The Tooth of Crime : 음악과 언어에 관한 연구 = Language and Music in The Tooth of Crime

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Sam Shepard, who was once involved in experimental theaters in the sixties, is an American playwright noted for performance-oriented plays. Like Antonin Artaud who longed for the Theater of Cruelty, Shepard tried to create total theater that appeals to all the senses. For that kind of theater, he tried to use rituals, violence, music, audio visual effects and various postmodern, experimental artistic methods rather than traditional dramatic techniques.
The Tooth of Crime is a carefully constructed play, contrasting a vulnerable person with his invulnerable partner in vice. This play stages a battle between two rock stars, Hoss and Crow, a war composed of violent words and music. Hoss is a killer under pressure to stay at the top of his profession and a great rock star who creates his own codes and lives by them. On the other hand, Crow, the final winner in this play, is willing to assume any identity and wear any mask in order to survive, competing outside the code.
Terrible competitions for survival in all the fields of American popular cultures such as sports, sci-fi future, rock music, drug, movies are shown through the battles between two. The fight between them is mostly through language as they challenge one another on a lexical battlefield. In this play words function as a weapon to fight. Shepard uses the language not only as a tool of meaning but also as that of violence.
Rock music is used here to sustain integral unification throughout the theater. As a musician, Shepard knew that music was by-passing the mind and that its impact was direct. And rock music is not only against the established adult culture but rooted in resistant youth culture related to the drug. Audience expects musical illusion from the theater composed of the seven songs and other music. But the words revealing most horrible competitive society break this illusion, Betraying the audience's expectation from music, language and music on stage in this play drive the audience into the irony that evoked by the discrepancy between the illusion and the reality of most horrible crime world. Surely, the combination of the violent language and musical stage in The Tooth of Crime is to fortify the interactivity between audience and the stage through the alienation effect and irony which musical illusion and terrible reality make.