Text & Presentation is an annual publication devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship. It represents a selection of the best research presented at the international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference.
This anthology includes papers from the 31st annual conference held in Los Angeles, California. Topics covered include Chicano theatre, the Vietnam War and 9/11 in the French theatre, actresses and modern Hamlet, Asian theatre, Antigone in pre- and post-communist Germany, adapting an Internet comic strip for the stage, and the future of dramatic literature in the academy, among others.

Stratos E. Constantinidis, former director of the Comparative Drama Conference and former editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, teaches in the Department of Theatre at Ohio State University and lives in Columbus.

Edited by Stratos E. Constantinidis
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 276
Bibliographic Info: 7 photos, notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2008
pISBN: 978-0-7864-3387-2
eISBN: 978-0-7864-5118-0
Imprint: McFarland
Series: The Comparative Drama Conference Series

Acknowledgments       v

Preface       1

1. Chicano Theatre in a Society in Crisis      5

Jorge Huerta

2. Responding to a Society in Crisis      24

Jon D. Rossini

3. When We Dead Awaken: The 1613 Marriage Masques of Shakespeare, Campion, and Beaumont      29

Ellen Caldwell

4. Out of Wasteland: Remembering the Cultural Revolution in Wasteland and the Human Being 45

Xiao Che

5. The Hyperrealities of America’s Vietnam War and 9/11 in the French Theatre of Armand Gatti and Michel Vinaver      61

Les Essif

6. Babel, Babble, and Multilingualism in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabu1 77

Erith Jaffe-Berg

7. Formal Subversion in How I Learned to Drive: A Structure of Meaning       93

Andrew Kimbrough

8. Shaw’s Saint Joan and Shakespeare’s Joan la Pucelle      109

Annie Papreck King

9. Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad and the “Tragedy of Electra”      122

Helen E. Moritz

10. Actresses and the Making of the Modern Hamlet      137

Amy Muse

11. Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: Education and “The Wherewithal to Resist It”      149

Doug Phillips

12. No Red Blood: Clyde Fitch and the Staging of the Neurasthenic      158

Michael Schwartz

13. Antigone in Pre–Wall and Post–Wall German Theatre: Bertolt Brecht’s and George Tabori’s Power Plays      169

Margaret Setje-Eilers

14. Shaw’s St. Joan (1923): A Platonian Tragedy?      185

P. S. Sri

15. Adapting an Internet Comic Strip for the Stage      196

James Utz

16. Antigone and Terrorism: Seamus Heaney Sends a Letter to George W. Bush      205

Kelly Younger

17. The Future of Dramatic Literature in the Academy:      213

A Roundtable Discussion

Verna Foster      213

Miriam Chirico      215

Jan L. Hagens      219

Karelisa Hartigan      222

Rush Rehm      224

Jon D. Rossini      227

Tony J. Stafford      230

18. Asian Theatre

A Review Essay

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei 233

Review of Literature: Selected Books

David Bevington, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance Then and Now 239

Emily Bartels

C. W Marshall, The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy 241

Eleni Bozia

David Krasner, American Drama 1945–2000: An Introduction 245

Dorothy Chansky

John Patrick Diggins, Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy 246

Kurt Eisen

J. Michael Walton, Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English 249

Katharine B. Free

Andrew Stott, Comedy, and Verna A. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy 251

M. Beth Meszaros


Index      255

“edited with care…preserves the conference experience by extending its scholarly dialogue to the wider reading community…many fine essays”—New England Theatre Journal.