Missing persons

In the hands of the twentieth century's most innovative dramatists, characters have revealed their identities on stage in a variety of unconventional ways: they speak with electronic voices or engage in solipsistic monologues; they are lost in self-conscious third-person forms of communicating or are expressed simply as movement, sound, and decor. Missing Persons is a study of character and its representation on the modern stage. Within broad literary contexts, William E. Gruber addresses specific questions about the dramatis personae of the playwrights Gordon Craig, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and Maria Fornes. Among the questions Gruber considers are why mechanical actors or the abrupt dislocations of oriental acting styles meant so much to dramatists as different as Brecht and Craig; why figures in Beckett's late plays are so often flat, schematized, heraldic; and why such contemporary dramatists as Fornes and Bernhard share a profound fascination with the mechanics of theatrical representation - quoting, reciting, reproducing, or impersonating an absent text. The figures who move across these stages are frail, contradictory, occasionally mutilated, or even dismembered. They are grim reminders, says Gruber, that the individual's place in the world is not as secure or as central as we imagine it once was. "Yet character," Gruber argues, "remains for these authors a crucial element of drama, even if it is more fragile, more ghostly, more enigmatic than ever before." . The study of character as a crucial component of drama has been neglected for much of this century. Missing Persons attempts to restore "character" to the current discourse by developing a vocabulary for discussing it in plays in which conventional terms seem insufficient or irrelevant. Drawing on evidence from five dramatists whose work has long been considered antagonistic toward character - as the term has typically been understood - Gruber maintains that modern drama is never anticharacter even when it is most aggressively antirealist and suggests that "character" remains a defining ideal throughout the modern and postmodern period, especially among dramatists who seem deliberately to have forsaken it.