Conversation and Drama: How Talk is Action

Beginning in the late 1950s, several authors began writing plays with absurdist themes in a realistic guise that depict power struggles in which characters use seemingly everyday language to combat ambiguously menacing forces, to negotiate hierarchical relationships, to create and maintain character masks, and to coerce others into accepting subjective versions of reality. This book analyzes the conversational implications of selected works by Harold Pinter, Simon Gray, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard toward a better understanding of how characters pursue goals with masked language and indirect speech acts disguised as mundane conversation. Four plays are treated with a discourse analysis to explore how everyday-sounding, dramatic conversation defamiliarizes the spectator with language as an effective means of communication by reacquainting him/her with commonly occurring discursive phenomena, so habitualized as to have become hidden. This book is intended for professional and student actors and directors studying both stage and camera work. The analytical methodology put forth will also assist scholars of dramatic literature.