CDE Studies 10

Christiane Schlote and Peter Zenzinger, eds.
New Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama: Essays in Honour of Armin Geraths

Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003.
ISBN: 3-88476-639-2, 494 S., kt., € 32,50

New beginnings in twentieth-century theatre and drama, experiments with forms and content and stylistic departures from traditional models are presented in this collection of essays in four sections, which are reprenstative of Armin Geraths’s interests and achievements. The first, entitled Anglo-American Stages, brings together case studies from the 1920s up to the present. Articles on expressionism and the response to the Vietnam war illustrate the innovative forces in American drama; British drama, which has taken the lead in developing new theatre aesthetics during the last three decades, is represented in articles on Brenton, Shaffer, Bond, Churchill, Kane, Ravenhill, Neilson, Welsh and Lochhead. The focus of the second section is on Musical Stages, where experiments in the opera, the rock opera, the ballad opera and, above all, the musical are analysed. The third section, entitled Multicultural Stages, moves beyond the category of Anglo-American theatre and drama and examines examples of ethnic drama, documentary theatre, and Kenyan and Cuban theatre. Finally, the fourth, overarching section, with the title Interdisciplinary Stages, contains essays which extend the range of genres dealt with in the previous contributions by adding the media of painting, dance, television and film.


Table of Contents

Christiane SCHLOTE/ Peter ZENZINGER
Introduction

I — Anglo-American Stages

TILL KINZEL (Berlin)
Hard Times for Great Men: Sir Winston Churchill Revisited in Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play

JAN HOLLM (Ludwigsburg)
„What did really happen?“: History in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage

UTE BERNS (Berlin)
History and Violence in British Epic Theatre: From Bond and Churchill to Kane and Ravenhill

RAIMUND BORGMEIER (Giessen)
„Let’s make it really, really rude“: The British Confrontational Theatre of the 1990s

PETER ZENZINGER (Berlin)
The „New“ Devolved Scotland Viewed Through Molière’s Eyes: Liz Lochhead’s Miseryguts

KURT MÜLLER (Jena)
The Rise and Fall of Expressionism as an Innovative Force in American Drama of the 1920s

MARGIT SICHERT (Giessen)
Megan Terry’s Viet Rock: Theater gegen den Krieg

II — Musical Stages

HORST DÖLVERS (Berlin)
Dunkelheit über Brigg Fair: Interpretationen der Modernität von Frederick Delius‘ rhapsodischen Tondichtungen

CORD-FRIEDRICH BERGHAHN (Braunschweig)
„A kind of poetry for the instruments“: Überlegungen zu Ingeborg Bachmanns und Hans Werner Henzes Opern

ERNEST W. B. HESS-LÜTTICH (Bern)
Tadzio – or: Intermedial Ephebophilia Benjamin Britten’s Opera Death in Venice

WOLFGANG JANSEN (Düsseldorf)
Das Musical kommt nach Deutschland: Zur Rezeption des populären amerikanischen Musiktheaters im deutschsprachigen Feuilleton der fünfziger Jahre

BERNHARD REITZ (Mainz)
„Babes in the Wood“: The Rocky Horror Show as Carnival and Rite of Passage

STEPHAN SEBASTIAN SCHMIDT (Berlin)
Pacific Overtures: Stephen Sondheim’s Unsuccessful Ballad Opera

ROLF EICHLER (Konstanz)
„See me, touch me, feel me, heal me“: Tommy the Autistic Superstar

III — Multicultural Stages

Klaus Schwank (Giessen)
Mainstream Theatre and „Totem Voices“: Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf

HERBERT GRABES (Giessen)
Die Imaginierung ethnischer Weltsicht im neueren amerikanischen Drama

CHRISTIANE SCHLOTE (Berlin)
Transatlantic Documentary Theatre: Dramatic Gleanings of Racialized Violence and Public Discourses

MIGUEL ANGEL ESQUIVEL RIOS (Havanna/Berlin)
Absurd, existentialistisch, kubanisch? Virgilio Piñeras Electra-Stück als Neuansatz im modernen kubanischen Drama

PETRA BITTNER (Boston)
The Perils of African Post-Colonial Theatre: Between Historical Fact and Fiction in Kenya

IV — Interdisciplinary Stages

RENATE BROSCH (Potsdam)
Insidious Interiors: John Singer Sargent’s Theatrical Versions of Domestic Portraiture

WILFRIED RAUSSERT (Berlin)
Reinterpreting the Body: Gender, Utopia and the Innovations of the Judson Dance Theater and the Living Theatre

FRANZ WIESELHUBER (Giessen)
Mamet and Television

TATJANA PAVLOV (Berlin)
Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover: A Contemporary Revenge Tragedy

MICHAEL KREKEL (Bad Honnef)
Re(tro)spektive: Armin Geraths in Giessen im Prisma der Erinnerung