2018, Vol.31, No.2

Arnold Wesker’s Kitchen: Is There Any Exit?

Soim Kim | 2018, 31(2) | pp.5~31 | number of Cited : 2

Arnold Wesker’s Kitchen: Is There Any Exit? Abstract Kim,So-im(KonkukUniv.) This paper explores the representation of labor in Arnold Wesker’s play, The Kitchen. It explicates the ways in which the sinister vicious circle of labor, laborers, labor environment, a capitalist and the society are constructed in the kitchen at the restaurant Tivoli, the metaphor of the industrial capitalist society. It also pursues how the play’s pseudo absurd theater techniques such as the fragmented plot development, undeveloped characters, the chaotic exchanges of words and movements, the isolated spaces contribute to the intensity of the vicious circle without providing the solution to the problems. This paper finds that both the cooks and Marango are portrayed as the components of the vicious circle. Because they do not have meaningful identity separated from their work, they do not seem to have means to escape or break the circle. The society that values money and shows lack of sympathy for the weaker and the poorer seem to be the main cause of the vicious circle. Also this paper probes whether there are clues to resolve the vicious circle in the play. Even though one of the goals of Wesker’s theater is to educate the laborers, The Kitchen asks questions to the audience about what to do with the vicious circle rather than provides concrete suggestions or definite guidelines to solve the problems. None of the characters attain the definite ideas about how to abolish the vicious circle. The communal social awareness of employment-friendly labor environment is not attained. In the play there is no easy exit from the vicious circle. What the audience is expected to do is to find the qualities that all of the staff, Marango and their society do not achieve, such as sensitivity to the capitalist working system, the future vision for the service industry and the sympathy for the underdogs. Obviously their insensitivity and ignorance block their exit. The play using the kitchen, the uglier version of the capitalist society, challenges the audience to see what would happen to themselves if they lack the education that Wesker’s theater intends to provide. While enriching the social play’s tradition with various non-representational characteristics, The Kitchen not only embraces the labor class who has been isolated from the British theater monopolized by the upper class but also attains the goal of education, as Wesker intended to.

Gender Identity and Intersubjectivity of Fun Home

Kim JaeKyoung | 2018, 31(2) | pp.33~56 | number of Cited : 2

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Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s Fun Home, a musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, has established an impressive performance history as the first Broadway musical with a lesbian protagonist. As an attempt to find the reason for its success, this article compares the focus of Fun Home, the musical heroine Alison’s gender identity, to the primacy of the father/daughter relationship in Bechdel’s graphic memoir. Both trace Alison’s past memories starting from her childhood to her college days, concentrating on two topics: her father Bruce’s life as a closeted gay and Alison’s discovery of her own sexuality as a lesbian. Despite sharing the same story, the graphic memoir emphasizes Alison’s unresolved relationship with Bruce, repeating the moment of his death, while the musical puts more emphasis on Alison’s growing understanding of her own sexual identity by staging three Alisons at different ages. Psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin’s relation theory, especially intersubjectivity, is applied through the analysis of both works because each fundamentally presents intersubjective relations (either between Alison and Bruce or between the three Alisons) based on love and mutual recognition. In the graphic memoir, Bechdel, through her narration in the caption, reminisces about her flawed relationship with Bruce, portrays his death in relation to her coming-out, and at last reaches a degree of self-recognition. Meanwhile, in the musical, Tesoori and Kron focus on the three Alisons’ mutual recognition and understanding beyond their different ages and maturities by visualizing the interaction between these three. As Benjamin argues that the power of domination and patriarchal gender relationship can be overcome by recognizing the other subject, the interaction among the three Alisons shows that the dualism of subject and object, father and daughter, and heterosexual and homosexual no longer exists in this musical. In short, the expansion of intersubjectivity from father and daughter to pluralized lesbian protagonists helps the audience to reconsider a lesbian heroine as a more approachable and universal character freed from the extant sense of difference and prejudice.

“Inventing New Elizas”: Anxieties about Automaton and Class in Pygmalion

Eunha Na | 2018, 31(2) | pp.57~80 | number of Cited : 0

Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire: A Study of the Eyesight and the Body of the Other through Jean-Paul Sartre's Concepts of Being and Nothingness

Yoon, Hee Oyck | 2018, 31(2) | pp.81~108 | number of Cited : 0

Nostalgia is a Disease!: Geography of 21st Century America in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat

Yon-hee Chun | 2018, 31(2) | pp.109~133 | number of Cited : 6

This paper aims at researching political/economic geography of 21st century America through the lens of post Black aesthetics in the play of African American playwright Lynn Nottage. In her recent play Sweat, Nottage portrays the crisis of community in Reading, Pennsylvania, a town which represents blue collar workers in the Rust Belt area and encounters serious unemployment issues due to the neo-liberal economic system in the age of globalization. Sweat foregrounds and focuses its microcosmic lens on both a public space and a private space, a ‘bar’, where the factory workers of Olstead Steel in Reading share their lives. Nottage explores the crisis of deconstruction set in motion by serious conflicts in that Olstead community that had previously been characterized as a town of sustained social harmony and stability in terms of sex, race and class due to the flexible employment found within a market economic system. She also depicts the stratification of the community, explores a newly defined ‘neo-liberalism racism’ and integrates all as the conglomerate result of a trap of uncertainty created by a market economy. Contemporaneously, Nottage suggests cosmopolitanism as an alternative macro-narrative to overcome the crisis and negative effects from neo-liberalism, and she also reclaims the bar as an origin from which energy can provide gaiety and conviviality beyond the barrier of gender, race and class. Thus, Nottage tries to show us the reclaiming and redemption of what was lost in a past America by citizens’ attempts to seize on the opportunity to redefine the future via the recovery of the Reading community. Nottage, who won the 2nd Pulitzer Prize in Drama,was privileged with the opportunity to stage Sweat on Broadway theater, thereby showing the intertextuality of politics and stage, surpassing any racial categorization.

Spatialized Trauma and the Treatment of Its Injuries in Philip Kan Gotanda’s Family Plays

Jung,Byung-Eon | 2018, 31(2) | pp.135~158 | number of Cited : 0

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The Storyteller’s Dilemma: Allegory of Violence and Redemption in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman

Yeoniee Cho | 2018, 31(2) | pp.159~186 | number of Cited : 1

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Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

2018, Vol.31, No.2