Experimental Theatre of the 1960’s – Challenges of the Performance. Performativity and Intentionality: Kennedy and Baraka
Experimental Theatre of the 1960’s – Challenges of the Performance. Performativity and Intentionality: Kennedy and Baraka

Summary/Abstract: “Experimental Theatre of the 1960’s – Challenges of thePerformance: Performativity and Intentionality – Kennedyand Baraka” explores the nature of the borderline experience of interpreting a drama in the process of stage production. The text discusses two aspects, namely the intention of the playwright as reflected in the play script and the intention of the director manifested in the theatre performance. This borderline experience, albeit foreign to other literary genres, has been inherently inscribed into every play known in history. The playwright’s intention embodied in the script is evaluated and subsequently transformed by the director. The level of transformation, though, depends on the nature of stage directions. In order to explain the mechanism which underlies the differentiated levels of production-based transformation, the paper refers to Richard Courtney’s idea of a play as a skeletal literary form, as well as to Beardsley’s, Ingarden’s and Stanislavski’s theories of intentional author/ playwright.There are two in-depth case studies, of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship, which exemplify the theory that the directors may in fact be restricted in their freedom of script interpretation. The paper provides an insight into the mode of playwright’s intentional seizing the control of stage production with the facilitated stage directions.

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