Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater

Abstract

The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert styles. Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W.B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theatre relies on the natural qualities of the stage scene, poetic theatre uses the poet's world, the text, to control performance. Modern political theatre, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play.