POMO Drama

* 2008 -- Stoppard & Postmodernist Theatre : pomo.vtheatre.net

... my POMO webpages logo?

1. Director's POV

2. PM Dramaturgy

3. Script (not play) writing (not wrighting)

filmplus.org/thr/pomo

filmplus.org/plays

...

script analysis *

Williams: We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

POMO:

Memory doesn't know SPACE. Anything spacial must be reconstructed, recalled. The only way to do it is through TIME, the true medium of mind (I think it's Bergson).

A-Century

My personal interest in postmodern drama technologies is based on Virtual Theatre projects I direct -- the perfomance texts.
I guess, I am American with "this longing for different type of world. And this longing is revolutionary." (Muller)

Memory -- "dialogue with the dead" -- Americans do not have it. Here I am Russian... Dead are the silent majority when compared to the living (Muller).

Perhaps, I should talk about my own views on Self and total separation from the Social. The techno-cocoon I am in asks for it, I am "socialized" by technology all the time.

This page is for Playscript Analysis class, where we study 20th century plays only.

See POMO for definitions of Postmodernity. See Glossary for terminology. Read the commentaries in your textbook (last part).

PM -- After 1968

Y2K and the Millennium

Get the mind of Nietzsche -- and you can read the POMO signs!

Beckett Page

... Did you read pomo page?

Summary

Read Pomo Page; the Postmodernism is more the grad level class, but we have to touch it here, because THR413 is last dram-analysis class before you (BA) graduate.

Questions

Maybe I should move some issues out of the class pages -- research, nonfiction?

Notes

Encyclopedia of Postmodernism (Routledge World Reference)

Providing an all-encompassing and welcome addition to the field this encyclopedia contains entries on foundational concepts of postmodernism which have revolutionized thinking in every intellectual discipline. "Theatre is not a mirror but a magnifying glass." Mayakovsky An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism

* POMO -- the first page!

"Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It's hard to locate it temporally or historically, because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins." Dr. Mary Klages, English Department, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Waiting for Godot, Beckett's first play, was written originally in French in 1948 (Beckett subsequently translated the play into English himself). It premiered at a tiny theater in Paris in 1953. This play began Beckett's association with the Theatre of the Absurd, which influenced later playwrights like Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard.
The most famous of Beckett's subsequent plays include Endgame (1958) and Krapp's Last Tape (1959). He also wrote several even more experimental plays, like Breath (1969), a thirty-second play. Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969 and died in 1989 in Paris.

* POMO = Mid 20th century? Over 50 years already?

ctheory.net ***

PMC Post Modern Culture *

Nietzsche : Forbidden generosity.-- There is not enough love and goodness in the world for us to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things. [from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.129, R.J. Hollingdale transl.]

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop. ~Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland [ Here, here! ]

A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights by John L. Digaetani; Greenwood Press, 1991

- Robert Anderson - Alan Ayckbourn - Eric Bentley - Ed Bullins - Mart Crowley - Jules Feiffer - Horton Foote - Michael Frayn - Larry Gelbart - Amlin Gray - Simon Gray - John Guare - A. R. Gurney - ChriS+̄topher Hampton - William M. Hoffman - Israel Horovitz - Tina Howe - David Henry Hwang - Albert Innaurato - David Ives - Barrie Keeffe - Romulus Linney - Craig Lucas - Terrence Mcnally - Adrian Mitchell - Richard Nelson - Marsha Norman - Eric Overmyer - David Storey - Timberlake Wertenbaker - August Wilson - Lanford Wilson - Paul Zindel

2006: Pinter

Projects: "postmodern gender"... Pinter vs. Mamet?

POMO acting? (Performance)

The Postdramatic Theatre of Richard Maxwell [2003]

The Post-Modern World
The Logic of Late Capitalism

Postmodern Self

[ back to POMO Page ]

Deep Symbols: Their Postmodern Effacement and Reclamation. By Edward Farley. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International. xii + 145 pp. $16.00 (paper).

R/G are Dead (UAF'07) see direct.vtheatre.net

... Theatre Theory Pages - Part 5. PM :

... THR331 Class "Stage Directing" -- part 4. Theory and Finals

...

postmodern and vTheatre (pomo project) 2006

POMO Drama: Pinter, Shepard & Hamletmachine

Sam Beckett @ Amazon *

NB. I have to give them one page -- American and British Post-Beckett pays. (See A-Century -- class notes). Also, I include "Hamletmachine" (Muller) as a formal (and even "formalistic") example of Pomo.
There is another page on AmDrama (A. Miller, who is in DramLit class).
The emphasis in Playscript Analysis class is on Northern playwrights, that is the main reason why the North Americans are on the list. O'Neill, Williams, Shepard (Miller -- DramLit, although it should end in 19th century)... and British ones.
I wish that Mamet could be in PM category (American urbanism). Right now only O'Neil is on AmDrama page, which I would like to preserve for analysis of what is American? (O'Neill will have his own page).
The next wave of changes will be made in the Spring 2000 for Dramatic Literature Class THR215
Thematic Breakdown
Family
Father & Sons
Man v. Woman
Money, Work, Happiness, Freedom, Slavery (topics)
Post-Protestant Mind (and our First US Pomo President, now ex)
[ more themes in Film600 directory, which serves as extra-reading for Film Analysis class ]
(see THEMES directory)
POMO Chronotope
From unpredictable past (Pinter) to unpredictable present (Shepard) to unpredictable (forgotten) reality...
Since the End of Time (Beckett) we try to understand the vertical (non-linear) structure of time. We try hard to comprehand the existence of time in Eternity. The best is to explain it from the hyper-text model...
Memory never was linear only (associations); the plot evolves by being based on previous and the next scene, but in comparasion with its entire entity. (Often, students thinks that "exposition" never ends -- new information is added layer-by-layer).
Postmodern mind wants to demostrate this principle of condensed time -- Hamletmachine. As if in the last moment of the dying world the whole history is flashed within one second. Can we observe it in one glance? (Piled up ruins of history, Walter Benjamin).
If the real space is replaced by Virtual Space, Time-Line opens into several dimentions, becoming SPACE. Travel in Time-without-Space is nothing but leaps (the favorite device of the science fiction); on the Web it's known as clicks. The jumps, when we move from one horizon of time-process to another time horizon. They all active and in process at the same time, we simply step out of the elevator on different floors.
..."synthetic fragment," a kind of assemblage play constructed from diverse parts.
...a dramaturgy of "flooding" (Aurthuad) or inundating the audience. This was aimed at the paradoxical project of both involving and overwhelming the viewer, offering too many simultaneus options to too much stimuli and thus defeating any easy position-taking.
"Beginning with the formal innovations of Beckett's late plays, which give theatrical form to "memoried states of being," Malkin goes on to study the stakes of memory for playwrights with different national and ethnic backgrounds. Shepard and Parks, through varying tactics and from very different points of view, dramatize the erasures of American memory, its disappearance into amnesia and commodification. Mueller and Bernhard, on the contrary, theatricalize a surfeit of historical memory and a chaos of ideological traces. All the plays aim to contest--and evoke--memories of collective pasts, to recontextualize, reopen taboo discourses, intervene in the politics of memory, and to engage (and occasionally enrage) the memoried consciousness of its target audience--with whose memory, and repression, these plays and their productions are in constant dialogue." Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama, Jeanette R. Malkin 6 x 9. 272 pgs. (1999) Cloth 0-472-11037-3 $60.00S
lanscapes of consciousness -mindscapes (p.72)
Explosion of Memory/Description of a Picture (1984)
Poem-plays: "antitheatrical theatre collages." Prose? Death of Genre (Beckett).
no memory = slave. Aitmatov on Mongolian torture.
Dramatic texts "which could serve as gravitation centers" (Letter to Wilson, Death Destruction and Detroit II -- DD&D II).
Stanislavsky's "theory of affective memory turns the actor into coauthor who rewrites a character by channeling a fictive text through remembered one." (pp 3-4)
NB. Plato's doctrine of anamnesis and electronic virtuality (restoration of ideal Forms in cyber-medium). Horizontal and Vertical Memory, Individual and Collective.
Chekhov, Strindberg, Williams -- the end of modernism (utopia).
"Frederic Jameson's essay, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, describes the ethos of its time. Published in 1984, the work provides a detailed analysis of the social and political implications of postmodernism, and predicts the continuation of a trend already well in progress in the 1980's: the further fragmentation of the self. Jameson's predictions are validated and updated in Sherry Turkle's book Life on the Screen (Touchstone Press, 1995), published a decade later. Where Jameson looks at art, literature and architecture in the 1980's, Turkle looks at virtuality and the online world in the 1990's for evidence of the postmodern decentralization of the self, and what its sustainable and unsustainable consequences might be." Postmodernism, Virtuality, Globalization and the (fragmented) Self - 1/3..."
Depthlessness and Simulacrum. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen. New York, NY: Touchstone Books, 1995.
"With Freud, the theatre of memory moved inward, beyond the imagination, into the psyche; and its drama was played out between repression, symbolic encoding, and therapeutic retrival." (p.5)
The Paul Virilio Reader (European Perspectives)

[Where do I start the pomo -- Chekhov?]

PS

The whole THR413 Playscript Analysis is the POMO POV!

I will collect all postmodern pages in 413 subdirectory.

How to act in PM drama? rethinking:

Formal Elements

a) stage directions.

b) division into acts and scenes

c) dialogue, formally introduced by each character's name.

d) performance in a specific building, a theatre, which contains a stage, curtains, footlights and seats for an audience

e) the action is compressed in time since a play usually takes about 2-3 hours.

f) Drama is classified as:

tragedy—a play with a sad ending, focusing on strong feelings. The protagonists are of royal birth and have noble characters which make their fall-downs tragic.
comedy-a play with a happy ending and with middle-class protagonists. A comedy displays the folly of the protagonist by means of burlesque episodes. Therefore it contains social critique.
tragi-comedy;— a social comedy where the serious is blended with the comic. Friel continues the hybrid tradition of tragicomedy, a form which is created out of the breakdown of the stable tradtional categories of pure tragedy and pure comedy(Andrews 71).
laughter and humour as in Friel's play has the function to undermine authority. See Concepts and Definitions: carnivalization, carnival laughter

( more @ source )

Go to Theatre Theory directory.

Homework

Textbook Critical Reading texts.

Method(s) of PM analysis (413)

Next: Theology of Technology

* All references: Memory-Theatre and Postmodern Drama, Jeanette R. Malkin, The University of Michigan Press, 1999 (Theatre: Theory/Text/Performance), Chapter 3 -- Heiner Muller's Lanscapes of Memory * The Zizek Reader (Blackwell Readers)

The Zizek Reader provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to this writer's work. Zizek has an international reputation and has had a considerable influence on both scholars and students. Divided into three parts, Culture, Women and Philosophy, the Reader not only gives careful explications of the individual extracts within each section but also connects these extracts in a general introduction, mapping the shiftings of Zizek's thought within a Lacanian framework. The book includes a Foreword by Zizek and a new, previously unpublished essay on cyberspace. The Adorno Reader (Blackwell Readers)

This volume is the essential collection of readings from the multidisciplinary work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential and admired German thinkers of the twentieth century.

In order to allow a ready appreciation of a specific area of Adorno's thought, The Adorno Reader organizes the most important of his writings into five sections: the task of philosophy, the concepts of philosophy, sociological writings, culture, and aesthetic criticism.

In addition to a general introduction, the editor has provided individual introductions to all of the material in the book. By explicating some of the more obscure terminology and arguments these introductions clearly situate each piece within the larger context of Adorno's writings and his philosophical tradition.