A study of post–World War II plays set in “total institutions”
such as hospitals, psychiatric wards, prisons, and military bases
Plays of Impasse probes the structure and significance of the numerous
and highly visible plays set in contemporary society’s dead
ends—the hospitals, psychiatric wards, prisons, and military
training camps so aptly described by Irving Goffman as “total
institutions.” Carol Rosen shows how the setting in these plays
tends to engulf and then to exclude the audience, turning an
encompassing stage structure—a closed, controlling, absolute
system—into a protagonist that overwhelms the characters. In
discussions ranging from Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse to Samuel
Beckett’s Endgame, she further maintains that the impasse of
characters in reductive environments supplies a unifying image for
post–World War II drama in general. This state of impasse pervades
contemporary drama. Everyday activities and attempts to endure life in
a parenthesis are vacated of traditional social or moral meaning
onstage. The pain of this kind of survival, spatially fixed, is at the
heart of Endgame, for example, an extreme instance of this mode of
drama at the edge of existence. In plays such as Peter Nichols’s The
National Health, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s
The Physicists, David Storey’s Home, Brendan Behan’s The Quare
Fellow, Jean Genet’s Deathwatch, and David Rabe’s The Basic
Training of Pavlo Hummel, the splintered self, like the divided
society, strives to endure against enormous, codified odds. Even in
plays not depicting the rigidity of institutions, the contemporary
dramatic mode is finally characterized by sparse, introspective action
in a closed system—an onstage model of a world gone awry, a world at
an impasse. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library
uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available
previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of
Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts
of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback
and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to
vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the
thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its
founding in 1905.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400886500
Publisert
2017
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter