Writing and the modern stage : theater beyond drama
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Bibliographic Information
Writing and the modern stage : theater beyond drama
Cambridge University Press, 2017
- : hardcover
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Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
It is time to change the way we talk about writing in theater. This book offers a new argument that reimagines modern theater's critical power and places innovative writing at the heart of the experimental stage. While performance studies, German Theaterwissenschaft, and even text-based drama studies have commonly envisioned theatrical performance as something that must operate beyond the limits of the textual imagination, this book shows how a series of writers have actively shaped new conceptions of theater's radical potential. Engaging with a range of theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Jarcho reveals a modern tradition of 'negative theatrics,' whose artists undermine the here and now of performance in order to challenge the value and the power of the existing world. This vision emerges through surprising new readings of modernist classics - by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett - as well as contemporary American works by Suzan-Lori Parks, Elevator Repair Service, and Mac Wellman.
Table of Contents
- Part I. Modernism's Negative Theatrics: 1. Introduction: negative theatrics
- 2. 'Something stranger yet': theatrical distractions in Henry James and Gertrude Stein
- 3. 'Gesture towards the universe': theater as utopia in Waiting for Godot
- Part II. Beyond the Present: Playwrights at the Turn of the Millennium: 4. Introduction: staging writing today
- 5. The promise of 'playwriting': Suzan-Lori Parks
- 6. 'Small, fierce creatures': Mac Wellman's auratic theater.
by "Nielsen BookData"