Contemporary Drama

In Childress' Wine in the Wilderness,  I was struck by how much focus was rooted around intersections. How ultimately the way we argue for certain avenues of being untimely gets entangled with others argument.  We  see in the play how much class distinctions is intentional made early on. According to Colbert (2009), "In teaching this play, I direct my students’ attention to how the characters’ language suggests their class positioning. I question how Bill’s class-inflected speech differs and aligns with Tommy’s categorization of her neighbors. I alert students to the fact that Tommy’s use of the pejorative separates her from the rioters and establishes her behavior as one of the several demarcations of class differences within the play. While most readings of Wine in the Wilderness, including La Vinia Delois Jennings’s account in Alice Childress, consider the ways Tommy forces Bill, Sonny-Man, and Cynthia to acknowledge their class privilege, critics do not consider Tommy...

This week, if found myself reading something to what I'm used to. Performance art. performance without an obvious narrative. Where the explanation seem less concerned with creating dimensions for a fictionally staged characters, and instead a fictional staged person. Based on our persona, aren't we all staged. Pretending to be people that makes awe and incite impacts in others live?  In-yur-face theatre seems less concerned with creating fictional characters and more of a fictional speaking situation. Things read more like a public speech, a persuasive one, filled with warrants, evidence and thesis argument.  Sarah Kane's Psychosis reads similar to Ellen Hopkins, where the words on the page are less of a character and more of an artistic argument for what needs to be said. Howard Baker's Judith reads like a long soliloquy after long soliloquy. As if Shakespeare had a lot of chips on his shoulders. Challenging people means to stop trying to entertain. Just like the Super...

 What is performance for? Who is it for? Why do we do this? These questions keep piercing around my brain like cracks giving way under ice on a lake bed. In my neck of the woods, in performance studies that is housed in Communication Studies, there is a acknowledgment of how life, especially the ways we can communicate, rivals the conventions of storytelling and staging is just as applicable. If that is the case, that what we see in front on stage mirrors the front of stages that we all perform in our personal and professional lives, why do we need to show an audience how "real" the real world is? From A Street Car Named Desire  to Belle Reprieve, or the violence in demonstrated in Blasted , the impulse on one hand to demonstrate a certain level of uncomfortable pain to harm also seems connected to the feelings on the other hand to be sat down and bare witness (or be an accomplice at times). There's a general feeling of wanting to reject something that is real in the worl...

 Scott Magelssen contends with the ways performers might come into harm as a result of the ways training for theatre manifests, and even the nature of the material might impact the performer. Even in the play that we had to go over this week, A Street Car named Desire, places the actors in situations of violence and confronting less than pleasant experiences. Under the assumption that theatre and art can be a means and vessel of good, and the greater assumption that performers need to suffer for their art at a certain capacity. "The idea, here, of what Jeremy Bentham would call “the greatest good for the greatest number” is paramount (Thebes and Denmark are restored to order), but the principal characters in serious drama must be the sacrificial surrogates that effect the happiness of the culture, and even then, only for the small elite class they represent (McMahon 7, citing Bentham)" (Magelssen, 21).  Is the assumption that we have about the nature of of theatre is that it ...