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| American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947-1962
ISBN: 9781587294471
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Iowa Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Theater -- United States -- History -- 20th century; American drama -- 20th century -- History and criticism;
In this groundbreaking study, Bruce McConachie uses the primary metaphor of containment--what happens when we categorize a play, a television show, or anything we view as having an inside, an outside, and a boundary between the two--as the dominant metaphor of cold war theatergoing. Drawing on the cognitive psychology and linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, he provides unusual access to the ways in which spectators in the cold war years projected themselves into stage figures that gave them pleasure.
McConachie reconstructs these cognitive processes by relying on scripts, set designs, reviews, memoirs, and other evidence. After establishing his theoretical framework, he focuses on three archtypal figures of containment significant in Cold War culture, Empty Boys, Family Circles, and Fragmented Heroes. McConachie uses a range of plays, musicals, and modern dances from the dominant culture of the Cold War to discuss these figures, including The Seven Year Itch , Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ; The King and I , A Raisin in the Sun , Night Journey , and The Crucible. In an epilogue, he discusses the legacy of Cold War theater from 1962 to 1992.
Bruce McConachie is professor of theatre arts at the University of Pittsburgh and current president of the American Society for Theatre Research. His Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa, 1992) won the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History. |
