Cleaning Augean Stables: Examining Drama’s Strategies

After one of the great creative periods of western drama in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century with their experimental brashness and their intellectual reach (once celebrated by critic Eric Bentley in his seminal The Playwright as Thinker) western drama in our time has by and large folded its hands and taken up residence in the cliche marketplace, shriveling its ambition, narrowing its strategies, settling for the intellectually bland, and justifying its sluggishness by worn-out critical pieties. Cleaning Augean Stables: Examining Drama’s Strategies addresses that failure in four ways:

• It critiques those critical pieties, counters their irrelevance and argues their diminishing value for our time.
• It reviews the dramatic strategies of great periods of western drama, strategies that expanded the reach and power of dramatic statement.
• It quotes and analyses remarkably effective strategies of more recent writers in theatre and film who, whether within or entirely outside conventional formats, produced brilliantly original models for contemporary dramatic writing, models inspiring emulation.
• Overall, it explains multiple and wide-ranging strategies - open, not precept-driven or marketplace-driven - to once again - as theatre famously did - offer moving and compelling voices to its cultures - most deeply meaningful dialogues.

Leon Katz, Emeritus Professor of Drama, Yale University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, taught at many universities in the US and abroad. He’s the recipient of ATHE’s Lifetime Achievement award for Outstanding Teaching.