“Ah the old questions, the old answers . . .”: Postmodernism and poetic justice in the plays of Charles Ludlam
1990; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10462939009365980
ISSN1479-5760
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoCharles Ludlam was the founder and, until his death in 1987, the artistic director and resident playwright of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, one of the most durable and highly acclaimed of New York's Off‐off‐Broadway theaters. His plays are rich embodiments of the postmodern sensibility. Three works that span his career—Bluebeard, The Mystery of Irma Vep, and The Artificial Jungle—present striking images of being as performance. Especially performance‐like are the workings of “poetic justice,” that system of moral checks and balances that has been an enduring feature of Western drama. Ludlam's parodic embrace of “poetic justice” challenges the stability of traditional categories of truth and identity, while affirming precisely those subversive aspects of the stage that, even as it claimed orthodoxy, earned the theater banishment from the ideal republics of Plato and Rousseau.
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