No Kidding! Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater
by Donald McManus
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Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2004
ISBN: 0-87413-808-6
Published in 2003
$39.50
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This work examines the way the clown has been used as a serious character by important playwrights and directors in twentieth-century theater. Clown's approach to performance is profoundly different from other modes of theatrical representation. It is the essential nature of clown to resist mimetic conventions, always asserting an alternative logic of stage action. The paradox of clown, a traditionally marginal, comic character thrust into center stage as the focus of the agon, provided a stimulating new way for modernists to renovate tragedy. Experiments with clown by Jean Cocteau, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Giorgio Strehler, Dario Fo, and Roberto Begnini are examined as the means of exploring how and why Clown became, in contemporary theater and film, a character from whom audiences expect philosophizing, angst, or political criticism as much as physical comedy and fractured language. Donald Cameron McManus is Assistant Professor of Theater at Franklin & Marshall College.
