Mouthing Off: The Negativity of Monologue in Mac Wellman’s <i>A Murder of Crows</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: This article examines how monologue functions in the work of American playwright Mac Wellman, focusing on his 1992 play, A Murder of Crows. Many of the features that mark Wellman’s work as “experimental” are already familiar to readers of canonical modernist and postmodern dramatists, like Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Nevertheless, attending to Wellman’s language can challenge a pervasive tendency in theatre studies: the consensus that monologue, particularly in contemporary or postdramatic theatre, is fundamentally a form of heightened communication with the audience. Engaging arguments by Hans-Thies Lehmann and other scholars, the article argues that A Murder of Crows uses monologue to withdraw from the co-presence of the theatrical audience. Defiantly solitary, this kind of monologue resists communication in the present, turning theatre into the site of a utopian protest.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".