Subject Area: Drama-Stage Production
Lapisardi, Frederick S.2006 0-7734-5570-1 432 pages
An avant garde playwright whose theories of stagecraft evolved through performance experience, W.B. Yeats left a complex body of dramatic materials. This book establishes dramaturgical criteria, based on the playwright’s own words, by which all productions of his plays might be judged. Then, through an analysis of Yeats’s plays in performance, it suggests how new stage productions might best engage audiences without violating either texts or theories. Based on fifty years of study and publication about Yeats’s stagecraft and on direct experience with the plays in production both in America and in Ireland, this study develops dramaturgical plans for new productions and shares with readers behind-the-scenes notes from the author’s American Yeats production and from the first three years of James W. Flannery’s International W.B. Yeats Theatre Festival at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Its basic premise turns on the belief that with new technology and with directors who accept the text as living theatre worthy of imaginative stage productions for a more general audience, rather than period pieces intended for an elite few, Yeats could finally emerge as a dramatist on a scale with Beckett, Strindberg, O’Neill and other major innovators of the modern stage.
Price: $259.95