Recently added articles from The Journal of American Drama and Theatre:
ECO-EPIC THEATRE: MATERIALITY, ECOLOGY, AND THE MAINSTREAM
Jan 01, 2009; ... [Nature as] metaphor is so integral a feature of the aesthetic of modern realist-humanist drama, that, paradoxically, its implications for a possible ecological theatre are easy to miss. It's very ubiquity renders it invisible.1 The artist who is a realist . . . exposes all the veils and ...
REMEMBERING AND REVENGING THE DEATH OF CHRIST: ADRIENNE KENNEDY'S MOTHERHOOD 2000 AND THE YORK CRUCIFIXION
Jan 01, 2009; ... In Adrienne Kennedy's Motherhood 2000, first performed as a staged reading at the McCarter Theatre's Winter's Tales festival in Princeton, New Jersey in 1994, the central character Mother /Writer recounts and, at the end of the play, re-enacts for the authence her execution of a policeman she ...
HOORAY FOR WHAT!: A GLIMPSE INTO THE GOLDEN AGE OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT
Oct 01, 2008; ... In one office, the agent came sidling out from behind his desk with a silly smirk on his face. He took my hand and hinted that if I would be "nice" to him, he could make contacts in Hollywood that would open doors for me. All the agents had rather creepy hands making me cringe and pull away. I ...
FROM FIRST NIGHTER TO ESSAYIST : THE (DIS)ESTABLISHMENT OF/AND DRAMA CRITIC JOHN MASON BROWN
Oct 01, 2008; ... Comment parler d'une "communication des archives" sans traiter d'abord de l'archive des "moyens de la communication"?1 - Jacques Derrida Archives "contain" nothing. Indeed, if one learns nothing else from searching through the files, documents, correspondence, and accumulated "papers" ...
TAKE A GIANT STEP INTO (AFRICAN) AMERICAN THEATRE HISTORY: BROADWAY'S FIRST "UNIVERSAL" DRAMA
Oct 01, 2008; ... Take a Giant Step is a landmark in theatre. ... It is a play about Americans. Most of the growing pains that make the life of the chief character so touching and entertaining are common to Americans as a whole. . . . Not that being a Negro in a white community is not a vital factor in the life ...
WILLIAM THOMPSON PRICE, THE USES OF SCIENCE, AND THE RHETORIC OF EARLY MODERN AMERICAN DRAMATURGY
Oct 01, 2008; ... When William Thompson Price's body was interred in the Frankfort cemetery in Kentucky in 1921, the eminent New York producer Harrison Grey Fiske wrote that 'The contributions of William T. Price to the American drama exceed in value those of any man thus far identified with its history" and that ...
SINGING HER OWN SONG: WRITING THE FEMALE PRESS AGENT BACK INTO HISTORY
Apr 01, 2008; ... In 1902, the Grand Rapids Herald offered compelling evidence of women's incursions into the field of press agency:1 Only a few years ago a woman "advance man" was a being unknown, unhonored, and unsung, but now she is coming right along singing her own song, or the song of her "star," ...
MAKING IT REAL? THEATRE IN TIMES OF VIRTUAL WARFARE1
Apr 01, 2008; ... Compared to fiction or film, theatre tends to react fairly swiftly to contemporary geopolitical crises such as the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq,2 for instance, by alluding to them in the mise-en-scène of a production or by promptly reviving classic war dramas such as The Persians, ...
EGGHEADS AND WITCHES: MOLLY KAZAN BOILS THE LEFT
Apr 01, 2008; ... Molly Day Thacher Kazan died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage three weeks after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and her funeral, like many other events that cold winter, was obscured by a nation in mourning. Those attending, however, had to be content with standing room only among a roster ...
(RE)CONSTRUCTING COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY: HARLEM EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE AND SOCIAL PROTEST
Apr 01, 2008; ... This Hole is our inheritance of sorts. Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play Absence, invisibility, a hole: these obstacles challenge an understanding of African American theatre history of the early twentieth century.1 Though the records of production at noncommercial black ...
A NATION IN NEED: REVELATIONS AND DISASTER RELIEF IN THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT
Apr 01, 2008; ... The movement of flood waters is an example of the blind legality-one might almost say constitutionality-of Nature. There is no appeal from it, and no amending process.1 R. L. Duffus In January of 1937, the upper Midwest experienced one of the most costly disasters in its history ....
INTRODUCTION
Apr 01, 2008; ... It is a great pleasure to introduce this exciting collection of essays written and edited by members of the American Theatre and Drama Society. ATDS has enjoyed a long and productive relationship with The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and we are excited to see that collaboration enter ...
"IT SOUNDS TOO MUCH LIKE COMRADE": THE PRESERVATION OF AMERICAN IDEALS IN ROOM SERVICE
Apr 01, 2008; ... Today the names Alien Boretz and John Murray are no longer widely recognized. Seventy years ago, however, they were the celebrated co-authors of the most successful Broadway script ever produced.1 That script-a farce entitled Room Service-remains a staple of the American theatre even now.2 Yet, ...
AFTER THE EMPEROR: INTERRACIAL COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN PROVINCETOWN ALUMNI AND BLACK THEATRE ARTISTS C.1924-1946
Jan 01, 2008; ... The Provincetown Players' production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, starring Charles Gilpin, was a cause célèbre at the time (1920) and has since become a landmark in American theatre history. Although O'Neill had been writing plays with black characters since 1916, and in 1919 the ...
(WELL, AT LEAST) LAZARUS LAUGHED-O'NEILL, RELIGIOUS DRAMA, AND STAGEABILITY
Jan 01, 2008; ... Lazarus Laughed was destined not to become the smash Broadway hit of the late 1920s. When Eugene O'Neill completed the play, the Shuberts did not come banging on his door to produce a play that called for at least 150 performers, eleven different choruses (all with hundreds of elaborate symbolic ...
I REMEMBER MAMA: LA MAMA'S PAST AND PRESENT IN THE 2006 THE TOOTH OF CRIME REVIVAL
Jan 01, 2008; ... "It is both gratifying and a little frightening when a play you had consigned to the crypt returns as a living prophecy of our times," confessed New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley of La Mama E.T.C.'s 2006 revival of its 1983 hit production The Tooth of Crime.1 Labeled "A Play with Music ...
THE SHINE OF EGALITARIAN MORALITY: STAGING A CONNECTIVE AESTHETIC IN ROBERT SHERWOOD'S ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS1
Jan 01, 2008; ... The Lincoln Legend of United States dramatic literature and live performance during Franklin D. Roosevelt's second presidential term is seldom analyzed in terms of its potential to affect widespread social change during the latter years of the Great Depression. Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938) is ...
WHAT IS IT?: THE FRONTIER, MELODRAMA, AND BOUCICAULT'S AMALGAMATED DRAMA
Oct 01, 2007; ... Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana, a racial melodrama about a tragic mulatta named Zoe and her doomed interracial relationship with the young white gallant, George Peyton, opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City on 6 December 1859, four nights after John Brown ...
THE INDUSTRY OF SPECTACLE ENTERTAINMENT: IMRE KIRALFY'S GRAND DRAMATIC HISTORICAL PRODUCTIONS OF THE FALL OF BABYLON AND NERO, OR THE DESTRUCTION OF ROME IN STATEN ISLAND
Oct 01, 2007; ... One of the most enduring and pervasive idioms that emerged in nineteenth-century post-bellum American culture was spectacle performance. The exuberant scale of these illusionary shows is greatly indebted to the tradition of nineteenth-century grand spectacle drama, circus "specs," and public ...
BEYOND THE CARICATURE: HARRIGAN, HART, AND BRAHAM'S MUSIC AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF NEW YORK IRISH IDENTITY
Oct 01, 2007; ... On 1 December 1882, Freund's Daily Music and Drama inserted a short paragraph in its general news section commenting on Irish-Americans and the theatre. It reported that "the Irish are a curious people from a theatrical point of view. Misrepresent any other nationality upon the stage and there ...