Missing Persons

In the hands of the twentieth century’s most innovative dramatists, characters have revealed their identities on stage in a variety of unconventional ways: they speak with electronic voices or engage in solipsistic monologues; they are lost in self-conscious third-person forms of communicating; or they are expressed simply as movement, sound, and decor. Missing Persons is a study of character and its representations on the modern stage. Within broad literary contexts, William E. Gruber addresses specific questions about the dramatis personae of the playwrights Gordon Craig, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Berhard, and Maria Fornes. Gruber attempts to restore “character” to the current discourse by developing a vocabulary for discussing it in plays in which conventional terms seem insufficient or irrelevant.