Superfluities Redux

A home of its own

2010-06-01T13:06:00Z

Superfluities Redux is moving to its own domain today: www.superfluitiesredux.com. All future posts will appear there, though this site will remain online for the foreseeable future.

This constitutes an easier way to find this blog and the material that I've developed for it over the past seven years, and also something of a rededication to its originating principles, as I explain in today's premiere post. I will look forward to your continuing participation and readership.

"Are plays proper literature?"

2010-05-27T14:54:00Z

... asks David Jays in today's Guardian. I'm rather with "zauberberg" in the comments section when she or he says, "I find the very fact that this question is posed baffling."

But more, they'd pretty damn well be literature or the May 2010 issue of Theater journal from the Yale School of Drama is a waste of so much pulp and ink. This new issue specifically addresses the current status of play-as-text or vice versa, featuring new performance texts from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma (Romeo and Juliet) and Big Art Group (SOS), as well as essays by editor Tom Sellar, Juliana Francis Kelly, Jacob Gallagher-Ross and Karinne Keithley. I suppose I provide my own response to Jays' question in my own contribution to the issue, "The Booking of the Play" — about six thousand words of it, I think, and only available to paying customers there, or on your local newsstands now.

But in brief: are plays proper literature? Of course they are, and capable of being interpreted from a variety of valid standpoints as readers: for entertainment, for study, for formal qualities. It's just that, like novels, poems and other forms, sometimes they're very poor proper literature indeed.

In conversation

2010-05-24T13:12:00Z

Those who were unable to attend the 10 May Howard Barker at the Segal Center event can now listen online to "A Conversation with Howard Barker," conducted by Prof. David Ian Rabey of the University of Aberystwyth, at theatreVOICE. The hour-long discussion is divided into two parts: part one ("about history, abandoning social realism, and creating new definitions of political theatre") is here, and part two ("about tragedy, working with actors, and the ethics of directing") is here. There is also a question-and-answer session that concludes part two.