Staging the impossible : the fantastic mode in modern drama
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Staging the impossible : the fantastic mode in modern drama
（Contributions to the study of science fiction and fantasy, no. 54）
Greenwood Press, 1992
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [221]-236) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Staging the Impossible explores the most recent critical thinking on the relationship between the literary mode of the fantastic and the literary genre of drama with respect to modern theatre. While a few monographs treat a particular dimension of the fantastic in drama, the Gothic or the fairy tale for instance, no other volume provides a critically sophisticated introduction to the diversity of fantastic drama written and performed in this century. The essays here lay to rest the illusion that realism is the only genuine form of theatrical expression and the notion that cinema special effects have rendered science fiction and the stage incompatible. Competing with the realism of the first half of the twentieth century and the new realism of the second half have been a range of successful theatrical repertoire, including the absurd, the horrific, the supernatural, the mythic, the dream-vision quest, the postmodern, the hyper-realistic, and the science fictional.
Wide ranging in time and space, this volume comprises fourteen essays on the fantastic on the modern stage, assessing dramatic works from the United States, Ireland, England, Western Europe, and the Caribbean. Canonical figures, such as Strindberg, Yeats, Beckett, Ionesco, Cocteau, and Stoppard are studied, along with neglected figures, such as Wassily Kandinsky, better known as an expressionist painter, and Halper Leivick, author of the Yiddish play The Golem, and innovative new performance troupes and individual artists, such as Squat Theatre and Spalding Gray. Concluding essays are devoted to contemporary experimental theatre and postmodern drama. A study of science fiction on stage includes an annotated listing of forty English-language plays. Concerned with the interstice of theatre and the fantastic, this work will be valuable to students and scholars of both, of genre studies, and of contemporary literature in general.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Patrick D. Murphy When Formula Seizes Form: Oscar Wilde's Comedies by Susan Taylor Jacobs A Task Most Difficult: Staging Yeats's Mystical Dramas at the Abbey by Frederick S. Lapisardi The Perilous Edge: Strindberg, Madness and Other Worlds by Peter Malekin Wassily Kandinsky's Stage Composition Yellow Sound: Elements of the Fantastic as Examples of the Symbolic Mode of Communication by Kent W. Hooper Ionesco and l'insolite by Elizabeth C. and Ian M. Hesson Ambiguity and the Supernatural in Cocteau's La Machine Infernale by Ralph Yarrow Beckett and the Horrific by Lance Olsen Multiplicities of Illusion in Tom Stoppard's Plays by Peter N. Chetta Leivick's The Golem and the Golem Legend by Carl Schaffer Dream on Monkey Mountain: Fantasy as Self-Perception by Robert J. Willis Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia: A Performance Gesture by Jessica Prinz The Shock of the Actual: Disrupting the Theatrical Illusion by Theodore Shank Playing at the End of the World: Postmodern Theatre by Veronica Hollinger "Infinity in a Cigar Box": The Problem of Science Fiction on the Stage by Joseph Krupnik Bibliography Index
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