2013, Vol.26, No.1

Transplant and Translation: Tim Crouch's ENGLAND

Ilhyung Park | 2013, 26(1) | pp.5~28 | number of Cited : 0

Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND premiered in 2007 reveals in detail the ethics of his theatre. Not only does ENGLAND specify the fundamental ethical question posed by his critical perspective, it also exemplifies it in a dramatic form that is unique to Crouch. The purpose of the thesis is to analyse ENGLAND in order to understand the essence of the formal experimentation and political issues it raises. With particular reference to the socio-economic paradox posed by the issue of organ donation and purchase, the thesis intends to concentrate on the aporia surrounding the concept of ‘gift’. In the two-act play, ENGLAND, the second act specifically poses the ethical question suggested in the lines that repeatedly appear in the play: “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here.” As a play cannot exist without the presence of the audience, English’s life is totally dependent on the organ donor. In order to repay this gist of ‘donation’, he has brought a ‘gift’ to the wife of the organ donor. The situation raises a series of questions that defy answering. In the first place, can one really repay the gift of a heart? If English was sincere in paying for the heart, why didn’t he describe what he had brought as payment but a ‘gift’? Can one repay the life of another individual? Can a work of art be a counter-gift to the gift of life?Crouch draws upon the cruel reality of organ trafficking within the controlled space of the art gallery totally cut-off from the outside world. What he deploys in doing so is not representation in the ordinary sense of the word which aims at imparting knowledge or providing clarity. The action taking place in Crouch’s play is not separated from the act of seeing the action itself. Art is a medium of representation of reality, but at the same time, it offers a perspective to gain an insight into art itself. In other words, the issue of organ transplant acts as a metaphor of the variety of issues related to exchanges within drama. What is hinted at through the protagonist may be the fact that the playwright is never free from his dominant role as a playwright, but the play itself can be read as an attempt to get ever closer to the reciprocity between art and the public, the playwright and the audience, the sender and receiver of signs with vigor. By allowing the audience to investigate critically the system of representation itself on the part of the audience themselves, Crouch wishes to transform the issue of dramatic representation into that of cultural and social exchange.

Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood: Dominant discourse on the Subaltern Woman and Talking Back

Yu,Sung-Yi | 2013, 26(1) | pp.29~50 | number of Cited : 2

This article aims to analyze how the dominant discourse oppresses the subaltern, Hester La Negrita, and how she speaks out against it. The discourse upon Hester is closely related to money and her poverty is the main cause of keeping her away from the society. The Welfare Lady pretends to help Hester, but she takes advantage of her work force and just works to be paid. Amiga Gringa, the white subaltern woman, always defrauds Hester of money, even her ovary. In order to prevent Hester from breeding, The Doctor obeys the Higher Ups’ order and finally removes the ovary of Hester. Reverend D does “Salvation Business” to get money from his congregation, treats Hester as a sex object, and then calls her “slut.”These people symbolize the dominant discourse oppressing Hester, the black subaltern woman, and they try to keep the well-drawn boundary line between them and Hester. In this way, they put Hester to silence. Hester, however, struggles against the dominant discourse by talking back with her own ways. First, she strives to thread a needle to embroider her thinking on clothes which means the ready-made social structure. Secondly, Hester fights against temptation of money. Amiga and Welfare seduces Hester to sell her children for money, but Hester never gives up her 5 treasures. Although Hester tries to show her dignity as the subaltern woman to the dominant society, all her effort is in vain. Finally, Hester speaks her resistant words by killing the first son Jabber who calls Hester slut. When she hears the bad word, she beats him with a club which symbolizes a penis, the authority of a patriarchal system. Therefore, I argue that Hester’s killing is the last and the best choice to resist the dominant discourse. The written “A” with Jabber’s blood gives us a hint “a start” of Hester, the African-American subaltern women.

A Study on Violence, Illusion, and Love in Fool for Love

Yu Ho-Jun | 2013, 26(1) | pp.51~80 | number of Cited : 4

Fool for Love is one of Sam Shepard’s family plays which present the issues of love and struggle between estranged lovers, Eddie and May, as well as those of American family and father/son relationship. Eddie came to May’s stark, low-rent motel room in the Mojave Desert to persuade her to go back to the countryside with him. She still loves him but also hates him because of his relationship with another woman, Countess. By the end of the theater, it is revealed that their love between May and Eddie is an incestuous relationship between half-siblings, which causes family destruction and the suicide of Eddie’s mother. Partly reflecting the writer’s autobiographic life story, he shows how love and passion comes and goes through this play. In Fool for Love, Shepard attempts to portray women characters as the independent, assuming determined and enthusiastic attitudes, different from those of his former plays. As a playwright noted for his performance-oriented plays, Shepard makes use of various kinds of violence in this play, such as physical violence, verbal violence, powerful light and sound on stage, and even fire and suicide. Violence is one of his stage strategies used not only for the communication between main characters and for the ritual ceremony, but also for the interaction between audience and the stage. In the play, there is a special presence called ‘Old Man’ who appears as the absent father not only in the stories of his offsprings but as a ghostlike character on stage as well. His double life with two women goes down from father to son, Eddie, causing his own wife’s agonizing death. Illusion itself or illusion of love which the Old Man is obsessed with, is juxtaposed with the plot of love story between his son and daughter, makes this play more successful. Implying that love can’t be lost at any price, Shepard succeeds in building a sur-realistic or psycho-realistic theater on stage, with the help of the violence and illusion in Fool for Love.

Life Enjoyment Literature through Memento Mori: Our Town and The Ecclesiastes

Yonghee Lee | 2013, 26(1) | pp.81~117 | number of Cited : 1

When Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in 1938, there were harsh criticisms on the play in that he ignored a particular social condition in U. S. A.; rather, he sang about humanity and love. It was just after World War I and the Great Depression that American society had undergone serious confusing circumstances. Wilder seemed to neglect his responsibility as a writer, compared to other contemporary writers; therefore, Our Town was severely attacked during that time. Nevertheless, this play received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938 and until now, has been beloved by a lot of readers and theatre audience all over the world. Likewise, the book of Ecclesiastes has been situated in the middle of hot debates whether it should have been included in Bible or not due to its seemingly pessimistic, at the same time, hedonistic tendency of the narrator, Qohelet. The Ecclesiastes demonstrates apparently Qohelet’s nihilism by describing human beings’ life as hebel, which usually means lack of worth or value. However, Qohelet was neither a hedonist nor a nihilist; rather, he turned out to be an optimist, showing an affirmative attitude toward life. Hebel is such an abstruse word that a number of Bible exegetists had difficulty catching its real meaning. Recent studies manifest the meaning of this word should be understood as lack of permanence, instead of ‘useless’ or ‘in vain.’Both Our Town and the Ecclesiastes appear to follow the tragic and pessimistic tendency about human life; in fact it was a literary device for conveying the message of Carpe diem. By confronting the naked truth about human existence such as the limitation of acknowledgment and human finitude caused by death, in other words, Memento Mori, readers and audiences need realizing the preciousness of daily lives and of living in the moment. Furthermore, this paper displays the similarities between these two literary works in terms of the emphasis on Carpe diem with other people in a community, and awe and wonder toward the eternal and God. By doing so, Our Town and the Ecclesiastes are verified as effective literary works praising human life and encouraging people to seize the day.

Sexual Politics in Speed-the-Plow

EUNJOO LEE | 2013, 26(1) | pp.119~141 | number of Cited : 0

Where Does Women’s Pleasure Lie?: Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play and the Third Wave Feminism

Lee,Insoo | 2013, 26(1) | pp.143~177 | number of Cited : 7

This essay analyzes Sarah Ruhl’s recent play, In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play (2009), in comparison with Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979). Both plays are set in the Victorian age, focusing on the female sexuality and women’s subjectivity oppressed in the patriarchal social and familial system of the time. The endings of the two plays are, however, quite different, which reflects the different women’s issues the two playwrights were challenged with in their own times: one in the 2000’s and the other in the 1970’s. While Cloud Nine, responding to the agenda of the second wave feminism to deconstruct the myth of women’s roles forced by the patriarchal ideology, portrays female characters who break their marriage bond to discover and recover their sexuality and subjectivity, In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play presents a female character, Mrs. Givings, who affirms her self-knowledge and fulfills her sexual desire in the relationship with her husband by demanding and teaching him what she wants. My observation is that Ruhl basically agrees with Churchill’s criticism of the patriarchal system but that she differs from Churchill in the strategies she chooses in order to shatter and overturn the oppressive regimes of the patriarchy. Ruhl explicitly displays women’s orgasm on the stage, although with enough discretion and humor, and allows her female character to pursue and express her own knowledge and definition of love, while staying in marriage. Furthermore, Ruhl creates a new male character, Dr. Givings, who is willing to learn from his wife how to please her and practices love as blessing. Thus Ruhl suggests a form of love in which the boundary between subject and object, self and other is blurred. The ending may seem as a reaffirmation of the old value of marriage, but the kind of love Ruhl envisions in the play reflects one of the new alternative forms of love that women who belong to the third wave feminism generation seek to discover and explore.

Territory, Gender, and Body Politics: Lynn Nottage's Ruined

Yon-hee Chun | 2013, 26(1) | pp.179~206 | number of Cited : 9

Ruined by Lynn Nottage, the second African American woman to winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, deals with physical and mental manifestations of trauma among Congolese women in the 21st century. Ruined was written based on the interviews in Uganda, Africa with Congolese refugee women who have been the victims of rape during Ituri conflict. Although Ruined has been compared to Mother Courage, a work that inspired Lynn to visit Africa to make a 21stcentury version of Mother Courage, the new play does not employ the original work’s false frame to deliver the plight of Congolese women. Lynn realized that Mother Courage had a false frame after she interviewed the Congolese refugee women. Ruined centers on the space of Mama Nadi, a woman who runs a bar in the marginal areas of the DRC during the civil war. The bar is the symbolic place to represent the political, social, and cultural positions of the women in the DRC. Mama’s place is not a place of deconstruction of political dichotomy but transcends the barriers of political ideology to the degree that victimizer and victims coexist there. At Mama’s bar exhausted soldiers and rebels find a place to gain recuperative powers and experience the warmth of motherhood. Nottage exposes how gender-based politics and the ideology of patriarchal rule affect the women’s bodies, symbols of the ravaged battleground of war. The relationships intensified by the motherhood and sisterhood at Mama’s place create dynamic social interaction and contribute to the formation of a subjective sense of identity virtually ruined by the gender politics of patriarchy. Mama’s firm resolution to protect the women in her space appears repeatedly, and her meticulous endeavors gradually influence the women she has taken care of to find their voice and new life. Nottage reveals the possibility of the recovery among traumatized women in this symbolic place where dialectic ideological tension exists by highlighting the power of women’s voices in a place where women had been silenced by the hegemony of patriarchy in a post colonial age. The women in “ruined” status decide that their bodies will no longer be battlegrounds for patriarchal ideology. Instead, they will use their physical capacities to speak out their positions on the socio-political contexts of their time and provide people with hope. This transformation also suggests the possibility of the construction of a new identity among abused women. Ruined confirms the power of theatre to enable us to expand the collective political consciousness and give every viewer the opportunity to think of other people as valuable human beings.

McGuinness's Experiment in the Renaissance Ireland: Focusing on Mutabilitie

Yumi Hong | 2013, 26(1) | pp.207~240 | number of Cited : 1

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A Study of the Literary Achievements and the Limitations of Lanford Wilson's Redwood Curtain

Hwang, Kyu Cheol | 2013, 26(1) | pp.241~261 | number of Cited : 0

This paper aims at revealing the literary achievements and the limitations of Lanford Wilson’s Redwood Curtain. One of its literary achievements is that it has a counterpoint structure in which three independent but interrelated themes are dramatized by three characters. The theme centering on Lyman is that the Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD have not reintegrated into American society many years after the Vietnam War. The theme concerning Geri is that Amerasian children try to find their biological fathers for the purpose of finding themselves many years after the Vietnam War. The theme regarding Geneva is that the redwood forest is in great danger because of extremely profit-seeking conglomerates. In addition, each character plays important roles to develop the themes regarding the others. Another literary achievement of the play is that the playwright induces readers/audiences to consider that each theme can be interrelated to other American historical events. The theme regarding Lyman can be interrelated to the Second World War, the Persian Gulf War, and other wars America has intervened. The theme regarding Geri can be interconnected to Americans’ finding themselves in the 1960s and finding their fathers even in 1990. The theme regarding Geneva based on the hostile takeover of Pacific Lumber Company by Maxxam, Inc. in 1986 can be interrelated to the largest oil spill in Alaska in 1989 and other environmental disruptions in America. On the other hand, the play has two limitations. One is that the Vietnamese and their society mentioned by Geri reveals the playwright’s orientalism. The other is that the playwright’s remark that Gymnopédies represents all cultures is unconvincing. Notwithstanding, Redwood Curtain deserves critical attention because it deals with three issues of the American society from the 1970s to 1990 which are interrelated to other American historical events.

The Paradox of Death and timor mortis in W;t

Hwang, Hoon-sung | 2013, 26(1) | pp.263~292 | number of Cited : 2

A Cultural Geography of “the Sweet Old Style”: Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days

Noh, Aegyung | 2013, 26(1) | pp.293~312 | number of Cited : 2

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2013, Vol.26, No.1