• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.297-304
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to examine the characteristics and theatricality of everyday plays in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and to re-examine this work that makes us recognize the importance of everyday life in the COVID-19 era. This work seeks to find a certain value in very trivial events with the subject matter of everyday life such as birth, love and marriage, and death. Grovers Corners, the background of this work, symbolizes the town and the universe where everyone lives today, and the action spans from 1901 to 1913, and this action shows universality in everyday life that takes place even today. Wilder won a second Pulitzer Prize for this work and is a leading figure in non-realist theater. Using an empty stage as the basic frame, this work shows theatricalism, a theory that acknowledges that the action on the stage is not true and shows that fact to the audience. In addition, he leads actors to act with mime instead of props, stimulating the audience's imagination and making them think of props that are not on stage as if they really exist. This work is an everyday play that makes people realize the importance of everyday life, and it has the effect of creating an opportunity for the audience to reflect on the play and life while keeping a distance.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.291-312
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• 2011

The academic world in Korea demands internationally competitive researches at the moment. However, there is a lack of understanding on research trends of Western countries. This research aims to understand how discussions on early modern Japanese plays are developed in Western countries such as America. Also, it aims to consider and compare the present situation of researches on early modern Japanese plays in Western countries, Japan and Korea. In Western countries, modern Japanese plays such as Kabuki and Joruri is accepted and enjoyed as universal plays of the world. It is not only because there is a background of enjoying plays such as Shakespeare's but also researches and translations are accumulated continuously from the early 20th century. In the early 20th century, the main theme of researches was about Kabuki actors in Ukiyoe which was collected because of an interest in orientalism. After 1930s, Japanese arts and handcrafts were sent to art museums in America in order to promote Japanese culture. Also, many Japanese books were donated to university libraries in order to form institutes of Japanology. The war was started when the foundation of Japanology was about to be laid. Students who were interested in Japan were mobilized to the war as agents to understand Japan. After the war, those students started to do researches on Japan on a full scale. There were researchers such as Donald Keen who did researches on Kabuki and Joruri. In western countries, there are researches on patterns of behavior and thoughts of Japanese people, comparison with Shakespeare's plays, dramaturgie, theatricalism as well as censorship of Kabuki during the war and mobilization of Kabuki to the war. It is necessary to understand where my researches are positioned in those research trends. It is also necessary to break away from overlapped and repeated researches of the same point of view and find out new research paradigms.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.237-253
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• 2010

In Christopher Marlowe's Cambridge days in the 1580s, the British forward wits were engaged in the curious pursuit of magic and occult philosophy in order to discover the mystery of things. Magic, together with judiciary astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and logic, was one of the most practical disciplines. Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson demonstrate their deep interest in magic and its language of spell and charms in the light of their analogical application to the alchemical theatre. As Shakespeare says that the poet, the lover, and the madman are of the same because they give forms to airy nothing, a magical illusion is, for the three playwrights, similar to the theatrical illusion in that both magic and theatre work in and by a language and both give us sportive pleasures through the deceptio visus. However, while Jonson is rather puritanically antagonistic to the illusive language of alchemy and magic, Marlowe and Shakespeare are attracted to the rapturous nature of the absolute language of magic. Doctor Faustus' indulgence in magic stands for the Marlovian aspiration for the absolute language which allows no discrepancy between thinking and willing, conceiving and actualizing. His uses of spells, charms, anagrams, and magic books are transformed and translated in the play into an alchemical theatre. Faustus is dependant on and bound by his books of magic, as is the actor on the stage. Faustus is the poet condemned from the beginning. Though he is mistakenly thinking that it is he himself that manipulates Mephostophilis the magical agent, it is otherwise. Faustus is a shadow or an actor in the Elizabethan language. He remains a farcical figure during the twenty-four years which are given to him for his sensual dalliance. Marlowe never forgets through his farcical clowning to satirize such Catholic rituals as exorcism and benediction for their illusive theatricalism. The sports of Faustus' playacting and play-directing rise at the last hour to the height of a tragedy. Ironically Marlowe the playwright succeeds as a tragedian at the point where Faustus fails as a magician.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.155-167
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• 2020

The stage manager role of "Our Town"(1938), a representative work of Thornton Wilder(1897-1975), is a unique theatrical device that presents a wide range of interesting and diverse perspectives in the actor's acting approach, the director's stage-shape methodology, and the audience's theater experience. Why did Wilder call stage manager role a stage manager, not just a simple narrator? Because "Our Town" intentionally lacks the basic elements that dramas must have, it needed a more self-reliant and omnipotent role in creating the margins of dramatic writing, including boldly omitted time and space, with infinite imagination. For this reason, stage manager role plays a much more complex and multi-functional role than a narrator. In response, this paper accurately articulates the concept of theatrical style and theatrical convention on the premise of the stage manager role in "Our Town," followed by making theatrical convention, the director of scene progress and scene change, the messenger of the writer's thoughts, and dramatic rhythm control.