BETWEEN ALBEE’S DOG AND GOAT: IMAGES OF ANIMAL COMPANIONSHIP

Modern times seem to have been inflicted with a puzzling sickness that pervades humans’ existence on every possible level. The modern sickness of loneliness and loss of connection assumes center stage position whether in social contexts or personal spaces. This modern ailment is clear within the modern American setting particularly; therefore, many dramatic pieces try to dramatize its manifestations and consequences. The present paper attempts to explore the manifestations of this sickness in the representations of animal companionship. Such representations populate many modern American plays from the beginning of the twentieth century and moving on to the millennium. The paper suggests that images and representations of animal companionship are only expressions of modern individuals’ isolation and loss of connection. The paper examines two plays by Edward Albee, The Zoo Story (1959) and The Goat or Who’s Sylvia? (2000), that represent a new kind of companionship that may or may not sustain the struggle of their modern protagonists to establish some kind of connection with the world around them. Key words: Animal Companionship, Human-Animal Studies, Loneliness

Paula Vogel And The Modern American Female Playwrights

Reading and analyzing Paula Vogel’s plays, the readers can attest that she achieves success in drama or theater because she is passionate about theater. Vogel is a modern American playwright who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Her success and insight in playwriting or in adapting do not come all of a sudden; she is influenced by many writers. Vogel is influenced by many American dramatists, including Eugene O’ Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee, and by other non-American writers, including August Strindberg, Anton Chekhove, and Bertolt Brecht. Certainly, there were female playwrights who wrote preeminent plays and they influence Vogel as well. Nevertheless, dramas by female writers, as a matter of fact, remain marginalized. This paper focuses on the influence of some female playwrights on Vogel.

Politicizing flight in Edward Albee’s seascape

In recent years, scholars and critics have become increasingly interested in the view that art is a means to escape from the existent reality and the difficulties of modern civilization. Many writers emphasized in their literary works the need to be emancipated from the restrictions of modern society and underlined the idea that flight is the ultimate way to avoid the complexities of contemporary life. Edward Albee, for example, addressed the issue of flight in his drama, particularly the sociopolitical and artistic scopes of escape. In his Seascape, Albee presents a multifaceted perception of flight juxtaposing the social with the literary and the political with the artistic. In the postmodern political thought too, there is a similar tendency that valorizes the struggle for the liberation of the individual from all forms of repression and domination exerted by sociopolitical forces. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (2005), for instance, criticize the constraints and rules that power authorities use to control the individual and call instead for freeing humans from all authoritarian policies. This paper, then, seeks to examine Albee’s staging of flight from the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective in an attempt to elucidate his complex yet refined dramatization of escape in his play Seascape.

Logic Images in Edward Albee’s The American Dream

The "American dream" is known to be the model of opportunity, an indication of America's exceptional destiny, where one and all can welcome himself and get what he merits. Tragically, the fantasy of Edward Albee in the play composed by him in 1960 ended up being very a long way from this thought. In the play, Albee obliterates the picture of his incredible nation. He appears the American dream even with an attractive, yet a rationally mangled Young Man, without the capacity to cherish, accept, trust, however, is prepared to do anything for cash. So the Young Man gets the wealthy Mommy and Daddy with the main aim of getting cash, regardless of how however much as could be expected. Yet, surprisingly his entry in their home uncovers the mystery that the bosses kept for their entire lives. When they had embraced a kid - his twin sibling - and he began hollering with great swears. At that point the guardians did not falter to assuage him (directly in the soul of "dark amusingness"), they put out his eyes, tore out his hands, hauled out his tongue. At the point when the receptive youngster finally kicked the bucket, his sibling on the opposite part of the bargain encountered a religious passing: his heart all of a sudden wound up numb, he was as though torn from his body, and from that point forward he can't love, feel empathy or some other emotions.

Theatre of the Absurd

Coined and first theorized by BBC Radio drama critic Martin Esslin in a 1960 article and a 1961 book of the same name, the “Theatre of the Absurd” is a literary and theatrical term used to describe a disparate group of avant-garde plays by a number of mostly European or American avant-garde playwrights whose theatrical careers, generally, began in the 1950s and 1960s. Of the playwrights and writers (whether or not accurately) associated with this movement that has not been self-proclaimed, four were awarded Nobel Prizes in Literature: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre (who refused the award). Other major playwrights associated with the absurd are Edward Albee, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet (among other important and minor playwrights). Often misconstrued as existentialist or nihilistic plays, they signaled the end of theatrical “modernism.” As such, some of these plays are considered among the most important and influential plays of the 20th century in their own right. As a group of plays, the Theatre of the Absurd, or known more casually as “absurd theater” or “absurd drama,” is widely considered, if not the most, certainly one of the most important theatrical movements of the second half of the 20th century. Besides leaving a treasure trove of important avant-garde plays, absurd drama and dramatists have left as possibly their greatest legacy, namely, that the tragicomic worldview of these plays has been subsumed by mainstream plays. Indeed, tragicomedy has become the default theatrical genre over the past five or so decades.

An Analysis of Ten Symbol of Grandma Death as Reflected in The Edward Albee Sandbox

This research is entitled An Analysis of Ten Symbol of Grandma's Death As Reflected In The Edward Albee Sandbox. Where in the short story the 85-year-old grandmother who had been left by her husband and after the death of her husband the grandmother fought alone to support her child `namely mommys. But the child that grandmother hoped didn't care about him. Mommy treats grandma very inhumanely. He put my grandmother under the kitchen and only had a thin blanket and used potluck utensils. Then mommy took grandma to a place and put her in a sandbox where I interpreted this as the last time for grandmother's care and that was very tragic, like waiting for grandmother to die so they could live in peace. They did not care about mommy until mommypun died. This research aims to : (1) To explain the reader understand the extrinsic elements of The Sandbox drama. (2) To explain the reader understand and be able to describe what symbols are used from the drama The Sandbox. (3) To analyze the absurd symbols of The Sandbox drama. This study uses the theory of Roland Barthes who put forward a sign or symbol and a little supporting theory from Saussasure. The method used in this research is descriptive analysis method and qualitative method, which is describing the collected data and then compiled it by analyzing a semiotic drama script which can be seen from its extrinsic elements that have absurd symbols. Based on the results of this analysis it can be said that in this analysis the writer found ten absurd symbols contained in the sandbox drama. From the results of this analysis there is also a picture of the theme raised for this drama is about the emptiness, emptiness, and loneliness of a person in which we as humans need love and affection from other humans.