Writing and the Modern Stage

With a focus on twentieth-century work, this book offers a new understanding of what text can do in theater. Written for scholars and students of modern drama, theater studies, modernist literature, and critical theory, it revises dominant views of Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Theodor Adorno, and contemporary theater artists.

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It is time to change the way we talk about writing in theater. This book offers a new argument that reimagines modern theater's critical power and places innovative writing at the heart of the experimental stage. While performance studies, German Theaterwissenschaft, and even text-based drama studies have commonly envisioned theatrical performance as something that must operate beyond the limits of the textual imagination, this book shows how a series of writers have actively shaped new conceptions of theater's radical potential. Engaging with a range of theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Jarcho reveals a modern tradition of 'negative theatrics,' whose artists undermine the here and now of performance in order to challenge the value and the power of the existing world. This vision emerges through surprising new readings of modernist classics - by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett - as well as contemporary American works by Suzan-Lori Parks, Elevator Repair Service, and Mac Wellman.