Innehåller bibliografiska referenser och index

Incommunication -- Theater/Media -- Demoition of a theater (1901) -- Residual becomes emergent -- Medium/media/remediation in reverse -- Theater/film -- Apparatus -- Williams, Beckett, Kennedy -- Walter Benjamin's work of art essay -- Benjamin's medium -- Modernism: Shaw, Lorca, Brecht -- Participation in postwar theater -- Artaud's voice against radio -- Publics -- Handke's Offending the audience -- Tennessee Williams -- Williams material ; Learning sexual violence with Tennessee Williams, or Streetcar in pictures ; Lead Belly's guitar and Williams's counterpublics -- Samuel Beckett -- Beckett, cinema, politics ; Film and its audiences ; Catastrophe: fixing the audience ; Endgame, postwar mass culture and forms of address ; Beckett, the proscenium, media ; Product placement -- Adrienne Kennedy -- Theater after Hollywood ; A movie star in 1976 ; The author as produced: Hollywood/Jim Crow ; Diary of lights ; Afterword/After theater

In Theater after Film, Martin Harries argues that after 1945, as cinema became omnipresent in popular culture, theater had to respond to cinema’s hegemony. Theater couldn’t break that hegemony, but it could provide a zone of contestation. Theater made film’s domination of the cultural field visible through hyperbole, refusal, and other strategies, thereby unsettling its power. Postwar theatrical experiment, Harries shows, often channeled and represented film’s mass cultural force, while knowing that it could never possess that force. Throughout the book, Harries brings critical theory into contact with theories of performance. Although Theater after Film treats the theatrical work of many figures, its central focus falls on Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Adrienne Kennedy. Discussions of these dramatists consider their ways of addressing spectators, the politics of race between film and theater, and the place of the theatrical apparatus. Readings of these central figures in twentieth-century theater exemplify the book’s historical engagement with the media surround that drama confronted. This confrontation, Harries shows, was central to the development of some of the most continually compelling postwar drama