The disguised and distanced real(ity) play within the fictitious play in israeli stage-drama

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

The chapter explores the aesthetic construction and prominent socio-political and ethical roles of the play-within-The-play structure as a rhetorical device in Israeli stage drama. In view of the enormous prestige of theatre art in Israel as identity generator, the rhetorical manipulation modes of the play-within-The-play device often enable the fictitious theatrical texts to serve as critical parables that disseminate higher , theological truths regarding the authentic , extra-Theatrical Israeli reality usually defined by the theatrical text as self-deceptive. This function asserts itself in three strategies. Strategy A: Reality as a play within the play and the spectator as an ousted outsider. Within this strategy observed already in The Dybbuk, the signature performance of Israeli theatre the play-within-The-play device is devised as a defamiliarizing mimesis of actual reality proper, thus exposing the discrepancy between it and the implied spectator s predominant reality convention. Strategy B: Social criticism through detached evidence. This strategy, culminating in plays by the bards of Israeli drama, Hanoch Levin and Nissim Aloni, employs nonrealistic, a-mimetic and self-conscious theatrical means in order to distance the evidence about the extra-performative referent to the never-never land of myth, legend or autonomous stage metaphor, thus stimulating the spectator s suggestive interpretive intervention. Strategy C: Merging the frame-play with the play within the play. This strategy blurs the boundaries between framing and framed plots and involves the implied spectator in the process. Through these strategies Israeli drama has transformed the play-within-The-play convention into a method for enabling society to present itself to itself.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
PublisherBrill Rodopi
Pages167-187
Number of pages21
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007

Publication series

NameInternationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
Volume112
ISSN (Print)0929-6999

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