Theatre! Theatre!
Session Coordinator: Avis Hewitt
Grand Valley State University
Farquhar’s Theory of Comedy
George Farquhar emerges as one of the great playwrights of the eighteenth century, due, primarily, to his two best known plays, The RecruitingOfficer and The Beaux Stratagem. While these two plays have received a lot of critical attention over the centuries, what has been relatively ignored is the fact that early in his career Farquhar attempted to theorize about the process of playwriting in his essay “Discourse upon Comedy.” Published in 1701 in his miscellany, Love and Business, “Discourse upon Comedy” was written after Farquhar had experienced great failure with Love and a Bottle (1698), and great success with The Constant Couple (1699). My paper explores Farquhar’s essay and juxtaposes the theory he explicitly states in his essay to the theory implicit in his comedies. The conclusion that I draw is that there are both points of convergence and divergence between his theory and practice, and I offer reasons why Farquhar ultimately abandoned all of the theories he posits in his essay for a fresh and new approach to playwriting.
Elisabeth J. Heard
Saint. Louis University
heardej@slu.edu
Collaborative Interpretation in Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts
Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts is typical of much of her mid-career work in its degree of interpretive impenetrability and ambiguity. It is, however, “an opera meant to be sung,” and in order for Stein’s libretto for the opera to be performed, it must enter into a series of collaborations with other groups and individuals: the music composer, the scenarist, the director, the choreographer, the actors, and even the audience. These collaborations combine to enrich Stein’s original text, an example of how Stein’s work exists not in a vacuum, but in a socially constructed network of audiences and readers. Without this collective performance, the libretto Stein’s work is left incomplete. Collaboration and performance, then, become a means of opening up Stein’s text to a variety of interpretations which combine to complete the text. This idea that Stein’s work may be collectively performed offers us a different way of thinking about Stein’s more challenging work, not only her plays, but her other genres as well.
John Reep
Saint Louis University
Performativity and the Discourse of Identity in Harold Pinter’s One for the Road and Mountain Language
The construction of self-identity has never been an easy task for a character in Harold Pinter’s plays, but unique to his later, post-Betrayal, drama is an emphasis on performance itself, through theatrical gestures and language, as a form of politicized identity construction. While his characters may be perpetually unable to locate a space and call it their own, performing the struggle for identification becomes their only identity, whether they like it or not. In One for the Road (1984), an incarcerated family is exiled to a space of identity that is defined by “country” rather than by “family.” Their only locus for identification lies within the rhetorical torture by the interrogator who works to negate who they were and are. Likewise, in Mountain Language (1988), naming and identity is reduced to the singular role performance of “guards” and “prisoners.” The nameless governing forces control not only the physical spaces of incarceration, but also the performance of identity by outlawing the prisoner’s own language. Within these plays, Pinter confronts the problematic discourse of home and exile, of language’s power to both colonize and be colonized, and the inherent complexity in performing the space of identity. By understanding this dialogue within the context of a distinctly self-reflexive politicized stage, I hope to provide another point of entry into the dense context of identity through theatrical performance.
Anthony Santirojprapai
Saint Louis University
santirad@slu.edu