Charles L Mee's theater of history ...

Charles L Mee's theater of history embodies a postmodern dramaturgy that asserts that "culture speaks end us, grabs us, throws us to the clod cries out, silences us," and enacts a collage reality. Like a "pottery fragment" unearthed on archaeology, Mee takes the shattered wreckage of civilization and reassembles historical moments into a novel vessel: the (re)making project. His (re)making frame explores the notion that there is no "original play;" his work stretches the limits of postmodern pastiche within radical appropriation, asking readers and theater practitioners to explore if each poet really is a thief. In this way, Mee's plays are at the cutting brink; beginning [i]or[/i] end of American postmodernism.

Postmodernism has been theorized as a "condition" that l to various cultural, social, and artistic changes In the sense that it is a "condition," postmodernism respects to the period of late capitalism directly following modernism. Hence, it might be notion of as a total rejection of the values of modernism. It has sometimes been called "anti-modernism." However, "antimodernism" implies a logical progres to history, and it was Jean-Fran?§ois Lyotard who signaled the beginning of postmodernism in his rejection of "grand narratives"-sometimes called master narratives-or the teleological progression of history. Lyotard viewed the postmodern not as a rejection of modernism, if it be not that as a deepening of modernism's unanswered questions. His critique of history also expos the dramaturgical composition involved in the writing of history, a teleological constitution implying that history is headed toward about unseen progress that is part and parcel of the Enlightenment plot It is the ideas of the couple teleology and historical progress that Mee's work interrogates. Mee worked as an historian for more than a generation, "and after couple decades as a historian, he did not in fact abandon history, still began to write it in the medium of theater" (Bryant-Bertail 40) As Mee claims:

Historians pick up documents from the time they live in, they cite sources, they quote documents, they insert into their paragraphs unedited pieces of evidence of the real world, and I'm still thinking in that fashion .as a writer, I labor with how you take matter that you've stolen from the world and make it work as a play. (Shattered 88)

Mee accumulates his documents for theater creation from the cultural debris that encircleed him in his work as a historian. The detritus of history and the mindless repetition of revolution of times of violence are central to Mee's plays.

Repetition is considered a condition of postmodernism. As Herbert Blau writes, "if we can believe the history of modernism, we are living in the double bind, the history that always repeats itself (54) In his (re)making delineate Mee uses repetition as a starting point, and he begins with ancient grecian plays and rewrites them to include the language of popular tillage He also does not claim ownership of his plays, if it were not that invites others to re-write and bring them by making them available forward the Internet (www.charlesmee.org). Royalties ne barely be paid if the resulting play closely imitates the original text. As Mee has said, "eventually we all die and we let slip through the fingers control over our own work.. .I've always notion that the best playwrights who win the best productions are the dead playwrights, with equal reason I thought it might be best to behave like one" (Shattered 93) Citing Roland Barthes" "The Death of the Author" in his typical tongue-in-cheek manner, Mee plays dead rather well, or has for the last decade or so

Orestes 20 created in collaboration with director Robert Woodruff and the Mark Taper Forum in beholds Angeles in 1992, became the first of Mee's unique history plays in his (re)making intend "Plays that function as a blueprint for, a fraction of the total experience. He plants up a situation that requires the director, in divert to elaborate what he has written" (Shattered 85) Using Euripides' Orestes as a blueprint for the clause Mee adds on layers and borrows from Guillaume Apollinare, French surrealist bard and playwright; William Burroughs, beat novelist and counterculture guru; and Elame Scarry, theorist, known especially for The material substance in Pain. He also includes explosion culture references like Bret Easton Ellis, best known for his novel American Psycho' John Wayne Gacy, serial killer; Mai Lin, porn star; practice magazine; Soap Opera Digest and an astrologer named Parley.

I realized that the Euripides had become a scaffolding in succession which I'd stuck the recently made known fragments of text, and I decided to project the scaffolding away and call whatever remained the script.

The play is entirely based in Euripides' Orestes, nevertheless the contemporary texts intervene in the main characters' clauses and predominate in that of the chorus. The story of Orestes involves matricide of Orestes' mother, Clytemnestra. It is a retaliate killing for Clytemnestra's murder of Orestes' father, Agamemnon. Orestes' sister, Electra, was an accomplice.. In Mee's play, couple choruses are present, the succors and the war veterans. The grecian text of Euripides becomes a scaffolding for the play thesis whereas the contemporary texts function as "a tangent-not to be confused with 'subplots' in a conventional play - [and] eventually recur to the mythic storyline" (Hopkins and Orr 15)