Academic Criticism + Informational Reviews

Click on the titles of the following selections to access the full text.

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Love Among the Ruins by Scott T. Cummings

Profiles playwright Charles L. Mee of the United States. Contributions to the theater industry; Influences and inspirations; Information on his plays `Big Love,' directed by Les Waters and `Summertime,' directed by Kenn Watt; Views on writing. INSET: TALKING TO MEE: 'STARTLED BY THE SUDDENNESS OF LIFE'.

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Remaking American Theater: Charles Mee, Anne Bogart, and the Siti Company 

This text, an outstanding addition to an impressive series edited by Don Wilmeth, offers a vital contribution to the study of two of the most significant theatre artists working today. It is the first full-length text linking Mee and Bogart in style, content, approach to craft, and influence on modern theatre practice. Applying the framework of "remaking" to Mee's playwriting and Bogart's approach to directing and audiences, Cummings draws his lines of argument so convincingly and develops the connections between these two artists in such a compelling fashion that one wonders why they haven't been the subject of a joint study before. Big Love feature.

*Rewriting the Greeks: Mee and Big Love Specifics (15 pages)

Taken from: The Translations, Adaptations, Distant Relatives and Productions of Aeschylus’ Tragedies in the United States of America from 1900 to 2009. (Full text 393 pages)

The purpose of this study is to examine the practices of rewriting Aeschylus’ tragedies for American audiences and the manner in which these rewrites are “read” by stage directors who adapt them in their academic and non-academic theatre productions in the United States. In order to analyze the translation and performance practices of Aeschylus’ plays, this study will examine all English language translations, adaptations, and distant relatives of Aeschylus’ works for the twenty and twenty-first centuries and analyze key moments that connect and illuminate those works.

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*Charles Mee's Intertextual and Intercultural Inscriptions: The Suppliants Vs Big Love

by Dr Savas Patsalidis of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece from Codifying the National Self

This essay offers a well-rounded and researched presentation of Charles Mee, his life, style of writing, and ways of interlacing culture within everything he creates. The essay is included as a chapter within "Codifying the National Self": a collection of essays selected in order to exemplify different aspects and theories of theater studies: the playwright, the play, the audience, and the actor are all examined as part of the theatrical experience that serves to formulate American national identity.

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Supplices, The Satyr Play: Charles Mee's Big Love by Rush Rehm

In "Big Love," Charles L. Mee converts Aeschylus' "Danaides" into a contemporary satyr play, the paratragic genre for which Aeschylus was famous in antiquity. Rehm delves into the ways in which Big Love is the "Satyr play" version of Aeschylus's earliest surviving drama. Highlighting the idea that the primal compulsions that affect human beings.

*The Rape of the Author: How Charles Mee (re)defines Authorship and its Manifestation in his Play Big Love by Jorge J. Rodriguez

This English Senior Essay offers an introduction to the work of contemporary American playwright Charles Mee and his (re)making project. It examines his play Big Love, paying particular attention to the characters’ suggestion that rape is not necessarily a sexual violation, but the act of taking anything by force. The essay argues that Mee’s figurative rape of other author’s texts is necessary to free writing from copyright restrictions and to ultimately establish a free textual exchange among writers. Given that this rape analogy is not Mee’s own, the essay ultimately suggests that the playwright literalizes a long-standing literary theory to suggest that textual appropriation is a manifestation of writing, rather than an assault on its conventions.

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Big Love: Relationality, Ethics, and The Art of Letting Go by Fintan Walsh

This article considers the performance of non-violent relationality. Focusing on a production of Big Love, it explores how performance might enlighten an ethic of non-violent being with others, and non-violent being in the world. While many theoretical models of identity emphasize the unavoidable aggressivity of intersubjective relations, this article focuses on scenes in which the subject is let go from

violence and retribution.