In January, Scott Proudfit, Assistant Professor of English, published an essay in the journal Modern Drama and a chapter and introduction in Palgrave's edited collection "Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre."
Scott Proudfit, assistant professor of English, had two publications released during January.
The first was an essay for the journal Modern Drama titled "Reunion, Complication, Refraction, and Translation: How Postcolonialism and Post-Structuralism Mark 'Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.'" This essay argues that what has perplexed critics and audiences about Rajiv Joseph's 2009 play — its seemingly apolitical and ruminative second act — in fact signals why the play is the rightful heir to an earlier generation of Broadway productions with postcolonial concerns, including David Henry Hwang's "M. Butterfly." In his new interpretation, Proudfit puts Joseph's play in conversation with the theories of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Arjun Appadurai, among others.
The second publication is a chapter in Palgrave's collection "Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre," edited by Kara Reilly, titled "Theatrical Mash-up: Assembled Text as Adaptation in 'Medea/'Macbeth/Cinderella.'" This chapter argues that a number of recent "assembled-text" theatre productions, including Bill Rauch and Tracy Young's "Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella" (M/M/C), have more in common with pop-music tracks from, for example, Danger Mouse's "The Grey Album" than with these plays' theatrical antecedents, the postmodern collages of late 20th-century U.S. theatres, such as the Wooster Group's "Route 1&9." "M/M/C", most recently presented in 2012 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, simultaneously stages Euripides' "Medea," Shakespeare's "Macbeth," and the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Cinderella" in an overlapping mash-up. Proudfit also wrote the Introduction to the first section of this collection, titled "Company and Directorial Approaches to Adaptation."