Theater after Film

"Theater after Film concerns the impact of film and mass culture on forms of drama after World War II. Martin Harries argues that after 1945, as cinema became omnipresent in the culture, theater couldn't challenge cinema's hegemony, but it could provide a zone of contestation. Theater could, in other words, make film's rule of the cultural field visible through hyperbole, refusal, and other strategies, thereby unsettling cinema's power. Postwar theatrical experiment, Harries shows, often channeled and represented the mass cultural force film, knowing it could never possess it. Although it treats the theatrical work of many figures, the book's greatest focus is on Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Adrienne Kennedy. This trio signals Harries's interest in bringing critical performance theory into contact with the history of drama: while these are canonical playwrights, they are also immersed in the discourses of race, gender, and sexuality that have formed that canon. These discourses are also central to the book's historical engagement with the media surround that drama confronted. This confrontation, Harries shows, was central to the development of some of the most continually compelling postwar drama"--