Focusing on both scripts and performance, Mirrors of Our Playing takes a fresh look at modern English-speaking drama, from its Anglo-Irish beginnings to its contemporary cross-fertilizations and international dispersals. It shows how most important English-speaking theater has been shaped in accord with several major paradigms, while it examines four major presences in that theater: Lord Byron, Samuel Beckett, Wole Soyinka, and Peter Brook. Whitaker starts with the premise that a play in performance is a manifold mirror of the playing that constitutes our lives, shaped through the...
Focusing on both scripts and performance, Mirrors of Our Playing takes a fresh look at modern English-speaking drama, from its Anglo-Irish begi...
Starting from the assumption that all theater is at least implicitly participatory, Professor Whitaker approaches thirteen plays, from Ibsen's Rosmersholm to Beckett's Endgame and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He asks the reader to commit himself to a variety of points of view--those of witnesses, actors, directors, and characters--as a series of "critical fictions" lead him toward the experience of each play in performance.
The author supplies detailed readings of the plays in various modes. The styles of the chapters vary according to the...
Starting from the assumption that all theater is at least implicitly participatory, Professor Whitaker approaches thirteen plays, from Ibsen's R...