Modern Drama and the Culture of War
Session Coordinator: Anthony Santirojprapai
Saint Louis University
Dept. of English—Humanities 127
3800 Lindell Blvd.
St. Louis, MO 63108-3414
santirad@slu.edu

Curtains of Fire: Shifting Representations of American Identity in the Theater of the Vietnam War

The fragmentation of indescribable experience left over from the Vietnam War needed an outlet–not simply a catharsis, but a way of making some kind of meaning, if not quite making sense, of the psychic visions, physical sensations, and atrocious actions of being a soldier in Vietnam. My essay examines how the memory of personal experience in Vietnam has been revised and translated into public art, particularly in the kinds of “psychodramas” (such as John DiFusco’s Tracers) presented by Vietnam veterans and the well-known “Vietnam plays” of David Rabe, in order to explore the Vietnam War as a central myth in the American imagination and its recreation in American drama. Vietnam is arguably the American war most vulnerable to “revisionism” in the areas of politics and media, but the theater points to another very key form of revisionist myth-making in this context. I look at how Americans historically have made meaning out of experience (art out of war) and how the Vietnam veterans writing, producing, and performing in the theater were responsible for changing representations of American identity, of what it meant to be an American on the stage after the War.

Annette Saddik
New York City College of Technology
annettesaddik@yahoo.com

Exploding Bombs: Masculinity and War trauma in Sam Shepard’s Drama

My paper will argue that Sam Shepard incorporates his understanding of war trauma and disillusionment both through numerous references to WWII and his violent war-torn male characters. Shepard’s men, unable to escape the nightmares of war and disillusioned with the family, church and state’s inability to comprehend and cope with their trauma, express their frustration through explosive outbursts of verbal and physical violence. After examining Shepard’s war-torn men, I will argue that the rage exploding from his other male characters, those who have not fought in any war, share a cultural consciousness of disillusionment brought back by war veterans. The American dream, like many European cities after WWII, is a heap of rubble in Shepard’s plays, and its broken promises insight anger within the men onstage. These men tear down the stage, smash typewriters and throw bottles against walls, in effect, destroy anything that perpetuates the lie of the mind.

Katherine Weiss
University of Łódź, Poland
kweiss73@yahoo.com

The Politics of Power and Supremacy in Post-War Drama

This paper is an evaluation of the culture of war in modern English and Nigerian theatres. The aim is to examine the specific forms of war embodied in the theatres and the manner in which they are fought out or displayed on the stage. This would be done through a detailed analysis of the treatment of foreign characters and ideas in some selected plays of Harold Pinter and Wole Soyinka. In Pinter’s The Caretaker for example the battle for power and domination is fought out between the two groups of characters, Davies (a foreigner) on one hand and Aston and Mick (British citizens) on the other as each group fight to be in control of the dilapidated flat where they live. In Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horsemen the African indigenes clash violently with the white settlers as they determine to prove the supremacy of African cultural traditions. The White settlers are equally unrelenting in exterminating what they see as an unacceptable way of life. In both, casualties abound. People die or are reduced to living corpses. This casts serious doubt as to whether the end is justified by the means.

Osita C. Ezenwanebe
University of Lagos, Nigeria
ositaezenwanebe@yahoo.com