(34) Gulnur
Savran and Nesrin Tura, "Cagdaslasma' soylemine teslim olmayiz," Pazartesi (September 1996) p.
The introduction to David
Savran's volume, in which he muses on what he calls "the haunting" of contemporary theatre, sets up a context for the interviews that follow.
David
Savran argues that, since the 1960s, white men have perceived themselves as victimized in various ways--by blacks, by women, by the government--and have embraced the fantasy that a real man is one who receives and absorbs incredible amounts of pain.
However according to Turkish daily Milliyet, one of the 10 victims, teacher Ahmet
Savran, was not even a convict let alone a terrorist.
Equally penetrating are the questions posed by David
Savran to Tony Kushner, who established himself as a world-class playwright with his masterful Angels in America (1993; see WLT 69:1, p.
For their suggestions and comments, I am grateful to Karin Cope, Jane Gerhard, Kevin Kopelson, George Monteiro, Miriam Reumann, David
Savran,and several anonymous readers.
Since the impact of these and other gay organizations and publications was at first small (
Savran 86), it's not surprising that Ashbery's published recollections of the early fifties would be directed toward the oppressive conditions of cold war hegemony: "the period when we [the members of the so-called New York School] all moved to New York and found ourselves together coincided with McCarthy and the Korean war, which was a very humiliating and cynical period, a low point" ("John Ashbery" 22).(16) Nor is it surprising that the poems in Some Trees, many of which are retrospectively concerned with childhood, express negative, albeit oblique, reactions to the cultural double bind that would be automatically imposed on gay pre-Stonewall young adults and children.
8: American Drama (1977); Ruby Cohn, New American Dramatists 1960-1980 (1982); James Haskins, Black Theater in America (1982); David
Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (1988); Theodore Shank, American Alternative Theatre (1982); and Gerald Weales, The Jumping Off Place: American Drama in the 1960s (1969).
There are exceptions, like, say, the brilliant David
Savran. Yet, in large part, theatre's best thinkers tend to write for each other, to speak mostly at conferences, to write in the codes of an increasingly jargon-heavy field.
Ayse ALTINTAS (1), Cigdem OZKARA (1), Melis SOHTAOGLU SEVINDIK (1), Mustafa UZAN (2), Cigdem KEKIK CINAR (3), Omer UYSAL (4), Fatma
SAVRAN OGUZ (3)
Acknowledgement: The authors wish to thank Aydin Ekim
Savran for English language assistance.