Wrapping Up MLA

Today was the last day of the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. I was only able to attend virtually, but I enjoyed many of the thoughtful discussions online.

Thursday, I attended a session on Automation, AI, and the Future of Contingent Teaching. Predictably, there were numerous technical problems, and the chair was never able to get onto Zoom to lead the session.

Friday, I caught a session called Early Modern Women’s Violence. They didn't have any technical problems. (Perhaps the Zoom gremlins were afraid of all those violent early modern women.) I particularly enjoyed learning about Jeanne d'Albret, the mother of France's Henry IV, and a broad you didn't mess with... unless you wanted to find yourself on the wrong end of a broadsword.

There was also an interesting session on Saturday about Approaches to Teaching Arthurian Literature, but the real reason I was attending MLA this year was because I was chairing a session this morning on Shavian Family Resemblances. Unfortunately, Dibasi Roy couldn't join us, but Alice Clapié from Columbia University shared some interesting information on Bernard Shaw's review of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Dan Stuart of Texas Tech also delivered an excellent paper on the censorship of Mrs. Warren's Profession, including the tidbit that Shaw considered changing Mrs. Warren's titular profession from prostitution to pickpocketing in order to get around the censors.

In the afternoon, I attended a session on Global Encounters, Translations, and Transformations in the Comedia. The speakers shared a lot of information on relationships with the New World during the Spanish Golden Age of literature. Medardo Rosario from Florida International University spoke on Lope de Vega's play about Christopher Columbus (which I have read) and a Tirso de Molina play on the conquistador Francisco Pizarro (which I have not read, but now want to). In Todo es dar en una cosa, Tirso apparently focuses on Pizarro's rise from poverty to glory, but mostly ignores the indigenous people of Peru he conquered.

The other speakers on that panel were interesting as well. Jose Estrada of Carnegie Mellon University talked about a Nahuatl translation of Lope's La madre de la mejor, which tells the story of the parents of the Virgin Mary. Rebecca Smith from UCLA then discussed another religious play, Sacrificio de Isaac, which was adapted into Nahuatl and then translated back into Spanish.

If you missed these talks but are an MLA member registered for the conference, they were all recorded and should be available to view for a limited time.

Report of the Special Committee

In 1832, the British parliament issued a report by a select committee formed to investigate the state of dramatic literature.

Edward Bulwer, who would later go on to write the popular plays The Lady of Lyons and Richelieu, chaired the committee. It also included other members of parliament with literary ambitions, including Richard Lalor Sheil.

According to the report, "a considerable decline, both in the Literature of the Stage, and the taste of the Public for Theatrical Performances, is generally conceded." That this was a matter of urgent business for the government seems almost unthinkable today in the U.S.

Of course, the British stage in the early 19th century was also subject to significant regulation. The Licensing Act of 1737 had solidified a virtual monopoly on spoken-word drama held by the Theatres Royal at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. However, according to the select committee, "such privileges have neither preserved the dignity of the Drama, nor, by the present Administration of the Laws, been of much advantage to the Proprietors of the Theatres themselves."

It was not until the passage of the Theatres Act in 1843 that the monopoly was abolished, allowing the so-called "minor theatres" to perform spoken-word drama. Before that, they were limited to a handful of musical genres such as burletta. What exactly is burletta? Well, the committee tried to find out, and discovered no one really knew. According to James Winston, former stage-manager of the Haymarket and Drury Lane, even the Lord Chamberlain himself--who was charged with regulating drama--had difficulty defining burletta.

While two theatres in London had been sufficient during the Restoration era, the city had grown tremendously since then. The sizes of the two patent theatres were enlarged, but there were still only two. J. Payne Collier (who had his own controversies to come) testified before the committee, "the great evil has always been that instead of multiplying theatres in proportion to the increase of population, the proprietors have enlarged theatres."

Collier opined that London playwriting was at low ebb, and the committee seems to have agreed. It would not be until the end of the century that the British theatre would see the playwriting talent of Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.

Back from Dublin

Yesterday, I got back from Dublin, where I was attending the International Shaw Society's conference on Bernard Shaw's Ireland.

Wednesday morning, I woke up before 5:00 am, jet-lagged, so I walked around a bit before the conference started. That's when I went by the Smock Alley Theatre, the latest in a number of theatres that have been on that street since the 17th century.

The first Theatre Royal on Smock Alley was established by John Ogilby in 1662, not long after the Restoration brought a return of legal drama to Britain and Ireland. The original building was demolished and replaced in 1735.

That second theatre came to be managed by Thomas Sheridan, whose son Richard Brinsley Sheridan later became famous for penning such plays as The School for Scandal. Though the theatre featured such stars as Peg Woffington and Charles Macklin, it eventually closed in 1787.

The building was partially demolished, but some of it got incorporated into a new church beginning in 1811. That church building provides a home for the new Smock Alley Theatre, which opened in 2012. Though quite a long time has passed since the old theatre closed, the new company tries to pay homage to the site's heritage.

Bernard Shaw wasn't born until 1856, so he never attended performances on Smock Alley. Neither did his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, though objects related to both men were on display at the Museum of Literature Ireland, which provided the venue for the conference. It's worth a visit!

Dreams of Dracula

Last night I saw the immersive theatre piece Dreams of Dracula. If you're looking for a fun immersive piece to see, you could do worse. Though not as good as the immersive The Great Gatsby, it has the advantage of still being open, and though the production doesn't have the same resources as Sleep No More, the tickets are more affordable.

Created by Nicole Coady and Jonathan Albert, the piece brings Bram Stoker's novel Dracula to life at the club Musica on 50th Street near the West Side Highway. The upper level focuses on dance pieces, while the lower level is the place you want to be if you prefer dialogue and interacting with the characters. That's also where I ran into Oscar Wilde (played by Kelsey Rondeau), a former classmate of Stoker's from Trinity College in Dublin.

My favorite character was Renfeld, portrayed by Paul Pecorino. He ran about in a straightjacket delivering in his madness lines from Percy Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" among other things. Alas, I never ran into Shelley himself, though Mary Shelley is supposed to appear on some nights, along with Lord Byron and Sigmund Freud for some reason.

Like with Sleep No More, audience members are all supposed to be masked. Those with glasses sometimes had a difficult time with this, but you can put your mask over your forehead, and no one will mind. The dress code is all black, which is good, as any speck of white will shine brightly in the venue's lights. Some of the audience members last night were even better costumed than the actors!

Notes on Post-War Drama

Singing and Dancing Through War

As disastrous as the First World War was, the Second World War was even more devastating for humanity. Eight and a half million soldiers died in World War I, the majority of them in the trenches of Europe. Civilian casualties were even higher, especially when factoring in a world-wide pandemic of influenza, spread by the massive deployment of soldiers. During World War II, however, the distinction between military and civilian deaths became almost irrelevant, as both sides targeted cities in massive bombing campaigns. Perhaps ten times as many people died during World War II than perished on the battlefields of World War I.

Moreover, the end of the war in Europe brought the revelation of what had been going on inside the concentration camps set up by Germany's Nazi government. Prisoners who weren't worked to death, starved, or summarily shot had been ushered into gas chambers to be murdered, and their bodies cremated at an astounding rate. This purposeful liquidation of human life shocked people not so much because of its cruelty, but because of the cold, calculating manner in which it had been carried out by people who had once been the friends and neighbors of many of their victims. Then, the end of the war came, not with a whimper, but with two terrifying atomic blasts over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world learned that more than a hundred thousand people could be killed by a single bomb.

Throughout all of this, the theatre not only continued, but thrived. For the most part, theatre produced through the war was unabashedly escapist. In Europe this meant that variety acts and musical reviews predominated, while in the United States, where the civilian population was relatively safe from the ravages of war, the musical dramas that had developed before the war became ever more sophisticated, integrating song and dance ever more into a fully imagined storyline. The idea of having an integrated musical with song and dance serving to advance plot and characterization rather than just provide entertainment, was hardly new. Playwright Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern had been able to do that in their 1927 musical Showboat, and George and Ira Gershwin had even won a Pulitzer Prize for drama with the politically themed Of Thee I Sing which opened in 1931.

After the Second World War broke out over Germany's invasion of Poland, however, the still neutral United States churned out musical after musical featuring toe-tapping tunes that were in the service of something far more serious than just selling sheet music. In 1940 lyricist Lorenz Hart and composer Richard Rodgers opened the musical Pal Joey based on the popular short stories of John O'Hara. Songs like "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" brought a new level of sophistication to the musical genre while helping to establish vibrant characters on stage. Having to flee Europe, Kurt Weill made a new home on Broadway, penning integrated musicals like Lady in the Dark in 1941. Rodgers and Hammerstein then teamed up to write Oklahoma!, which opened in 1943, two years after the U.S. had officially entered the war. The dark yet still nostalgic look at frontier life seemed to fit the mood of the country perfectly, and the show was a hit, in no small part due to choreography by Agnes DeMille that communicated story and character through dance.

While the war was still raging, Rodgers, Hammerstein, and DeMille opened a new show, Carousel, which went even further both in integrating song and dance with story, and in dealing with serious and even disturbing themes. Based on the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar's play Liliom, the musical Carousel addresses domestic violence, suicide, and speculations about the afterlife. After the war ended, Rodgers and Hammerstein turned their attention to telling the stories of those who had fought it, adapting James A. Michener's book Tales of the South Pacific into the musical South Pacific. The play opened in 1949, just a few years after the events it recounts. In the years that followed, Rodgers and Hammerstein continued to have hits with the musicals The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music.

Questioning Society

As serious as those musicals were, they still tried to create a happy ending that could reconcile audiences to the disturbing aspects of the world they presented. Other dramatists, however, having lived through the horrors of World War II, used the theatre to openly question a society that could create such death and destruction. Eugene O'Neill, who rose to fame as a writer of expressionist dramas, wrote his most famous plays during the war, though they were not performed until later. O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh was completed in 1939 when World War II first broke out, and returns to a much more realistic style than many of his previous plays. The play opened on Broadway in 1946, and was followed the next year by another play O'Neill had written during the war, A Moon for the Misbegotten. That piece includes a character from the previously written Long Day's Journey into Night, a play considered by many as O'Neill's masterpiece, but which the author did not allow to be performed until after his death in 1953. 

Tennessee Williams, who rose to fame during the war with his memory play The Glass Menagerie, continued to challenge the conventions of society after the war with A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, both of which make allusions to the forbidden topic of homosexuality. While Williams was questioning conventional sexuality, Arthur Miller was questioning economic and political assumptions with plays like All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible. Miller's plays, which were basically realistic, but included harsh social comedy, helped to inspire similar American plays in the 1950s that urged reform. These included William Inge's popular dramas Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, and Bus Stop. The professional theatre in New York also began to open up more to African-American dramatists, allowing Alice Childress to have an Off-Broadway success with Trouble in Mind and Lorraine Hansberry to reach Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun.

The American theatre, while pushing boundaries in terms of subject matter, tended to remain very conventional in terms of form. Occasionally, plays like The Glass Menagerie or Death of a Salesman might utilize flashbacks and memory sequences, but they still remained essentially realistic. European writers were more adventurous. The poet T.S. Eliot had already had moderate success with verse dramas in Britain, including Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, when he wrote The Cocktail Party, a modern drama inspired by Alcestis by Euripides. The play premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949, later transferring to London and New York.

By that time, the French playwright Jean Genet had already shocked audiences with his 1947 play The Maids. Though based on a real-life murder, the play brought a non-realistic sensibility to its subject matter, portraying servants who role-play their employer in a sado-masochistic game. Genet followed up that play with his prison drama Deathwatch. Though the play has elements of realism, it purposefully pushes characters to outrageous extremes to show the venality and purposelessness of mundane ordinary life. In his most famous play, The Balcony, Genet pushed these ideas to a new level, blurring the identities of authority figures including judges, generals, and bishops, and the ordinary people who merely pretend to occupy these roles. Life's meaning itself seemed to be flexible and uncertain, an idea picked up upon by a new movement in the theatre.

Theatre of the Absurd

When the critic Martin Esslin wrote his 1960 essay on Theatre of the Absurd, he was looking back over more than a decade of drama that had mystified audiences. Esslin focused on three playwrights who entertained crowds in spite of the fact that their plays seemed to lack any sort of coherent plot. These authors were the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, the Armenian writer Arthur Adamov, and the Romanian writer Eugene Ionesco. All three seemed to write not so much plays as "anti-plays" in which neither the time nor the place of action is ever clear. Rather than telling a traditional story these plays are pure theatre, creating a magic on the stage that exists completely outside of any normal framework of conceptual reality. Works of Theatre of the Absurd portray the world as an incomprehensible place where dialogue moves in circles and full meaning is never revealed.

Beckett's 1953 play Waiting for Godot draws upon vaudeville acts and circus performances to tell the story of two tramps waiting for a man who might or might not show up to meet them. To call the play an allegory about mankind's search for meaning is not incorrect, but the play does not present clearly identifiable allegorical figures, as a work like Everyman does, or as might be found in expressionistic drama. Instead, the characters are individualistic and highly idiosyncratic. Their dialogue frequently repeats, and they face the world with incomprehension. Beckett's subsequent plays, including Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, and Happy Days, all follow a similar vein, presenting fascinating characters in dreamscapes where little makes sense.

Arthur Adamov's works have largely faded from the theatre's collective memory, but his 1955 play Ping Pong managed to entertain audiences with nothing other than philosophical conversations about the nature of pinball machines. Ionesco's plays have had a greater staying power. His early one-act plays The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, and The Chairs make little sense, yet continue to entertain. In fact, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson have been playing continually at the Theatre de la Huchette in Paris since 1957. With his 1959 play Rhinoceros, Ionesco married the absurd with the political. The play shows a succession of ordinary people as each transforms into a titular pachyderm. For audience members who had seen many of their friends and neighbors embrace murderous totalitarian ideologies during the Second World War, the relevance of the absurd play to their own lives was clear.

Peter Brook and Director's Theatre

One of the most towering figures of theatre during the post-war era was not a playwright, but a director, Peter Brook. His career began with productions of Shakespeare and other classic authors in the 1940s, but his re-interpretations of classic plays were far from traditional. When asked to direct the Richard Strauss opera Salome, based on the play of the same name by Oscar Wilde, Brook commissioned sets by the surrealist painter Salvador Dali. His production of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus in 1955 utilized ritual techniques to have ribbons of red fabric stand in for the play's infamous bloodshed. Brook brought his non-realistic stagings even to the works of playwrights generally known for their realism, as when he directed the premiere of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, complete with a choral character providing narration as if the play were an ancient tragedy. Brook also introduced a number of foreign experimental playwrights to English-language audiences, including the Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt, whose play The Visit Brook directed in 1958.

Brook was heavily influenced by the theories of Antonin Artaud and attempted to bring his hypothetical Theatre of Cruelty to life on the stage. This included performing Artaud's play The Spurt of Blood for the first time, albeit in a modified version. In 1964, Brook combined the theories of Artaud with the Epic Theatre of Bertolt Brecht in a production of a play by the German writer Peter Weiss called The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, often called Marat/Sade for short. Based on the fact that the notorious pornographer Donatien de Sade frequently did stage plays that were enacted by his fellow inmates in an insane asylum, the drama imagines what one of those performances might have been like if it had portrayed the assassination of a famous leader of the French Revolution. Though the play takes place in 1808, and the play-within-the-play is set in 1793, both reflect on the conditions of a society in the shadow of the Holocaust and nuclear warfare.

Some of Brook's productions departed from the written text, occasionally replacing words with shrill screams or intense physical movement. Though he frequently had productive relationships with playwrights, actors, and designers, critics tended to hail Brook as the genius behind the productions he staged. Other directors followed Brook's lead in taking a strong hand in the work they staged, frequently leaving their own unique stamp on a piece, whether it was a revival of a classic or a brand new play. This was true of the Polish directors Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski, as well as other directors later on, including Ariane Mnouchkine in France and Peter Stein in Germany. For better or for worse, Brook paved the way for theatre moving away from the spoken word and toward a total experience of the senses.

Theatre of the 1960s

The 1960s were a tumultuous decade for the theatre, as well as for the world in general. Durrenmatt, in his 1962 play The Physicists, pictured the world as an asylum, just as Marat/Sade would do later. What made The Physicists so powerful was its overwhelming pessimism, predicting that mad, evil individuals would gain ever greater power. The following year, Durrenmatt premiered Hercules and the Augean Stables, which had begun its life as a radio play. Like The Physicists, it was strikingly pessimistic, portraying an environmental catastrophe for which there is simply no solution.

In the United States, dramatists frequently blended pessimism together with optimism, as was the case in Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? During the Black Arts Movement, African-American authors brought the civil rights movement to the stage in plays like Blues for Mister Charley by James Baldwin. LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka, captured the spirit of the era in his short play Dutchman. The same year Dutchman premiered, Adrienne Kennedy pushed African-American drama further away from realism with her play Funnyhouse of a Negro, which fractured one woman's personality into a variety of characters played by different actors. She followed that play up with The Owl Answers and A Rat's Mass, which pushed boundaries of form even further by combining the human world with the animalistic.

The British stage was still subject to censorship until 1968, but some playwrights like Joe Orton tried to bring forbidden topics to the stage in spite of government prohibitions. Orton's early play Entertaining Mr. Sloane was a financial failure, though it drew praise from some critics. Orton's break-out play was Loot, a hysterical farce set in a funeral parlor. The work refuses to honor anything, even the dead. Orton's last play, What the Butler Saw, premiered after the abolition of censorship in Britain, so it was able to be even more outrageous. Unfortunately, the production was posthumous, as Orton had been murdered by his lover two years previous to the premiere.

Censorship was also a problem with theatre in Eastern Europe. The Polish writer Slawomir Mrozek began writing Theatre of the Absurd, and his first play The Police was performed in Warsaw and subsequently abroad as well. As Mrozek's work became more political, however, the communist government in Poland became less amenable. His play Tango premiered in the small town of Bydgoszcz rather than in Warsaw, and many of his subsequent works had difficulty getting past censors. In Czechoslovakia, the absurdist writer Vaclav Havel had even greater problems with censorship. His 1965 play The Memorandum made fun of constant changes in language and the government's efforts to spy on its citizens. Though the play managed to get by censors, many of his later plays were not so fortunate, and the writer endured multiple imprisonments for speaking out against the government. Later, however, after the fall of communism, Havel was elected his nation's president.

Notes from Chuck Berst

Bernard Shaw scholars tend to be a generous lot. When I first went to the Comparative Drama Conference, folks from the International Shaw Society made me feel quite at home, and they have continued to be welcoming as I've met up with them at subsequent conferences.

When the Shaw scholar Chuck Berst passed away in 2019, it was a great loss. His wife Roelina, however, has tried to pass on his large collection of books about Shaw, and generously offered to send me the Constable & Co. collection of the great dramatist's works. One thousand and twenty-five copies of the 32-volume set were printed in 1931, and they are a treasure.

In the past, I have always checked out individual volumes of the Constable & Co. set from the library when I needed them. Unfortunately, libraries have been declared "non-essential" for more than a year now, so I was excited to receive the books. Even better, Roelina left in place the bookmarks where Chuck noted passages of particular interest. I've been going through them, trying to glean what I could from his insights.

One volume of Shaw's writing, Pen Portraits and Reviews, had quite a few passages flagged. The first one was a book review called "The Old Revolutionist and the New Revolution" which Shaw published in The Nation in 1921. Though actually about a book by H.M. Hyndman, the article is more interesting for what it says about the novelist H.G. Wells, a long-time associate of Shaw who had joined him in championing Socialism.

Another book mark, labelled "Terry" in an underlined fashion, marks an interesting comment on the actress Ellen Terry, who "has always been adored by painters." That is certainly true, and John Singer Sargent's 1889 portrait of her as Lady Macbeth has frequently been reproduced in prints and postcards (of few of which I might own). Shaw admits that he wanted Terry to perform his own plays and implies that he wrote Captain Brassbound's Conversion for her. Chuck marked in the margins where Shaw acknowledged that the description of the heroine of The Man of Destiny was "simply a description of Ellen Terry."

Shaw's contribution to a memoir on the journalist H.W. Massingham was also marked, but I was more interested in a flagged article called "Shaming the Devil about Shelley." The first article I published on Shaw had to do with the influence Percy Shelley's play The Cenci had on Shaw's early work. Shelley had anticipated Shaw's vision of the "life force" he worshipped, or at least Shaw thought so when he wrote "there never was a man with so abiding and full a consciousness of the omnipresence of a living force, manifesting itself here in the germination and growth of a tree, there in the organization of a poet's brain."

The final bookmark in the volume is for a published letter Shaw wrote about fellow Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde. Each slip of paper was illuminating for me, and I look forward to exploring some of the other marked passages in the set.

Postmodernism

Just as the failed revolutions of 1848 brought about the climax and end of Romantic movements across Europe, the year 1968 brought a climax of the dreams and ambitions of the entire world in the post-war era, as well as the collapse of those dreams for very many.

In January of that year, the Prague Spring began in Czechoslovakia, when the liberal reformer Alexander Dubček became head of the country's Communist Party, promising "Socialism with a human face" and lifting censorship. The wave of liberalization led to uprisings in Poland and other Eastern European countries, as more and more people sought liberation from the oppressive policies of the past.

In the United States, Robert Kennedy launched a campaign for president that drew millions of young, idealistic voters. Meanwhile, his ally Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a civil rights movement that continued to be peaceful, in spite of provocations by white supremacists.

But if the year promised freedom, what it ultimately delivered was death. The bloody Tet Offensive in Vietnam left a huge number of casualties. Both King and Kennedy were assassinated. Student protests in Paris devolved into riots that failed to bring about meaningful political change. Across the United States, many cities were literally burning with social strife, and authorities tried only to contain the violence, unable (and in the view of many observers, unwilling) to stop it.

The Prague Spring collapsed, and days later, so did the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as police clashed with anti-war protestors. The subsequent election of Richard Nixon as President of the United States and installment of Soviet tanks throughout Eastern Europe ensured that violence, repression, and decay would continue.

Though the following year, 1969, saw the first human beings land on the moon, what should have been a victory for all humanity came in the wake of so much chaos that many people were unsure of what humanity's future would really be. Modernism, which had thrived after World War II, seemed hopelessly naïve with its optimism of unending horizons and positive change.

Instead, art from around 1970 on is sometimes labelled postmodern, since it embraces skepticism and irony rather than grand gestures and sweeping narratives. Postmodern art engages with art from the past, but in a way that is eclectic, borrowing snatches and pieces of past art, but deliberately not synthesizing it together into a unified, comprehensive whole. The very notion of totality or universalism becomes a bitter joke in the hands of postmodern artists.

Postmodernism can be seen in architecture, for instance the AT&T skyscraper in New York which is topped by a non-functional broken pediment. It can be seen in photography, for instance in the work of Cindy Sherman, whose "Untitled Film Stills" series shows the photographer herself dressed up in various costumes, looking like she is in a series fictional movies. Postmodern sculptors like Jeff Koons use grand techniques to immortalize items of kitsch, producing such objects as giant stainless steel balloon animals. 

Perhaps the defining element of postmodernism is its unwillingness (and perhaps inability) to get away from the past it always confronts. The postmodern feminist artist Judy Chicago spent years assembling "The Dinner Party" which includes 39 place settings at a giant triangular table, each place setting painstakingly handcrafted to honor a different woman from history, including the playwrights Hrotsvitha, Hildegard of Bingen, and Virginia Woolf.

In theatre, postmodernism can be seen in the work of such playwrights as Tom Stoppard, Heiner Müller, and Janusz Glowacki, each of whom wrote plays that deconstruct the most famous work in the dramatic canon: William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966, shifting the play's center of attention from Hamlet to two minor characters. The play's dialogue is deeply influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett, but its playfulness marks it as a work of postmodern drama rather than the serious modernism practiced by Beckett. Müller's 1977 play Hamletmachine goes even further in its rejection of the conventions of drama, questioning even the importance of an author at all. In 1982, Glowacki premiered Fortinbras Gets Drunk, which takes a Stoppard-like approach of focusing on a minor character from Hamlet, but to probe political issues as much as existential ones. All three writers went on to create other postmodern works, including Stoppard's Travesties, which reworks Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Müller's Quartet based on the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel Dangerous Liaisons, and Glowacki's The Fourth Sister, which sends up Chekhov.

The British writer Harold Pinter was a close associate of Beckett, and his early works, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming, all exhibit the anxieties of post-war theatre of the absurd. Dubbed "comedies of menace," these plays rely on seemingly mundane dialogue and pregnant pauses to create an atmosphere of dread that reflected the unspoken horror of the new nuclear age. In the 1970s, though, Pinter turned in a new direction. Influenced by the postmodern turn toward skepticism and questioning, Pinter wrote a series of plays that retained the sometimes comic and sometimes tragic atmosphere of his earlier plays, but that delved into the nature of memory of past events. In Old Times, three people tell stories about their past together, sometimes revising their versions of the story, and sometimes contradicting the versions of other characters. Pinter's 1975 play No Man's Land depicts two older men recalling their past lives together, but the piece gets us to not only question whether the two men ever met in the past, but also whether the men themselves know the truth. One of Pinter's most commercially successful works, Betrayal, tells the story of a marital affair, but in reverse chronological order, from end to beginning.

Another postmodern British playwright, Caryl Churchill, first rose to prominence with Cloud 9, an attack on Victorian colonialism and sexual repression that implies a link between the two. Her 1982 play Top Girls utilized overlapping dialogue and out-of-chronology scenes to critique the way women sacrifice themselves and one another to get ahead in the world. Written in the wake of the election of the rightwing politician Margaret Thatcher as the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom, the play celebrates feminism while at the same time critiquing it. Churchill's work sometimes appropriates figures from folk belief to discuss contemporary issues, as is the case in Mad Forest and The Skriker, but the hallmark of her plays is an unending drive to experiment. Her fragmented 2012 play Love and Information contains more than 100 characters in dozens of scenes, many of them less than a minute long.

One manifestation of postmodernism in drama has been the so-called Theatre of Images. While most traditional theatre has been concerned with language (one of the six elements of drama laid out by Aristotle), the Theatre of Images replaces linguistic texts with a procession of images that are not necessarily aligned with any verbal meaning. Directors such as Richard Foreman, Lee Breuer, and Robert Wilson are often identified as artists working in a Theatre of Images rather than a theatre of words. Foreman is influenced by modernist writers like Gertrude Stein, but he has also tried to make audience members active participants in the creation of theatre, as he did with his 1976 play Rhoda in Potatoland. He frequently directs plays with non-professional actors, preferring their simplistic expressions over the mannered performances of trained actors.

Breuer co-founded the avant-garde Mabou Mines Theater Company in 1970 (together with JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, Frederick Neumann, and David Warrilow). With Mabou Mines, he has re-imagined numerous classic plays from the canon. His production of Gospel at Colonus used gospel music to re-introduce the feeling of the sacred into Sophocles' play Oedipus at Colonus. Breuer's production of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House portrayed Nora as physically towering over the men in the play, accentuating the absurdity of her situation. His production of Peter and Wendy used Japanese-style puppetry techniques to tell the story of Peter Pan, and has played to adult and child audiences alike.

The term Theatre of Images is perhaps most associated with Wilson, who borrows from different media, cultures, and historical time periods to create eclectic pieces of theatre that usually have no discernible plot. He collaborated with the composer Philip Glass to create the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach. Because of the length of the opera (more than five hours with no intermission) audience members were invited to come and go as they pleased, selecting which parts they chose to pay attention to and which parts to ignore. For the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Wilson planned a massive 12-hour-long performance called the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, but the Olympic Arts Festival cancelled it. Since then, Wilson has frequently worked outside of the United States.

Some scholars have labeled the Theatre of Images as postdramatic, since it eschews plot in favor of creating an overall mood or feeling. Rather than creating a narrative that tells a story, postdramatic theatre focuses on physical phenomena that audiences experience directly. While this style of theatre has its roots with modernist playwrights like Beckett, as well as postmodern writers like Müller, Pinter, and Churchill, it attempts to outgrow the playwright entirely. It renders the text as merely one component of a performance, and usually not even a very important one. Postdramatic performance stretches theatre to its limits, and because of that, most audiences have tended to avoid it, opting instead for more commercial theatrical ventures.

Top Plays of 2019

I've come up with this year's list of the top plays I saw that opened in New York in 2019.

Of course some plays didn't qualify, like What the Constitution Means to Me, which opened last year Off-Broadway, or Timon of Athens, which I actually saw in England.

Last year, Travesties and Twelfth Night topped the list, and this year included pieces produced by Roundabout and The Public Theater as well. Here's this year's top ten, in reverse order:

10. Antony and Cleopatra - Hudson Warehouse provides a mixed bag of free classical theater in Riverside Park, but this year's modernized production of one of the great tragic love stories of all time was definitely worth seeing.

9. The Importance of Being Earnest - Another great free outdoor production this year was New York Classical Theatre's clever take on Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. This year they performed the play in both traditional and gender-swapped versions.

8. Midsummer: A Banquet - Food for Love Productions turned Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream into a tasty treat with this immersive production directed and choreographed by Zach Morris. The Art Nouveau aesthetic worked brilliantly, but it was the remarkable acting that sold the show.

7. Cyrano - Yes, this musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac by the New Group was all over the place, but it still managed to make me cry... a lot. If they end up releasing a cast album, definitely buy it. And yes, Peter Dinklage can sing. (We already knew Jasmine Cephas Jones and Grace McLean could.)

6. King Lear - Glenda Jackson gave a performance of a lifetime in this Broadway production of Shakespeare's bleakest tragedy. Sam Gold's direction was problematic at times, but a supporting cast including Jayne Houdyshell and Ruth Wilson made up for it, and the production was thoroughly enjoyable, if rather long.

5. Caesar and Cleopatra - Gingold Theatrical Group scored a hit again this year with their Off-Broadway revival of an epic historical comedy by George Bernard Shaw. Director David Staller's imaginative staging featured seven amazing actors and one hysterical puppet. I'm looking forward to seeing what GTG does next year!

4. Hillary and Clinton - Lucas Hnath's play about the 2008 presidential primary had already been making the rounds before landing on Broadway this year. His writing is always clever, but Broadway audiences had the added benefit of seeing Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow in the title roles.  The play succeeded by eschewing historical accuracy in favor of a more metaphorical truth.

3. Much Ado About Nothing - The stand-out Shakespeare production of the year was undoubtedly The Public Theater's production of Much Ado About Nothing in Central Park. Director Kenny Leon assembled an incredible cast, and fortunately their performance was recorded and aired on PBS to be shared with the entire nation. If you missed it in the park, make sure you see the recorded version.

2. Scotland, PA - A lot of people have been crowing about Hadestown, which I saw both Off-Broadway and in London, though I have not yet seen in its new Broadway incarnation. The best new musical that I saw this year was Adam Gwon's Scotland, PA, a brilliant adaptation of the 2001 film, which was itself based on a certain Scottish Play. Alas, Roundabout has closed this production, but it deserves to have a longer life elsewhere.

1. Juno and the Paycock - Though I'm not a huge fan of Sean O'Casey, this spring Irish Repertory Theatre presented his three Dublin plays in rep, which is an opportunity not to be missed. Of the three, Juno and the Paycock is O'Casey's best play, and this production was masterfully directed by Neil Pepe to navigate the layers of comedy and tragedy for maximum effect. Irish Rep has a great line-up of shows for the coming year, including Dion Boucicault's classic farce London Assurance, which is running now.

I'm looking forward to that and lots of other great shows in 2020!

Grateful

On this day of giving thanks, I am grateful for some of the wonderful theatre companies in New York City that keep going in spite of the difficulties of this day and age.

I am grateful for Gingold Theatrical Group, which has managed not only to keep its Project Shaw reading series going in lean times, but to continue to produce excellent fully staged work as well. This fall's production of Caesar and Cleopatra brought an epic to life on a shoe-string budget. We need more work like that: dedicated, daring, and filled with enthusiasm.

Though I didn't get out there as much as I would have liked to this year, I'm grateful that Irish Repertory Theatre is still with us, too. Their production of Sean O'Casey's trilogy of Dublin plays was not to be missed, and I particularly loved Juno and the Paycock. They'll soon be opening one of my favorite under-produced plays, London Assurance by Dion Boucicault. Thank you yet again, Irish Rep!

Theatre in the parks is always hit-or-miss, which is why I'm particularly grateful to New York Classical Theatre for consistently providing quality outdoor theatre for the masses. This summer's production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest was a delight. I hope what they have to offer us next summer will likewise entertain and provide food for thought.

Finally, I'm grateful to Urban Stages for bringing new work to life and being one of the few New York theatres left to take unsolicited scripts. It's a pity we don't have more theatres in this city with the type of open-door policy that has helped Urban Stages discover truly new voices.

Some of the larger theatre institutions in New York frequently get applause for their good work, but it's smaller companies like these that really keep New York theatre alive and vibrant!