Text & Presentation, 2016

Bringing together some of the best work from the 2016 Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore, this collection of essays presents the latest research in comparative drama, performance and dramatic textual analysis. A variety of approaches and formats—including twelve research papers, five book reviews and one transcript—cover topics ranging from Ancient Greece to 21st century America. A highlight is the keynote conversation featuring the great American playwright Tony Kushner.

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: 252
Bibliographic Info: 8 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2017
pISBN: 978-1-4766-6335-7
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2865-3
Imprint: McFarland
Series: The Comparative Drama Conference Series

Table of Contents




Acknowledgments vii


Preface 1


A Conversation with Tony Kushner (James Fisher)  5


Signifyin’ Sam: Motivated Signifyin(g) and Future Nostalgia in ­Post-Reconstruction Black Musicals  (Beck Holden)  31


Identifying with Presence, Absence and Identity in Laurie Anderson and Mohammed el Gharani’s Habeas Corpus (Ariel Sibert)  47


Eating Your Children: Timberlake Wertenbaker and Erin Shields Adapt the Myth of Procne and Philomela (Clara Shaw Hardy)  62


Terence, Wilder and Saturated Characterization (Mitch Brown)  76


Molière’s Don Juan and Ukrainka’s The Stone Master: Freedom, Authenticity and the Other (George Mihaychuk)  92

Musical Strindberg: The Soundscape of Ett Drömspel and Spöksonaten (Brigitte Bogar)  110


Acting and the Politics of Print: A “Monster of Illiteracy” in the Published Pygmalion (Jeffrey M. Brown)  124


Trying to Understand Adorno Trying to Understand Endgame (Doug Phillips)  143


Dialogues of Dueling Genres: Williams’s Streetcar and Rose Tattoo (Jeffrey B. Loomis)  158


“What are you doing in my hallucination?” Immigration, Hospitality and Transformation in Angels in America (Jodi Kanter)  175


To Catch the Conscience of the Queen: Michael Laurence’s Hamlet in Bed (William Hutchings)  187


You Can Take the Catholic Out of the Church, but…: Rajiv Joseph’s Catholic Dramaturgy (Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.)  203


Review of Literature: Selected Books Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka, eds. Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (Jeffrey M. Brown)  219


Matthew Kendrick. At Work in the Early Modern English


Theater: Valuing Labor (Brittany Proudfoot Ginder) 222


Melissa Mueller. Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy (Karelisa Hartigan)  225


Esther Kim Lee. The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (William Hutchings)  229


Blair Hoxby. What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early


Modern Canon (Michael Schwartz)  232


Index  237