Bringing together some of the best work from the 2015 Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore, this book covers subjects from ancient Greece to 21st century America with a variety of approaches and formats, including two transcripts, 10 research papers and six book reviews. This year’s highlight is the keynote conversation featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. This volume is the twelfth in a series dedicated to presenting the latest research in the fields of comparative drama, performance and dramatic textual analysis.

Graley Herren is a professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati and an executive board member for the Comparative Drama Conference. He has published widely on modern literature, with an emphasis upon the drama of Samuel Beckett and the fiction of Don DeLillo.

Edited by Graley Herren
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 240
Bibliographic Info: 12 photos, notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2016
pISBN: 978-1-4766-6334-0
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2473-0
Imprint: McFarland
Series: The Comparative Drama Conference Series

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments v

Preface 1

A Conversation with David ­Lindsay-Abaire (Kelly Martin Younger) 7

Visions of Tragedy in American Theatre (David Palmer, Jeffery Kennedy, Sharon Friedman, Jackson R. Bryer, Susan C.W. Abbotson, Stephen A. Marino, Natka Bianchini, Brenda Murphy, Sandra Shannon) 24

Politic Silence: Female Choruses in Lochhead’s Medea and Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale (Lydia Craig) 42

Gender, Democracy and the Justice of Athena’s Vote to Acquit

Orestes (Jacqueline Long) 57

“Kill the Pity in Us”: The Communal Crisis as Crisis of Individualism in David Grieg’s Oedipus the Visionary (Phillip Zapkin) 70

With Rhyme and Reason: Hip Hop Hamlet in Prison (Elizabeth Charlebois) 87

Strange Interludes: Wallace Stevens and the Theatrical Event (Doug Phillips) 108

Spirits in Black and White: Ethiopia as the Black Columbia in African American Pageantry (Lurana Donnels ­O’Malley) 131

In Search of the Void: Metaphysical Theatricality in Giorgio de Chirico’s The Painter’s Family and Emptiness in the Arts (Davenne Essif) 154

Archives of an Ironic Film Fan: The “Tony” Drafts of The Glass Menagerie (Jeffrey B. Loomis) 173

“Bring Your Own Translator”: Communication and Changing Business Paradigms in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish (Martha Johnson) 185

Sympathetic Curiosity, Not Voyeurism: David ­Lindsay-Abaire Takes Up Joanna Baillie’s Abandoned Grief Project (Amy Muse) 194

Review of Literature: Selected Books

Paul Elsam. Stephen Joseph: Theatre Pioneer and Provocateur (Verna A. Foster) 209

J. Chris Westgate. Staging the Slums, Slumming the Stage: Class, Poverty, Ethnicity and Sexuality in American Theatre, 1890–1916 (William Hutchings) 212

Gwendolyn ­Compton-Engle. Costume in the Comedies of Aristophanes (Hallie Rebecca Marshall) 216

Amy Holzapfel. Art, Vision and ­Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeing (Michael Schwartz) 218

Ellen Ecker Dolgin. Shaw and the Actresses Franchise League: Staging Equality (Ann M. Shanahan) 221

Judith Fletcher. Performing Oaths in Classical Greek Drama (Daniel B. Unruh) 224

Index 229