Monodrama in Jordanian TheatreA Reading in Two Plays : The Night of BuryingActress Jim, and Searching for Aziza Sulaiman

This paper aims at introducing a critical reading of two Jordanian plays that belong to the monodrama genre: They are The Night of Burying Actress Jim by Jamal Abu Hamdan, and Searching for Aziza Sulaiman by the late poet and drama author Atif Faraya. The analysis emphasizes the technical and semantic aspects of the two plays. The paper starts with pointing out the theoretical framework of the concept of “monodrama. This theoretical framework includes multi definitions of the concept of “monodrama,” its roots in theatre, its essential characteristics, and the harbingers it yields within the context of monodrama in the western theatre, the Arab theatre in general, and the Jordanian theatre in particular. Through an applied reading, this paper attempts to highlight the most significant techniques of monodrama, including audio and visual in which private and inner stories are combined with general and external stories through memory, invocation, interrogation, monologues, or dreaming, away from the systemic time and close to the psychological moments that are not limited to chronological history.