Professor Styan examines what a play is as well as understanding the dramatist's intentions towards this medium.

Professor Styan examines what a play is as well as understanding the dramatist's intentions towards this medium.

In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat (eds.) focus on a fundamental question that transcends the disciplinary boundaries of theatre studies: how and to what extent did the convergence of dramatic theory, theatrical practice, and various modes of audience experience — among both theatregoers and readers of drama — contribute, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, to the emergence of symbolic, social, and cultural space(s) we call ‘public sphere(s)’? Developing a post-Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, the articles in this collection demonstrate that related, if diverging, conceptions of the ‘public’ existed in a variety of forms, locations, and cultures across early modern Europe — and in Asia.

How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it. Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between? A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form. Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination. ‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom "interdisciplinary" is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail ‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)

This work takes a phenomenological approach to analyzing the dramatic form, focusing not on the interpretation of plays, but rather on Brownstein's perceptions and their sources. The distinct aspects of the dramatic art form are discussed using a wide variety of well-known plays, from ancient Greece to the present day. Brownstein offers a theoretical survey of the "perception shift" that infuses even the smallest element of a play, the forces that are expressed through major dramatic strategies, and the ways in which a single narrative sequence may serve both prospective and retrospective strategies.