The Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Drama Volume 1: Plays for the Popular Stage

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.

• 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.