Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

In Theatre, Communication, and Critical Realism (2010), Nellhaus argues for distinctive innovations in theatre practice as symptomatic of a society's relationship with its communication framework. In his first two examples, he compares two cultures that experienced a shift from orality to writing, Greece during the fifth century BC and medieval England. Both the Greek tragedy and the York mystery cycle evince the cognitive effects of speech and writing, but they assumed their exceptional forms because of the mitigating influence of other causal factors. Likewise, Ben Jonson's dramaturgy distinguishes itself from the writing of contemporaneous Elizabethans because Jonson was particularly attuned to the material effects of ownership and entrepreneurialism that the use of the new printing technology suggested. And although British sentimental drama of the early eighteenth century also relied upon cognitive modalities conditioned by print, its unique features stem from a change in the use of print, specifically in the proliferation of the periodical. The periodical, in Nellhaus's view, separated the private from the public sphere and emphasized the psychological depth, emotion, and heightened expression characteristic of the genre.

In American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962 (2003), McConachie fashions a historiography of American mainstream theatre during the Cold War that prioritizes the influence of radio in shaping the cognitive structures of the American public at that time—and by extension the unique expressive corollary of the popular and successful theatre productions. Identifying the commercial availability of radio in the 1920s, McConachie argues that by 1947 a generation of Americans attuned to “radiophony” would have necessitated a shift in the modes of theatrical production. Whereas realist productions from the end of the nineteenth century to the early 1940s strove for a physical verisimilitude in keeping with photography, radiophony suggested levels of abstraction, timelessness, and interiority that became evident in the writing and stage designs that followed.²¹ McConachie discusses the differences in the writing and initial staging of Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! in 1935 and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in 1949 as examples. The events of Sing transpire