Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance)

Description

Much of the theater of antiquity is marked by erasures: missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them.  Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory traces the remains, the remembering, and the forgetting of performance traditions of classical theater. The book argues that it is only when we look back over the accumulation of small evidence over a thousand-year sweep of classical theater that the remarkable and unequaled endurance of the tradition emerges. In the absence of more evidence, Odai Johnson turns instead to the absence itself, pressing its most legible gaps into a narrative about scars, vanishings, erasures, and silence:  all the breakages that constitute the ruins of antiquity. In ten wide-ranging case studies, theater history and performance theory are brought together to examine the texts, artifacts, and icons left behind, reading them in fresh ways to offer an elegantly written, extended meditation on “how the aesthetic of ruins offered a model for an ideal that dislodged and ultimately stood in for the historic.” Contents Abbreviations Introduction: The Size of All That’s Missing Prologue: The Unmixed Prior One. Domesticating Dionysus Two. The Fining of Phrynichus: Shaping Memory and Genre in Athens Three. Broken Shards and Buried Barbs: Ostracism and Weaponized Comedy Four. The Serene Face of Menander; or, “The Dipper Dipped” Five. Unspeakable Histories: Terror, Spectacle, and Genocidal Memory on the Roman Stage Six. Mapping Rome: Becoming Togati Seven. Mapping Rome: Shitting on Romans Eight. Mapping Rome: Rules for Borrowing Memory Nine. Savage Cuisine / The City of Always Ten. Antiquity’s Last Supper Eleven. The Damnatio of the Gods: Theater and Resistance in the Pagan Holocaust Epilogue. The Lacuna in the Text Notes Bibliography Index