MAD THEORY!

The following is from the article Serious Money Becomes "Business by Other Means": Caryl Churchill's Metatheatrical Subject by Daniel Jernigan. Found via EBSCO on the UAlberta Library site.

"metatheatre, order is something continually improvised by men" (291)
"metadrama blurs the boundaries between illusion and reality, it does so by circumscribing a theatrical order explicitly "improvised by men" (291)
"Brecht is metatheatrical... because "he insists on the fact that [his characters] are puppets"; he "does not try to pass them off as real people, and [he] delights in exhibiting their mechanisms." ... this reminds us that the point of Brechts plays is to focus on the very fact that they have indeed been "improvised by men" (291)
                Does Mad Forest subscribe to any aspects of metatheatre akin to Brecht? Is there not a kind of improvised nature throughout the play (especially Part II) of Mad Forest? How do Churchill's characters relate to Brecht's puppet image, and how do they relate to "reality"?

"a metadramatic technique distinctively Churchill's - the way in which she explicitly recognizes how the two sides of the fourth wall, that conceptual barrier between audience and stage, actually interact with one another" (292)
"Churchill demonstrates how "'Truth' [the theatre, in this case] is linked in a circular relation with systems of power [multinational capitalism] which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it" (293)
"the theatre itself can be legitimated by the power/knowledge hierarchy in just such a way that even those theatreical productions which might have been revolutionary in their original intent are co-opted so as to serve the status quo" (293)
"Churchill goes out of her way to raise moral issues in her work... taking theatre as her subject in order to focus critical attention on the corrupting influence 'the real world' can have on theatre" (293)

             stay tuned for more from this article!
Jernigan, Daniel. "Serious Money Becomes 'Business By Other Means': Caryl Churchill's Metatheatrical Subject." Comparative Drama 38.2-3 (2004): 291-313. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 15 May 2012.


This next bit is from an E-book called Unmaking Mimesis, a collection of essays concerning feminism. Hurrah! Citation below.

theatrical representation for how historical truth is produced (99)

What is real? Through metatheatricality (?) Churchill questions the experience held by Romanians who watched the revolution through a screen.

“attention to the dialectical and contradictory forces within social relations, principally the agon of class conflict changing in its historical forms; commitment to alienation techniques and deliberate discontinuity in theatrical signification; literalization of theatre space to produce a spectator/reader who is not interpellated into ideology but is passionately and pleasurably  engaged in  observation and analysis” (44)

How does Romanian pronounciation and Brechtian theories relate to this production of Mad Forest? Will there be any acknowledgement of the fact that some or most of the actors are not Romanian/ don’t speak Romanian?

How far will this production be exposing the theatrical apparatus?

Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis [Electronic Resource] : Essays On Feminism Andtheater / Elin Diamond. London ; New York : Routledge, 1997., 1997. NEOS's Catalog. Web. 15 May 2012.






These are my current thoughts. Let me know what you think!


-A