3 Review(s)

Modern(ist) Drama: Essays in Criticism is a casebook of ideas and arguments about Western modern drama, as well as the avant-garde kind. The author gathers a uniquely wide-ranging selection of original essays whose subjects span the late nineteenth century, most of the twentieth, and reach forward into the twenty-first. He thereby provides access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating playwriting (and performance) the modernists had to offer, in addition to supplying guidelines to understanding current drama’s most adventurous developments. Treated in this volume, in chronological order by date of their work, are modern dramatists such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, J.M. Synge, Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Brendan Behan, David Hare, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet; and seminal avant-gardists such as Alfred Jarry, Georg Kaiser, Fernand Crommelynck, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, Carlo Terron, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Joe Orton. The work of these men, and one woman, illuminates the modern tradition together with the astonishing daring of avant-garde dramatists in wrenching drama out of all its old habits (including ‘modern’ ones) and creating a new, distinctive, and free-standing artistic vocabulary.