Alfred Farag and Egyptian Theater

by Amin, Dina A.

• ISBN13: 9780815631637
• ISBN10: 0815631634
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-30
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr

Summary

"As one of Egyptian theater's leading contemporary playwrights, Alfred Farag has had a profound influence on shaping Arabic drama and Egyptian cultural politics during the past five decades. In the first book-length examination of his work in English, Dina Amin chronicles Farag's career and offers a critical perspective on his creative output and the condition of Eyptian theater in the 1970s through the 1990s." "Farag is best known for the folkloric and neo-realist plays he produced during the sixties, but critics haw consistently overlooked the immense body of work produced in the thirty years that followed. Filing that gap, Amin offers an account of the sophisticated development of his later work, revealing his bold experimentation and successful embrace of modernist, absurdist, and postmodern styles. With fresh insight, Amin contextualizes these works within Farag's own creative history and the larger history of Arabic theater. This critical text includes four complete short plays and a monologue translated for the first time into English and will bring a much-deserved wider audience to the work of this extraordinary dramatist."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Dina A. Amin is assistant professor of Arabic literature and culture and theatre at Villanova University and a professional stage director in both the United States and Egypt.

Table of Contents

Illustrations
Foreword
Poetics
Alfred Farag and Political Commitment	p. 3
Alfred Farag's Drama and the Politics of Identity	p. 27
Metadrama: The Poetics of Disguise	p. 51
The Theater
The Sixties: Egyptian Theater in Search of an Identity	p. 77
The Seventies: Dramatic Self-consciousness and Drama Against Itself	p. 105
The Seventies: Self-conscious Characters and Places of Danger	p. 144
Conclusion: Farag's Metadrama, from Formalism to Functionality	p. 193
The Plays
The Visitor	p. 203
The Peephole	p. 226
The Stranger	p. 245
The Egyptian Hay Circle	p. 254
The Last Walk: A Monologue	p. 267
Appendixes
Theater of the Absurd	p. 275
Works by Alfred Farag	p. 279
Alfred Farag's Photo Gallery	p. 285
Works Cited	p. 289
Index	p. 303
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