Ambivalent Pathways of Progress and Decline: The Representation of Aging and Old Age in Joanna McClelland Glass’s Drama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last fifteen years, various projects and publications in the interconnected areas of theatre studies, theatrical pedagogy, and literary criticism have highlighted associations between theatrical creativity and constructions of age and aging. Despite a thriving “theatrical gerontology,” the work of contemporary dramatists, especially those outside European and American canons, remains scarcely analyzed. Núria Casado Gual looks at the dramatic work of Joanna McClelland Glass, a Canadian writer born in 1936 in Saskatoon, and who currently lives in Florida. Despite the recognition that McClelland Glass has received in North American academic and theatrical circles, her plays written between 1984 and the present remain unexamined and a more complete study of her playwriting career is yet to be developed. Through the double lens of cultural gerontology and dramatic criticism, Casado Gual offers an overview of McClelland Glass’s theatricalization of old age, based on the main characters and secondary figures that can be associated with this stage of the life course in her work. The composite characterization of McClelland Glass’s older figures ensures not only the complexity of the author’s portrayal of aging-intoold-age, but also its verisimilitude and, therefore, its meaningfulness. McClelland Glass combines notions of progress and decline in the dramatic depiction of her aged characters, generating an ambivalent narrative of aging that re-presents this essential human experience in a truthful and dignified way. Ultimately, McClelland Glass’s recreation of old age is shown to contain the main defining traits of her theatre, as well as the insights that it offers on the complexities and mysteries of the human life course.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".