Startseite Family Matters: Trauma and the Legacy of War in James Allen Moad II’s Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home
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Family Matters: Trauma and the Legacy of War in James Allen Moad II’s Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home

  • Andrea Roxana Bellot EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 23. Oktober 2021
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Abstract

Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home (2016), a play written and performed solo by James Allen Moad II, a former Air Force pilot, explores the enduring effects of war on American veterans and their families after soldiers return home from the battleground. The play moves beyond the individual representation of a traumatized veteran by addressing two intertwined issues: the collective and transgenerational burden of war, both in the form of physical wounds and/or moral injuries. Outside Paducah contributes to promoting the stage as a dynamic place to think about the war legacy and to question and challenge war itself by stressing the importance of understanding the cost of war on both personal and societal levels. The play shows that the scenes of war fought in foreign lands are brought back to the home territories and families, who become equally demoralised by the perpetuation of war in their homelands. The soldiers return as ghosts of their previous selves and haunt their families and friends from one generation to the next. Therefore, war remains an open wound at the core of the American nation. At the same time, the play sheds some light on the harsh realities of the underprivileged and how joining the military often seems to provide a way out of the world of poverty and lack of resources.

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Published Online: 2021-10-23
Published in Print: 2021-11-02

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. “It Can’t Happen Here”: Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play
  4. “My Skin Is Not Me”: The Transformations of William Shakespeare’s Othello in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet
  5. “You Don’t Know Who This Man Is”: Hospitality and Trauma in Alexandra Wood’s The Human Ear
  6. Family Matters: Trauma and the Legacy of War in James Allen Moad II’s Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home
  7. When Young Playwrights Are Kept Awake Because of History: Cultural Memory and Amnesia in Recent American Plays
  8. This Is England 2021: Staging England and Englishness in Contemporary Theatre
  9. Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad
  10. Book Reviews
  11. Emily Klein, Jennifer-Scott Mobley, and Jill Stevenson, ed. Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, xvi + 238 pp., €84,99 (hardback), €71,68 (ebook).
  12. Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, and Brandon Woolf, ed. Postdramatic Theatre and Form. London: Methuen, 2019, xii + 266 pp., £52.50 (hardback), £26.09 (paperback), £37.12 (PDF ebook).
  13. Sarah J. Ablett. Dramatic Disgust: Aesthetic Theory and Practice from Sophocles to Sarah Kane. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020, 199 pp., €38.00 (paperback), €37.99 (PDF ebook).
  14. Clare Finburgh. Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017, xv + 355 pp., £76.50 (hardback), £26.99 (paperback), £21.59 (PDF ebook).
  15. Kim Solga. Theory for Theatre Studies: Space. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, 208 pp., £45.00 (hardback), £11.69 (paperback), £9.35 (ebook).
  16. Shonagh Hill. Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019, x + 257 pp., £75.00 (hardback).
  17. Marco Galea and Szabolcs Musca, ed. Redefining Theatre Communities: International Perspectives on Community-Conscious Theatre-Making. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2019, 262 pp., £76.00 (hardback).
  18. Roxanne Rimstead and Domenico A. Beneventi, ed. Contested Spaces, Counter-Narratives, and Culture from Below in Quebec and Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2019, 348 pp., $71.25 (hardback), $71.25 (ebook).
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  20. Molly Mullen. Applied Theatre: Economies. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019, xiv + 265 pp., £38.31 (hardback), £31.10 (paperback), £22.58 (Kindle ebook).
  21. William C. Boles, ed. After In-Yer-Face Theatre: Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xvi + 251 pp., £79.99 (hardback), £63.99 (ebook).
  22. Daphne P. Lei and Charlotte McIvor, ed. The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance. London: Methuen Drama, 2020, 280 pp., $157.00 (hardback), $126.00 (PDF ebook), $126.00 (EPUB/MOBI ebook).
  23. Stephen Greer. Queer Exceptions: Solo Performance in Neoliberal Times. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019, ix + 222 pp., £80.00 (hardback), £20.00 (paperback), £20.00 (ebook).
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