Staging Technology

Medium, Machinery, and Modern Drama

Craig N. Owens

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350196704
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350168589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Through an examination of a range of performance works ranging from Jean Cocteau's ballet The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party (1921) to Julie Taymor's monumental production of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark (2010) and Mexican playwright Isaac Gomez's La Ruta(2018), Staging Technology asks what becomes visible when we encounter plays, operas, and musicals that are themselves about fraught human/machine interfaces. What can theatrical production tell us about the way technology functions as an element of ideology and power in narrative drama? About the limits of the human?

Staging Technology bridges the divide between the technical practices of theatre production and critical, theoretical approaches to interpreting drama to examine the way dramatic theatre's technologies are shaped by larger historical, ideological, and economic forces. At the same time, it examines how those technologies themselves have influenced 20th and 21st-century playwrights', composers', and librettists' choice of subject matter for staged representation.

Examining performance works from the modernist and post-modern European and American canon of drama, opera, and performance art including works by Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, Sophie Treadwell, Harold Pinter, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, Arthur Miller, Robert Pinsky, John Adams and Alice Goodman, Staging Technology transforms how we think about the interrelationship between theatre practice, performance, narrative drama, and text. In it Craig N. Owens synthesizes approaches to interpretation and practice from disparate realms, offering insights into over-arching ways of making meaning that are illustrated through focused and innovative readings of individual works for the dramatic stage. Staging Technology provides a new and transformative paradigm for thinking about dramatic literature, the practices of representational theatre production, and the historical and social contexts they inhabit.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Staging Technology
• 1 Avant-Garde Assemblages: Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, and Eugène Ionesco
• 2 Machineries of Nostalgia and American Modernity: Sophie Treadwell, Elmer Rice, Arthur Miller, and Isaac Gomez
• 3 Alienating Devices: Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill, John Adams & Alice Goodman, Don DeLillo, and Athol Fugard
• 4 Machineries of Constraint: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Badal Sircar
• 5 Post-Human Recursivity: Heiner Müller, Julie Taymor, and Tod Machover & Robert Pinsky
• Coda: Medium, Machinery, and the Present Moment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page