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This article investigates the different nuances of the term modern in Brazilian theater criticism, seeking to map the main variations and their implications for the analysis of the drama in Brazil. Through examination of materials from press pages and books of the 19th and 20th centuries, studies dedicated to the history of Brazilian theater, and remarks on the concept of the modern made by researchers like Hans Robert Jauss, this text seeks to present the widespread use of the term, applied to different productions in the Brazilian theatrical context. Consequently, we propose to reflect on the modern in Brazilian theater as a fruitful inquiry into the various aesthetic influences that transformed the country's stage and dramaturgy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Shakespeare's interest in masques and their impact on his plays, specifically The Tempest and The Winter's Tale. It delves into the controversy surrounding the antimasque in The Tempest and Shakespeare's perspective on masques and the absolutist ideology they promoted. The article emphasizes the significance of considering non-Jonsonian masques, like those by Samuel Daniel and Thomas Campion, in comprehending Shakespeare's involvement with masquing. It highlights the personal involvement of Shakespeare and his company, the King's Men, in producing masques and collaborating with the Master of the Revels. The text explores the influence of court masques on Shakespeare's plays The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, drawing parallels between Campion's masques and certain scenes in The Winter's Tale, such as the animation of Hermione's statue. However, it advises against assuming that Shakespeare endorsed Campion's views on royal pageantry and power. The text also mentions the impact of Jonson's masques on Shakespeare's plays and suggests that further research is necessary to fully comprehend Shakespeare's engagement with masques and their ideological implications. [Extracted from the article]

Despite the prevalence of audience-centred drama criticism, very little is actually known about the composition or nature of theatre audiences in antiquity. Metatheatrical passages in Plautus' and Terence's comedies in which the audience is described or addressed are usually treated as historical evidence for real-life theatre audiences in Republican Rome. This article argues that it is preferable to treat the comic audience as a fictional character. The scripted audience is recurrently portrayed by the comedians in a far-fetched and anti-realistic manner: it can be treated as a stereotype, along the other 'stock' characters of Roman comedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Romania, during the interwar years, it seems that theatre reviews - much like theatre criticism in general, narrowly as it was and sometimes continues to be defined in Romania - was only considered legitimate if signed by men. There were but two timid exceptions, two female voices whose writings were partially recovered as late as 1978-1983 and have been insufficiently explored since: the poet and memoirist Otilia Cazimir, who worked as an inspector for the Ministry of Arts' Theatre Directorate for a decade, and the aesthetics professor Alice Voinescu. This paper is an attempt to turn the spotlight not onto the two writers' theatre-related activity, but rather to the way they engaged, in writing or in action, with the thorny issues of feminism. Their opposing standpoints - a feminism of emancipation vs. an anti-feminist type of feminism - still proves emblematic to our day for the specific way in which socio-cultural mentalities and perceptions on women's condition in 20th-century Romania were preserved; it appears that post-socialist theatre criticism, especially from the decade 2000-2010, coalesced around the same positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Al-Academy is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the profound and enduring legacy of the treatise on classical drama known as Praenotamenta ascensiana in shaping early modern dramatic poetics. Written by Flemish scholar Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535) as a preface to his 1502 edition of the Classical plays of Terence, this work has been unjustly overlooked by the critics that have invariably credited Aristotle's Poetics for foregrounding the debate on early modern dramatic criticism, following Alessandro de Pazzi's first Latin translation (1536) and Francesco Robortello's monumental commentary (1548). The purpose of Praenotamenta was to provide educators, students and playwrights with a concise and accessible compendium of ancient dramatic poetics. This treatise circulated widely across Europe and helped disseminate ideas that became central to early modern discourse on poetics, such as verisimilitude and decorum, as well as discussion on the didactic and civic role of poetry. Blended with Aristotelian doctrine, these concepts became the tenets of late sixteenth‐century poetics treatises in England, France, Italy and Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the correlativity between the acting of the Seonghwangdang (Village Shrine)-style revolutionary theatre in North Korea and the Stanislavsky system. Kim Jong-il dictates that Seonghwangdang-style revolutionary theatre is one of the representative art works that explains the origin of North Korean juche in his books On the Art of the Cinema and On the Art of the Theatre. Despite his criticism of the Stanislavsky system, Kim almost translates the process of role creation into urisik (our style, that is, North Korean style) one, borrowing a given circumstance, experience, jagam (creative state), and "magic if" from the system according to the principles of juche and sokdojeon (speed battle). The result is simplification of the semantic area of experience and the creative state, which shows how theatrical arts are limited by political ideological centrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current proliferation of digital platforms and the reduction of arts coverage in mainstream media outlets in Canada has given rise to many theatre reviewers whose contributions to critical discourse are often dismissed because they lack professional legitimization. This article uses Jacques Rancière's formulations of the ignorant schoolmaster and the emancipated spectator to interrogate the distinction between professional and amateur critics. It argues that participants and practices typically understood as amateur provide models of criticism that are pluralistic, affective, and inclusive. Analyzing three central case studies—a newspaper column featuring "regular" spectators, reviews by children and youth, and mentorship initiatives for emerging Black, Indigenous, and people of colour critics—the article demonstrates how amateurs challenge the notion of expertise as exclusive knowledge possessed by the elite. It highlights the benefits of opening up critical conversations during this crucial moment when the Canadian theatre industry is confronting its complicity in systemic injustices and seeking to attract new audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theatre criticism in the Global North currently finds itself at a pivotal point, as the internet eclipses legacy media as the central space for critical discourse and as ongoing antiracist and anticolonial activism highlights the underrepresentation of BIPOC artists across the theatre industry. Within this context, stakeholders in the theatre community, recognizing the importance of a vibrant critical discourse, are faced with finding more sustainable and equitable models. This article considers the future of theatre reviewing through a case study of Taking on the World (TotW), a mentorship program for emerging BIPOC critics run in conjunction with Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company and Intermission magazine. TotW participants' innovative critical practice demonstrates that de-hierarchizing theatre criticism necessitates reimagining the form, and specifically centering conversation as a key quality of process and product. Exploiting the capabilities of the digital, TotW participants embed conversation within their work and model a mode of criticism that challenges traditional notions of expertise and is ultimately more inclusive. Applying recent scholarship on theatre criticism to examples of work produced in the program and participant interviews, this article advances new ways of practicing and teaching theatre criticism at this crucial moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Theatre Research in Canada is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the intersections of queerness and Jewishness in Marcel Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu," particularly in response to the social and political context of the Dreyfus affair. Topics include the heightened visibility of Jews and queers in nineteenth-century Europe, the performative aspects of Jewishness and queerness in Proust's work, and the deconstruction of identity through dramatic language as a response to emerging French fascism.

In the pre-March (Vormärz) period, i.e. in the first half of the 19th century, tragedy and the tragic experienced unprecedented interest not only on the part of playwrights and audiences, but also on the part of aestheticians and critics. This study focuses on several questions, namely: Where did this interest come from? Which forms of the tragic were popular and which were rejected? How did critics, such as Josef Jungmann, approach the questions of fatality and the (dis)proportion between the guilt and suffering of the tragic hero? Were the opinions of critics reflected in the works of playwrights? Were there differences in this respect between Czech- and German-written plays and reviews in the Czech lands? The first part of the study presents the main interpretive frameworks of tragedy that entered into the consideration of this genre in Central Europe and the Czech lands in the first third of the 19th century. Subsequently, attention is focused on the central dispute over fate and providence in tragedies. In the latter case, critics attempted to reconcile the tragic with the positive social values of Biedermeier culture at the cost of significantly narrowing the genre canon and rejecting the form of fatal tragedy. In the third part, the paper presents how the theoretical principles of criticism were reflected in the tragedies written in the Czech lands at that time. Especially in the case of tragic heroes chosen from national history, there was a tension between the need to motivate, in the spirit of poetic justice, the hero’s downfall by his bad character and the desire to portray the national hero as a moral authority. Finally, the last section of the paper focuses on the differences and similarities between these tendencies in Czech- and German-written criticism and drama from the Czech lands. While the arguments of critics against fatalism were similar on both sides, German-written plays seem to have overcome the paradigm of poetic justice slightly earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, Theatre Journal has served as an important venue for documenting what made past theatrical productions or performances compelling and significant. As the journal commemorates its achievements over its first seventy-five volumes, this essay reflects on the vital contributions of the performance review section by considering its enduring impact on the field. In addition to tracing the evolution of the section from its earliest days as a single-authored article highlighting productions from the Broadway season to its current iteration, the essay argues that performance reviews have afforded authors crucial opportunities to hone their critical voices and vocabularies. It further contends that, even as performance reviews have been instrumental in introducing the journal's readers to artists and events that they might not have otherwise known about, the influence of the section has also manifested in more practical ways. For example, it has been key in cultivating a pipeline of editors, thereby shaping how we think, read, and write about drama, theatre, and performance critically. Central to the essay is a consideration of the meaningful ways that the performance review section has advanced and enhanced the journal's rich legacy of accomplishments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploration of the most recent revival of Utpal Dutt's play Titu Mir in 2019 by the ensemble group Theatre Formation Paribartak in India. Islamic religious reformer Titu Mir led a peasant rebellion from 1827 to 1831 in the Barasat region of Bengal and the play focuses on a narrative of revolutionary resistance to colonialism. Titu Mir becomes an articulation of political theatre against the Hindu right-wing agenda of expunging Muslim national heroes from Indian history. This essay seeks Titu Mir 's relevance as a site and theory of materializing historical contradictions, and as part of a 'gestic' feminist criticism of theatre. The essay attempts to understand how critique of patriarchal ideology is enmeshed in critique of colonialism in Titu Mir , especially in those moments where the play addresses complexities of political violence, interracial romance, martyrdom, alienation in the colony and deep-rooted misogyny in the project of colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his writings on aesthetics, Jacques Rancière argues that Rousseau’s criticism of the theater in The Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theater is significant because it calls into question the possibility of the uniform transmission of the artist’s knowledge to the spectator. Despite this important point, Rancière largely adopts the commonly accepted reading of the Letter that Rousseau finds the theater politically pernicious because it separates and isolates audience members, turning them into passive spectators. According to this reading, Rousseau proposes to replace the theater with the ethical immediacy of the festival. Situating the Letter in its historical context and reading it with Rancière to argue against his own reading, I challenge this interpretation. I argue that for Rousseau the theater is problematic because as a spectacle that calls attention to its difference from what it represents, it invites the spectators to actively engage with the performance, preventing the uniform transmission of the artist’s ideas to the spectators. For Rousseau, this democratic potential of the theatrical spectacle transforms it from a possible means of moral instruction to a risk to the existing social order, which relies on a distinction between those who should instruct and those who should be instructed. Insofar as the spectators refuse to act as passive recipients of knowledge and do something they are not supposed to do, including taking part in the idle pleasures of the rich and judging the quality of the plays, they reconfigure the distribution of the sensible. Rousseau’s alternatives to the theater, the marriage ball and the public festival, seek to close off this possibility by carefully concealing their representational status. By presenting the representations of an “ideal” community as the immediate expressions of the community’s truth, these spectacles achieve, or so Rousseau hopes, what the theater fails to do, the effective delivery of moral instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theater collectives address different topics and have unique ways of creating theater. They also have a role of "playing according to the field" approach that contrasts with traditional approaches like "theater for the people" and "theater for art." These characteristics challenge the old, established examples of theater and are commonly referred to as 'autonomous theater'. The subsidized or unsubsidized theaters usually perform in large, crowded halls for general theater audiences, also known as the audience of the masses. In contrast, these new avant-garde artistic collectives are restricted to performing in their own small venues for specific audiences. They evoke a struggle between the old and established on one hand, and the new and seeking to find a place for themselves on the other, on their stages. The new theater scene is emerging, in small venues with audiences ranging from 30-70 people. These theaters aim to present diverse narratives on topics such as "fringe, new political, LGBT, immigrant issues, disadvantaged groups". Despite being a semi-professional feminist theater group established in 2000, Theatre Boyalı Kuş does not describe itself as a direct "women's theater". Theatre Boyalı Kuş was founded by Jale Karabekir and Zeynep Kaçar, graduates of the Istanbul University Department of Theater Criticism and Dramaturgy. The company took serious steps towards institutionalization with the later addition of Burçak Karaboğa and Duygu Erdoğan. Contrary to what is claimed, Theatre Boyalı Kuş is not a structure that only houses women. It is a group that aims to change the perception of male dominance in theater, by also involving men in their performances but prioritizing female voices in the decision-making mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Babylon Center for Humanities Studies is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Forum Modernes Theater is the property of Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co.KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Lingüística y Literatura is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Facultad de Comunicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article attempts to provide an overall overview of the Greek theatre during the interwar period. Specifically, it examines the conditions that influenced playwriting and the establishment and operation of theatrical troupes and institutions. The interwar period sheds light on modern Greek theatre and its darker side, leading up to the current theatrical landscape. The article summarises its impact on theatrical practice, the reception of ancient drama, and the emergence and consolidation of important domains such as directing and theatre criticism within the institutionalisation of basic demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the theme of contested identities and sacred spaces in Ronnie Govender's debut play, "Beyond Calvary". The tension between Hinduism and Christianity is explored within the context of 1960s South Africa, which saw the destruction of vibrant communities due to racial segregation, and a wave of forceful conversion campaigns by Christian missionaries that exploited the vulnerability and precarity of displaced subalterns. The antagonism of the new Christian converts towards their Hindu brethren was as despicable as white aversion towards black people. The crux of the play is formed by the Hindu–Christian conflict depicted between the key protagonists, Linda and Prabhu. The play exposes occidental blindness, prejudice, and arrogance. Govender points to a spiritual sensibility that experiences the world in different ways in order to appreciate the range of sacred spaces that characterised the early narratives of the indentured sugar slaves. The play imperceptibly moves "other" modes of thought, prayer, and sacrosanctity into the public space in order to assert the legitimacy of all modes of living and thinking. Gods, homes, and hetero-patriarchal politics are expertly drawn in the play, giving way to issues of social concern which open out to matters of class, gender, and cultural identity. The article will draw congruences with Agnes Sam's short story "Jesus Is Indian" and Omar Badsha's resistance photography, which disrupts dominant occidental/settler discourses in apartheid South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pós: Revista do Programa de POS-Graduacao Em Artes - EBA/UFMG is the property of Pos - Programa de Pos-graduacao em Artes (PPG-Artes) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As the study of nineteenth-century theatre has expanded over the decades, the extent and popularity of cross-dressing and cross-gender casting on the Victorian stage is being revealed. Yet there is an enduring tendency in Victorian theatre criticism to situate transvestite performances within broad-brush assumptions of binary attitudes towards gender amongst theatre audiences. Universalised gender norms and assumptions of binary thinking have long been discarded in critical analysis of Victorian fiction, and their lingering influence on Victorian theatre studies has arguably been unhelpful. Building on the vital pioneering work of Jacky Bratton, this article will focus on the careers of Louisa Cranstoun Nisbett and Mary Anne Keeley, two prominent and acclaimed mid-century actresses, drawing on reviews, memoirs, and commentaries on their performances to attempt to construct alternative theories for how they were viewed and understood. The critical and popular success of their performances and the language and ideas employed by reviewers and commentators to record and explain them reveal far more flexible, multiple, fluid, complex, and imaginative attitudes to gender roles and identities than allowed for in established critical narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Nabo is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the book "Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century," edited by Peggy Farfan and Lesley Ferris. The book is a collection of twenty-eight chapters that explore the field of feminist theatre criticism and the significance of plays by women. It highlights the influence of feminist scholarly approaches in the academy and the need to articulate the importance of women's plays and research in the larger fields of theatre and performance. The book offers diverse essays that analyze texts from around the world through various methodologies, making it a valuable resource for students and instructors. However, the article notes that the book could have benefited from a discussion on the category of "women playwrights" and its complexities. Overall, the book is praised for its comprehensive scope and skillful treatment of feminism's intersectionalities. [Extracted from the article]

Antonio Gramsci's contributions have engaged scholars for nearly a century, sporadically favoring topics such as literary criticism and theater. This article examines his critique of Luigi Pirandello's theater and the direct impact of artistic and cultural elements on the success of a play. Gramsci's reviews for Avanti! along with Quaderni del carcere will demonstrate the evolution of his conception of success, which is denoted by pragmatic elements of dramatic execution, set forth for playwrights, directors, actors, and audiences alike. His opinion on Pirandello's productions will reveal a mix of mild criticism and resigned approval, despite the playwright's international fame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides an outline of the 1920s Ukrainian newspapers that consistently covered theatre life, lists and characterizes their leading contributors, and analyzes a number of illustrative drama reviews. The basis for systematization and comparative analysis of the 1920s theatre journalism constituted the general scientific research methods based on empirical, descriptive principles of source studies. The method of biographical research is an attempt to recreate the biographical facts of certain critics, the formation of their aesthetic landmarks, and trace the features of their individual writing style. Developments in the field of the theory of literary and critical genres were used in the analysis and classification of reports by these theater critics. The paper addresses a genre of brief reports in the 1920s Ukrainian newspapers, as well as more detailed reviews. A quantitative increase in the number of articles on theater, their diversity, and cultural scope was noted. An attempt was made to follow the transformation of critical thought in the 1920s newspapers exemplified by the critics of different generations and aesthetic orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos Dieciochistas is the property of Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Radio drama belongs to the broader term 'audio literature', a genre that includes both literary and intermedial studies. Radio drama has been underestimated and unappreciated during its history on four grounds: rarity, invisibility, audience negativity and "secondariness". The aim of this paper is to defend radio drama and counter these criticisms, proving that radio drama has its own merits. Accordingly, its success should be judged only on its ability to convey whatever catches one's eye to one's ear, and its ability to give the listeners the same sense of a full-length stage play. Theoretically, an analytical approach will be applied to the selected plays in order to show how radio drama succeeds in conveying visuality via the use of four overlapping elements: descriptive dialogue, sound effects, narration, and character. Aboulela's The Museum and The Sea Warrior are hereunder selected for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acotaciones: Investigación y Creación Teatral is the property of Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramatico and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Al-Bahith Journal is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines a 1962 episode of The Defenders as a landmark scripted drama that staged a debate about unplanned pregnancies and abortion access in the early network era. "The Benefactor" served as a test of television networks' authority, and its success created space for more open discussion of controversial topics in prime time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past two decades of contemporary British drama have been marked by an upsurge of interest in the exploration of the ethics, aesthetics and politics of authorship along with the relational dynamics among the author, the work and audience/reader. One of the latest and paradigmatic examples of this trend is Ella Hickson's The Writer (2018), a play informed by a queer feminist sensibility and distinguished by its aesthetics, its form, and its political critique of theatre as an institute underpinned by phallogocentric and heteronormative discourses. Accordingly, the essay will demonstrate how the queering of gender and genre are indelibly intertwined in the play. The Writer queers conventional theatrical form not only by deconstructing its "economy" and "forms" of hegemonic subjectivity, expression, and desire; but also by incorporating a surreal scene and various metatheatrical moments – to develop a more evental (or feminine) form characterised by formal transgression, abstraction, and excess. The Writer queers gender by pondering the dynamics of an evental love-sex relationship between the female writer (the protagonist) and her female lover along with a surreal experience of intimacy between the writer and mythical Semele. To effectively ponder the thematic and formal preoccupations of The Writer, this essay develops a nuanced conceptual framework whose premises include Irigaray's "the female imaginary", Deleuze's "becoming-other", Cixous's "écriture feminine", Lyotard's "the figural" and Derrida's "chora". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how borders are negotiated in Lola Arias' Minefield/Campo Minado (2016). Arias' representation of the war experiences and traumatic memories of six veterans, three from each side of the Malvinas/Falklands war, suggests an effort to reframe fixed categorizations around the conflict and cross temporal, spatial and aesthetic borders. We will study the articulation of these borders as devices for verbalizing the continuities and discontinuities between "fact" and "fiction" and "self" and "other" in an attempt to assess how the play constructively manages the anxiety arising from the urge to tell and the need to forget experienced by war veterans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates mediatization and the relationship between the local and the large in contemporary world in the plays "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder in 1938 and Caryl Churchill's 2016 "Escaped Alone." Topics include the reason for the difficulty in distinguishing the local and the large in "Escaped Alone," the role of the revolution in technology in the 20th and 21st centuries in the conflation of the local and the large, and the effects of mediatization as reflected in both plays.

The article analyzes the Scandinavian school play "Den utro hustru (The Unfaithful Wife)" presumably written around 1500 by a university-educated teacher dramatizing humanistic, pre-Lutheran views on sex and marriage. Topics include the significance of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) for European communities, comments on the play's structure and motifs as well as its dramaturgy and values, and the staging of courtship driven by market mechanisms in the play using physical humor.

The article explores non-domestic dramatic spaces such as the Irish pub and the African barbershop as culturally specific third places in the plays "Conversations on a Homecoming" by Tom Murphy in 1985 and Inua Ellams' 2017 "Barber Shop Chronicles." Topics include the depiction in both plays of the experiences of their representative diasporic communities, the significance of everyday third spaces such as the Irish pubs, and a comparison of Ellams' eponymous barbershop to the Irish pub.

The article examines how the formal structure of Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play "A Doll's House" was replicated by Samuel Adamson in his 2019 play "Wife" which premiered at the Kiln Theatre in London, England. Topics include methods of audience member engagement with a historical text modeled in Adamson's play and how Adamson's choice to adapt "A Doll's House" into four temporally distinct moments extends the considerations of the 1879 play to address the ongoing implications of the original themes.

Although British playwright Edward Bond is well known for his early plays during the 1960s–80s, his later works, from the late 1990s onward, have been relatively overlooked and underexplored. In this article, I aim to bridge these two phases and propose a theoretical framework to approach Bond's evolution as a playwright. I will first examine Bond's critical engagement with Brecht, and then I will proceed to analyse Bond's evolving dramaturgy of the Holocaust, which will help to demonstrate how Bond has developed what we might call his post-Auschwitz dramaturgy. While criticizing Brecht's theatre for being the "Theatre of Auschwitz," Bond bases his post-Brechtian dramaturgy on his specific understanding of the infamous Nazi concentration camp. Bond regards Auschwitz as not only a localized historical event but also a trans-historical structure of biopolitics, manifested in both the camp and an ensuing neoliberal capitalist system. By drawing on two pivotal passages of the Palermo improvisation (which took place in 1983) and the Russian guard's story, both of which Bond describes in "Commentary on The War Plays" (1991), I will elucidate how these examples herald a "post-Auschwitz" dramaturgical model that can be understood through Emmanuel Levinas's ethics and Giorgio Agamben's biopolitics. Building on this analysis, I will analyse Bond's plays The Crime of the Twenty-First Century (1999) and Born (2006) to argue that it is the dissonance between the biopolitical paradigm exemplified in Auschwitz and the human subject's fundamental creativity that defines Bond's later works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abundance of Bible story–based plots and preponderance of Jewish lyricists in musical theatre suggests religion should play a central role in its study. Yet religion is not a major theme in musical theatre criticism. This article suggests this silence is a symptomatic forgetfulness of the default secular operative in American musical theatre and its analysts in theatre studies. Focusing on Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) as an artist of particular accomplishment within the raced, gendered, and religious aesthetic of the American musical's secularism, it examines "Sunday," the Act One closer to Sunday in the Park with George (1984), as a climax of such expression. "Sunday" is an instruction manual on what the secular is, conveying in its lyrics, compositional location, and author's autobiography the story of religion's hiddenness in the American musical. Sondheim's "Sunday" is a way to see how musical theatre regulates religion on stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Suzan-Lori Parks's dramatic work should be considered in terms of its presentation of apocalyptic scenes that are unique in their rejection of endings. I examine Parks's The America Play and Death of the Last Black Man in the Entire World as examples of apocalypse-in-process, representations of apocalypse that refuse a teleological context and instead focus on the unending nature of historical and global catastrophe. I build upon scholarship on Parks's treatment of African American history and memory, particularly that which centres her preoccupation with the material and psychical remnants of slavery and oppression, to examine how apocalyptic themes undergird her writing. Parks's reorientation of apocalyptic writing away from easily resolvable endings speaks directly to our present moment, in which anti-Black violence borne out of chattel slavery continues to reverberate in the face of the insidious violence of microaggressions and police brutality. In presenting sites of ostensible death as unlikely spaces for insurgent life, Parks's plays rethink what narratives of death and trauma can look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]