Description

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The popular stages of Indonesia offer a window to inter-ethnic cultural obsessions and signs of participation in global trends. Volume 1 of the Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Drama brings together representative plays from the 1890s until the 1960s. It includes examples from the diverse genres that make up Indonesian popular theater: komedi stambul, a form of musical theater initially dedicated to the Arabian Nights; opera derma or Chinese-Indonesian 'charity opera'; and tonil, theatre in the mold of European realist social drama. These genres are interspersed with vaudeville numbers; sandiwara or nationalist drama; and lenong, an urban folk theatre of Jakarta that resurged in the late 1960s when it found a new audience among students seeking an idiom for urban belonging.

About the Author

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Matthew Isaac Cohen (Editor) Matthew Isaac Cohen is professor of international theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, and performs wayang internationally under the company banner Kanda Buwana.John H. McGlynn (Editor) John H. McGlynn has translated several dozen publications under his own name, and through the Lontar Foundation, which he co-founded in 1987, has ushered into print close to two hundred books on Indonesian language, literature, and culture. He is the Indonesian country editor for MĀNOA, a literary journal published by the University of Hawai'i Press; the senior editor for I-Lit, an on-line journal focusing on Indonesian literature in translation; a contributing editor to Words Without Borders and Warscapes, U.S. based literary journals; and an editor advisor for Jurnal Sastra, an Indonesian-language on-line journal. He is also a frequent speaker at seminars both in Indonesia and abroad.