2013-2014 American Drama Study Questions

1. How does Jean Paul Sartre define the bourgeois theatre and in what ways does he criticize it?

2. What is the Theatre of the Absurd and how does it differ from the Existentialist Theatre according to Esslin?

3. Compare and contrast dramatic theatre and epic theatre; explain why Brecht priviliges epic theatre.

4. How did modernism start in the 1900s and what kind of directions occurred in the same period?

5. What are the views of Vsevolod Meyerhold? What was his aim at creating a “new drama”? 

6. How do his ideas change in time?

7. What are the premises of Italian futurist drama?

8. What is alienation effect and what is its significance?

9. "The past is present ,it's future too"(Long Day's Journey...) How can you interpret Nina's obsession with Gordon in "strange interlude "?

10. How does the definition of present as a "strange interlude" affect and,at the same time, result from the characters' perception of past and future ?