Hagood: Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers

Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers

Taylor Hagood

Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers seeks to rescue the plays of seven black women, Marita Bonner, Mary P. Burrill, Thelma Duncan, Shirley Graham, Zora Neale Hurston, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, and Eulalie Spence, from obscurity. This volume is the first book-length treatment to address these plays and their authors exclusively rather than as part of a discussion of other African American playwrights from different eras. It is also one of the few to carry out an extensive discussion of secrecy’s role in both literary representation and social interaction.

Exploring secrecy from the standpoints of poststructuralist language theory and game theory as well as dramatic performance, Taylor Hagood argues that the secret—a thing visible for its very invisibility—is a fundamental cog in the machinery of society, employed as a tool for both oppression and subversion. The many facets of secrecy have been particularly salient in African American culture, informing everything from the Underground Railroad to the subtle coding of Signifying. Most devastatingly, people on both sides of the color line are caught within a web of secrecy that is the result of centuries of distrust, doubt, and fear, a fact that is powerfully manifest not only in these one-act plays but in the reader’s/spectator’s interactions with them.

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Seniors: Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing

Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing

The Culture of Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater

Paula Marie Seniors

Paula Marie Seniors’s Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing is an engaging and well-researched book that explores the realities of African American life and history as refracted through the musical theater productions of one of the most prolific black song-writing teams of the early twentieth century. James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson, and Bob Cole combined conservative and progressive ideas in a complex and historically specific strategy for overcoming racism and its effects. In Shoo Fly Regiment (1906–1908) and The Red Moon (1908–1910), theater, uplift, and politics collided as the team tried to communicate a politics of uplift, racial pride, gender equality, and interethnic coalitions. The overarching question of this study is how roles and representations in black musical theater both reflected and challenged the dominant social order. While some scholars dismiss the team as conformists, Seniors’s contention is that they used the very tools of hegemony to make progressive political statements and to create a distinctly black theater informed by black politics, history, and culture. These men were writers, musicians, actors, and vaudevillians who strove to change the perception of African Americans on stage from one of minstrelsy buffoonery to one of dignity and professionalism.

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MacKenzie: The Theatre of the Real

The Theatre of the Real

Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim

Gina Masucci MacKenzie

The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim traces the thread of jouissance (the simultaneous experience of radical pleasure and pain) through three major theatre figures of the twentieth century. Gina Masucci MacKenzie’s work engages theatrical text and performance in dialogue with the Lacanian Real, so as to re-envision modern theatre as the cultural site where author, actor, and audience come into direct contact with personal and collective traumas. By showing how a transgressively free subject may be formed through theatrical experience, MacKenzie concludes that modern theatre can liberate the individual from the socially constructed self.

The Theatre of the Real revises views of modern theatre by demonstrating how it can lead to a collaborative effort required for innovative theatrical work. By foregrounding Yeats’s “dancer” plays, the author shows how these intimate pieces contribute to the historical development of musical as well as modern theatre. Beckett’s universal dramas then pave the way for Sondheim’s postmodern cacophonies of idea and spirit as they introduce comic abjection into modernism’s tragic mode. This exciting work from a new author will leave readers with fresh insight to theatrical performance and its necessity in our lives.

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Spinrad: The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage

The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage

Phoebe S. Spinrad

“In the great age of the English drama, death walked the stage in many guises, constantly reminding Renaissance man and woman that all endings were one end. But such a vivid reminder was not new to the Renaissance audience, and in fact was not only a mutation but a muting of the Death that had frightened and comforted audiences for two centuries before. Without the medieval Legends and Dances of Death, without the Dreary Deaths that brandished spears from medieval painting and stage, there would have been no Doctor Faustus, no Bosola, no Yorick.

“It is the purpose of this study, then, to examine the way in which four centuries of art managed to grapple together Everything and Nothing into the greatest drama of the English language—only to lose sight, at the end, of what they were grappling with, and to wrestle helplessly with the scenery as the curtain came down.” —from the preface

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Beja, Gontarski, and Astier, eds.: Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Humanistic Perspectives

Edited by Morris Beja, S. E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier

This collection of original essays has been assembled to honor Samuel Beckett on his seventy-fifth birthday—a celebration to which the writer himself has made his own contribution in the form of a play especially written for the occasion and entitled Ohio Impromptu. This special piece appears in an appendix to the volume, where it has been reproduced, through a combination of photographic facsimile and textual transcription, in various versions through which it evolved to its final form

Samuel Becket—the Irishman who lives permanently in France and writes primarily in French (though he translates everything he writes into either English or French, depending on the original language of composition)—has achieved fame throughout the world for his work in fiction, drama, and film. A particularly multicultural writer, Beckett’s intellectual interests are so broad and so diverse that his writings in all media are best approached from a variety of disciplines; and this is the approach adopted by the editors of this collection. They have included, not only detailed treatments of literary matters, but also close examinations of such topics as, among others, Beckett’s theater in performance, the philosophical traditions against which he writes, his sense of history and politics, his close relation with the visual arts, the complex uses to which his language is put, and his effort to write “without style.” The result is a series of critical essays that come close to being the measures of the man and the artist they honor—the writer found particularly congenial to he modern sensibility as one in whose work the illusions and deceptions of the outer world resist each system that attempts a faithful, comprehensive, and coherent account, and that, in the end, must inevitably collapse under too great a weight of enigma and error.

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Burkman: The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter

The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter

Its Basis in Ritual

Katherine H. Burkman

The drama of Harold Pinter evolves in an atmosphere of mystery in which the surfaces of life are realistically detailed but the patterns that underlie them remain obscure. Despite the vivid naturalism of his dialogue, his characters often behave more like figures in a dream than like persons with whom one can easily identify. Pinter has on one occasion admitted that, if pressed, he would define his art as realistic but would not describe what he does as realism. Here he points to what his audience has often sensed is distinctive in his style: its mixture of the real and surreal, its exact portrayal of life on the surface, and its powerful evocation of that life that lies beneath the surface.

Katherine H. Burkman rejects the contention of some Pinter critics that the playwright seeks to mystify and puzzle his audience. To the contrary, she argues, he is exploring experience at levels that are mysterious, and is a poetic rather than a problem-solving playwright. The poetic images of the play, moreover, are based in ritual; and just as the ancient Greeks attempted to understand the mysteries of life by drawing upon the most primitive of religious rites, so Pinter employs ritual in his drama for his own tragicomic purposes.

The author explores two distinct kinds of ritual that Pinter develops in counterpoint. His plays abound in those daily habitual activities that have become formalized as ritual and have tended to become empty of meaning, but these automatic activities are set in contrast with sacrificial rites that are loaded with meaning, and force the characters to a painful awareness of life from which their daily routines have served to protect them.

Pinter’s ritual counterpoint is one that reveals the writer’s keen awareness of the rhythms of modern life as well as his awareness of those profound rhythms of sacrificial destruction and renewal that have always informed the best of drama. The playwright explores the celebration that accompanies the most cruel rituals of life, and his plays become an initiation for us from which we may emerge with a clearer insight and some feeling of renewal. It is in Pinter’s highly individual treatment of ancient ritual rhythms that Burkman finds the major import of his compelling art.

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Pierce: Shakespeare’s History Plays

Shakespeare’s History Plays

The Family and the State

Robert B. Pierce

The concept of the family as a microcosm of the state dates back to antiquity. It was revived in the Renaissance, when it became a common sentiment in the literature of Elizabethan England and provided William Shakespeare with a public basis for his art.

Robert B. Pierce systematically examines the nine history plays of the 1590s in the approximate sequence of their composition. He discovers in them a constant elaboration and rich development of the correspondence between the family and the state into an ever more subtle and effective dramatic technique.

Through a careful analysis of the language, characterization, and plots of the chronicles, Pierce demonstrates how the family served as an analogue of those grave events that marked the turbulent reign of King John and the subsequent terrible century of civil strife and wars with the French that haunted the imaginations of Englishmen more than a hundred years later. At times, he finds, Shakespeare depicts the family as a miniature of the kingdom, and the life of the family becomes a direct or ironic comment on the larger life of the commonwealth. At others, the family is inextricably bound up in a political situation by means of characters who are portrayed both in their public roles and as members of their families.

No dramatist treating of those persons and events that are the stuff of the chronicles could avoid depicting the family; for kings and princes are necessarily fathers and sons, husbands and brothers. But Shakespeare’s special contribution is to make the language and episodes of family life relate closely to the political themes that informed his drama—themes that, for his audience, were not mere abstractions but real issues involving the ever present danger of drastic disruption of the established order. Marriage and the relationship between father and son are the materials of a highly personal drama. By exploiting the correspondence between the family and the state recognized and accepted by his audience, Shakespeare, in plays shaped by Tudor political ideas, used these personal, familiar, and familial elements to bring a special immediacy to the rise and fall of kingdoms and kings.