1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910255252203321

Autore

Lipscomb Valerie Barnes

Titolo

Performing Age in Modern Drama / / by Valerie Barnes Lipscomb

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Palgrave Macmillan US : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2016

ISBN

9781137501691

1137501693

Edizione

[1st ed. 2016.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (207 p.)

Disciplina

792

Soggetti

Performing arts

Theater

Arts

Sociology

Social groups

Culture - Study and teaching

Literature, Modern - 20th century

Theatre and Performance Arts

Sociology of Family, Youth and Aging

Cultural Studies

Twentieth-Century Literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction -- 1. Classics of Modern Drama -- 2. Contemporary Memory Plays -- 3. Contemporary Memory Plays II -- 4. The Continuum of Age -- 5. The Fullness of Self -- Bibliography.

Sommario/riassunto

This book is the first to examine age across the modern and contemporary dramatic canon, from Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams to Paula Vogel and Doug Wright. All ages across the life course are interpreted as performance and performative both on page and on stage, including professional productions and senior-theatre groups. Act your age. This common admonition provides the springboard for this study, which rests on the premise that age is performative in nature, and that issues of age and performance crystallize in the



theatre. Dramatic conventions include characters who change ages from one moment to the next, overtly demonstrating on stage the reiterated actions that create a performative illusion of stable age. Moreover, directors regularly cast actors in these plays against their chronological ages. Lipscomb contends that while the plays reflect varying attitudes toward performing age, as a whole they reveal a longing for an ageless self, a desire to present a consistent, unified identity. The works mirror prevailing social perceptions of the aging process as well as the tension between chronological age, physiological age, and cultural constructions of age.