Modern drama and the rhetoric of theater / W.B. Worthen.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-219) and index.

In Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, W.B. Worthen examines how the dynamic interplay between dramatic text and stage production shapes the audience's experience in the modern theater. Dividing the "rhetoric" of theatrical performance into three modes--realistic, poetic, and political--Worthen traces the course of British and American drama from the 1880s through the 1980s, showing how textual conventions and performance practices direct the interpretive performance of the theater audience. The realistic theater translates the objectivity associated with science into a vehicle for treating social class. Worthen examines realism's onstage representation of social "others" for an invisible, privileged offstage audience; he discusses the problem drama of the turn of the century (Robins, Shaw, Galsworthy, Glaspell), the experiments of O'Neill, Rice, and the American Method, and the contemporary realism of Pinter, Shepard and Bond. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. The plays of Yeats, Auden, Eliot, and Beckett explore the kinds of authority--over actors and audiences--that poetic theater can achieve. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period (Barnes, Brenton, Churchill, Fornes, Nichols, Osborne, Soyinka) is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Treating a wide variety of plays and drawing extensively on performance history, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater outlines the strategies that have produced both the modern drama onstage and the modern audience in the theater.

Chekhov's camera : the rhetoric of stage realism -- Invisible women : problem drama, 1890-1920 -- Invisible actors : O'Neill, the Method, and the masks of "character" -- Visible scenes : American realism and the absent audience -- Empty spaces and the power of privacy : Pinter, Shepard, and Bond -- Poetic theater and the work of acting -- The discipline of speech : Yeats's dance drama -- The discipline of performance : The dance of death and Murder in the cathedral -- The discipline of the text : Beckett's theater -- Transforming the field of theater -- Breaking the frame of history : Hitler dances and The Churchill play -- History and the frame of genre : Laughter! and Poppy -- Framing gender : Cloud nine and Fefu and her friends -- Postscript : Sidi's image : theater and the frame of culture.

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