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.