Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater.
Title:
Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater.
Author:
Worthen, W. B.
ISBN:
9780520963047
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (261 pages)
Contents:
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Theater and the Scene of Vision -- Chekhov's Camera: The Rhetoric of Stage Realism -- Invisible Women: Problem Drama, 1890-1920 -- 2. Actors and Objects -- Invisible Actors: O'Neill, the Method, and the Masks of "Character" -- Visible Scenes: American Realism and the Absent Audience -- Empty Spaces and the Power of Privacy: Pinter, Shepard, and Bond -- 3. Scripted Bodies: Poetic Theater -- Poetic Theater and the Work of Acting -- The Discipline of Speech: Yeats's Dance Drama -- The Discipline of Performance: The Dance of Death and Murder in the Cathedral -- The Discipline of the Text: Beckett's Theater -- 4. Political Theater: Staging the Spectator -- Transforming the Field of Theater -- Breaking the Frame of History: Hitler Dances and The Churchill Play -- History and the Frame of Genre: Laughter! and Poppy -- Framing Gender: Cloud Nine and Fefu and Her Friends -- Postscript. Sidi's Image: Theater and the Frame of Culture -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.
Abstract:
The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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