『시인기질』(A Touch of the Poet): 멜로드라마에 관한 극

Abstract

A Touch of the Poet: A Theater about Melodrama In A Touch of the Poet Eugene O'Neill shows that characters perform for themselves and others. The framework that inner performance is going on within the outer frame play is formed by the existence of a role-playing actor and audience who watch him on the stage. By this device, characters remind the audience in the seats not that they are representing reality but that they are only in the middle of performing on the stage. It leads us, the audience to see that this play is just a play, not real reality. The aim of this study is to examine the metatheatricality in A Touch of The Poet with its focus on how melodramatic acting style of excesses is mocked and attacked by the role-playing actor and audience. But O'Neill is not simply negative about the melodramatic style. Beneath his mockery and attack on actor's melodramatic style O'Neill reveals an admiration on the side of audience for the power of melodrama. The ambivalent attitude toward melodrama is related to O'Neill's attitude to the theater of his father's. It is very natural that this play is closely related to melodrama not only in the sense that O'Neill's father was considered a very famous actor through the model melodrama, The Count of Monte Cristo in the second half of the 19th century, but also in the sense that O'Neill lived in the transition period when American drama was modernized. The metatheatricality of this play suggests a new possibility of history play in which a history of American drama is concerned with melodramatic and realistic commingling. This metatheatricality, the heightened awareness of O'Neill's own artistic medium, goes beyond the autobiographical level in the sense that his play is not subsidiary to a biographical reality.