Staging the Impossible explores the most recent critical thinking
on the relationship between the literary mode of the fantastic and
the literary genre of drama with respect to modern theatre. While a
few monographs treat a particular dimension of the fantastic in
drama, the Gothic or the fairy tale for instance, no other volume
provides a critically sophisticated introduction to the diversity
of fantastic drama written and performed in this century. The
essays here lay to rest the illusion that realism is the only
genuine form of theatrical expression and the notion that cinema
special effects have rendered science fiction and the stage
incompatible. Competing with the realism of the first half of the
twentieth century and the "new realism" of the second half have
been a range of successful theatrical repertoire, including the
absurd, the horrific, the supernatural, the mythic, the
dream-vision quest, the postmodern, the hyper-realistic, and the
science fictional. Wide ranging in time and space, this volume
comprises fourteen essays on the fantastic on the modern stage,
assessing dramatic works from the United States, Ireland, England,
Western Europe, and the Caribbean. Canonical figures, such as
Strindberg, Yeats, Beckett, Ionesco, Cocteau, and Stoppard are
studied, along with neglected figures, such as Wassily Kandinsky,
better known as an expressionist painter, and Halper Leivick,
author of the Yiddish play The Golem, and innovative new
performance troupes and individual artists, such as Squat Theatre
and Spalding Gray. Concluding essays are devoted to contemporary
experimental theatre and postmodern drama. A study of science
fiction on stage includes an annotated listing of
fortyEnglish-language plays. Concerned with the interstice of
theatre and the fantastic, this work will be valuable to students
and scholars of both, of genre studies, and of contemporary
literature in general.
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