Going (Neo)Baroque the Foreman Way: A Case Study of Panic! (How To Be Happy!)

Agnieszka Matysiak

doi:10.18290/rh257311.7

Published : 2025-12-19

Vol. 73 No. 11 (2025)

Going (Neo)Baroque the Foreman Way: A Case Study of Panic! (How To Be Happy!)

Agnieszka Matysiak

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0134-7690

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh257311.7

Abstract

Panic! (How to Be Happy!), Foreman’s 2003 theatrical “piece,” written, directed and designed by the playwright himself, tests the conventional limits imposed by both the characters’ bodies and the very structure of the theatrical stage. The present article proposes to re-appraise this composition as a new form of a theatrical work, that is, not a purely avant-garde or neo-surreal play, but a (Neo)Baroque dramatic phenomenon only seemingly restricted to and framed by the principles of spatial geometry. By celebrating the idea of fragmentation through the construction of the play and its short dialogues, and by accentuating and cherishing the creative potential of linguistic and set-design “rubbish,” Foreman encompasses in his work both the (Neo)Baroque and surreal art, and transforms them into an altogether new category. I shall call that new type of a dramatic creation a (Neo)Baroque play.

Keywords:

(Neo)Baroque, American theater, Richard Foreman, Off-Off Broadway, Wunderkammer, rubbish theory

Details

References

Statistics

Authors

Download files

pdf

Altmetric indicators

Cited by / Share

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

References

Aronson, Arnold. Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited and introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1999.

Bredekamp, Horst. The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology. Translated by Allison Brown. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Sage Publications, 1994.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics. Translated by Dorothy Z. Baker. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013.

Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Translated by Charles Lambert. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Castillo, David R. “Horror (Vacui): The Baroque Condition.” In Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, edited by Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo, 87–104. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Dolan, Jill. Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991.

Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Egginton, William. The Theatre of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics. Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Egginton, William. “How the World Became a Stage”—Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity. New York: State University of New York Press, 2004.

Ellis-Fermor, Una. The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation. New York: Vintage Books, 1964.

Feingold, Michael. “Shanghaied Gestures.” The Village Voice, January 22, 2003.

Foreman, Richard. Panic! (How to Be Happy!). In Bad Boy Nietzsche and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007.

Foreman, Richard. Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theatre. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.

Lambert, Gregg. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. London: Continuum, 2004.

MacDonald, Erik. Theatre at the Margins: Text and the Post-Structured Stage. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Translated by Terry Cochran. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Parkinson, Gavin. Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Richardson, Brian. “Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama.” New Literary History 32, no. 3 (2001): 681–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2001.0042.

Reilly, Kara. Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Robinson, Marc. The Other American Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Robinson, Marc. “The Mind King Abdicates.” Review of Panic! (How To Be Happy!), by Richard Foreman. Theatre 33, no. 3 (2003): 138–41. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/52179.

Sandman, Jenny. Review of Panic! (How to Be Happy!), by Richard Foreman. CurtainUp, January 21, 2003. http://curtainup.com/panic.html.

Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: SAGE Publications, 2002.

Thompson, Michael. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Westerhoff, Jan C. “A World of Signs: Baroque Pansemioticism, the Polyhistor and the Early Modern Wunderkammer.” Journal of the History of Ideas (2001): 633–50. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2001.0041.

Zimmerman, Susan, ed. Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. New York: Routledge, 1992.