Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the 'Howl' Generation

Description

Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote plays-and these, together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre-shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came after them, from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes, to the many vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting work in drama and performance by and about the Beat Generation, ranging from the well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to the "Afro-Beats" - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima, Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the performance space itself.

Deborah R. Geis is Associate Professor of English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, USA, where she specializes in 20th and 21st-century American literature and drama. She is the author of Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama and of Suzan-Lori Parks, and the editor of Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America (with Steven F. Kruger) and of Considering MAUS: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust. She is also a published performance poet who has appeared in the National Poetry Slam and in many other venues.

The Beat generation created a surprisingly large body of drama. This book covers the obvious figures, like Michael McClure, Amiri Baraka, and Jack Kerouac, along with somewhat minor ones, e.g., Ted Joans and Rochelle Owens. Writers of the period with tangential connections to the Beats-Frank O'Hara, Rosalyn Drexler, Adrienne Kennedy-get their due as dramatists. The essays on theater groups (The Poets' Theatre and The Living Theatre) provide some important context for drama of the period. A few of the essays interpret drama rather loosely: Ginsberg's Howl and the early poems of Bob Kaufman have some dramatic elements but are not really plays. There are five essays on the Beats and film. A collection like this one has value because it rounds out knowledge of the Beats and their role in the period. The plays themselves are minor. The notes to essays are often stimulating. There is no overall bibliography, but each essay has a good list of works cited. This volume will be valuable for those with a particular interest in the Beats. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE * Deborah R. Geis has compiled a selection of incisive essays that explore the impact made by the works of representative artists ... A recurring theme among the essays asserts the importance these artists had in sowing the seeds of performance art as well as deeply influencing the Off-Off Broadway scene of the 1960s. * TDR: The Drama Review *