The acknowledged origins of Asian-American drama date to the 1890s and the controversial symbolist plays of Sadakichi Hartmann, including Christ: A Dramatic Poem in Three Acts (privately printed, 1893), Buddha: A Drama in Twelve Scenes (written, 1891–95; privately printed, 1897),… Read More ›
Gao Xingjian’s plays are characterized by originality, in no way diminished by the fact that he has been influenced both by modern Western and traditional Chinese currents. His greatness as a dramatist lies in the manner in which he has… Read More ›
The Berger family are on the verge of the middle class and as such are especially vulnerable. To deny the reality of the American dream is ostensibly to condemn themselves to permanent deprivation. The constant image is one of flight,… Read More ›
His plays are concerned with expressing his own feeling of helplessness and solitude when confronted with the despair and loneliness of man caught in the hall of mirrors of the human condition, inexorably trapped by an endless progression of images… Read More ›
Nothing happens in Endgame and that nothing is what matters. The author’s feeling about nothing also matters, not because it is true or right but because it is a strongly formed attitude, a felt and expressed viewpoint. . . …. Read More ›
Farce is tragedy played at about a hundred and twenty revolutions a minute. The story of Othello and the plot of Feydeau’s Puce à l’Oreille have a striking similarity. Desdemona’s lost handkerchief and Victor Emmanuel Chandebise’s missing braces both give… Read More ›
The Lower Depths . . . is a remarkable play for a relatively inexperienced dramatist. It entertained but confronted, challenged and divided the auditorium. The Moscow Arts Theatre and arguably Russian theater were never to be the same again. —Cynthia… Read More ›
It has been suggested that in The Hostage Brendan Behan is trying to “open up the stage.” This is an understatement. He would like to hack the stage to bits, crunch the proscenium across his knee, trample the scenery underfoot,… Read More ›
Like steam, life can be compressed into a narrow little container, but, also like steam, it will endure pressure only to a certain point. And in Three Sisters, this pressure is brought to the limit, beyond which it will explode—and… Read More ›
Lorca said once that the only hope for happiness lies in “living one’s instinctual life to the full.” Blood Wedding can be understood as a gloss on that belief. In it the poet succeeded in creating a medium that allowed… Read More ›
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is in many important respects a “first.” In addition to being the first of Albee’s full-length plays, it is also the first juxtaposition and integration of realism and abstract symbolism in what will remain the… Read More ›
The great vice of English drama from Kyd to Galsworthy has been its aim of realism was unlimited. In one play, Everyman, and perhaps in that one play only, we have a drama within the limitations of art. . …. Read More ›
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is, perhaps, to this time, the most mature example of a myth of Contemporary life. The chief value of this drama is its attempt to reveal those ultimate meanings which are resident in modern… Read More ›
The Lysistrata has behind it much suffering and a burning pity. Aristophanes had more than once risked his civic rights and even his life in his battle for peace, and is now making his last appeal. It is owing to… Read More ›
Whenever evoked in a modern or a postmodern cultural context, even outside France, Tartuffe still carries with it a considerable amount of polemical baggage. It may be argued that it delves far closer to the level of persistent cultural preoccupation… Read More ›
Within this single drama—in great part, a harsh critique of Athenian society and the Greek city-state in general—Sophocles tells of the eternal struggle between the state and the individual, human and natural law, and the enormous gulf between what we… Read More ›
In one key scene Dionysus asks the question which has perplexed theorists of tragedy: “would you really like to see what gives you pain?” Dionysus, ironic questioner and stage-manager of the action, is a double of the poet himself. The… Read More ›
Whether one reads A Doll’s House as a technical revolution in modern theater, the modern tragedy, the first feminist play since the Greeks, a Hegelian allegory of the spirit’s historical evolution, or a Kierkegaardian leap from aesthetic into ethical life,… Read More ›
Medea, with its conflict between the boundless egoism of the husband and the boundless passion of the wife, was a completely up-to-date play. Accordingly, the disputes, the abuse, and the logic used by all its characters are essentially bourgeois. Jason… Read More ›
[The Oresteia is a] trilogy whose special greatness lies in the fact that it transcends the limitations of dramatic enactment on a scale never achieved before or since. —Richard Lattimore, “Introduction to the Oresteia” in The Complete Greek Tragedies Called… Read More ›
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