Modern(ist) Drama: Essays in Criticism is a casebook of ideas and arguments about Western modern as well as avant-garde drama. In this volume, the author gathers together a uniquely wide- ranging selection of original essays whose subjects span the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century and reach forward into the twenty-first. He thereby provides access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating playwriting (and performance) the modernists had to offer, in addition to supplying guidelines to understanding current drama's most adventurous developments.
Treated in this volume, in chronological order by date of their work, are such modern dramatists as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, J.M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Brendan Behan, David Hare, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet; and such seminal avant-gardists as Alfred Jarry, Georg Kaiser, Fernand Crommelynck, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, Carlo Terron, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Joe Orton. The work of these men, and one woman, illuminates the modern tradition together with the astonishing daring of avant-garde dramatists in wrenching drama out of its old habits (including 'modern' ones) and creating a new, distinctive, and free-standing artistic Yocabulary.
R.J. Cardullo has taught for over four decades at the University of Michigan, Colgate, Wesleyan, and NYU, as well as outside the United States in Turkey, Kurdistan, and Finland. His essays have appeared in such journals as the Yale Review, Modern Drama, New Republic, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and Cambridge Quarterly. He is the author, editor, or translator of a number of books, among them A Critical Edition of Two Modern Plays on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, German-Language Comedy; Lost Masterpieces of Euro- American Drama; and What Is Dramaturgy?
Take, for example, Tennessee Williams' misguided homage expressionism in his production notes to the otherwise romantically realistic Glass Menagerie (1944). Or consider the frequently misunderstood and overborrowed alienation effect' of Bertolt Brecht (really a defamiliarizing or distancing device, which is not the same as an exclusively anti-illusionistic one). Brecht was primarily a social realist whose real objection to the theatre of realism and naturalism was its psychologization of human character, not its rendering of surface reality. Indeed, Brecht wrote his two greatest Schaustücke 'show' or 'spectacle' plays-Life of Galileo (1939) and Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), in an effort to bridge, and not to widen, the gap between the often numbing prosaism of the modern social-problem play and the sometimes indulgent ethereality of avant-garde drama. Using expressionistic techniques, this politically revolutionary playwright created, one could say, an anti-expressionistic drama that evolved into mock-epic theatre or faux-historical chronicle-with the cool, detached style, direct presentation of character, and episodic plotting that we have also come to recognize in related forms of narrative cinema.
It is time, in fact late, to bring genuine dramatic expressionism and the major innovative tradition of twentieth-century theatre, into central focus in a single historical volume. Such a volume would illuminate not just a single national tradition or movement, nor even one style or posture that cuts across national boundaries (such as 'Absurd' or 'Protest'), but instead the astonishing variety and daring of the writers in all Western countries and theatrical movements who since before the turn of the twentieth century have wrenched dramatic art out of every one of its habits, including its more fundamental ones. Represented should be such movements as French and Russian symbolism, Italian and Russian futurism, German and American expressionism, and Dada-surrealism, as well as seminal figures like Jarry, Strindberg, and Artaud along with a Gesamtkünstler such as Kandinsky.
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