Staging Modern Playwrights

From Director's Concept to Performance

Sidney Homan

2003
ISBN 0838755631

In this performance criticism Sidney Homan examines his own work in the theater as actor and director, as well as that of others. Staging Modern Playwrights offers a topical approach to various issues, both artistic and philosophical, involving in staging modern dramatists.

Using Pinter's Old Times, Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class, Beckett's Come and Go, and Bogosian's Talk Radio as examples, he raises the artistic, theatrical, and legal questions involved in determining the playwright's intentions, as well as the degree to which the director can and should be faithful to the playwright. With Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others and Feiffer's Little Murder the focus is on discoveries made by actors as they work with the director. The degree to which the set itself influences the director's decisions is the subject of a chapter recounting Homan's collaboration with set designers in Brecht's Galileo, Pinter's The Lover, and a stage adaptation of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's short story "The Secret River" where dancers established the set.

Implicit in Staging Modern Playwrights are two compatible arguments. One is that the play's full "text" is realized only in performance, or rather, through the sum of all its performances. For the text embraces not just the playwright's dialogue but also the actor's subtext, blocking, gestures, and movement, along with the lighting, sound, set, costumes, props, indeed, the entire picture presented by the stage. Two is that, despite the actor's need to "play the moment," or the director's notion of theatrical presence, a play is not just for the moment but rather exists within the larger world of space and time surrounding the theater. Here that text exists in a context that simultaneously historical and economic, political and philosophical. As such, scholars and people working in the theater have much to say to each other. Staging Modern Playwrights is therefore meant to appeal to those both in the study and on the stage, the audience in and outside the house.

About the author:

Sidney Homan is Professor of English and Theatre at University of Florida.