Postmodern Drama

The present study addresses one of the most recently debated areas in postmodern literature and art, the revival of interest in theatricality. The researcher aims to introduce a few strategies which are used to turn the intertextual elements and the pastiche into working tools for creating theatricality. In order to do so, Thomas Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) which was later made into a movie version as well, directed by Stoppard himself, is examined. The study tries to show how theatricality can affect the performance as well as the contribution of the spectators to the dramatic text and performance. The shared experience of the pastiche made based on Hamlet by William Shakespeare, can contribute to the understanding of how theatricality can work when intertextuality is a powerful and positive force. The sample scenes chosen here are concluded to be the examples of how the illusion of having a stable identity is what not only the characters, the players or the author just assume to exist, but also what the text deliberately and constantly recreates. The playful nature of theatricality highlights the way each of these contributors willingly dupe themselves for the show to go on.

In this unique and invigorating study, chaos theory and quantum mechanics are employed as the basis for a clearer understanding of the often confusing contemporary theatre world. Examining numerous antecedents to contemporary thought on chaos and the cultural roots of the notion of chaos, links are provided to playwrights ranging from Shakespeare to Ibsen and Tom Stoppard to Sam Shepard. William Demastes investigates parallel developments across the arts and sciences: connections between the dramatic naturalism of the late nineteenth century and Newtonian thought, and theatre of the absurd and disorderly chaos theory. After centuries of isolation and increased specialisation, the author contends, it may once again be time to consider the 'arts' and 'sciences' not as two isolated enterprises but to acknowledge interrelations between them.

This article is based on the analysis of Tom Stoppard’s well-known play Indian Ink from the standpoint of New Historicism. New Historicism is a new approach to history attempting to rewrite it from different view points in order to prove that past is inaccesible and what a historian can only do is to work on incomplete knowledge. But while doing this he must be aware of the fact that a teleological, linear approach to history is definitely misleading. Therefore new historicist scholars differ from traditional historians in terms of their post structuralist and postmodern approach to history which is, for them, nothing more than texts. Tom Stoppard shows much affinity to new historicist approach towards history in literary studies and in Indian Ink he gives us the dramatic performance of why new new historicism is becoming to be a more popular literary study than the tradional approaches to history .

Parody as a type of literary creation can be seen from two perspectives: one is its formal meaning in its lexical and linguistic context, and the other is its social and/or cultural functions. When seen in the light of these two (formal and functional) contexts simultaneously, the meaning it gets becomes innumerable and serves as a deconstructive force to challenge the desire for closure. The study of a literary text from this perspective finds an interesting and limitless scope. Taking David Ives’ short play, Time Flies, as an example, we try to expound on and reveal the true potentiality of parody along with the critical reading of the play itself. In fact, our reading demonstrates the critical power of parody especially in a postmodern context. Going through many postmodern critics, we try to show that parody is the best means of representing postmodern condition, the incredulity to metanarratives in literature and/or art.

(The Edwin Mellen Press, 2011)

This volume focuses on the affinity between the early modern (or protomodern) and the postmodern. The methodology is grounded in the interpretive procedures of semiography, which recontextualizes the findings of iconological research in the new theoretical framework of the postsemiotics of the subject and the poststructuralist theories of signification and mediality.
Through the analysis of dramas, stage productions and cultural representations, my aim is to show that both the early modern and the postmodern period are characterized by an epistemological crisis which arises from the questioning of the earlier conceptual paradigms and the absence of a new, stable world model. Protomodern and postmodern plays both use comparable representational strategies to thematize the dilemmas concerning the identity of the human being and the possibilities of getting to know reality.
The epistemological uncertainties of the early modern and the postmodern give rise to a characteristic inwardness, an anatomical interest and an anatomical desire that are behind several representational techniques. It is this anatomical perspective that I scrutinize through discussing the semiography of violence, abjection and the fantastic which are characteristic of the traditions of early modern drama, tragedies in particular, and which survive mainly in the postmodern experimental theater, performance art and certain subgenres of the cinema.

This thesis uses the semiotic perspective to deal with cruelty in Sarah Kane’s drama. Stage drama needs specific dramaturgy; it is different from other types of drama in that it is written to be performed and not to be merely read. Thus, it would usually include items that help to transform it from text into a live performance. In the semiotic analysis, these items are termed sign systems. The task of semiotic analysis is to break down the dramatic piece into its components of sign systems and analyze each of them in relation to the others. Semiotic analysis is not concerned merely with how many components are there or what they might be, rather it is concerned with how the general meaning is created and what each sign system signifies. Sarah Kane is a post-modern dramatist; she belongs to a dramatic movement known as in-yer-face that had appeared in the 1990s. Sarah Kane's drama is distinguished by its richness of multiple sign systems and their significant presence in all of her work. She uses drama to send strong messages about society and human nature and she does so by her heavy reliance on cruelty, physical or psychological. Thus, the researcher attempts to define how sign systems were used by Sarah Kane to present cruelty and to what ends.

Totally different from the traditional forms, In-yer- face theatre is mostly referred as a new breath in the provocative drama, in which the audience is made to go through the shocking experience of the mix of sex, violence and street poetry on the stage. Being more than a collection of experimental and provocative shock-tactics, this collection of plays is the consistent critique of modern life and the problems of their time; therefore, the plays unavoidably question the problems of violence, masculinity, post-feminism and consumerism. As the in-yer- face sensibility, which has boomed in the 90s, was being collectively shaped through the challenging and outstanding forms in the British theatre since the 50s, the same provocative and confrontational sensibility was also being gradually shaped from the other-side of the ocean, within the New World by the American playwrights with their unique treatment of the ‘extremities’ with the extreme language on the stage. Thus, this paper attempts to analyse and scrutinize the very in-yer- face sensibility within the American context through Amir Baraka’s Toilet (1964) and Holly Hughes’s Dress Suits to Hire (1987) by discovering how the concepts of sex, violence, homosexuality and blatant language have constructed the new inner voice as the extremity of provocative and confrontational theatre.  Keywords: In-yer-face Theatre, sex, violence, homosexuality, masculinity.

Stoppardian Drama: The approach towards a text through a postmodernist and counter-postmodernist consciousness brings into mind new methods and theories of criticism like New Historicism. This study, however, is not merely committed to an analysis of the postmodernist aspects of (Czech-born British playwright) Tom Stoppard?s drama with a New Historicist stance; rather it aims to exploit or make use of the New Historicist hints to understand what Stoppard strives to do while writing his plays, because there are striking parallelisms between Stoppard?s technique of creating his plays and the New Historicist critics? method of analysing history and literary texts. In a way Stoppard plays the role of a new historicist while writing his brilliant comedies of ideas. This book, thus, aims to show the parallelism between the New Historicist approach and Stoppard?s playwriting by a close reading of Travesties, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Arcadia. The three plays that have been studied in this book are most likely to serve as reflections of the new historicist practice within a fictional framework and prove the very claim that Stoppard is a new historicist playwright.

Sam Shepard’s Seduced (1978), an extravagant and obscure dramatic piece generally neglected by scholars and theatre practitioners, is a work containing a compelling meta-imaginative discourse and meditation on the influence of images and spectacle in the realm of everyday consciousness. This article explores its main character’s imposition of subjective vision in a solipsistic world, as well as the influence of cinematic images in his intellectual framework of understanding and creating a world picture. Building on feminist critique of film spectatorship, it identifies also, within the spectatorial possession of the world the protagonist pursues, the imposition of a male gaze and assesses its embodiment on the stage.

This is an updated version of a paper I first presented at the International Arthur Miller Centennial Conference at the Universidad de Extremadura Cáceres, Spain on November 19, 2015. In this paper, I present an alternative reading of two late Arthur Miller plays, Some Kind of Love Story and Clara. Both concern detective who are not, I contend, real detectives, and so are similar to Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, released the same year that Clara was first staged. I argue that this similarity can, and should, prompt a re-evaluation of Miller's later work , specifically in relation to postmodernism. I also go back to Miller's earlier play from the late-1970s, The Archbishop's Ceiling, and, using Andrew Sofer's "From Technology to Trope: The Archbishop's Ceiling and Arthur Miller's Prismatic Drama" as a key text, argue that we can see the development of a postmodernist viewpoint in Miller's theatre from there

The master’s thesis “Mythopoetics in the early plays of Jordan Plevneš” comprises interpretations of the plays of the Macedonian writer Jordan Plevneš, which point out to the mytopoetics system formed in his early creative phase.

In the first part, the pre-apocalyptic predictions in the drama world of Plevneš are presented, as well as his dramaturgical efforts for politically engaged theatre and his poetics in the Balkan theatrical context.

The second part observes the five early plays of Jordan Plevneš: “Erigon”, “Mazedonische Zustände”, “Yu-Antithesis”, “R” and “Free Hunt”, with all of their mythopoetical elements and features. In the analysis of the dramatic pieces, special emphasis is given to the mythopoetic recognition of: the pathos, the double and the shadow, the animalism and the grotesque, the mirror principle, the Hamletian acting, the poetics of dream, the metaphors of birth /death and the symbolism of birds.

The third part consists of insights through which Plevneš’s dramatics, as a continuation of the European postmodernism, enables dialectical modelling of a new, our mythopoetic sphere.

Considering the timeless significance of the dramatic pieces of Jordan Plevneš with open opportunities for staged performances, we hope that this thesis is an appropriate contribution to the study of phenomenology of the new Macedonian dramatic literature.

Chaos and Chaotic Systems may sound to be the main areas of interest of the disciplines like mathematics and physics, however, Chaos Theory stands for the matrix of Postmodern theory and art as well. Chaos Theory illustrates the very essence of almost all plays of Tom Stoppard because the main question he has been dealing with is: “Is there a system behind the absurdity of existence?” This theory attracts Stoppard mostly because it asks the same question. Stoppard, as an artist deals with human being and meaning of its existence. In Arcadia, he tackles this subject matter relating it to concepts like bifurcation, entropy and second law of thermodynamics. He moulds these scientific concepts with the idea of history, love and the irreversibility of time in two distinct time periods. Some of the scenes take place in 1800s, whereas others in 1990s. Stoppard, in a way, wants to demonstrate that however much physics and literature sound remote, they still deal with the same problems and concerns related to existence.

The black literature as one of the most dominant literary movements, genres, and features of Modern American literature worth the better and deeper study. Since the black literature, here especially American Black Drama, based on the social and racial concepts which show a kind of protesting and fighting with oppressions and discrimination which are dominant in the modern American society and according to the Marxist view and Blacks' ideal utopia that they wish in their writing, making and building this kind of ideal and utopian society needs facing with different challenges. Baraka's Dutchman tries to portray, symbolically and allegorically, the bitter reality which is in the American society. The writer of this paper tries to present a new analysis according to the African-American writers' prevailing and leading views which has been blended with Marxist literary criticism for any kind of objection and protection against the whites' social norms which are based on sexual(gender), racial and social discrimination.

This article draws upon the recent work of Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič to explore the relationship between theatrical comedy and the sublime. These Slovenian theorists’ Lacan-inspired approach encourages us to complicate traditional conceptions of comedy, which often tend to regard the comic as contrasting with sublimity and transcendence, emphasizing our finitude and physical-material limitations. If comedy often invites us to accept (and indeed to celebrate) the fact that we are “only human,” a close examination of Tony Kushner’s The Illusion (a free adaptation of Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique) will accentuate a contrary thrust in comedy, stressing the latter’s  insistence on problematizing the finite. If much comedy delights in human flaws, celebrating those endearing foibles correlative to our finitude, I argue that the true object of Kushner’s comedy is the “flaw” afflicting finitude itself. Central to my exploration of The Illusion is the question of how theatrical experience can address and respond to this paradoxical “failed finitude” which Žižek and Zupančič identify at the heart of the human subject. I argue that the play ultimately stages a “traversal of the fantasy” which, in its very comedy, gestures toward new modes of configuring our relation to the sublime and confronting what Lacan calls the Real.

In this paper, I argue that Miller's 1991 play, The Ride Down Mount Morgan, is best understood as a postmodernist work, for multiple reasons. Miller's use of ambiguity, especially with regards to memory, clearly shows that his believe in any firm reality underpinning existence had begun to dissipate by the 1990s. We also see that there is no longer as strong a moral core to his characters, and so condemnation and approval are no longer as readily available as they were in All My Sons and The Crucible, for example. There are also noted uses of the postmodernist double, discussed using Gordon Slethaug's work, ironic intertextuality, and the blending of high and low art forms. I use numerous critics and theorists, most importantly Linda Hutcheon, to build my case.

Literary narratives are often premised upon the progression of the self, as evident by the bildungsroman and the kunstlerroman. But what happens when the ‘self’, whose unity is contestable itself, is absent? This presentation examines the ‘subjectivity-in-flux’ of the absent protagonist of Martin Crimp’s play Attempts on Her Life (2004) due to the varying chain of signifiers that stake claims on ‘her’ subjectivity. Crimp’s play is an ‘attempt’ to find out about its ‘missing’ protagonist Anne, who could
be a woman, a car, or just a set of late twentieth-century obsessions. The various characters who try to define, catalogue or categorize this missing character are not fixed either and they might not be individually sufficient or even necessary to sustain the narrative. These ‘attempts’ are also directed at the viewer in order to make them believe in the credibility of each ‘attempt’, and of one over the other. The abundance of contradictory narratives is emblematic of the disturbing negotiations with a postmodern world where meaning is always deferred and de-centered due to the endless chain of signifiers. The presentation suggests that the revolutionary potential of protagonist’s subjectivity is due to ‘her’ truly rhizomatic nature, as defined by Gilles Deleuze. The presentation also discusses the implications of this claim in the light of Crimp’s possible anticipation of the multiple disembodied selves engendered due to social media applications, and a graver possibility that, as per the title, Anne’s life is ontologically dependent on these
contradictory attempts to define it.

In this paper I suggest that the best way to interpret Arthur Miller's The Archbishop's Ceiling, which was written in the 1970s, is through the lens of paranoia. This leads into a discussion of the postmodernist aspects of the play, the first time Miller truly situates his work in a postmodernist trend. Miller's depiction of surveillance in an Eastern European city fits in perfectly with the cultural narrative of paranoia that defined the 1970s for many, and here I make the link with classic films of the genre, including Alan J Pakula's "paranoia trilogy" of Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men.

"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls"

How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4:48’s inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane’s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It’s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.

Glenn D’Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre (2007).