Rethinking Laughter in Contemporary Anglophone Theatre

The revival on the contemporary stage of long-established aesthetic categories inherited from the comic tradition and comprising a wide variety of styles, ranging from the burlesque, the slapstick or the farcical to satirical and black comedies, calls for a re-examination of the role and function of laughter in anglophone theatre since the second half of the twentieth century. In a post-Auschwitz world where, according to Theodor Adorno’s much-quoted dictum, it has become impossible to write ..

The Haunted Stage of "Summer and Smoke:" Tennessee Williams's Silent Film Sequences

Recent re-evaluation of Tennessee Williams’s late plays has brought to light another side of the playwright, an avant-garde impulse ignored by his contemporaries because it did not match his image as a poetic realist. Of course, this new Williams did not appear out of the blue; he was there from the beginning, if less conspicuous, but the weight of prejudice drove him underground. Thus, the avant-garde is most visible in the early plays, in deviations from artistic norms that did not always make it to the published versions. Summer and Smoke (1948) is a case in point. Examination of the unpublished drafts of the play reveals an ambitious project that never saw the light of day. Inspired by Erwin Piscator’s Epic Theatre, Williams intended to put a screen on the stage, inviting the spectator to see differently, in a manner reminiscent of Brecht’s “exercise in complex seeing.” The drafts, therefore, unveil the avant-garde ideas of a playwright who never ceased experimenting with form, finally to find his true voice, a voice that resonates most loudly in the late plays

SUZAN-LORI PARKS AND NAOMI WALLACE IN RELATION: PLAYING THE AMERICAN GAME FOR REAL AND BEYOND.

International audiencewo American women whose writings for the theatre have been both nationally and internationally recognized, Suzan-Lori Parks and Naomi Wallace have drawn on the notion of game-playing to explore and undermine the inextricability of the power relations that govern their vision of America. Because theatre is about playing, games occupy a central position around which meaning revolves and multiplies on stage, infinitely magnified by Parks’s and Wallace’s poetic imagination. As far apart and unique as they are, their voices deeply resonate with the American landscape and beyond, echoing each other in ways that call for an examination of the correspondences that make their plays related, in the sense Edouard Glissant gave to the term, of a totality that does not exclude differences, of a meeting of pluralities, which is the stable/unstable ground of games, and of a place from where infinite beauty can spring. Parks’s The America Play and Wallace’s The War Boys, both written in the early 90s, evolved through a creative process that feeds on itself into the widely acclaimed Topdog/Underdog that earned Parks a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and The Breach, which was produced at the Avignon Theatre Festival in 2019, expanding Wallace’s popularity in France. Through a comparative analysis of the poetics at work in these four plays, the aim of this article is to bring these two women’s voices together, placing them in relation without erasing their particularities to delineate the contours of a “relational poetics,” to again use Glissant’s terminology, one that evokes rather than explains, one that resurrects the past to reinvent our present and divine the future: an art of divination

Major discrepancy between factual antibiotic resistance and consumption in South of France: analysis of 539,037 bacterial strains

International audienceThe burden of antibiotic resistance is currently estimated by mathematical modeling, without real count of resistance to key antibiotics. Here we report the real rate of resistance to key antibiotics in bacteria isolated from humans during a 5 years period in a large area in southeast in France. We conducted a retrospective study on antibiotic susceptibility of 539,107 clinical strains isolated from hospital and private laboratories in south of France area from January 2014 to January 2019. The resistance rate to key antibiotics as well as the proportion of bacteria classified as Difficult-to-Treat (DTR) were determined and compared with the Mann-Whitney U test, the chi(2) test or the Fisher's exact test. Among 539,037 isolates, we did not observe any significant increase or decrease in resistance to key antibiotics for 5 years, (oxacillin resistance in Staphylococcus aureus, carbapenem resistance in enterobacteria and Pseudomonas aeruginosa and 3rd generation cephalosporin resistance in Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae). However, we observed a significant decrease in imipenem resistance for Acinetobacter baumannii from 2014 to 2018 (24.19-12.27%; p = 0.005) and a significant increase of ceftriaxone resistance in Klebsiella pneumoniae (9.9-24.03%; p = 0.001) and Enterobacter cloacae (24.05-42.05%; p = 0.004). Of these 539,037 isolates, 1604 (0.3%) had a DTR phenotype. Over a 5-year period, we did not observe a burden of AR in our region despite a high rate of antibiotic consumption in our country. These results highlight the need for implementation of real-time AR surveillance systems which use factual data