Theatre Journal articles from May 1993

Theatre Journal archives from May 1993

Hailing ideology, acting in the horizon, and reading between plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker.
May 1, 1993... Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good traces how a group of convicts and jailers isolated in an eighteenth-century Austrahan penal colony work together to produce George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer.(1) While based on an actual...

Collaboration, identity, and cultural difference: Karim Alrawi's theatre of engagement.
May 1, 1993... When Egyptian Farag Fouda was assassinated on the streets of Cairo in June of 1992, playwright Karim Alrawi found himself compelled to remember his fellow writer in print. Alrawi mourned the loss of a "civil rights activist" and a writer...

Charabanc Theatre Company: placing women center-stage in Northern Ireland.
May 1, 1993... Kate: What a day Ceely. My Dustin under seige. My wee dog on the run and now Rose Marie arrested. Ceely: And it's only half eleven. Kate: It wasn't fair arrestin' her, all she was doing was polishing Tucker's riot gear. Ceely: What do...

Domesticating Mr. Orton. (playwright Joe Orton)
May 1, 1993... Joe Orton, perhaps remembered today more for how he died than for the work that he produced, was appropriated by John Lahr in his 1978 biography of Orton, Prick Up Your Ears. Orton has become, in one sense, Lahr's property and his creation....

Stephen Poliakoff's drama for the post-scientific age.
May 1, 1993... The year 1989 saw the appearance both of a new play by Stephen Poliakoff, Playing with Trains, and of the first volume of his collected plays, Poliakoff Plays: One(1) An unfortunate side-effect of issuing separate volumes of his collected...

Interview: David Hare. (Interview)
May 1, 1993... David Hare has been one of the most influential members of his generation of British playwrights. He started out on the production side of the stage business, and then moved to collaborative writing and directing. With Tony Bicat he started...

Doctoral projects in progress in theatre arts, 1993.
May 1, 1993... This is the forty-first annual report of dissertations in progress in the theatre arts in the United States. The success of this report continues to depend upon prompt and accurate replies from the graduate departments of theatre, speech,...

Angels in America, Part 1: Millenium Approaches. (Royal National Theatre, London, England)
May 1, 1993... The old-fashioned British history play, the kind that immerses the audience in the past without worrying about whether it is learning anything about the present, was abundant on the London stage in 1992. There was Alan Bennett's The Madness...

A Midsummer Night's Dream. (Royal National Theatre, London, England)
May 1, 1993... Consciously working to rival Peter Brook's 1970 original and provocative Royal Shakespeare Company production, Robert Lepage's National Theater A Midsummer Night's Dream succeeds in concept but decidedly fails in execution. The production set...

In the Company of Men. (Theatre de la Ville, Paris, France)
May 1, 1993... Edward Bond's two most recent plays, Jackets and In the Company of Men, have been published by Methuen (and in France by Arche) as two "Postmodern" plays along with eighty-two "Notes on Post-Modernism" by their author. Since the former play...

Restoration. (The Black Swan, Ashland, Oregon)
May 1, 1993... Restoration may seem an incongruous choice for OSF. The play's rousing politics create an inescapable dissonance of message and ambience. Ashland's tranquil setting, thick with tourists on a bender of Shakespeare and shopping, seems to...

Uncle Vanya. (Tom Patterson and Festival Theatres, Stratford, Ontario)
May 1, 1993... With financial woes abounding on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, the Stratford Festival opted for early season productions that showcase its traditional strengths: lavish costume, effective design, intelligent directing, and ensemble...

Romeo and Juliet. (Tom Patterson and Festival Theatres, Stratford, Ontario)
May 1, 1993... With financial woes abounding on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, the Stratford Festival opted for early season productions that showcase its traditional strengths: lavish costume, effective design, intelligent directing, and ensemble...

Love's Labour's Lost. (Tom Patterson and Festival Theatres, Stratford, Ontario)
May 1, 1993... With financial woes abounding on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, the Stratford Festival opted for early season productions that showcase its traditional strengths: lavish costume, effective design, intelligent directing, and ensemble...

The Tempest. (Tom Patterson and Festival Theatres, Stratford, Ontario)
May 1, 1993... With financial woes abounding on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, the Stratford Festival opted for early season productions that showcase its traditional strengths: lavish costume, effective design, intelligent directing, and ensemble...

Medea. (Tugs, Seattle, Washington)
May 1, 1993... Greek Active's production of Euripides' Medea at Tugs found a site not unlike some of the elements of classical Athenean theatre. Tugs is a gay bar, known to be lesbian-friendly and to produce a variety of evening entertainments. The bar has...

Women in the Wings. (Grahamstown, South Africa)
May 1, 1993... Much of the bill of the 1992 Standard Bank National Arts Festival, more commonly known as the Grahamstown Theatre Festival, focused on the emergence of the "New South Africa" from different vantage points. These productions included Ishmael...

The Suicide. (Cleveland, Ohio)
May 1, 1993... Cleveland, Ohio and Volgograd, Russia (formerly Stalingrad and Tsaritsyn) are "sister cities." In 1991, the Cleveland Play House invited Otar Djangisherashvili, artistic director of Volgograd's New Experimental Theater (NET), to visit...

Blood! Love! Madness! (2nd Stage Theater, Hollywood, California)
May 1, 1993... Good theater in Los Angeles is hard to find. However, hope has appeared through The Actor's Gang, who, in their eleventh season in 1992, staged some of the best work in L.A. Over the last decade The Gang has also successfully staged poor...

Woyzeck. (2nd Stage Theater, Hollywood, California)
May 1, 1993... Good theater in Los Angeles is hard to find. However, hope has appeared through The Actor's Gang, who, in their eleventh season in 1992, staged some of the best work in L.A. Over the last decade The Gang has also successfully staged poor...

Rosmersholm. (Stockholm Stadteater, Stockholm, Sweden)
May 1, 1993... Near a sunny window filled with plants, Rebecca West (Lena Granhagen) is sleeping peacefully in large rocking chair, one hand holding a lacy shawl. Awakening with a start, she jumps up, and we sense that the chair and shawl offer no ease or...

Serious Fun! (Lincoln Center, New York City, New York)
May 1, 1993... "The Shocking Truth" was how Lincoln Center billed its sixth annual Festival of Serious Fun! which ended July 30 at Alice Tully Hall after three weeks and ten productions. The Festival was by turns exhilarating, hilarious and dull but never...

Vivisections from the Blown Mind. (Seven Stages Theatre, Atlanta, Georgia)
May 1, 1993... Presented in conjunction with the 1992 National Black Arts festival in Atlanta, Vivisections from the Blown Mind (directed by Clinton Turner Davis) recounts the fall from stardom of a young black rap artist called Castro. The play begins with...

Street Dish: The Stories, Writings and Lives of Homeless Youth. (Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, California)
May 1, 1993... In the middle of August, election year 1992, a Republican party which had grown neither kinder nor gentler but only exceedingly desperate gathered in the mean humid heart of Texas to re-nominate the incumbent. During the convention's second...

The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics.
May 1, 1993... A confession. I wrote a first review of this book which welcomed it warmly but added a note of celto-saxon caution about PC. We have heard a great deal about political correctness over here and we view it with skepficism and dread. Skepticism...

Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage.
May 1, 1993... Early in Not in Front of the Audience, Nicholas de Jongh summarizes the historical narrative he is setting out: "It seeks to trace the way in which a monolithic, commercial theatre, redolent of orthodoxy and conservatism, came to mirror the...

Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to Shepard.
May 1, 1993... In 1956, Jean Vannier published an article in Theatre populaire entitled "languages de l'avantgarde." It was subsequently printed in English in the Tulane Drama Review as "A Theatre of Language." In this essay, Vannier defines three different...

Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture: Play and Performance from Beckett to Shepard.
May 1, 1993... In this book on tragicomedy and contemporary western culture, John Off defineates a particular form of dramatization in its intricate relation to aspects of western cultural conditions. Drawing primarily upon Beckett, Pinter, and Shepard and...

Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor: "The Actors are Come Hither," The Performance of Tragedy in a Secure Psychiatric Hospital.
May 1, 1993... This is a deceptively simple book, in part a moving but straightforward account of the performance of four Shakespearean tragedies in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital between August 1989 and January 1991. At a deeper level it prompts the reader...

The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Work and the Myth.
May 1, 1993... This text represents another foray into the now popular business of reinventing Shakespeare. Like many of its cultural materialist predecessors, Marsden's volume is concerned not simply with that group of plays we imagine to have been single-...

The Jamaican Stage: 1655-1900, Profile of a Colonial Theatre.
May 1, 1993... Probably few people outside the Caribbean were aware of any West Indian drama until the St. Lucian poet and playwright, Derek Walcott, received the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature. Even within the West Indies, theatre artists suspect their...

Junius Brutus Booth: Theatrical Prometheus.
May 1, 1993... Not only is Stephen Archer's work cogent and readable, but it is simply destined to become the definitive work on Booth. The author's narrative style draws the reader into the turbulent life of the great actor and avoids any sense of a dry...

The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw.
May 1, 1993... John Bertolini's book The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw covers six of Shaw's major plays and a number of one-acts, and provides close readings bent on discovering ways in which they furnish insight into Shaw the man as well as his ideas...

Theatre in the Victorian Age.
May 1, 1993... The new survey of Victorian theatre by Michael R. Booth will rapidly become the standard treatment of the subject, replacing the venerable but aging volume first published in 1956 by George Rowell, to whom Booth's book is dedicated. Another...

The Profession of the Playwright: British Theatre, 1800-1900.
May 1, 1993... The new survey of Victorian theatre by Michael R. Booth will rapidly become the standard treatment of the subject, replacing the venerable but aging volume first published in 1956 by George Rowell, to whom Booth's book is dedicated. Another...