William B. Worthen

Plays, Criticism, Theory

Modern Drama

Swannee Bennett

-- 1993 Award of Merit, American Association for State and Local History

Arkansas Made: Photography, art

The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator. The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.

Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater

Joanne Tompkins

Richard Paul Knowles

The contributors examine varied topics such as the analysis of periodicity; the articulation of social, political, and cultural production in theatre; the re-evaluation of texts, performances, and canons; and demonstrations of how interdisciplinarity inflects theatre and its practice.

Defining the Field

The HB Anthology of Drama has set the pace in comprehensive coverage of world theatre from Greek to the present. This anthology continues that trend with a strong representation by women writers and by writers of color. Each unit of the third edition begins with an extensive introduction, placing drama in the context of a specific historical era. Each play is accompanied by a brief biography of the playwright and a short introduction to the play and concludes with a selection of critical readings drawn from the period, essays on performance, and a contemporary theater review of one play in that unit. The text can be adapted for a range of courses, such as Theatre History, Modern Drama and various surveys of drama, i.e., by genre (tragedy, comedy), by national origin (American) or as a survey or dramatic literature.

The Harcourt Brace Anthology of Drama

Analyzing the relationship between dramatic action and the controversial art of acting, William Worthen demonstrates that what it means to act, to be an actor, and to communicate through acting embodies both an ethics of acting and a poetics of drama. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Idea of the Actor

Volume II covers the introduction and spread of painting and photography, illustrated with approximately 200 photographs. (Volume I is out of print.)

William B. Worthen

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