action to write a biographical drama about the Brontes. The bulk of this essay will draw on contemporary theories of adaptation to explain why three important women dramatists have chosen to rewrite The Three Sisters and what we might learn about their plays--as well as Chekhov's--from a comparative study of the ways in which they respond to and exploit Chekhovian characters and themes. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier argue that adaptation is not only a creative act but also "features a specific and explicit form of criticism." (3) Crimes of the Heart, The Sisters Rosensweig, and The Break of Day variously illuminate some of the ways in which adaptation operates creatively in producing new works and critically in offering new insights into the adapted work. Morrison's We Are Three Sisters is a different case. As a double adaptation--of the historical lives of the Brontes and of Chekhov's play--We Are Three Sisters provides an intriguing opportunity to enter from a new perspective and refine the current conversation about adaptation and adaptation theory. As a revision Morrison's play offers an especially interesting take on its source because Morrison was not rewriting The Three Sisters in contemporary terms, as Henley, Wasserstein, and Wertenbaker did, so much as using Chekhov's play to write one about the Brontes. The result--a consequence unaccounted for in current adaptation theory--is that any insights that Morrison's play offers into Chekhov's are incidental and the more intriguing because apparently undesigned. In A Theory of Adaptation (2006) Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as "an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art." (4) All four dramatists have acknowledged their debt to Chekhov, but revisit The Three Sisters more or less extensively, in different ways, and for different purposes. The Break of Day talks back to Chekhov's play; Crimes of the Heart refracts it in a new social environment; We Are Three Sisters cannibalizes it. The Sisters Rosensweig makes the least sustained use of it and is more simply allusive. Pfeni, for example, quotes Irina's "I've forgotten the Italian for window" and "If I could only get to Moscow!" (5) The terms used to describe kinds and degrees of adaptation have proliferated over the last few years: appropriation, revision, version, offshoot, and so on. (6) "Appropriation," which Julie Sanders distinguishes from "adaptation" as moving more emphatically "into a wholly new cultural product and domain," perhaps best defines the relationship between Henley's, Wasserstein's, Wertenbaker's, and Morrison's plays and Chekhov's, though I also like the term "revision" because, as Sharon Friedman notes, it emphasizes the process of reinterpretation on the parts of both the dramatist and the receiving audience. …

Tragicomedy is an exceedingly slippery genre that can incorporate the tragic and the comic, the melodramatic and the farcical, the romantic and the satiric in a variety of combinations. It can boast antecedents in Euripidean, Terentian, and medieval drama and cognates in sentimental comedy, the drame (serious drama that is neither tragic nor comic), melodrama, savage farce, and so on. But the dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable and theoretically significant new genre, tragicomedy, has developed only twice in the history of drama. Controversial in the Renaissance, tragicomedy has in modem times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic kinds.

Comment Shakespeare permet en fait a son public d'anticiper la resurection d'Hermione du moins emotionnellement par une subtile dramaturgie tragi-comique.