MODERN DRAMAPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3138/md-65-1-br7
A. Varty
{"title":"Marlis Schweitzer. Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century","authors":"A. Varty","doi":"10.3138/md-65-1-br7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-1-br7","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarly and accessible, Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles, an investigation of the nineteenth-century child actresses Clara Fisher and Jean Margaret Davenport in Britain and North America, will be of interest to researchers and students of nineteenth-century theatre, transatlantic theatre, theories of girlhood, cultural expressions of racial hierarchy, and theatre and empire.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43481602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MODERN DRAMAPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3138/md-65-1-1187
Emily B. Klein
{"title":"A New Feminist Absurd?: Women’s Protest, Fury, and Futility in Contemporary American Theatre","authors":"Emily B. Klein","doi":"10.3138/md-65-1-1187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-1-1187","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Absurdism has long been associated with existentialist white male writers like the ones Martin Esslin analysed in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which coined the term that came to define a lasting dramatic genre. More recently, however, several female playwrights have begun to reinvent this movement with an uncanny brand of feminist absurdism in their intimate domestic tragicomedies. In this essay, a close reading of Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad (2015) serves as a touchstone for analysing performances of ludic feminist futility in plays by diverse writers including Ruby Rae Spiegel, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Alice Birch, and others. In their festive moments of anti-structural and non-linear oscillation between rage and glee, these plays mark the messy implosion of an outdated feminist political project, first anticipating and later reflecting the political tensions and crises evidenced in women’s voting, activism, and protest practices since the 2016 US presidential election. Often confining their characters within domestic or interior feminized spaces like kitchens, bedrooms, hidden supermarket aisles, or girls’ locker rooms, these playwrights celebrate failure and madness in the lives and labour of their female characters. By transforming historically feminized sites into dynamic spaces of resistance as well as spectacular failure, these performances of excess, from dieting to devouring, precarity to privilege, force audiences to confront cultural blind spots and failed or incomplete work toward efficacious feminist intersectionality. Furthermore, by bridging contemporary women’s anger research with whiteness and affect studies, this essay identifies a nascent trend in US theatre with a growing international profile that engages an updated absurdist rubric within a larger feminist praxis of political revolt.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"65 1","pages":"24 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48259164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MODERN DRAMAPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3138/md-65-1-1148
D. Chansky
{"title":"Alice Brown Takes on Social Insecurity: Joint Owners in Spain","authors":"D. Chansky","doi":"10.3138/md-65-1-1148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-1-1148","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Alice Brown’s 1913 one-act play Joint Owners in Spain offers the first depiction of a person with dementia to appear on the American stage absent any belittling of its cognitively impaired character. The play features four women, is billed as a comedy, and was a favourite among little theatres of the 1910s and 1920s; it also enjoyed productions across more than seventy years. This essay explores the cultural assumptions and dramaturgical workings that made it a success in its day and then considers evolving reception strategies in order to unpack both its long-lived stage-worthiness and its importance today. While Brown is generally regarded as a New England regionalist, her work can also be read as the output of a gentle (and genteel) but firm feminist. In addition, while it is easy to read decades’ worth of revivals as an investment in the “quaint,” the generally amateur context in which these productions were mounted offers a rich site for examining the anxiety, intergenerational solidarity, and even existential dilemmas aroused by dealing with dementia in a middle-class, American context.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"65 1","pages":"73 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44294332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MODERN DRAMAPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3138/md.65.1.n
{"title":"Outstanding Article Award for 2021","authors":"","doi":"10.3138/md.65.1.n","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md.65.1.n","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44342071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MODERN DRAMAPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3138/md-65-1-1166
Warren Kluber
{"title":"Artaud’s Surgical Theatre: War, Medicine, and Regeneration","authors":"Warren Kluber","doi":"10.3138/md-65-1-1166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-1-1166","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In 1916, as the adolescent Antonin Artaud was treated for “war neurosis” in a military hospital, he witnessed the birth of modern plastic surgery. These procedures, which rearranged injured bodies in new constellations of flesh and bone, helped to inspire Artaud’s first theatrical foray. “The spectator,” he writes in 1926, “will go to the theater the way he goes to the surgeon.” I argue that literal surgical practice is crucial to Artaud’s surgical metaphors. Plastic surgery revealed to Artaud the body’s plasticity: its capacity to morph, regrow, and heal. While the physical culture movement in interwar France promoted militarized and medicalized models of the body, Artaud used surgical motifs in his plays, poems, and films to explore how physical and mental habits might be dissevered and how they might regenerate. Although Artaud ultimately considered his attempts at theatrical surgery to have failed, I conclude by looking at current applied theatre work with US military veterans, which has been shown to transform participants’ neural networks – performing, as Artaud would put it, a kind of “brain surgery.”","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":"65 1","pages":"1 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47528084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MODERN DRAMAPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3138/md-65-1-br5
Patricia A. Maley
{"title":"Michael Mckinnie. Theatre in Market Economies","authors":"Patricia A. Maley","doi":"10.3138/md-65-1-br5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-1-br5","url":null,"abstract":"Theatre in Market Economies argues convincingly that theatre is embedded in the market-driven, political culture of the contemporary United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Northern Ireland. Through careful analysis of case studies drawn from theatre and its social activity, Michael McKinnie shows theatre as a cultural entity participating actively in a mixed economy.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46365774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MODERN DRAMAPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3138/md-65-1-br3
I. R. Walsh
{"title":"Hélène Lecossois. Performance, Modernity and the Plays of J.M. Synge","authors":"I. R. Walsh","doi":"10.3138/md-65-1-br3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-1-br3","url":null,"abstract":"Building on the insights of performance studies, Performance, Modernity and the Plays of J.M. Synge offers a fresh examination of Synge’s plays, exploring them in relation to embodied cultural practices and material culture to reveal how they are at once both indicative of and resistant to the commodity culture of capitalist modernity.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48903011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MODERN DRAMAPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3138/md-65-1-br8
Wendy Arons
{"title":"Lisa Woynarski. Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change","authors":"Wendy Arons","doi":"10.3138/md-65-1-br8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md-65-1-br8","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing from a wide range of ecocritical theories, Woynarski’s Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change maps out the concept of ecodramaturgies by interrogating how intersectional ecological meanings are generated in performance.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46411752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MODERN DRAMAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.3138/md.64.4.br5
Matthew Buckley
{"title":"Rohan McWilliam. London’s West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800–1914.","authors":"Matthew Buckley","doi":"10.3138/md.64.4.br5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md.64.4.br5","url":null,"abstract":"This book offers the first history of London’s West End, the greatest pleasure district of nineteenth-century modernity, detailing the rise and development of its recreational spaces and tracing its signal impact on modern culture.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43887053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MODERN DRAMAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.3138/md.64.4.br7
Malik Gaines
{"title":"Shana Redmond. Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson.","authors":"Malik Gaines","doi":"10.3138/md.64.4.br7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/md.64.4.br7","url":null,"abstract":"Shana Redmond tracks the ways Paul Robeson’s presence has travelled via recordings and other forms of capture. The author builds on Robeson’s diverse output to construct an interdisciplinary method, enabling a formal analysis of a range of materials and underscoring the interplay between modes of representation and Black life.","PeriodicalId":43301,"journal":{"name":"MODERN DRAMA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47489692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}