TY - BOOK ID - 1629477 TI - Modern drama and the rhetoric of theater PY - 1992 SN - 0520074688 0585280983 9780585280981 9780520074682 9780520963047 0520963040 0685526836 9780685526835 0520286871 1336029730 PB - Berkeley : University of California Press, DB - UniCat KW - English literature KW - American literature KW - Drama KW - anno 1900-1999 KW - American drama KW - English drama KW - Theater KW - Théâtre américain KW - Théâtre anglais KW - Théâtre KW - History and criticism KW - Production and direction KW - History KW - Histoire et critique KW - Production et mise en scène KW - Histoire KW - History and criticism. KW - 820-2 "19" KW - -English drama KW - -Theater KW - -Dramatics KW - Histrionics KW - Professional theater KW - Stage KW - Theatre KW - Performing arts KW - Acting KW - Actors KW - Engelse literatuur: toneel; drama--20e eeuw. Periode 1900-1999 KW - -History KW - -Engelse literatuur: toneel; drama--20e eeuw. Periode 1900-1999 KW - 820-2 "19" Engelse literatuur: toneel; drama--20e eeuw. Periode 1900-1999 KW - -English literature KW - -American drama KW - Théâtre américain KW - Théâtre anglais KW - Théâtre KW - Production et mise en scène KW - Dramatics KW - Theater - English-speaking countries - History - 20th century. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:1629477 AB - 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 1880's through the 1980's, 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. ER -