Bøger af Annette J. Saddik

This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It focuses on representative plays and performance texts from the 1940s to the present that experiment with both form and content.

The plays of Tennessee Williams' post-1961 period have often been misunderstood and dismissed. In light of Williams' centennial in 2011, which was marked internationally by productions and world premieres of his late plays, Annette J. Saddik's new reading of these works illuminates them in the context of what she terms a 'theatre of excess', which seeks liberation through exaggeration, chaos, ambiguity, and laughter. Saddik explains why they are now gaining increasing acclaim, and analyzes recent productions that successfully captured elements central to Williams' late aesthetic, particularly a delicate balance of laughter and horror with a self-consciously ironic acting style. Grounding the plays through the work of Bakhtin, Artaud, and Kristeva, as well as through the carnivalesque, the grotesque, and psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, Saddik demonstrates how Williams engaged the freedom of exaggeration and excess in celebration of what he called 'the strange, the crazed, the queer'.

Even with his great commercial success, Tennessee Williams always considered himself an experimental playwright. In the last 25 years of his life his explorations increased-especially in shorter forms and one-act plays-as Williams created performance pieces with elements of theater of the absurd, theater of cruelty, theater of the ridiculous, as well as motifs from Japanese forms such as Noh and Kabuki, high camp and satire, and with innovative visual and verbal styles that were entirely his own.Influenced by Beckett, Genet, and Pinter, among others, Williams worked hard to expand the boundaries of the lyric realism he was best known for. These plays were explicitly intended to be performed off-off Broadway or regionally. Sometimes disturbing, sometimes outrageous, quite often the tone of these plays is rough, bawdy or even cartoonish. While a number of these plays employ what could be termed bizarre "happy endings," others gaze unblinkingly into the darkness.Though several of Williams' lesser-known works from this period have already been published by New Directions, these twelve plays have never been collected. Most of these shorter plays are unknown to audiences and scholars-some are published here for the first time-yet all of them embrace, in one way or another, what Time magazine called "the four major concerns that have spurred Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival."