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Articles 1 - 17 of 17
Full-Text Articles in Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory
“Be Yo’Self. It’S Just A Show”: Performing Community Through The Comic Grotesque In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’S Neighbors, Annette Saddik
“Be Yo’Self. It’S Just A Show”: Performing Community Through The Comic Grotesque In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’S Neighbors, Annette Saddik
Publications and Research
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Neighbors, which premiered at the Public Theater in 2010, explores the history of Black representation in the theater and, subsequently, the performance of Black identity in the US through its depiction of a complex and contradictory minstrelsy that cannot easily be classified as satirical or subversive. Generating what Jacobs-Jenkins has called “wrong laughter” through contradiction, ambiguity, and ambivalence, Neighbors engages the unstable space of the comic grotesque in order to open up pathways for something new to emerge. In this play, the figure of the clown – a grotesque outlaw who moves between, within, across, and beyond …
Exploring The Line Between Creation And Creator In Mabou Mines’S Glass Guignol: The Brother And Sister Play, Annette Saddik
Exploring The Line Between Creation And Creator In Mabou Mines’S Glass Guignol: The Brother And Sister Play, Annette Saddik
Publications and Research
During the last ten years of his life, Lee Breuer, who passed away in 2021, had been interested in framing Tennessee Williams’s canon, particularly the late plays, through the perspective of the grotesque and the Grand Guignol. Mabou Mines’s Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play (2017), directed by Breuer and conceived by Breuer and Maude Mitchell, views Williams’s work alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in order to expose the grotesque truth of the messy and complex creative process. On one level, Glass Guignol is a multilayered exploration of the relationship between Williams and his sister Rose, whose story of …
Los Fantasmas De La Imaginación En El Deseo Más Canalla De Arístides Vargas, Rojo Robles Mejias
Los Fantasmas De La Imaginación En El Deseo Más Canalla De Arístides Vargas, Rojo Robles Mejias
Publications and Research
Como motivo del evento crítico teatral Un espacio seguro producido por Caborca y Teatro Público en el Teatro de la UPR en Octubre 2022, este ensayo revisita la obra de Arístides Vargas, El deseo más canalla (2001). El artículo argumenta que la obra divisa la posibilidad de transformar espacios y proyectar seres creativos por medio de la imaginación. La imaginación en la dramaturgia de Vargas es un mecanismo recurrente para establecer una relación entre la realidad interior y la exterior, entre una posible construcción del yo y la otredad. Esa metamorfosis del yo se alcanza por medio del juego literario …
Book Review: Anna Watkins Fisher. The Play In The System: The Art Of Parasitical Resistance, Nora Almeida
Book Review: Anna Watkins Fisher. The Play In The System: The Art Of Parasitical Resistance, Nora Almeida
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
"Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, And Broadway Bodies, Ryan Donovan
"Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, And Broadway Bodies, Ryan Donovan
Publications and Research
This article surveys how contemporary Broadway musicals cast fat women and focuses on Hairspray. The use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses figure into the discussion of fat stigma and casting practices. Seemingly body-positive musicals both celebrate and undermine the identities staged in them.
Whispering Together In The Dark: Rereading Samuel Beckett's Homosociality Through Harold Pinter, Aaron Botwick
Whispering Together In The Dark: Rereading Samuel Beckett's Homosociality Through Harold Pinter, Aaron Botwick
Publications and Research
In a 1960 letter to a friend, Harold Pinter wrote of Samuel Beckett, “I’ll buy his goods hook, line, and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty; his work is beautiful.” What do we learn if we take the word “beautiful” seriously? Rereading Waiting for Godot backward through Betrayal, this article argues that Beckett’s landscape, typically read as a realization of postwar angst, is in fact one released of the pressures of contemporary living and for Pinter a homosocial Eden. Jerry’s joke upon discovering the adultery—“Maybe I should …
From Humiliation To Epiphany: The Role Of Onstage Spaces In T. S. Eliot’S Middle Plays, Ria Banerjee
From Humiliation To Epiphany: The Role Of Onstage Spaces In T. S. Eliot’S Middle Plays, Ria Banerjee
Publications and Research
This essay looks at T. S. Eliot's major dramatic productions from the 1930s-40s: Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party as a series of investigations into spatial expressions of faith. By using onstage space in unique ways, Eliot encourages audiences to consider the connections between performance and belief, the knowable and unknowable.
Sibling Affection And Domestic Heterosexuality In Lodovick Carlell’S The Deserving Favorite, Mario Digangi
Sibling Affection And Domestic Heterosexuality In Lodovick Carlell’S The Deserving Favorite, Mario Digangi
Publications and Research
Lodowick Carlell’s play The Deserving Favorite (1629) deploys the ideological strategy of using erotic “likeness” to validate marital unions as consensual and erotically compatible. In an era before the normalization of heterosexuality, the play suggests that sexually passionate marital relations earn legitimacy to the degree that they emulate the affectionate relations between women and between siblings. Although eroticized female friendship approaches the ideal of a consensual and sensual partnership, intimate relations between women seem best to thrive in a separatist environment removed from courtly social and economic exchanges, including the marital negotiations crucial to cementing dynastic and political alliances. Brothers …
Shakespeare's Blush, Or "The Animal" In Othello, Steven Swarbrick
Shakespeare's Blush, Or "The Animal" In Othello, Steven Swarbrick
Publications and Research
This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactual statement (“Were I the Moor, I would not by Iago”) that is most significant about his relation to Othello. From there I consider the overlap between the play’s representations of animality and black skin. Read in the context of Jacques Derrida’s reflections on animals, I consider the deconstructive value of linking …
Disciplines, Institutions—And Desires, Will Stockton, Mario Digangi, Ruth Mazo Karras, Melissa E. Sanchez
Disciplines, Institutions—And Desires, Will Stockton, Mario Digangi, Ruth Mazo Karras, Melissa E. Sanchez
Publications and Research
Will Stockton: I would like to begin by asking you to consider the chiasmus under which we gather: “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire.” The chiasmus focuses our attention on the crossing of two terms, each with noun and verb forms their grammatical flexibility indexed, perhaps, to the methodological flexibility of the fields in which most of us work: early modern (here both Renaissance and late-medieval) queer and/or sexuality studies. Talk a bit about the definitions of desir/e/ing and histor/y/icizing, and the relation of these terms to the periodization and thematization of your and our work. Is defining these words more …
Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift
Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …
Reading With The Grain: On Vin Nardizzi’S Wooden Os: Shakespeare’S Theatres And England’S Trees, Steven Swarbrick
Reading With The Grain: On Vin Nardizzi’S Wooden Os: Shakespeare’S Theatres And England’S Trees, Steven Swarbrick
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, And Tears, Christopher B. Swift
A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, And Tears, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
This essay draws upon a poetic and devotional texts from late medieval Spain to show how public displays of emotion (weeping, in particular) during penitential processions could be learned and prepared for in advance.
Road Show (Review), Alisa Roost
Elisabeth, Alisa Roost
The Sacred Performative: Holy Wednesday And Colonial Ritual/Theatre, Christopher B. Swift
The Sacred Performative: Holy Wednesday And Colonial Ritual/Theatre, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
"Holy Wednesday" is a late sixteenth century adaptation of a Spanish auto sacramental (sacred play) written in alphabetized Nahuatl, the predominant pre-Columbian language spoken on the High Central Plateau of Mexico. The author remains unknown, however he was likely a Nahua amanuensis educated by Franciscans at Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. Religious drama was one of the important evangelizing tools of the Catholic brotherhoods in colonial Mexico and although a record of performance of Holy Wednesday does not exist, this dramatic depiction of the final meeting of Christ and Mary prior to the crucifixion was almost certainly performed as …
Constant Star (Review), Alisa Roost