Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American DramaKonstantinos Blatanis
About the Author:
Konstantinos Blatanis received his Ph.D. from Aristotle University. He is currently an independent scholar and has presented papers at international and local conferences and symposiums and has published articles on modern drama.
This study focuses on the extensive and multisided rapport contemporary American playwrights have established with popular culture in the course of the past four decades. Attention is given to individual cases that deal fruitfully with the most foreceful cultural agent in postmodernity, the icon. The discussion addresses the task of theater images in a cultural field where the real is mistaken for its reflection, originality constantly played against seriality, at a moment when simculacra, clones, and emulations of selves and texts become firmly established as the norm. The accommodation of pop icons on stage and the results this framing yields constitute this work's primary interests and aims. The plays discussed in this work include Sam Shepard's The Mad Dog Blues (1971), Michael McClure's The Beard (1965), Shepard's Angel City (1976), Adrienne Kennedy's A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), Terrence McNally's Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? (1971), Shepard's The Tooth of Crime (1972), Shepard and Patti Smith's Cowboy Mouth (1971), Stephen Metcalfe's The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers (1984), Jean Claude Van Itallie's TV (1966), John Guare's Kissing Sweet (1969), Thomas Babe's Great Solo Town (1977), Shepard's States of Shock (1991), Len Jenkin's Five of Us (1984), Thomas Babe's Billy Irish (1977), Shepard's The Unseen Hand (1969), McClure's General Gorgeous (1975), Kopit's Indians (1968), Shepard's Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1974), and True West (1980), and Marsha Norman's The Holdup (1983). ISBN 0-8386-4008-7, Price $39.50
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