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America Appropriates In-yer-face Theatre: Tracy Letts's August: Osage County

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2011, 24(3), pp.125-154
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

JUN, JOON-TAEK 1

1고려대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Tracy Letts’s 2007 play, August: Osage County belongs to in-yer-face theatre which shocks audiences by the extremism of its language and images. Though Letts’s former plays, especially Killler Joe and The Bug had soundly fell into in-yer-face theatre as well, this British movement had not been fully appreciated in America when Letts’s August: Osage County surprisingly became the recipients of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 2008 Drama Desk Award for Best New Play, 2008 Drama Desk Award, etc. This paper aims to examine what has made the British movement to be acceptable in America through Letts’s changed dramatic technique. Though Letts’s play contained in-yer-face theatre’s extensive use of roller-coaster riding reversals and humors combined with violence, his narrative proved to be derived from American classic dramatic literature of O’Neill, Miller, Williams, and Albee and his plot development owed much to the editing technique of American soap opera. This new, postmodern approach had been also criticized in relation to his former in-yer-face plays, but the tone has changed from blame to worship when Letts became the hero of major drama awards. This research thus also aims to offer some means to overcome the dilemma by opening up new horizons in the dramatic criticism of the so called ‘Americanized in-yer-face theatre.’

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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