“Mama Dada” is the first book to examine Gertrude Stein’s drama within the history of the theatric and cinematic avant-gardes. It explores her development of a unique playwriting aesthetic based in avant-garde drama, cinema, and queer identity. This is the first study to distinguish between her major and minor dramatic works, and examine in detail Stein’s major plays: “Four Saints in Three Acts ” (1927); “They Must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife.” (1931); “Listen to Me” (1936); “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights” (1938); “Yes Is for a Very Young Man” (1944-46); and “The Mother of Us All” (1945-46). It is also the first book to consider Stein’s impact as a major influence on the American avant-garde, in particular her influence on The Living Theater, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. Through close examination of her career and work (as text and in performance), Sarah Bay-Cheng aims to demystify Stein’s drama and to connect her achievements to a larger historical and theoretical tradition in European and American theatre.

Candace Falk – Emma Goldman: passion, politics, and the theatrics of free expression

August 22, 2012

1) teorija/analiza, 2) drama, 5) itd, Emma Goldman

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The article is an exploration of the ways in which Emma Goldman was both a virtuoso of political theatrics – especially effective in a period when challenging ideas were suppressed – and an advocate of politically conscious theater. Goldman was among the first to bring awareness of European modern drama to the USA. Her appreciation for the theater was an integral part of her intellectual development and a strategic component of a political strategy that aspired to embrace all aspects of the human experience. The themes addressed in the plays about which she lectured and wrote served an integrative role – crossing class, ethnic, and national boundaries. Goldman herself lived with a high sense of drama, and played an imposing role on the

political stage, which resonates even today.

Emma Goldman’s Lost Drama Lectures

August 22, 2012

2) drama, Emma Goldman

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At a time when public speakers in New York could be arrested for making subversive statements, the fiery Emma Goldman at least once eluded arrest by speaking in Yiddish. “She spoke to this group of Jewish women on the Lower East Side,” a policeman reported, “and I’m sorry I couldn’t take down what she said because she spoke in Yiddish.” (The late Howard Zinn recounted this episode in his book, Artists in Time of War.) The cop’s failure to record Goldman’s speech might be considered unfortunate, especially if she happened to be talking about Yiddish drama — for while many of her other speeches were published, her lectures on that subject, delivered between 1914 and 1916, have been lost to us.

Today, of course, Goldman is remembered less for her theater discussions than for her passionate speeches against conscription and war (“the road to universal slaughter”). Her autobiography, Living My Life, devotes only a few paragraphs to her drama lectures. Yet theater was quite important to her: In essays, public speeches, and a book, The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, Goldman introduced Americans to plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Frank Wedekind, creators of what she once described as “modern drama, the strongest disseminator of radical thought.”