John S. Bak

Suddenly Last Supper: Religious Acts and Race Relations
in Tennessee Williams's 'Desire'

[pages 122 - 145]

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Abstract

Tennessee Williams, like many gothic authors in America, understood perfectly the hypocrisy inbred in Puritanism and openly attacks it in two of his most gothic works, "Desire and the Black Masseur" and Suddenly Last Summer. Queer Christian allegories, whose protagonists cling desperately to an unflagging faith in the Puritan ideal and the Otherness that it inscribes, both texts faithfully reproduce the religious imperative only to expose it by their unconventional ends. Perhaps indicative of Williams's view of his own place within Cold War culture as its public spokesman and invisible anathema, his Anthony Burns and Sebastian Venable project a respectable front while struggling internally with the inconsistencies between their spiritual leanings and the homosexuality it repudiates in them. Consequently, both consider themselves at first to be without grace and only obtain that grace through an act of self-sacrifice—a violent apotheosis which makes them unlikely Christ figures. Avatars of the Eucharist who nourish society at the moment their bodies are literally consumed, Burns and Sebastian become for Williams a quiet plea for Christian tolerance towards its gay Other and a subversive swipe at heteronormative America for turning Communion into a performative act that determines which desire is saintly and which sinful and who can partake of the Lord’s Supper and who cannot. And yet, in invoking the distorted image of the Last Supper in both works to unfetter human desire from its proscriptive Christian dogma and, moreover, in equating that desire with blackness, Williams proves unable to escape his own racial othering and thus inadvertently reinscribes in "Desire and the Black Masseur" and Suddenly Last Summer that national bugbear which Toni Morrison describes as "the potent and ego-reinforcing presence of an Africanist population." Though allegories about religious othering, then, both works Other themselves, where certain acts of sexuality and the piety that declares them illicit are rendered benign in comparison to the carnivorous "black mass" Williams has eating its way through white society.

Jeff Dailey

Christian Underscoring in Tamburlaine the Great, Part II

[pages 146 - 159]

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Abstract

Although Christopher Marlowe was accused of atheism throughout his life, these attacks came from his enemies. There is no concrete evidence that the playwright espoused heretical teachings. This article looks at the religious content of Tamburlane the Great, Part II--the play usually held as evidence of Marlowe's anti-Christian prejudice, and finds in it instead clear evidence in three places that Marlowe uses the play to reinforce traditional Trinitarian Christianity. The article examines the meaning of Islamic references in the play, and calls into question the common interpretation of Islam as a stand-in for Christianity in the end of the play.

Donny Inbar

TAMING OF THE JEW
Marlowe's Barabas Vis-à-vis
Shakespeare's Shylock

[pages 160 - 174]

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Abstract

Whereas Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is considered an intriguing, yet problematic play, thus forcing any modern stage (or screen) interpreter to focus first and foremost on its Anti-Jewish component; Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (about Barabas, a serial killer, whose character and plot are clearly echoed in the play about Shylock the usurer) is generally ignored, for being too Anti-Semitic to even consider mounting. How true is this unwritten perception, what is so frightening about Barabas the Jew, and at what price was Shylock’s indictment reduced from crime to misdemeanor?

Jennifer Lavy

Theoretical Foundations of Grotowski's Total Act, Via Negativa, and Conjunctio Oppositorum

[pages 175 - 188]

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Abstract

The three theoretical concepts most central to Poor Theatre—as this aesthetic was developed by Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Laboratory Theatre in the early 1960s—are conjunctio oppositorum, via negativa, and total act. This essay explores the theoretical foundations of these key concepts by investigating the theories of Patanjali and his yoga sutras, Nagarjuna and the Hindu concept of sunyata, Zeami and his treatises on the art of Japanese Noh drama, Denis Diderot, Martin Buber, Victor Turner, Niels Bohr, and Grotowski himself. This research leads to an enhanced understanding of these concepts’ practical application in Polish Laboratory Theatre work.

Sam Vasquez

The Deployment of Humor and Song in Asserting Black Diasporic Identity in Aimé Césaire's A Tempest

[pages 189 - 196]

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Abstract

This essay examines Martinican author Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest which responds to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Recognizing the need to engage literary sites crucial to the early formation and articulation of Black diasporic identity, Césaire’s text offers alternative interpretations of what it means to be Black from the position of the marginalized. As additional counter to the dominance of Western ontology, the author offers Black vernacular strategies such as humor and song to disrupt the dramatic form and content of the original narrative.