Studies Theatre Hist & Culture – serie

The story of Czech theatre in the 20th century involves generations of mesmerizing players and memorable productions. Beyond these artistic considerations, however, lies a larger story: a theatre that has resonated with the intense concerns of its audiences acquires a significance and a force beyond anything created by striking individual talents or random stage hits. Amid the variety of performances during the past 100 years, that basic and provocative reality has been repeatedly demonstrated, as Jarka Burian reveals in his history of the dramatic world of Czech theatre. Following a brief historical background, Burian provides a chronological series of perspectives and observations on the evolving nature of Czech theatre productions during this century in relation to their similarly evolving social and political contexts. Once Czechoslovak independence was achieved in 1918, a repeated interplay of theatre with political realities became the norm, sometimes stifling the creative urge but often producing even greater artistry. When playwright Vaclev Havel became president in 1990, this was but the latest and most celebrated example of the vital engagement between stage and society that has been a repeated condition of Czech theatre for the past 200 years. Underlying all questions of the Czech theatre's relevance to its audience is the historically and culturally shaped relationship between the two. In Jarka Burian's hands, it also becomes an extremely important touchstone for understanding the history of modern theatre within western culture.

Collective identities grow from a sense of the past, and the theatre very forcefully participates in the ongoing representations of and debates about the past, sometimes by contesting them and sometimes by reinforcing them. In his examination of the ways in which the theatre after World War II has presented different aspects of the French Revolution and the Holocaust, Freddie Rokem shows us that by ""performing history"" actors - as witnesses for the departed witnesses - bring the historical past and the theatrical present together. Rokem analyzes the significance of stage representations of the French Revolution and the Holocaust in different national contexts: the United States and Europe for performances about the French Revolution and Israel for performances about the Holocaust. By pointing out both the great diversity and the common features of these performances, he draws attention to the complex collective efforts and the creativity of playwrights, directors, designers and actors as they connect their theatrical energies to a specific historical past. He also focuses on the ways in which audiences in different cultures have been affected by and even had an influence on the ideological debates embedded in these performances. Rokem looks at plays and performances by Yehoshua Sobol, Dudu Ma'ayan and Hanoch Levin in Israel; Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkin and Ingmar Bergman in Europe; and Orson Welles, Herbert Blau and Robert Wilson in the United States. Drawing upon these and upon his own life in Europe, Israel and the United States, Rokem makes us aware of the critical interaction between the failures of history and the efforts to create viable and meaningful works of art.

Collusions of Fact and Fiction traces a generational shift in late twentieth-century African American cultural engagements with the history and legacies of transatlantic slavery. With a focus on works by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and visual artist Kara Walker, the book explores how, in comparison to the first wave of neo-slave narratives of the 1970s and 1980s, artists of the 1990s and early 2000s tend to approach the past from the vantage point of a liberal entanglement of fact and fiction as well as a highly playful, often humorous, and sometimes irreverent signifying on entrenched motifs, iconographies, and historiographies.Saal argues that the attempt to reconstruct or recuperate the experience of African Americans under slavery is no longer at stake in the works of artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era. Instead, they lay bare the discursive dimension of our contemporary understanding of the past and address the continued impact of its various verbal and visual signs upon contemporary identities. In this manner, Parks and Walker stake out new possibilities for engaging the past and inhabiting the present and future.

Each day, countless southerners pass symbols and monuments dedicated to white supremacy and the “Old South”: statues, cemeteries, plantations, downtown squares, and even regional theatre stages. Some may only glance at them, ignorant to their history, while others recall the physical and psychological trauma embedded by generations of enslavement.Through the eyes of actors and everyday people, Southern Stages offers an engaging new model for interrogating the performance of southernness, as well as how memory and imagination intersect in spaces that have shaped hundreds of years of American history. Chandra Owenby Hopkins employs cultural memory and lived realities of Black and white communities to examine the earliest and most enduring southern stages: the playhouse and the public square.