THEA 210W Reading for Performance (Fort)

This book foregrounds some of the ways in which women playwrights from across a range of contexts and working in a variety of forms and styles are illuminating the contemporary world while also contributing to its reshaping as they reflect, rethink, and reimagine it through their work for the stage. The book is framed by a substantial introduction that sets forth the critical vision and structure of the book as a whole, and an afterword that points toward emerging currents in and expansions of the contemporary field of playwriting by women on the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Within this frame, the twenty-eight chapters that form the main body of the book, each focusing on a single play of critical significance, together constitute a multi-faceted, inevitably partial, yet nonetheless integral picture of the work of women playwrights since 2000 as they engage with some of the most pressing issues of our time. Some of these issues include the continuing oppression of and violence against women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and ethnic minorities; the ongoing processes of decolonization; the consequences of neoliberal capitalism; the devastation and enduring trauma of war; global migration and the refugee crisis; the turn to right-wing populism; and the impact of climate change, including environmental disaster and species extinction. The book is structured into seven sections: Replaying the Canon; Representing Histories; Staging Lives; Re-imagining Family; Navigating Communities; Articulating Intersections; and New World Order(s). These sections group clusters of plays according to the broad critical actions they perform or, in the case of the final section, the new world orders that they capture through their stagings of the seeming impasse of the politically and environmentally catastrophic global present moment. There are many other points of resonance among and across the plays, but this seven-part structure foregrounds the broader actions that drive the plays, both in the Aristotelian dramaturgical sense and in the larger sense of the critical interventions that the plays creatively enact. In this way, the seven-part structure establishes correspondences across the great diversity of dramatic material represented in the book while at the same time identifying key methods of critical approach and areas of focus that align the book's contributors across this diversity. The structure of the book thus parallels what the playwrights themselves are doing, but also how the contributors are approaching their work. Plays featured in the book are from Canada, Australia, South Africa, the US, the UK, France, Argentina, New Zealand, Syria, Brazil, Italy, and Austria; the playwrights include Margaret Atwood, Leah Purcell, Yaël Farber, Paula Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, debbie tucker green, Lisa Loomer, Hélène Cixous, Anna Deavere Smith, Lola Arias, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, Marie Clements, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Alia Bano, Holly Hughes, Whiti Hereaka, Julia Cho, Liwaa Yazji, Grace Passô, Dominique Morisseau, Emma Dante, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Lynn Nottage, Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Colleen Murphy, and Lucy Kirkwood. Encompassing several generations of playwrights and scholars, ranging from the most senior to mid-career to emerging voices, the book will be essential reading for established researchers, a valuable learning resource for students at all levels, and a useful and accessible guide for theatre practitioners and interested theatre-goers.

Includes an essay on Ibsen's _A Doll's House_. "Realism in theatre is traditionally defined as a mere "seed" of modernism, a simple or crude attempt to copy objective reality on stage. This book challenges this misconception by redefining realism as an under-examined form of visual modernism that positioned theatre at the crux of the unstable interaction between consciousness and the visible world. Tracing a historical continuum of "acts of seeing" occurring on the realist stage, Holzapfel illustrates how theatre participated in modernity's aggressive interrogation of vision's residence in the human body. New findings by scientists and philosophers, such as Diderot, Goethe, Müller, Helmholtz, and Galton, exposed how the visible world is experienced and framed by the unstable relativism of the physiological body rather than the fixed idealism of the mind. The book illustrates how realist artists across media embraced this paradigm shift, destabilizing the myth of a direct correspondence between reality and representation by giving focus in their art to the subject of the "embodied observer." Drawing from extensive archival research, Holzapfel conducts close readings of iconic dramas and their productions, including Scribe's The Glass of Water, Zola's Thérèse Raquin, Ibsen's A Doll House, Strindberg's The Father, and Hauptmann's Before Sunrise, alongside intensive considerations of artwork by painters and photographers like Chardin, Manet, Nadar, Millais, Rejlander, and Liebermann to show how realist drama was influenced by new approaches towards vision arising in science, visual art, and visual culture. In a radical departure from the dominant critical approach to realism, Holzapfel argues that what realist dramatists sought on stage was not a copy of objective reality but greater acknowledgment of the gap that exists between the eye and the world"