Narrating the Past through Theatre Four Crucial Texts

This cutting-edge Palgrave Pivot title explores how narrating the past through theatre both conflicts and creates an interesting relationship with drama's "continuing present" that arcs towards an unpredictable future. Examining three influential historical adaptations that span the time frame of modern drama (from the 'first' modern play to the cusp of WWII)Georg Büchner's Danton's Death, Oscar Wilde's Salome, and Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileothis book delves into modern drama's sense and perception of time and its effect upon both the present and the future. Theatre both brings the past alive and also fixes it, but through the performance process (i.e., through the choices the director and actors make), allowing the past to be molded for future (not-yet-existent) audiences. Translated to the stage, the tense of the past (in a historical adaptation), then, is "always" (in both the present and the future): both in its limitation to a strict time and place and in its timelessness.

Michael Y. Bennett is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He is the author of Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd (2011), Words, Space, and the Audience (2012), and The Cambridge Introduction to the Absurd (forthcoming). He is also the editor of Refiguring Oscar Wilde's Salome (2011) and co-editor of Eugene O'Neill's One-Act Plays (2012).

"Narrating the Past through Theatre is a philosophical/literary discussion of how works of literature translate the past for the present and the future. It is a worthwhile discussion since the past as we know it at the beginning of the twenty-first century is unbearably burdensome unless we can somehow own it intellectually. Michael Y. Bennett's discussion of these texts is not polemical, but analytical, demonstrating the philosophical depths which drama must reach. These are all crucial moments in the intersection of time and culture. I find his reading simply the best thing I have ever read on Salome; the pace of fascinating insights is quite thrilling. I don't know of anyone who writes about drama quite like Bennett does. Perhaps Bert O. States would be a possible comparison. Both States and Bennett refuse to let philosophy or drama dominate the other. This book is solid intellectually, thoroughly researched, clearly and engagingly written, and will be a great success." - Robert Combs, George Washington University