Papers by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr
Dramat współczesny to przystępne omówienie rozwoju dramatu i teatru od 1880 roku. Jak na rozwój d... more Dramat współczesny to przystępne omówienie rozwoju dramatu i teatru od 1880 roku. Jak na rozwój dramatu wpłynęli Ibsen, Beckett, Grotowski? Co osiągnęli wielcy eksperymentatorzy? Jakie tematy oburzały widzów? Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr pokazuje najważniejsze przemiany, jakie zaszły w nowoczesnej dramaturgii, od wczesnego modernizmu przez czasy powojenne aż do odkryć i przełomów ostatnich lat.
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jul 27, 2023
Susan Glaspell in Context provides new, accessible, and informative essays by leading internation... more Susan Glaspell in Context provides new, accessible, and informative essays by leading international scholars and artists on Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Glaspell's life, career development, writing, and ongoing global creative impact. The collection features wide-ranging discussions of Glaspell's fiction, plays, and non-fiction in both historical and contemporary critical contexts, and demonstrates the significance of Glaspell's writing and other professional activities to a range of academic disciplines and artistic engagements. The volume also includes the first analyses of six previously unknown Glaspell short stories, as well as interviews with contemporary stage and film artists who have produced Glaspell's works or adapted them for audiences worldwide. Organized around key locations, influences, and phases in Glaspell's career, as well as core methodological and pedagogical approaches to her work, the collection's thirty-one essays place Glaspell in historical, geographical, political, cultural, and creative contexts of value to students, scholars, teachers, and artists alike.
Open Book Publishers, Oct 11, 2022
The visual iconography of the COVID-19 global pandemic has been striking. Every night for at leas... more The visual iconography of the COVID-19 global pandemic has been striking. Every night for at least eighteen months, BBC News showed an enormous backdrop graphic of the virus, blown up to grotesque proportions that dwarfed the news presenter and made its crown-like protein structures clearly visible. The image served as an instantaneous shorthand for two otherwise 'invisible', near-incomprehensible scales of existence: the microscopic virus itself, and the unprecedented worldwide health crisis it caused. Our iconography for climate change is rather different, typically resorting to the more familiar scale of animal and landscape. Several recognisable images recur on our pages and screens: polar bears stranded on shrinking ice; sea birds drenched in oil spills; vast swathes of the rainforest burned or cut down. But rarely do we see images of climate change that take place beyond the more easily conceived human scale, at the level of microorganisms analogous to the icon of the COVID-19 virus, or on the vastly larger scales of global CO 2 emissions or ozone layer depletion: 'the new kind of incommensurability that is being forced on us by our ecological predicament'. 1 Endearing, easily
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 21, 2017
This chapter reads Hedda Gabler as self-conscious actor and director of her own drama. It builds ... more This chapter reads Hedda Gabler as self-conscious actor and director of her own drama. It builds on the groundbreaking work of Gay Gibson Cima on Elizabeth Robins’s depiction of Hedda in 1891. Cima traced Robins’s development of an “autistic gesture” in acting the role of Hedda, whereby she would pause and gaze directly out at the audience. This created a tension between private mental state and public action, which in turn was part of a wider movement by actresses like Eleonora Duse and Janet Achurch to carve out a specific interior female space on stage through their gestures, expressions, and readings of roles. At the same time as Ibsen’s plays were premiering, suffrage theatre was beginning to highlight the related theme of how women were always performing a role and following a script someone else had written. Hedda is perhaps Ibsen’s strongest representation of women’s self-suppression and adoption of another’s identity.
Modern Drama, 2007
... that there is no fundamental opposition between realism and metatheatrical reflection, betwee... more ... that there is no fundamental opposition between realism and metatheatrical reflection, between ... to the neglect of Lionel Abel, whose coinage of "metatheatre" would have ... anything like Beckett's inertia, Chekhov's disillusionment, Brecht's anti-illusionism, Pirandello's role-playing ...
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Sep 1, 2006
ABSTRACT Judging by the many new ventures into the genre of the 'science play' ov... more ABSTRACT Judging by the many new ventures into the genre of the 'science play' over the last few years, the surge of interest in science on stage continues unchecked. The most interesting aspect of this trend, however, is not quantity but variety, and the ways in which directors in particular are beginning to challenge the playwright-driven and biographically inflected engagements that have so far dominated science on stage. In this article we discuss two recent productions from two prominent directors: Luca Ronconi's Biblioetica, staged in Turin in February–March 2006, and Jean-François Peyret's Le Cas de Sophie K., given in Paris in April–May. The gulf between these productions and more theatrically conventional plays like Copenhagen and Arcadia is wide, and this new work represents a significant step for science plays in the direction of 'postdramatic theatre', a term used by Hans-Thies Lehmann in his groundbreaking work on the subject. We argue that for many reasons these productions suggest that the interaction of science and the stage lends itself by its very nature to the postdramatic condition.
The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science
This chapter compares two plays of the early twentieth century in America that engage very differ... more This chapter compares two plays of the early twentieth century in America that engage very differently with scientific and medical subject matter: Susan Glaspell’s pioneering treatment of heredity, genetics, and evolution in Inheritors (2010a) and Sidney Howard’s dramatization of the quest to identify the cause of and eradicate yellow fever in Yellow Jack (1934), which Howard based on Paul de Kruif’s bestselling book Microbe Hunters. These two plays represent radically different approaches to putting science on stage, and show the deep history and tenacity of certain ways of dramatizing science that still persist. The two plays also raise intriguing questions about how gender figures in conceptualizing science on stage.
Choice Reviews Online, 1998
Preface Cross-Cultural Contexts: Ibsen's Modernism and the Theatre in England and France A Do... more Preface Cross-Cultural Contexts: Ibsen's Modernism and the Theatre in England and France A Doll's House on Stage in London and Paris A Doll's House and Maison de Poupee: A Case Study in Translation Rosmersholm: Toward New Realms of Art Worlds Apart: Hedda Gabler in London and Paris The Master Builder: "An Ibsen within an Ibsen" Conclusion: The Concept of Early Modernist Theatre in Theory and Practice Bibliography Index
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2002
I greatly enjoyed the special issue of ISR on science and theatre (2002, 27, (3)). However, I was... more I greatly enjoyed the special issue of ISR on science and theatre (2002, 27, (3)). However, I was disappointed that there was little analysis of science plays from a theatrical perspective. In all the discussions of science on stage over the last few years, performance and dramaturgy have taken a back seat to themes and issues. How about an account of the development of science plays by those trained and quali ed in the eld of dramatic scholarship and in the practice of theatre?
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Papers by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr