European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Klára Madunická Image Credits: Article For thirty-two years the city of Pilsen has hosted the largest international festival in the Czech Republic. In the course of three decades, from an originally smaller cultural event, show-casing theatrical works of the countries of the so-called Visegrad Four, it has developed into a festival that presents the best of theatre from all over the world - from Britain and France, through Germany, the Netherlands, Italy to America, Iceland and Israel. The year 2024 was no exception, with ensembles from all over Europe gathering in Pilsen. From 11th to 19th September, on the new and old stages of the J. K. Tyl Theatre, Alfa Theatre and Moving Station a total of thirty-one productions were presented. And although the 32nd edition of the festival had no specific overarching title, the dramaturgy’s prevalent focus on socially critical themes was evident. The main leitmotif of all the productions included in the main program was the human being's confrontation with their past - be it in personal, national, or generational terms. The Human Being as a Social Construct Human beings as social creatures and their destiny are largely co-shaped by the society in which they live – by its history, its present and the future it heads toward. And certain archetypes can be perceived on the basis of ingrained patterns of behavior that recur in society across the centuries. This was the theme raised by the opening performance of the festival - Hecuba, not Hecuba of the Paris Comédie-Française (discussed in more detail in essays on Avignon and Epidauros in this issue). The author and director of the production is the Portuguese actor, director, playwright and producer Tiag o Rodrigues - a world-renowned theatre-maker. His work blurs the boundaries between theatre and reality, questioning the viewer's perception of social and historical phenomena, finding intersections between them and presenting them as a new reality to the audience. Hecuba, not Hecuba. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage Hecuba, not Hecuba is a tragedy born between the lines of another tragedy. The author wrote it directly "on the body" of the actors. The story is about a small theatre company that has just begun rehearsing Euripides' ancient drama about Hecuba, who, as the wife of a Trojan ruler, has lost everything after the fall of Troy - her husband, her property, her power and her children - and is desperate for justice. The fictional tragedy is mixed with the painful fate of the play's protagonist Nadia. She has an autistic son who has been the victim of abuse and mistreatment in a nursing home. As a mother she rebels and, in parallel with rehearsals at the theatre, pursues a lawsuit against the institution on her son's behalf. Through the gradual culmination of the plot, a synthesis transpires, a painful encounter between the world of the fictional and the real. Nadia represents the archetype of the mother who defends her children, their honour, life and rights. She invokes justice in the same way as the ancient Hecuba and achieves catharsis only when her enemies suffer. The unequal, exhausting struggle, however, must necessarily take its toll on the warrior. Tiago Rodrigues is famous for his ability to look at difficult subjects from a detached perspective and with a sensitive humor that underlines the seriousness of the topic. The affectionate humor that accompanies the uneasy fates of the individual characters from the beginning to the end of the production is interspersed with emotionally tense, dramatic scenes in dynamic pacing and abrupt interludes. Such a directorial approach places high demands especially on the acting, which dominates this production. The simple, somber set, designed by Fernando Ribeiro, is dominated only by a large, antic sculpture of a dog, which forms one of the essential elements linking the text of Euripides' play and Rodrigues' play. Basic furnishings such as a table and chairs provide only minimal support for the actors, who do not leave the stage space for a moment. Despite the complicated plot, however, the viewer is not lost - the creators punctuate the intersections between present and past, reality and fiction by multiple means. The first, most striking of these is via light: warm hues for reality and cold white light for the upcoming play. The second, perhaps even more important element, is the manner of acting. The latter teeters on a spectrum from natural civility to absolute movement and vocal stylization. The Comédie-Française had, thus, provided a unique experience for the festival visitors. This success was confirmed by their guest appearance at the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava a few days later, where two performances of Hecuba, not Hecuba in a sold-out hall were an unprecedented success with both professional and lay audiences. The Comédie-Française production remains for me one of the highlights of this year's Pilsen festival. Dealing with the Past The theme of coming to terms with the past at different levels of human existence was subsequently developed in several other productions. The German-French co-production of the internationally acclaimed French director Julien Gosselin, Extinction , certainly deserves the title of "the most challenging performance" of all this year's productions. Extinction . Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage In three closed, yet interconnected parts, this five-hour long saga focuses on the search for one's own self, one's own voice in today's world, as well as on family or partnership relationships, interpersonal communication, the dreams and worldviews of an individual or an entire society and, ultimately, the direction of the world in the 21st century. The director starts the whole performance in a rather irritating way: with a forty-minute techno party, during which the audience freely comes on stage, drinks beer and has fun. Through a screen on which just-shot details of the onstage action are projected live, the audience learns about the fate of Elsa, a teacher who has abandoned her home. She does not share the views and way of life of her parents and siblings, and lives in Vienna, where she enjoys herself with her friend, the actress Aurelie. She has a film project in the making, which the audience witnesses in the second part of the production. The third part is a telling, hour-long monologue by Elsa, who has just learned that her parents have died. Gosselin looks at the exuberant artistic and intellectual life in Vienna, yet not from the perspective of a historian of the middle of the 20th century, but rather than that from the perspective of a contemporary, giving the audience on stage and in the auditorium a glimpse of its "merry apocalypse," From the party, we go straight into a house as if cut out of the Viennese underbelly of early 20th century Vienna. The engagement party, which transpires there and which degenerates into a sexual orgy, incest, rape, prostitution and anti-Semitic talk, and ends in a murderous massacre, is watched via live cinema from a house built on the stage. It is only at the end of that second, almost three-hour-long, section that Gosselin learns that this is a film set in the 1930s. The entire production is an adaptation of Thomas Bernhard's novel Extinction , which is interwoven with texts by Hugo von Hofmannstahl and plays or novels by Arthur Schnitzler. Despite the diametrically different stage treatment and semantic language of the individual parts, at the end of the production the viewer receives a coherent point formulated in an hour-long monologue by Rosa Lembeck in a close-up on the screen above the stage, paraphrasing Thomas Bernhard's text about the transience of time, the stereotypical patterns of social and human existence, or the need to find one's own way through life. The production stands between theatre, film, site-specific theatre and performance, with each of the three parts employing diametrically opposite means of artistic expression. Gosselin lets the viewer experience a five-hour journey towards the final punch-line, which ultimately turns the entire responsibility for the issues raised and the socio-critical dimension of the work onto the viewer himself. The direction that the 'merry apocalypse' is to take in the 21st century is up to each and every one of us. The Hungarian ensemble Őrkény Színház from Budapest, which performed Ibsen's drama Solness at the festival, also reported on the personal coping not only with the past, but especially with the future (See also the essay Where Comes the Sun in this issue.) The dramaturgically abbreviated text about an architect who is afraid of being replaced by younger and more talented colleagues gradually revealed the personal and family tragedies that, in a tangle of events and long years of silence, have remained embedded in the conscience of a man and which, through the influence of an innocent event, have surfaced. Solness . Photo © Judit Horvath Director Ildikó Gáspár's production took place in an arena-like space in which the boundaries between auditorium and stage were blurred. The actors entered the centre of the arena from the auditorium itself and exited it again among the audience. The chamber character of the production further underlined the heavy, psychoanalytic atmosphere of Ibsen's play, which in the Hungarian ensemble's conception took on the features of a movement and music production. Yet, it was the very text of Norway's most important playwright that became the biggest stumbling block. The narrative nature of this drama largely predetermined both the form of the production and its outcome. This Solness , thus, ranked among the weaker entries in the festival program, especially with its over-dimensioned conclusion, which seemed, in the context of the rest of this rather classic drama production, like a film about Count Dracula. National History as a Topic The Czech Republic and Slovakia seem to have a constant need to revisit their national past, its ups and downs. The Goose on a String Theatre presented a dramatization of Juan Goytisolo's novel The Marx Family Saga, directed by Jan Mikulášek. The plot intertwines the historical perspective of the 19th century with the present day, with the family portrait of the Marx family being the main subject of the confrontation of the two periods. The Marx Family Saga. Photo © Narodni divadlo Brno Mikulášek opens the production with a farce surrounding the installation of a statue of Marx, which subsequently comes to life and tries to approach or defend the meaning of its own existence. The production has a collage-like character in which the viewer meets not only Marx and Engels, but also their wives, getting to know both the light and dark sides of their personalities, worldview and politics. The past is juxtaposed with the socialist world of the second half of the 20th century and then with the present, where the phenomenon of the cult of Marx's personality is beginning to emerge under the influence of a resurgent capitalism. Mikulášek's stage composition stands on the borderline between psychological drama, comedy, metaphorical stage stylization and reportorial inquiry. On stage we see not only actors and actresses, but also footage from a street reportage on the topics like "Who was Marx? Does he deserve a statue in the city? Is communism an acceptable form of ordering society in the 21st century?" The production, thus, brought to the festival a format featuring both artistical and documentary means of expression that ultimately looks at history with both critical detachment and sarcastic humor. The Alfa Theatre in Pilsen also presented a production for which it had turned to the past: Čáslavská - Tokyo – 1964. In it they theatrically processed the memorable event when Věra Čáslavská won the Olympic gold medal in Tokyo in 1964. In the resulting fictional story based on real events, the creators present the Czechoslovak gymnast as the embodiment of the best national qualities: Čáslavská is honest, good-hearted, modest and fair. The production, which is primarily intended for children’s audience, not only brought humour, but director Jakub Vašíček also managed to achieve a truly realistic atmosphere of the Olympic Games in the 1960s through the colours, costumes, props and music. Its premiere was in Tokyo in 2024 and was created by a Czech-Japanese team of actors and creators. The authenticity with which the Alfa Theatre treated this important moment in the sporting and cultural history of Czechoslovakia captivated both young and old audiences alike. The theme of national history was also presented by the ensemble of the Slovak National Theatre with a dramatization of Pavel Vilikovský's short story Dog on the Road . This production touched me the most, but not in a generally positive sense. As a Slovak, I was sensitive to the political and social themes that are revealed in the short story. The four protagonists basically spend the whole time explaining to the audience that they are "just" Slovaks and therefore will never culturally reach the level of Germany, Austria or Scandinavia. From this starting point, the episodic etudes subsequently present various tragicomic, grotesque or downright irritating situations that reflect the history of the Slovak nation after 1989. The references to political figures, specific journalists and writers, however, took on a monstrously topical dimension after the performance, when the protagonists read the manifesto of the Open Culture movement, which is currently read by all state-established and independent theatres in Slovakia after all performances. The parallel with Vilikovsky's short story, written after the fall of the communist regime, acquired special strength at a time when the Minister of Culture is making mass personnel changes in the management of key cultural institutions in Slovakia without giving any reason and without appointing an adequate replacement. So the production Dog on the Road became a gesture of protest. It is an example of how a mediocre production in a new social and political context can become an important landmark of international significance. Dog on the Road. Photo © Slovak National Theatre The Pilsen Festival in 2024 brought forward a number of thought-provoking themes. Both the organization and the artistic level have traditionally been of a higeh standard. For me this edition of the Festival has been the best possible start of the 2024/25 theatre season, which will hopefully be full of similarly stimulating and inspiring artistic experiences. The creation of the review supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council. References References About the author(s) Klára Madunická, AICT, Slovakia. Klára Madunická graduated in theatre studies at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia. She successfully completed her PhD in Aesthetics and as a researcher at the Slovak Academy of Sciences she has been working on theatre theory, history and criticism for a long time. She has been a member of AICT since 2024, serves on several committees and editorial boards, is editor of the peer-reviewed professional journal Theatrica and is the author of several national and international studies. In 2025 she will publish two monographs on musical theatre in Slovakia. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Encounter Richard Move / MoveOpolis!'s work Devrai (Sacred Grove) in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Summer on the Hudson and Riverside Park Conservancy. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Devrai (Sacred Grove) Richard Move / MoveOpolis! Dance Friday, June 7, 2024 @ 6pm and 6:30pm Riverside Park, Manhattan Meet at Riverside Drive and 79th Street. Performance on 80th St Lawn Summer on the Hudson and Riverside Park Conservancy Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event "Devrai (Sacred Grove)” calls attention to our local ecosystems and landscapes. The Indian word “Devrai” is a compound of Dev meaning 'God' and 'Rai' meaning forest. A prehistoric tradition of nature conservation, sacred groves have long been revered as sacrosanct and imbued with the belief that no creature may be harmed within its boundaries. This performance of Devrai (Sacred Grove) is a section of Richard Move’s Herstory of the Universe series commissioned by the Trust for Governors Island as part of Herstory of the Universe@Governors Island, named “Best Dance of 2021” by The New York Times. Devrai (Sacred Grove) will be performed by Aristotle Luna (Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Richard Move / MoveOpolis!) at 6:00pm and again at 6:30pm. Featured Image Credits: Akua Noni Parker in "Devrai (Sacred Grove)" by Ben DeFlorio. Richard Move / MoveOpolis! Richard Move, Ph.D., M.F.A. is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, TED Global Oxford Fellow, New York Public Library Dance Research Fellow, Artistic Director of MoveOpolis! and Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Dance. Move's choreographic commissions include productions for Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Dance Project, two works for the Martha Graham Dance Company, a solo for New York City Ballet Principal, Heléne Alexopoulos, and a trio for PARADIGM - Carmen De Lavallade, Gus Solomons, Jr. and Dudley Williams. Visit Artist Website Location Meet at Riverside Drive and 79th Street. Performance on 80th St Lawn Summer on the Hudson and Riverside Park Conservancy Summer on the Hudson is NYC Parks' annual outdoor arts and culture festival that takes place in Riverside Park from 59th Street to 153rd Street. With a mix of music concerts, dance performances, movies under the stars, DJ dance parties, kids shows, special events, wellness activities, and more there is something for everyone! All programs and events are free to the public and registration is not required unless specifically stated in event information. The mission of the Riverside Park Conservancy is to restore, maintain, and improve Riverside Park in partnership with the City of New York for the enjoyment and benefit of all New Yorkers. We support the preservation of the park’s historic landscape, structures, and monuments, engage the community in active stewardship of the park, and provide a wide range of public programs. Visit Partner Website

Johan Callens, Guest Editor Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Johan Callens, Guest Editor By Published on May 30, 2018 Download Article as PDF For a good understanding, the Spring 2018 American Theatre and Drama Society issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre is best considered as an initiative that follows up the BELSPO sponsored international research project, “Literature and Media Innovation: The Question of Genre Transformations.” Running from 2012-2017, it brought together six research teams, four of which hailed from Belgian institutions—two Flemish (KULeuven & VUB) and two Walloon ones (Louvain-la-Neuve and Liège)—besides one from Canada (UQAM) and one from the US (OSU). [1] Among the many genres analyzed and fields explored in light of the increasing mediatization of the arts and society at large, theatre and performance fell to the Center for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) at the Free University of Brussels. On March 17, 2016, this Center organized a conference already devoted to the theme of the present journal issue, even if the ATDS contributions zoom-in on specifically American inflections of the topic. Still, in a globalized world, the mobility and mixed roots of artists, besides the constant need to find sponsors, renders the characterization of projects in national terms perhaps questionable and their mediaturgical interests seldom exclusive. As Jacob Gallagher-Ross, one of the speakers at the Belgian conference, in the meantime has argued, it is somewhat ironical that the first installment of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s media-enabled Life and Times project, “singing the sorrows and pleasures of a very American childhood, was featured in Berlin’s Theatertreffen festival as one of the ten best German productions of the year.” [2] Aside from the ironies of international funding, and scholarship, we may add, I here want to mention, as a preliminary, some of the more general issues that the March 2016 VUB conference tackled. [3] Thus, Matthew Cornish (Ohio U) dealt with the reliance on diagrammatic scripts by the English-German theatre collective Gob Squad to support their improvised encounters with people on the streets, synchronously relayed into heavily mediatized stage productions. Bernadette Cochrane (U of Queensland) discussed the destabilization of the spatio-temporal locators of productions and audiences in global but not necessarily democratizing “livecasts,” whether from New York’s Metropolitan Opera or London’s National Theatre. Dries Vandorpe (UGent) returned to mediaturgical theatre’s related deconstruction of the vexed ontological distinction between live and techno-mediated performance on the grounds of diverse arguments (spatiotemporal co-presence and spectatorial agency, affective impact and authenticity, contingency and risk, unicity and variability…)—arguments all flawed because of logically defective classification systems. With the aid of some intermedial choreographic work by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, I myself queried the reciprocity between technology’s invitation to appropriation and adaptations’ increasing hybridization because of that very technology, a process challenging the logical discreteness, self-presence or self-sufficiency, as well as hierarchical character of generic, media, and gender identities, both, much like traditional authorship, making for an empowering yet disenfranchising exclusiveness. [4] The themes of the Brussels conference and present ATDS issue also adhere closely to the remit of the doctoral project conducted by CLIC member Claire Swyzen, here represented by an essay on the Hungarian-American Edit Kaldor and New Yorker Annie Dorsen. Kaldor’s Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) are shown to open up the theatre stage to the social media, converting it into a more apparently than actually co-authored media-activist site, joining physically present and tele-present audience members. As a result, the authorship here already signaled towards Michel Foucault’s more discursive author function. Dorsen’s Hello Hi There (2010) in fact consisted of a staged conversation between two chatbots mouthing text bits partly culled by computer algorithms from an interview between Foucault and Noam Chomsky on whether language creates consciousness or vice versa. [5] As indicated by Dorsen’s post-human talk show, whose textual database was expanded with material from the Western humanist tradition, the scope of Swyzen’s research and of postdramatic mediaturgies obviously exceeds the American context, reaching out to the very processes of cognition. The term and concept of the “postdramatic” were nevertheless popularized by German scholars like Gerda Poschmann and Hans-Thies Lehmann who theorized the notion with the aid of the varied theatre practice in Germany and surrounding countries during the late 20th century. [6] As recently as 2015, Marvin Carlson still argued the relative absence of postdramatic theatre from the North American mainstream, despite important contributions from experimentalists like the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. [7] On both sides of the Atlantic, however, there have been misconceptions regarding the precise nature of the postdramatic, leading to confusions with collective, interdisciplinary, and devised theatre productions. [8] After all, these just as easily allow for the contribution of independently active playwrights with a lingering dramatic bent as for the more broadly defined writing integral to postdramatic mediaturgies. Central features of postdramatic theatre are the reconfiguration, if not abandonment, of Aristotelian dramatic concepts and traditional theatrical notions such as character, action and plot, proscenium stage and set, normative temporality and spatiality, etc. As a corollary, conventional drama’s underlying mimetic premise is challenged, too, though illusionistic effects, whether aestheticizing, activist, or media-critical, remain common, as Swyzen demonstrates with regard to Kaldor’s Web of Trust . These illusionistic effects are also hard to resist, as when critics interpreted the fragmentation of Spalding Gray’s recollections in India and After (America) (1979) as reflections of his cultural alienation and psychological breakdown, as argued by Ira S. Murfin in his contribution to the present ATDS issue. Mimesis possibly survives the postdramatic mediaturgical turn in the guise of reenactments which problematize any arguable paradigm shift, insofar as the “post-dramatic” signals both continuities and discontinuities. Reenactments therefore could be said to limit dramatic theatre’s creation of a “fictive cosmos” [9] to the overt recreation of a “reality,” whether artistic or not, often with the help of advanced technology, as in the scrupulously reproduced everyday speech, at times verging on uncanny nonsense, in the productions of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. This invites comparison with what Dorsen calls the occasional “near-sense” of the chatbots’ dialogue foregrounding the thingness and materiality of language, undermining dramatic theater’s logocentrism as well as infusing postdramatic theatre like Dorsen’s with an unexpected lyricism. As Gallagher-Ross argued at the Brussels conference and in his subsequently published study on Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage (2018), the technology-based practice of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, besides documenting an extant reality, touches on the very processes of perception and thought, struggling to achieve verbal expression prior to any artificially imposed aesthetic or (post)dramatic form, given that in the different installments of their epic Life and Times they also experiment with extant genres and media forms. Reenactments do not, for that matter, automatically reclaim realist art’s function as illusionistic slice of life. To the extent that this function indeed depends on maintaining the fourth wall, it actually staves off everyday reality to the benefit of some Platonist ideal controlled by the dramatist. Gallagher-Ross traces the roots of America’s theaters of the everyday, like that of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, to American Transcendentalism but this democratic homebred tradition represented by Emerson and Thoreau, revalorizes the aesthetic value of daily life as personally experienced. Quite surprisingly, a similar impulse may be at work in Kaldor’s work, insofar as it seems to share characteristics with the Slow Media movement, as argued by Swyzen. This reflective, contemplative impulse should be distinguished from European idealist aesthetics permeating the continental dramatic tradition via Hegel’s abstract moralism up to the late 19th century and beyond, which is not to say, as Gallagher-Ross argues, that there is no ethical-critical dimension to an enhanced awareness of our everyday experiences, be they technological or not. [10] In Swimming to Cambodia (1985), one of Spalding Gray’s “talk performances” discussed in the present JADT issue by Murfin, the manner in which Gray incessantly and obstinately pursues an idealized yet heavily mediatized “Perfect Moment” makes him oblivious to the everyday beauty Emerson advocated. On Karon Beach in the Gulf of Siam Gray apparently found his “Shangri-La,” evocative both of perfect Kodachrome color spreads for luxury resorts and of Robert Wilson’s mediaturgical theatre of images. [11] Emerson is explicitly referenced by Gray when he mentions his own studies at Emerson College and in his moment of “Cosmic Consciousness” echoes the philosopher’s famous “transparent eye-ball”-passage from his essay on “Nature.” The eventual shift to a non-contigent idealism making timeless abstraction of the evanescent everyday could be seen as evidence of Murfin’s claim that Gray’s early talk performances solidified in later productions under the influence of the very technologies he initially played off to preserve his monologues’ freshness. Put differently, Gray’s talk performances, as here argued, moved away from a more postdramatic authorship deflected by “intermedial contingency,” to a more self-authored dramatic literary model. Lehmann in this regard speaks of realist drama’s and the dramatic form’s “catharsis” of the real, [12] supplementing tragedy’s much debated abreaction of pity and fear (or the negative features of these emotions) in the course of a dramatic action thereby completed and closed off. Postdramatic theatre, by contrast, tends to reduce the dramatist’s control, it opens up the stage to the everyday, and redistributes authorial power. This happened partly under the influence of technology, partly by promoting the performer-audience relation or so-called theatron axis, [13] thus releasing a social activist potential in the joint “creation” of text and performance. What is eventually lost in terms of illusionistic representation, aesthetic pleasure and entertainment value may be gained in terms of political awareness, as the physical embodiment and exposure of, and to the mediation returns a sense of agency in a mediascape obfuscating its operations, material and immaterial, for whatever reasons (sheer complexity, profit, ideology…). The media’s prominence in contemporary dramaturgies has led Bonnie Marranca to coin the term “mediaturgy” for those productions where the technology is integral to the composition of the theatrical performance rather than a surface phenomenon. [14] Cases in point she provided at the time were Super Vision (2005-2006) by The Builders Association and Firefall (2007-2009) by John Jesurun. This is one of the reasons why the Brussels conference on postdramatic mediaturgies featured Shannon Jackson (UC Berkeley) as keynote speaker, with a talk on “The Relational Construction of Form and Authorship in Cross-Arts Collaboration.” In that talk, she explored a variety of institutional settings—museums, theaters, festivals, installations—and considered how conceptions of form and authorial signature change accordingly. Depending, in part, upon the curatorial conventions of the venue, a performer may be a collaborator, a subordinate, or a form of material. Similarly, moving work across institutional venues may shift the stance taken towards artistic contributions, whether by the artists-creators or spectators-consumers. Work discussed included that of The Builders Association, on which Jackson and Marianne Weems published the first lavishly illustrated monograph, and which Marranca deemed exemplary of postdramatic mediaturgies. [15] That Weems, the director of The Builders Association, together with several company members, should have co-authored this critical-genetic study which is partly archive, partly (auto)biography, marks the extent of her creative practice and possibly the postdramatic remediation of a retrograde seeming, paper-based platform, all too easily lending itself to linear single-authored stories. [16] The meticulous crediting of each and every one involved in each of the Builders Association productions is further evidence of the dispersion of traditional authorship, which may well have been the default of theatrical creation. To quote from the book’s intro: “Early pieces such as Master Builder , Imperial Motel (Faust) , and JUMP CUT (Faust) restaged and rearranged classic tales across unorthodox architectural assemblies of screens and bodies, a practice of postdramatic retelling to which The Builders returned in their recent restaging of House/Divided .” [17] The epilogue, too, in a conversation between Weems and Eleanor Bishop, extensively dwells on the mediaturgical aspect of The Builders Association’s work at large, more in particular the prominence of computer-aided media design as dramaturgy and the medial creation of meaning and implementation of media-related ideas, like the networked constitution of self by such a mediascape. [18] Thus the media become material and metaphor. This reciprocity gets reflected in Jackson’s critical vocabulary when she speaks of the company’s “theatrical operating systems” and “storyboard” phases—terms derived from computer science and cinema to designate the mediaturgical postdramatic (re)assembly process, “that may or may not be post-narrative as well.” [19] The resulting “smart” productions are directly addressed to a “smart” audience perhaps too much at ease with “smart” technologies [20] to fully fathom or question their implications. Hence these technologies have become the means and object of theatricalization, as in Super Vision , dealing with the economics and politics of “dataveillance,” or Continuous City (2007-2010), exploring global social networking technologies and their impact on how we inhabit local geographies. John Jesurun, that other exemplar of postdramatic mediaturgies Marranca singled out, has been at the center of the scholarship which Christophe Collard generated in the context of the inter-university research project on genre transformations and the new media. Like the predoctoral work of Swyzen, some of his wide-ranging postdoctoral work is here sampled, albeit with a more programmatic contribution in which Jesurun’s “ecological,” i.e. organic and holistic interrelational interpretation of the mediaturgical concept allows for a brief survey of his creative output. In the course of his playwriting career, Jesurun has collaborated with Weems’s Builders Association, as well as with Ron Vawter, founding member of the Wooster Group, on scripts that were subsequently produced by other companies, too. [21] But Jesurun is also reputed to reduce his live performers to language-machines, as here argued by Collard. This again attests to the lingering tension between the loosening and tightening of authorial control, equally evident in Dorsen’s algorithmic theater, where the options for the chatbots’ conversation in Hello Hi There have been preprogrammed and are thus contained by Dorsen and her collaborator, the chatbot designer Robby Garner. Even in Kaldor’s Web of Trust , the seemingly co-authored protocol in retrospect was prescripted, as Swyzen discovered. Whereas Kaldor herself may have obfuscated the “rehearsal” of the protocol for her Web of Trust prior to its live performance, Gray’s critics were the ones who tended to miss or neglect the reliance on media of reproduction in his low-tech monologues. [22] At first sight, his early “talk performances” seem diametrically opposed to Dorsen’s chatbot and Kaldor’s computer desktop performances. Yet Murfin in his discussion of Gray’s monologues demonstrates their postdramatic mediaturgical stance by foregrounding his deliberate extemporaneous use of language as material and process rather than narrative content, in reaction to medial fixity and dramatic linearity. This resonates with the aleatory artistic tradition in which Dorsen also inscribes her work partly because of the manner in which freedom is generated by constraints, just as for Jesurun language provides an enabling limit for his performers and technology, even if he opposes his actors’ improvisation. Contrary to his later reputation as unassisted “solo” performer, Gray’s monologues were heavily determined by media objects. During the creation and performance of his early work these were used as found or documentary material triggering improvisation rather than as support of a fixed script, whether the taped interviews with family members, slides, and vinyl recording of The Cocktail Party in Rumstick Road (1977), a dictionary in India and After (America) (1979), or his journal entries on a West Coast tour, framed by contemporaneous newspaper, magazine and book excerpts in The Great Crossing (1980). However, Gray’s reliance on the same media (writing, print, audio and video recordings) for the development and circulation of his monologues, in a sort of feedback loop fixed them, whereas the human recall and extemporization earlier on made for fragmentation and discontinuity, at the expense of an authoritative voice and story. What may have accelerated this process, Murfin argues, is the artist’s need for a commodifiable format or comedy act. By doing without the diary entries in Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk (1980) Gray very much resolved the dilemma in favor of the dramatic lineage and replication, but at the expense of intermedial contingency. Gray’s autobiographical talk performances, dependent on predominantly analogue media, form a radical contrast with the collective identity performance of in-groups by means of social media and the web, dealt with by Ellen Gillooly-Kress. This hybridized live and digital identity construction through visual signposts, insiders’ language and performative gestures, rather than solidify in the course of time, as argued by Murfin for Gray, keeps changing, as the markers of identity are appropriated by opposite parties, like anti-fascists and white supremacists. The hazards of the social media are indeed such that any meme can be co-opted and abused in ideological conflicts. This recalls Roland Barthes’s claim that the only way to outwit myths is to remythify them in turn, the more since myths in his definition exchange a physical reality with a pseudo-reality, much like the internet may be said to do. The partly arbitrary choice of a meme as vehicle for a new ideological content also fits Barthes’s myths, though in both kinds of appropriation, the original content is still needed as support of the new signification. [23] The initiative for these appropriated identity memes and their ideological reinscription may have been taken by individuals or be limited to the policy-makers of the ingroup. Yet, the memes’ viral spread on the social media and imageboard websites like 4chan and Reddit collectivizes authorship, short of exploding it altogether. Through its antagonistic rhetoric, making for a war-like scenario, the digital and discursive performance, when picked up by the traditional media, also risks spilling over from the internet back into the physical world and actual violence. This was the case with #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS , an unmoderated live stream participatory performance, set up by Nastja Säde Rönkkö, Luke Turner, and Shia LaBeouf on the occasion of Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017. Apart from traveling from New York to Albuquerque, Liverpool and Nantes, this installation and its reception provide a more disconcerting, inflammable hybridized “theater of the everyday” unlike those with which I started this introduction, in a space where physical and digital identity formations merge to end up forming what Gillooly-Kress calls a “hypermediated haunted stage” with all too dangerous consequences. By way of conclusion, I want to thank Cheryl Black and Dorothy Chansky, the former and current ATDS Presidents, for offering another forum next to the 2016 VUB conference platform; the ATDS members who submitted their work to this Spring issue of the JADT ; and last but not least, the ATDS members who acted as anonymous peer-reviewers. All generously contributed to the scholarship here presented, offering what I hope is an exciting and thought-provoking sample of American postdramatic mediaturgies in which authorship is variously modulated along different spectra, operating between the human and the non-human, the analogue and the digital, the individual and the collective, the distributed and the delegated. References [1] For a brief presentation of the overall project see Jan Baetens, Johan Callens, Michel Delville, Heidi Peeters, Myriam Watthee-Delmotte, Robyn Warhol, and Bertrand Gervais, “Literature and Media Innovation: A Brief Research Update on a Genre/Medium Project,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 64, no. 4 (2014): 485-492. [2] Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 152, original emphasis. [3] The VUB theatre conference program can be found online at http://www.vub.ac.be/en/events/2016/mediations-of-authorship-in-postdramatic-mediaturgies-conference . The March 17 event was matched the following day by a second series of talks, presented at Leuven University (UCL) under the title, “Intermediality, or, the Delicate Art of World-Layering” dealing with non-dramatic genres. See http://research.vub.ac.be/sites/default/files/uploads/clic-cri_confer_flyer_final.pdf . [4] Johan Callens,”Rosas: Reappropriation as Afterlife,” in Routledge Companion to Adaptation Studies , eds. Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts (London: Routledge, 2018), 117-127. [5] The Chomsky-Foucault debate was moderated by Fons Elders and broadcast in 1971 by Dutch television as part of a series. Elders first included the transcript in a collection of three interviews he edited, Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind (London: Souvenir Press, 1974). He reprinted it separately as Human Nature: Justice vs Power. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate (London: Souvenir Press, 2011), though by then A.I. Davidson had already released the text in Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1997), 107-145. Elders’s 2011 edition consists of an introduction, followed by the two-part transcript. The first part tackles the question of human nature, knowledge, and science, the second deals more with politics. [6] See Gerda Poschmann, Der nicht mehr dramatische Theatertext. Aktuelle Bühnenstücke und ihre dramaturgische Analyse (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997) and Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. and introd. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006). [7] Marvin Carlson, “Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance,” Brazilian Review of Presence Studies / Revista Brasileira de Etudos da Prescença 5, No. 3 (Sept.- Dec. 2015), 579. [8] Carlson, “Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance,” 582. [9] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theater , 22. [10] The gap between European idealism and Emerson’s Transcendentalism is somewhat diminished in his theory of visuality, holding that sight, like language, is a way of inhabiting a visual field and integrating its objects, at the cost of distorting both by the idealizing operations of language and perspective, the visual distortions of the one and the other’s fixations by figures of speech and generic conventions, and we might add medium specificities. See Branka Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 55, 68, as discussed by Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday , 50-51, 68. [11] See Johan Callens, “Auto/Biography in American Performance,” in Auto/Biography and Mediation , ed. Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag, 2010), 287-303. [12] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 2006: 43; rptd by Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday , 18. [13] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 128. [14] Bonnie Marranca, “Performance as Design: The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall ,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 96 (2010), 16. [15] See also chapter 5, “Tech Support: Labor in the Global Theatres of The Builders Association and Rimini Protokoll,” of Jackson’s Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011), 144-181. [16] In fact, Weems has always combined creative with critical work, whether as a founding member of the V-Girls and Builders Association or as dramaturg for the Wooster Group, also co-directing Art Matters and lecturing at different universities. [17] Shannon Jackson and Marianne Weems, The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 2015), 3. [18] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , xiii, 384-385. [19] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , 17. [20] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , 8, 393. [21] Faust/How I Rose , which The Builders Association used for Imperial Motel (Faust) (1996) and JUMP CUT (Faust) (1997-1998), received major runs at the National Theater of Mexico, while his Philoktetes , after featuring in Philoktetes Variations , as directed by Jan Ritsema in 1994, was revived in October 2007 by Jesurun himself at the SoHo Rep with a cast featuring Will Badgett (Odysseus), Louis Cancelmi (Philoktetes), and Jason Lew (Neoptolemus). See Johan Callens, “The Builders Association: S/he Do the Police in Different Voices,” in The Wooster Group and Its Traditions , ed. and introd. Johan Callens, Dramaturgies Series: Texts, Cultures, and Performances vol. 13 (Brussels & Bern: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes-Peter Lang, 2004), 247-261; Johan Callens, “The Volatile Value of Suffering: Jan Ritsema’s PhiloktetesVariations,” in The Trojan Wars and the Making of the Modern World , ed. and introd. Adam J. Goldwyn, Studia Graeca Upsaliensia vol. 22 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2015), 223-244. 2015; and Christophe Collard, “Processual Passing: Ron Vawter Performs Philoktetes,” Somatechnics 3, No.1 (2013), 119-132. [22] See also Claire Swyzen, “‘The world as a list of items’: Database Dramaturgy in Low-Tech Theatre by Tim Etchells and De Tijd, Using Textual Data by Etchells, Handke and Shakespeare.” etum: E-Journal for Theatre and Media 2, No. 2 (2015), 59–84, accessed May 15, 2018, https://cris.vub.be/en/searchall.html?searchall=swyzen , for an interpretation of one British and two Flemish low-tech postdramatic mediaturgical productions: Broadcast/Looping Pieces (2014), Peter Handke en de wolf (2005) and Elk wat wils. Iets van Shakespeare (2007). [23] Roland Barthes, “Le mythe, aujourd’hui,”Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 191-247; “Myth Today,” Mythologies , ed. and trans. Annette Lavers, Noonday Press (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 109-164. Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Cheryl Black Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline Cheryl Black By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF “I believe that art can inspire action.” —Anna Deavere Smith, Notes from the Field In 2010, Civil Rights advocate and attorney Michelle Alexander's groundbreaking The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness explicitly analyzed the ways in which racism “infected” the US justice system, disproportionately devastating the lives of young people of color. More than a decade later, the continuing stream of ethnic minority victims of police brutality and the continuing evidence of gross overrepresentation of ethnic minorities in prisons keeps Alexander’s findings relevant. ( [2] ) One of the particularly heinous aspects of the “new Jim Crow” is the “school to prison pipeline” or “nexus,” a system whereby school policies (along with other racist policies and practices) are pushing students out of schools and into the criminal justice system. Because the students in the “pipeline” are disproportionately poor students of color, this practice offers a striking example of how institutional racism operates within America's educational and criminal justice systems as well as how institutional racism has perpetuated cycles of poverty. ( [3] ) Recently, and within a few years of each other, notable African American playwrights Anna Deavere Smith and Dominique Morisseau produced dramatic works indicting America’s school-to-prison pipeline. Both playwrights are recipients of MacArthur (“genius grant”) Fellowships; both are noted for integrating art and activism in works that address social issues of race, class, and gender; and both have dramatized historical events involving racial violence and discrimination. Their dramaturgical styles, however, are distinct. Borrowing from documentary, historiographic, ethnographic, and journalistic methods, Smith creates scripts consisting of verbatim quotations from interviews. ( [4] ) Morisseau employs a dramatic structure that might be described as “selective Realism.” ( [5] ) Given the different approaches each playwright employs to address the same subject, looking at them in relation to each other is a fruitful way to investigate how these artistic forms function as anti-racist activism, what solutions these playwrights put forward as ways to challenge injustices, and how their different strategies might “read” to different audiences. Alongside Alexander's groundbreaking publication and these plays, a number of recent documentary films have explored the impact of racism on America's justice system, including Maya Ben-Shahar and Cedric B. Theus’s JustUs (2021), Tommy Oliver’s 40 Years a Prisoner (2020), Destin Cretton’s Just Mercy (2019), and Ava Duvernay’s 13 (2016). Fictional precursors that portrayed the insidious nexus of racism, gendered social roles, segregation, and poverty that has supported the new Jim Crow in all its manifestations range from John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991) and Higher Learning (1995) to Season 4 (2006) of HBO’s The Wire . Although it is outside the scope of this article to offer an in-depth examination of the relationship between Smith and Morisseau’s dramatic works and these films, the proximity of their creation and their obviously shared motivation to raise awareness about these injustices highlights the urgency of the subject and the significant role that the arts may play in effecting social change. ([6]) Although, arguably, all art has this power, live theatrical performance, with its ability to illuminate the human condition within a specifically human and interactive context, can be particularly effective. As a theatre historian, actor, and director, I am a believer in the theatre’s power not only to reflect but also to shape the world we live in. It is this conviction that has led me to the current exploration. It is an exploration that contributes to our understanding of these two artist/activists and these two works in particular. Remarkably, neither work has received extensive attention, but interest in both is growing. Minou Arjomand’s Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment (2018) includes brief observations on Anna Deavere Smith’s projects, including an earlier version of Notes from the Field during which Smith stopped after Act 1 to facilitate small group discussions among audience members. ([7]) More recently, Amal Dahy has also focused significantly on this version, in which he identifies Smith’s engagement with the audiences as Boalian “Forum Theatre” techniques. ([8]) In 2022, Deborah Geis included brief comments on Smith’s Notes within a broader survey of plays she terms “Black Lives Matter drama . . . a significant new subgenre also characterized as a type of ‘crossroad’ with earlier works.” ([9]) In 2023, both Amanda Stuart Fisher and Ryan Claycomb included a discussion of Notes in their wide-ranging and diverse studies of testimonial and verbatim dramaturgies. ([10]) Jonathan Taylor has recently looked at Morisseau’s Pipeline as a model for future activist theatre, with special attention to her use of magical realism and other imaginative staging techniques that he credits with enhancing the play’s political power. ([11]) With great appreciation for these insights (some of which I will revisit in my conclusion), my analysis complements without duplicating existing discussions of these works and extends them through its comparative analysis of both works. To conduct my analysis, I rely on close readings of the texts, published interviews with the playwrights, and audience and critical response to the plays in performance. I also draw upon a range of critical race and performance theories, including Ibram X. Kendi’s succinct explication of racism as the conception that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group;([12]) I further consider Kendi’s thoughts about the efficacy of various anti-racist strategies alongside Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality as discrimination and oppression stemming from the intersections of various aspects of a person’s social or political identity. ([13]) In her introduction to the published version of Notes , Anna Deavere Smith identifies this play as the “most recent installment” in her life’s work: a series of plays that “bear witness to particular historical moments” in the hopes of “sparking a conversation, of making change possible.” ([14]) She specifies that her subject is social injustice, that she intends for her artistry to lead to action, and that the first step in redressive action is listening to the voices of those who have been historically discounted. To create the script, Smith interviewed 250 individuals in four geographic areas of the US and abroad—including students, teachers, administrators, mentors, advocates, judges, inmates and former inmates, and government officials—from which she selected seventeen interviews. All spoken dialogue in the play is composed of verbatim excerpts from these interviews. A number of scholars have explored the relationship between Smith’s socially conscious aesthetic and that of Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. ([15]) It was Brecht’s aim to reveal the social factors that influence human thought and action, to show “reality” as constructed and, therefore, changeable, and to encourage critical thinking, rather than emotional identification, in his audiences. Brechtian theatre eschews the illusionistic strategies associated with realism that attempt to convince an audience they are observing “real life” in favor of “distancing” reminders to an audience that they are watching a theatrical performance. Typical distancing techniques include narrative interruptions, direct address, use of multimedia, musical interludes, and a performance style that maintains an aesthetic distance between performer and character. Primary among the distancing strategies in Notes is the fact that Smith performs all seventeen roles, embodying a range of genders, races, ethnicities, and ages, a strategy that calls attention to identity as constructed and performed. Smith values this method as one by which the person she is portraying “will, despite her impression, retain his or her individual character and speech.” ([16]) Her character transformations are accomplished in full view of the audience by the addition or removal of a costume piece or prop. Nonspeaking stagehands, also in full view of the audience, aid character and location changes. Smith’s use of multimedia reveals the social factors behind the individual stories she performs. Preshow digital projections provide the audience with statistics regarding disenfranchisement related to felony convictions and the disproportionate school punishments, incarcerations, and deaths at the hands of police for young persons of color. Every story is introduced through projections providing the person’s name, occupation, or position. Each story is also accompanied by projected news footage and cell phone videos of the events described and/or video or still images that locate the action. Examples include Freddie Gray being hauled into a police car in Baltimore; a police officer straddling a fourteen-year-old Black girl in Texas; a student being thrown across a classroom by a police officer in South Carolina. Original music is performed live onstage by jazz bassist Marcus Shelby who occasionally interacts with Smith. All characters directly address the audience. The first monologue, from President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Sherrilyn Ifill, exhorts the audience to consider the investment our nation has made in the criminal justice system at the expense of education. Ifill later delivers a reprise in which she articulates even more explicitly the problems (the end of serious investment in our public school system and mass incarceration) and possible solutions (body-worn cameras and other reforms around policing and a massive investment in education). Ifill stresses the importance of recognizing our current moment as crucial—a moment when change can happen—and the need to confront ourselves before we can move toward that change. Three testimonies describe active resistance to the death of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray under police custody in Baltimore in 2015. Kevin Moore, a young Black man wearing a “Copwatch” hoodie, filmed the arrest on his cell phone, which he then distributed widely. Eighteen-year-old Allen Bullock smashed a city police car in protest. Projected footage of Gray’s actual funeral reveals a packed megachurch and cries from the congregation of “No Justice, No Peace!” Pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant delivers an impassioned call to action: “Get up! Get your Black self up and change this city! . . . Don’t expect nobody to open the door for you! If they don’t open the door, kick that sucker down and get what you need! GIT UP!!!” ( [17] ) Two segments come from the Yurok community. Former inmate and Yurok fisherman Taos Proctor shares his odyssey from multiple school expulsions beginning when he was eight (“they said I hit the teacher.... I just pulled away from her, and it hurt her arm or something”) to California Youth Authority to San Quentin. Proctor bluntly recounts the brutality he experienced in prison: “Prison don’t do nothing but make you a worser person. . . . Everyone’s bad in there . . ..” ( [18] ) His ability to overcome his past (at the time of the interview he was married with a son and making a success of his fishing business) are a testament to his humanity and self-respect in the face of determined effort to eradicate both. In a later interview, Yurok Tribal Court Chief Judge Abby Abinanti reports having to prevent an eight-year-old child from being handcuffed. Judge Abinanti’s verdict: “the country’s broken.” ( [19] ) As Ibram X. Kendi and others have observed, people of color are not immune to deeply entrenched racist ideas. Salvadoran American Steven Campos reports that he, his brother, and all his mother’s brothers have served time in prison. Campos seems to believe that individuals hold full responsibility for their actions: “you dumb enough to get caught for it. You Fuck! It’s yo’ bad.” ( [20] ) African American “student concerns specialist” Tony Eady, who previously worked in a prison, seems to view his students as potential criminals and his current position as “similar” to working in a maximum-security prison. His description of school policies makes the high school sound like a training ground for prison, including in-school suspension: “I call it school jail. . . . And then if you act up in here, they send you to ‘Twilight.’ And I call that ‘penitentiary’. . . ‘cause you in there all day, every day, for months.” ( [21] ) Although Eady may aim to help these students with some kind of tough love, he puts the responsibility for avoiding the pipeline squarely on their shoulders, admonishing them to learn to deal with authority figures. He uses military imagery in his solution: “I need police officers in the school. . . . He’s my— our last line of defense.” Eady also highlights the struggle between teachers and students over cell phones, declaring “They would rather go to jail than give up their cell phones!” ( [22] ) This statement resonates with the assertion from Kevin Moore, videographer of the Freddie Gray arrest, that “the camera is the only weapon we have that can actually protect us.” ( [23] ) The story of Shakara, a Black Columbia SC high school student who was thrown across the room by a school resource officer in 2015, is related by white journalist Amanda Ripley and Shakara’s classmate Niya Kenny, who is also Black. Shakara got in trouble for not giving up her cell phone, and then refusing to leave the classroom with the assistant principal (a Black man) who brought in the (white) police officer. As Niya tells her story, her cell phone video of the event plays in the background. Kenny, who was eighteen, was arrested but released when her video made national news. Kenny had a clear message for those who told her to mind her own business: “How can you mind your business? Like, that’s somethin’ you need to make your business.” ( [24] ) A teacher from Finland provides a rare perspective on the event from a white person outside of the US. Her shock at viewing the video of Shakara’s encounter with the police or the idea that police officers would ever be needed in a classroom illuminates the contrast between American educational values and those of some other nations. As Finland is about 1/30 the size of the US and has a distinctly homogeneous population, it seems an odd comparison, but possibly Deavere included this interview to goad American audiences into imagining a culture like Finland’s in which “the teacher was always a candle in the village.” ( [25] ) Testimony from Denise Dodson, a woman convicted of a murder her boyfriend committed, and emotional support teacher Stephanie Williams highlighted the urgent need for overhauling the educational system. Dodson linked education to survival and regretted not getting the attention she needed from teachers: “I think if I had gotten that attention, I could have moved forward. . . . They [teachers] have to see ‘em [students] as people. They [teachers] have to see them [students] as the future.” ( [26] ) Williams poured out the difficulties of her job at Philadelphia’s Huey Elementary School, working with “the most needy children . . . kids that need food. Shelter. Clothes. Love , like . . . an education. They just need so much.” She admitted to feeling “hopeless” and compared her work to “running a jail without a gun.” She shared stories of student rage and violent reactions to being bullied or abused, concluding with the story of stopping a raging ten-year-old by grabbing him “in the tightest hug. . . . And I just held him until his body just collapsed. And he just started crying and crying and crying and crying on me. ” ( [27] ) In a departure from current events, Smith performs a brief interlude from James Baldwin’s 1971 interview with Margaret Mead in which Baldwin delivers a wake-up call still resonant with twenty-first-century experiences. Baldwin ponders how, if he were fifteen, he would find any respect for human life or any sense of history or hope. He provides a possible answer to his question by bringing up a book of poetry by children, compiled by a teacher who “respected them. And he dealt with them as if they were—as in fact all children are. As a fact, all human beings are . . . some kind of miracle!” ( [28] ) A larger context for the school-to-prison pipeline is provided by Equal Justice activist Bryan Stevenson, who asserts that “we are a post-genocide society,” a reference to the slaughter of “Native people.” For Stevenson, the “great evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude. . . . It was this ideology of white supremacy, this idea that Black people are not fully human.” Stevenson echoes Judge Abinanti’s use of the term “broken” to describe his legal clients, the [legal] system in which he works, and himself. Stevenson, however, finds hope in this realization: I actually think it’s in brokenness that we understand our need for grace, our need for mercy. It’s actually brokenness that helps us appreciate justice. . . . It’s the broken among us that actually can teach us what it means to be human. Because if you don’t understand the ways in which you can be broken by poverty or neglect or abuse or violence or suffering or bigotry, then you don’t recognize the urgency in overcoming poverty and abuse and neglect and—and bigotry. Stevenson rejects the notion that one should learn to live “silently” with one's brokenness: “I don't think that's the way forward. I’m looking for ways to—to not be silent.” ( [29] ) Although poverty is rarely directly referenced, in virtually all the stories of abuse, arrest, and incarceration, class, as well as race, is a factor, a circumstance that supports the irrefutable fact that our criminal justice system punishes poverty in myriad ways, including disproportionate rates of incarceration. ( [30] ) These testimonies are also further illustration of the disproportionate rates of poverty within ethnic minority communities. According to the most recent federal data, Blacks have the highest poverty rate (19.5%), with Hispanics at 17.1%. ( [31] ) Lest anyone in Smith’s audience fails to recognize racism and racist institutions as the underlying cause of these conditions, Dr. Victor Carrion identifies social factors surrounding slavery and the history of slavery as an explanation for the current, disproportionate poverty rates in African American communities: “it's a way of maintaining that enslavement. . . . through poverty.” ( [32] ) Some critics have deemed the play’s concluding stories, featuring activist Bree Newsome and Congressman John Lewis, as digressions from the specific topic of school-to-prison pipeline. ( [33] ) These stories, however, specifically address the white supremacist system, the “nexus” that fosters the “pipeline.” Newsome narrates how she scaled the South Carolina State House flagpole to remove the Confederate flag in 2015, and the late Congressman John Lewis’s story reminds us of the struggles an earlier generation endured to challenge the “old” Jim Crow. In juxtaposing news footage of Newsome’s recent climb with one of Lewis’s arrests (and Lewis’s recounting of being asked for and freely giving forgiveness to one of his abusers decades later), Smith links these acts of resistance and suggests the ongoing nature of civil rights movements. Alisa Solomon, who served as dramaturg for this play, has reported that “ the more she spoke to Americans across the country, the more Smith was convinced that solutions will take a new civil rights movement, one that brings healing to struggling communities as well as equality and justice.” ( [34] ) If these last two incidents portrayed had not actually happened, it would seem an impossibly sentimental ending. In fact, one reviewer observed, in reference to both the Newsome and Lewis stories: “ It’s only a feel-good ending if you haven’t been paying attention for the previous two hours.” ( [35] ) After a two-month run Off-Broadway in fall 2016, the Obie-winning Notes premiered on HBO in 2018, where it has presumably reached a wider and more diverse audience. The HBO performance also included one notable added episode that reinforces Smith’s belief in the significance of “healing” for “struggling communities”: footage from the 2017 trial of white nationalist Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine African American congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. During the recording, voices from the Black community are heard crying out that they forgive him: “We are the family love built.” ( [36] ) Critics responding to Notes universally applaud Smith’s virtuosity as a performer and her commitment to exploring worthy and timely subjects. Perceived weaknesses in the script include a certain lack of cohesion (several episodes considered tangentially related to the central theme), a lack of differing opinions, and an ambiguity regarding the ultimate message. The Guardian’s Alexis Soloski reached her own ambiguous conclusion that although Smith’s “call to empathy” was too “simple a solution,” Smith’s “hortatory force” deemed it “worth a try.” ( [37] ) Several critics perceived a message of hope and uplift despite the grim subject matter. ( [38] ) In 2017, Dominique Morisseau shared that she had “learned to embrace” the “idea of being a political writer. . . . I’m not trying to push a political agenda, per se, or tell people what politics to embrace, but I am looking at how politics, in a certain light, impact people. . . . I have a very strong social justice call to my work.” ( [39] ) Pipeline demonstrates Morisseau’s signature ability to integrate the political and the personal, and to blur the distinctions between the two. The play is dedicated to her mother, who taught public school in Highland Park, Michigan (according to Morisseau, an economically stressed city) for forty years. She has also drawn from her own experience as a teacher in New York City for fifteen years and other personal connections: I had been reading Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow , which talks about mass incarceration and mass incarceration being the new Jim Crow. But I really believe education is also the new Jim Crow right now because there is so much segregation in education, and there’s an excessive system of have and have-nots. So I was first and foremost interested in exploring the school-to-prison pipeline because of how personally it affected some people in my life. ( [40] ) Morisseau has reported that the character of Omari in Pipeline was inspired by her “surrogate nephew” who had a “bad incident at school and was criminalized online and in the press,” and by the death of Michael Brown, the Black teenager shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson Missouri in 2014. ( ) Pipeline, which debuted at Lincoln Center in 2017, offers a microcosmic view of the school-to-prison pipeline, zeroing in on the experience of one Black teenager named Omari. Omari is expelled and threatened with criminal charges after shoving a teacher who attempted to prevent him from leaving a classroom. The play is particularly concerned with how Omari’s trouble affects those who love him: his girlfriend Jasmine, his mother Nya, and his father Xavier. Jasmine is an inner-city native who attends the same private and predominantly white school as Omari. His mother teaches English in an inner city public high school and is described by Morisseau as a “struggling parent doing her damnedest.” ( [41] ) His father Xavier, Nya’s ex-husband, is a marketing executive. Context is provided by the two remaining characters, both Nya’s colleagues: Laurie is a tough, white middle-aged teacher who gets into trouble for using physical force to break up a fight in her classroom; and Dun is a Black security guard who is overworked but forbearing. As New York Times critic Ben Brantley noted, they both “seem to regard their jobs as mostly a matter of keeping a tenuous peace in a combat zone.” ( [42] ) Although fictional, Nya, Laurie, and Dun call to mind actual individuals portrayed in Notes from the Field , like Stephanie Williams and Tony Eady, who compared working in US schools to working in prisons. Although realistically drawn, these six characters (only three are given a last name) may be seen as symbols with specifically meaningful names. In naming Omari, Morisseau honors his African heritage: “Omari” i n Swahili means “flourishing.” “Nya” is of Swahili and Gaelic origin and means “purpose.” It also intriguingly evokes Niya Kenny, the student activist featured in Notes from the Field. “Xavier” has Spanish, Basque, and Arabic origins, meaning “new house” (perhaps a nod to his departure from the inner city). And lastly, “Jasmine” is of Persian origin, meaning “gift of God.” Although Morisseau tells an individual story, she situates it within a larger social context. At the opening of Pipeline , as Nya leaves a voicemail for Xavier about Omari’s trouble, smartphone camera footage of school fights gradually morphs into shadows behind her. The smartphone footage reminds us of its deployment by young Black activists, and its transformation into shadows provides an expressionistic image of Nya’s mental state. A voice from her school’s PA system establishes an authoritarian and antagonistic environment, commanding students to take off their hats, hand over their smartphones, and to face automatic suspension if caught with any non-approved electronic device. “We have the city government behind us. You cannot win. I repeat YOU CANNOT WIN!” ( [43] ) A scene between Omari and Jasmine in her dorm room follows. Although she believes the smartphone video of his school fight will make him a “celebrity,” Omari fears he’ll be seen as “a monster” and plans to run away. The next scene in the teachers’ lounge reinforces the image of this school as a dangerous environment. When Dun enters, he reports that “they” have been “jackin’ cars” despite the addition of extra security cameras. Laurie deepens the image by referring to her students as “hooligans” and the teachers’ lounge as her “den.” ( [44] ) In another departure from realism, Omari appears in “undefined space” as Nya discusses with her students Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool.” He repeats and embodies the words of the poem, expressionistically communicating Nya’s psychic state of fear that her son will “die soon.” Published in 1959, “We Real Cool” does not specifically speak to a school-to-prison pipeline; it does, however, speak to a “nexus” of limited opportunities and foreshortened lives of young Black men. The class discussion about the Broadside printing of the poem highlights the poet’s rejection of Eurocentric aesthetic standards in favor of what Nya describes as graffiti, or street writing—writing that “reps the hood” and anticipates the aesthetic adopted decades later by playwrights Ntozake Shange, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Marc Bamuthi Joseph, among others. ( [45] ) Morisseau critiques private as well as public school education, challenging the assumption that private, predominantly white schools, are “better” than public schools with more diverse student populations. In the play, during a phone call to an unnamed friend, Jasmine explains her parents’ choice to send her to this PWI “cuz they're so damn spooked I'll get pregnant or shot or some shit.” Jasmine is profoundly unhappy in this environment as she is experiencing class and race-based bias from students: “Stuck up girls in my dorm acting like I’m gonna steal their fabric softener or grab their granny panties out of the laundry cuz I don’t have my own or whatever.” She rejects the “false god of this freakin’ Fernbrook Academy that somehow it produces better people,” asserting someone like me would actually survive better in an environment in which I am COMFORTABLE instead of being the token poor girl of color that everyone thinks is trying to sleep with their pussy-ass boyfriend or take their gotdamn cocaine or crystal meth or whatever . . . . ( [46] ) Speaking with Nya about Omari's incident, Jasmine explains how racist assumptions may motivate violent responses: “Sometimes people push you too far. Make you feel like an animal from another jungle. Like you don't belong even when you're here. Cuz they got expectations that you of the wild. So you become the expectation.” ( [47] ) In turn, Nya pours out her fears as the mother of a Black son: You have no idea if one day someone will try to expire them because they are too young. Or too Black. Or too threatening. Or too loud. Or too uninformed. Or too angry. Or too quiet. Or too everyday. Or too cool. Or too uncomposed. Or too mysterious. Or just too TOO. ( [48] ) The experiences of Jasmine and Omari mirror findings from a 2012 study of the experiences of Black students in predominantly white institutions. “Most students felt that they were stereotyped as the ‘angry black’ person and felt intimidated when in the racial, social class, and gender minority.” Black students also reported feeling “strong emotion” when teachers used material depicting Black people as criminal or violent. ( [49] ) Omari shares that he “went blind for a second” during a class discussion of Richard Wright's Native Son in which the teacher expected Omari to respond to his questions about what motivated Bigger Thomas to kill a woman. “Like I’m Bigger Thomas. Like I’m predisposed or some shit to knowing what it’s like to be an animal.” ( [50] ) During this scene, Nya herself succumbs to racist language, an inadvertent slip that her son quickly picks up on: Nya: You don’t just walk out in the middle of a lesson as if you are some sort of king or god that no one can tame. Omari: Tame? Nya: Damnit, Omari. Omari: Tame. Nya: Do not do that. Do not twist and remodel this convo and change the meaning. Omari: I'm not changing anything. I’m repeating. Verbatim. ( [51] ) Although Omari is possibly headed for some form of incarceration, it is his mother whose physical and psychological deterioration is most vividly portrayed for the audience. Nya stands in for all the mothers of Black sons who have borne the loss of a son to racist violence. At the play’s opening, she is described as “holding together by a thread” and throughout the play we witness that thread’s unraveling. ( [52] ) Morisseau evokes one of the most familiar Black Lives Matter mantras in her call for breathlessness as an indication of Nya’s increasing distress, including stage directions repeatedly calling for Nya to take “strange,” “revealing,” “deep” inhalations or “gasps.” ( [53] ) Ultimately, Nya physically collapses and is rushed to the hospital after uttering “I can’t—breathe—.” ( [54] ) For audiences in 2017, the moment almost certainly evoked the final words of Eric Garner, who uttered them moments before his death during his arrest in 2014; for present-day audiences, they would also the death of George Floyd under police custody in 2020. ( [55] ) Morisseau critiques constructed masculinity as well as capitalism in her creation of Xavier, described as “financially stable” and “emotionally impoverished.” ( [56] ) Although it is revealed that Nya had an affair with Dun, which presumably ended her marriage, Omari places the blame squarely on his father's shoulders: “. . . you were mean. Cold. Making her feel like shit every day. You was never happy living over here.” ( [57] ) “Over here” seems to suggest an urban, possibly lower-income neighborhood which Xavier has abandoned for a bougier lifestyle. Xavier relates fatherhood primarily to financial provision: “I took good care of you. Never missed a payment. Never missed a birthday or first day of school. You never went hungry. Always had a shirt on your back. Money in your pocket. Didn’t I do that?” ( [58] ) Xavier is also paying for Omari’s private school education, but Omari does not equate financial support with love, informing Xavier that they are “miles apart” and implicating Xavier in his emotional outburst at school: “It was my teacher. But I wished it was you. . . . And I don't know if that is hate or love or somethin’ else I was feelin’. But I know why Bigger Thomas did what he did and I hate that I know. But you I hate more. You I hate most of all.” ( [59] ) After this revelation, Xavier also finds himself unable to breathe. Utterly defeated as a father, he is not without sympathy as he walks away “dumbfounded.” ( [60] ) In a discussion about the play, Morisseau declared, “Hypermasculinity is just as problematic to me [as is racial stereotyping] . . . It doesn't give men the space to be emotional, to acknowledge their own pain or that they seek love. It’s like it’s too socially expensive to be fragile.” ( [61] ) In her final scene, Jasmine leaves a long phone message for Omari, assuring him that despite her love for him, she is glad that he is leaving this school, “[b]ecause this place can’t hold you. This place can't hold none of us.” This dialogue is followed by video images of school fights, kids going through metal detectors, police handcuffing teenage boys. ( [62] ) The PA system comes on again, but this time it is a student’s voice reading “We Real Cool” intercut with Nya addressing the private school board to prevent their pressing charges against her son. Omari's actions aren’t his bag alone. They’re mine. All of ours. We didn’t carve out enough space. He doesn’t belong anywhere. . . . No land he can travel without being under suspicion and doubt. No emotion he can carry without being silenced or disciplined. . . . I want my son to have another chance. Be born again with a slate clean of the baggage. Our baggage. MY baggage. . . . He's not an animal. Nor more than the rest of us are. And if so, we built the jungle. . . . This rage is not his sin. It was never his sin. . . . It is his inheritance. ( [63] ) We do not learn of the board’s decision, but Omari has the last word, fulfilling Nya’s request for “instructions” about how to “save him.” ( [64] ) Along with Nya’s recognition of “all of our” complicity in the struggles faced by young people of color in America today, Omari’s “instructions” seem to be Morisseau’s recommendation for positive action to begin to address the problem: “Hear me out. Let me chill sometimes. Know when to back off. Know when to keep pushing. Let me have some space. Don’t assume me for the worst. Show up. In person. Be fair. Forgive that I’m not perfect.” ( [65] ) The final image of the play is an embrace between Nya and Omari. The focus on familial relationships and the awareness that Omari’s “instructions” might be those of any adolescent to a parent could distract from the intersecting conditions of race and poverty that are crucial to addressing the school-to-prison pipeline. Some reviewers perceived a lack of social context. Bill Marx, for example, objected that Morisseau “does not look outside ‘broken family dynamics’ or the ‘comfortable confines of realism’ that would seem to be required for serious social critique.” ( [66] ) Then again, strategies like projecting smartphone footage and allusions to Black artist/activists of an earlier generation (like Brooks and Wright) render Omari’s race and race-based discrimination specific. Although, as the child of well-educated professionals Omari is relatively privileged, it is part of Morisseau’s message that other forms of cultural capital are poor defenses against the juggernaut of racism in America. Although he found the play “frustratingly unresolved,” Ben Brantley nevertheless affirmed, “the concerns of its heroine, Nya, about her teenage son, Omari, have everything to do with his being a Black youth in the United States in the 21st century.” Brantley also directly compared Pipeline to Notes without expressing a clear preference for either Notes ’ “cleareyed overview” or Pipeline ’s “more emotionally immersive approach.” ( [67] ) As with Smith, Morisseau’s virtuosity was widely recognized, with critics lauding her dramaturgical power and eloquence. She was awarded the 2018 OBIE for writing Pipeline , and it was one of the top ten most produced plays in the 2019/20 season. It seems evident that these playwrights are politically motivated to write these plays, and that their aims are to raise awareness about a particular form of social injustice that is manifestly rooted in racism and to offer possible solutions. Art, and especially live theatrical performance, is never just a purveyor of facts. Live theatre presents facts in a particularly human context. Despite Brecht’s best efforts, even the most “distanced” performance style, as exemplified by Anna Deavere Smith’s approach, evokes emotional and empathic identification, an identification underscored in Morisseau’s “more emotionally immersive approach.” ( [68] ) Morisseau has repeatedly expressed her desire to create community through interaction and engagement from audiences: “ I feel like if I ask the important questions that I have around it [social injustice], maybe, collectively, as a society, we will start to have the kind of conversation that can find a solution.” ( [69] ) Throughout Pipeline’s run, the theatre held several talkbacks and panels with experts and activists. Morisseau also spearheaded a fundraising effort at Lincoln Center that raised approximately $10,000 to fund free tickets to groups of students. ( [70] ) The value of “raising awareness”—of providing Americans with facts about racism—has been challenged by Ibram X. Kendi, who has argued that political and economic self-interest, rather than any moral or intellectual awakening, have led to anti-racist policies. “They [those with power to make policy changes] have also conceded to Antiracist change as a better alternative than the disruptive, disordered, politically harmful, and/or unprofitable conditions that anti-racist protestors created.” ( [71] ) The shortcomings of empathy as a change agent have also been explored by scholar Sadiya Hartman, ( [72] ) and Georgetown law professor Paul Butler has been even more explicit in his critique: “The problem is, love and forgiveness are not productive in American politics. That’s not how social change is achieved.” ( [73] ) Among theatre scholars, there is disagreement over the efficacy of theatrical performance for social change. In 2023, Ryan Claycomb, partially prompted by the writings of Lauren Berlant and Jodi Dean, described his former optimism in the power of verbatim theatre—and more broadly, democratic deliberation— as “cruel, prompting us to hope for something that binds us,” and “often a passive replacement for radical egalitarian action.” ( [74] ) Although Kendi, Hartman, Butler, Claycomb, and others make compelling arguments, given America’s history, centuries of theatrical artivism provide a counterargument. Years of experience in creating theatre that addresses urgent political issues have led Smith to her conviction that “art inspires action” and Morisseau to her belief that “asking the important questions” is the first step toward finding solutions to social problems. In her recent study, Amanda Stuart Fisher argues that “testimonial theatre, which aims to expose and interrogate the kinds of truths that are being re-authored or erased by today's politicians, can play a central role [in challenging political domination].” ( [75] ) The activist Bree Newsome, whose removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State house is portrayed in Notes, has affirmed that “artists telling the truth about the world is itself a form of activism.” ( [76] ) Both plays advocate a prerequisite mindset of optimism and hope—the belief that political action is not likely to happen without a certain degree of faith that change is possible. This is a belief shared by one of America’s most notable anti-racist activists, Angela Davis: “No change is possible without hope.” ( [77] ) Recently, Michelle Alexander expressed her belief in the necessity of a “moral and spiritual revolution” dependent upon treating “all people of all colors with dignity, humanity, compassion, and concern. . . . True progress depends on us caring and demonstrating care, compassion, and concern for poor people, and people of color, and being willing to invest in their well-being and their health and their education and their thriving rather than simply in their punishment and in their control. . . . ( [78] ) The point that awareness, hope, and empathy alone are insufficient to effect social change is, however, well-taken. In the oil and gas industry, decommissioning (safely removing) a pipeline requires “a series of properly planned and executed actions.” ( [79] ) These plays offer both/and strategies, building empathy and community as well as engaging in radical, direct action. Both these plays demonstrate (or perhaps advocate for) a range of resistant actions, most of which involve disorderly or illegal conduct. Militant language abounds in both plays, leaving audiences with a sense of America as a war zone, and neither leaves any doubt about which is the right side. Both plays highlight the deployment of smartphone cameras, which have become pivotal weapons in the Black Lives Matter movement . ( [80] ) In his comments on a production of Morisseau’s Pipeline that he witnessed in March 2020, Harvey Young reminded readers that the play featured images of Civil Rights era activism, “possibly to inspire audiences to speak out and to take to the streets.” Young concludes: “I remember leaving the theatre less feeling anxious about a looming pandemic, than grateful for the ways theatre can be a catalyst for change.” ( [81] ) Smith's inclusion of “off-topic” episodes in Notes is strategic and in keeping with the school to prison “nexus” concept. At Freddie Gray’s funeral, Pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant’s oration is an exhortation to action. Bree Newsome defied the law and risked her life to remove a symbol of injustice, an action that ultimately effected its permanent removal. Congressman Lewis’s story reminds us of the achievements wrought during the 1960s through strategic anti-racist activism and also provides an example of a moral awakening by one who formerly engaged in racist violence. In Pipeline , Omari’s refusal to accept the role of racial spokesperson, his refusal to be constrained by the white “authority figure” in his classroom, provides another example of anti-racist resistance. Kendi has also deemed as a “false construction” the idea that “ignorance and hate” lead to racist ideas and racist policies . ( [82] ) Although apparently in agreement that hatred is a manifestation, rather than a cause, of racism, Smith and Morisseau advance the notion that its eradication is prerequisite for meaningful social change and, moreover, that its eradication is possible. An oft-quoted musical theatre lyric from South Pacific avers that hate must be “carefully taught.” Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that love also can and must be taught. Granted, “love” is a variously defined term, but in this context, perhaps best understood as encompassing agape (selfless, universal love for humankind) and phlautia (self-love). Smith’s inclusion of a story about redemption and forgiveness between a former white supremacist and a Black civil rights activist, and Morisseau’s request, on the behalf of Omari, for understanding and forgiveness, are vital to this message. Smith has given serious consideration to the cultivation of the capacity to love, sharing with Richard Schechner in 2018 that “the revolution can begin with love, hospitality, and grace,” an assertion she expanded on in an article about the pipeline project: Could you ever imagine The Graduate School of Empathy and Love? I know that sounds ridiculous. But I also know that some individuals have a special aptitude for these core elements of our humanity. Those gifts should be honed, nourished, refined, and celebrated in the same way we cultivate athletic prowess, intellectual productivity, and business acumen. We need a generation of leaders who are as loving as they are strategic. We need such leaders to help us find ways to imagine ourselves as beings who could extend our concern beyond the boundaries of our front doors, our fences, our perceived self-interests, our skins. ( [83] ) Both Notes From the Field and Pipeline appeal to the hearts as well as the minds of their audiences; both portray personal stories within specific political contexts; both celebrate acts of civil disobedience; both valorize compassion, empathy, and love; and both feature embraces between human beings as personal actions with profound political implications . Although the ultimate goal or the desired effect of this raised awareness, heightened empathy, and commitment to active resistances to decommission—to safely remove from activity—the school-to-prison pipeline, the implications for more wide-ranging anti-racist activism, are profound. References 1. I would like to express my appreciation to JADT’s editors and anonymous readers for their support and valuable feedback. 2. African Americans make up 13.6% of the total US population and 38.5% of the prison population; Latinos or Hispanic, 18.9% of the general population and 30.2% of the prison population; Native Americans, 1.3% of the general population and 2.6% of the prison population. (2021 statistics). See https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221 ; https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp ; https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_ethnicity.jsp , accessed 1 March 2023. 3. See Lauren Camera, “Study Confirms School to Prison Pipeline,” US News and World Report, July 27, 2021, https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-07-27/study-confirms-school-to-prison-pipeline . Recently scholars have begun to favor the term “nexus” as a way to highlight the complex connections between educational, justice, and other social systems “ which condition us to see people of color as inherently dangerous and in need of constant monitoring.” See https://westwinded.com/blog/understanding-the-school-to-prison-nexus/ , 19 October 2019, accessed 1 March 2023. Although I believe both terms, and concepts, are relevant to the works analyzed in this article, I see the term “pipeline” as a useful metaphor and in keeping with the terminology within the plays and author interviews. 4. Smith’s works are frequently described as “documentary theatre” or “verbatim theatre.” 5 . For an interesting discussion of ways in which Morisseau veers from realism in this play, see Jonathon W. Taylor, “Revolutionary Spaces: Julia Kristeva Gwendolyn Brooks, and a Post-Pandemic Path Ahead in Dominique Morisseau's Pipeline,” Theatre Symposium 30 (2023), 40-54. 6. A student at Brock University has produced an interesting study comparing the representation of black youth (and especially the trope of the absent father) in Singleton's Boyz N the Hood and Morisseau’s Pipeline . See Linda Eronmhonsele, "Representation of Black Youth in John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline ,” Sept. 9, 2022, https://dr.library.brocku.ca/handle/10464/16619?show=full , accessed 18 August 2023. Interestingly, Morisseau includes an allusion to Season 4 of The Wire in Pipeline (p. 20). 7. Minou Arjomand, Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment . New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 8. Dahy, Amal Saad Abu El-Leil. “Notes from the Field: Challenging the American Justice System and the School-to-Prison Pipeline in Anna Deavere Smith’s Verbatim Theater,” fjhj.journals.ekb.eg , no. 2 (2022): 1-23, Accessed 5 September 2023. Smith discusses the earlier version of this performance in an interview with Richard Schechner. After the first act, she stopped the show, divided the audience into groups of 20, and asked them to talk about the problem and to make commitments about solutions. See Richard Schechner, “There’s a Lot of Work to Do to Turn this Thing Around,” interview with Anna Deavere Smith, TDR/The Drama Review (2018) 62 (3 (239)): 35–50. 9. Geis, D. R., (2022) “Say Their Names: Drama of the Black Lives Matter Era”, the Black Theatre Review 1(1), 71-80. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/tbtr.4824 , 1. 10. Amanda Stuart Fisher Performing the Testimonial: Rethinking Verbatim Dramaturgies, https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781526145758/9781526145758.00011.xml,2020, accessed 3 September 2023. See also Ryan Claycomb, In the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023). 11. See Taylor. 12. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 5. 13. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizaing the Intersection of Race and Sex: a Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1): 139. 14. Anna Deavere Smith, Notes from the Field (New York: Anchor Books, 2019, xv-xx. 15. See, for example, Carola Hilfrich, “Aesthetics of Unease: a Brechtian Study of Anna Deavere Smith’s Eyewitness Performance in Fires in the Mirror ,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas (June 2009): 299-318; Charles R. Lyons and James C. Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on Her Performance Within the Context of Critical Theory,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall 1994): 43-66. 16. Quoted in Alison Stolpa, “Anna Deveare Smith: Voices from the Gaps,” Retrieved from University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, 2005, 2, https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/166329/Smith,%20Anna%20Deavere.pdf;sequence= , accessed 30 May 2022. 17. Ibid., 27. 18. Ibid., 42, 44. 19. Ibid., 52. 20. Ibid., 105. 21. Ibid., 60-61. 22. Ibid., 62-63. 23. Ibid., 13. 24. Ibid., 76. 25. Ibid., 84. 26. Ibid., 91-92. 27. Ibid., 108-9, 112. 28. Ibid., 116-17. 29. Ibid., 125, 127, 128-29. 30. See Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice (London: Pearson 2012); Randall G. Shelden and Pavel V. Vasiliev, Controlling the Dangerous Classes: A History of Criminal Justice in America , 3rd ed. (Long Grove IL: Waveland Press, 2017); Maggie Germano, “How the US has Criminalized Poverty and How to Change That Now,” Forbes , August 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiegermano/2020/08/04/how-the-united-states-has-criminalized-poverty-and-how-to-change-that-now/?sh=55a21d913281 , accessed July 1 2023. 31.U.S. Poverty Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau, released September 13, 2022, https://federalsafetynet.com/poverty-statistics/#:~:text=Blacks%20have%20the%20highest%20poverty,have%20the%20lowest%20at%208.1%25 , accessed July 6, 2023. 32. Ibid., 99. 33. See, for example, Ben Brantley, “Anna Deavere Smith’s ‘Notes From the Field’ Delivers Voices of Despair and Hope,” New York Times , 2 Nov. 2016, www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/1835203616/fulltext/8433760FB1C44EBFPQ/8?accountid=14576 , accessed 15 May 2022. 34. Alisa Solomon, “Digging Up the Pipeline,” https://www.annadeaveresmith.org/digging-up-the-pipeline-by-alisa-solomon-2/ ), accessed 15 May 2022. 35. Zachary Stewart, “Notes From the Field,” theatremania, November 02, 2016, https://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/reviews/notes-from-the-field_78996.html , accessed 15 May 2022. 36. Notes From the Field, HBO-TV movie, directed by Kristi Zea. 2018. Now streaming on HULU, www.hulu.com/movie/notes-from-the-field-dfb792f7-37f2-4b8e-8bc7-51576f0ad71d 37. Alexis Soloski, “Notes from the Field Review—a One-Woman Study of Incarceration,” The Guardian, 2 November 2016, www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/nov/02/notes-from-the-field-anna-deavere-smith , accessed 16 May 2022. 38. Ben Brantley, “Voices of Despair and Hope” ; Helen Shaw, “Many Voices Unite in Anna Deavere Smith’s New Documentary Play,” Village Voice, 8 Nov. 2016, www.villagevoice.com/2016/11/08/many-voices-unite-in-anna-deavere-smiths-new-documentary-play/ ; Zachary Stewart, “Notes From the Field,” accessed 15 May 2022. 39. Victoria Myers, “An Interview with Dominique Morisseau,” The Interval , 25 July 2017, www.theintervalny.com/interviews/2017/07/an-interview-with-dominique-morisseau/ , accessed 12 May 2022. 40. Ibid. 41. Dominique Morisseau, Pipeline (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2018), 5. 42. Ben Brantley, “Review: A Mother Fervently Tries to Protect Her Son in Pipeline,” New York Times , 10 July 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/theater/pipeline-review.html , accessed 18 May 2022. 43. Morisseau, Pipeline , 11. 44. Ibid., 24. 45. Ibid., 28-9. 46. Ibid., 35-6. 47. Ibid., 38. 48. Ibid., 41. 49. Mahajoy A. Laufer, “Black Students' Silence in Predominantly White Institutions of Higher Learning,” ( Smith Scholar Works 2012), 2, 16, scholarworks.smith.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1716&context=theses , accessed 15 May 2022. 50. Morisseau, Pipeline , 49. 51. Ibid., 52. 52. Ibid., 5. 53. Ibid., 24, 26, 32, 39, 43, 52, 58, 64, 65, 73, 74. 54. Ibid., 74. 55. The phrase “I Can't Breathe” is now widely used to protest police brutality and racial inequality. According to the New York Times , the phrase has been used by over 70 people who died in police custody. Mike Baker et al, “Three Words: 70 Cases. The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe,’” New York Times 29 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/28/us/i-cant-breathe-police-arrest.html , accessed 16 May 2022. 56. Morisseau, Pipeline , 5. 57. Ibid., 79. 58. Ibid., 79. 59. Ibid., 82. 60. Ibid., 83. 61. Rohan Preston, “‘ Being Human is Not Conditional’: Playwright Dominique Morisseau Seeks to Expand Ideas around Black Kids in Pipeline,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 29 Sept. 2019: E.5. l 62. Morisseau, Pipeline, 86. 63. Ibid., 89. 64. Ibid., 55. 65. Ibid., 90. 66. Bill Marx, “Pipeline a Didactic Excursion,” Artsfuse, 11 May 2020, artsfuse.org/tag/nora-theatre-company/ , accessed 19 May 2022. 67. Ben Brantley, “Race, Schooling and Inequality: Let’s Watch ‘Pipeline,’”  New York Times, 20 May 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/theater/pipeline-play-stream.html , accessed 18 May 2022. 68. Recent sociological research has affirmed these beliefs. See, for example, Steve Rathje, Leor Hacket and Jamil Zaki, "Attending live theatre improves empathy, changes attitudes, and leads to pro-social behavior," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , Vol. 95 July 2021, 104138, ScienceDirect.com . 69. Dominique Morisseau, “Rules of Engagement,” www.centralsquaretheater.org/2019-20-season/articles/from-the-playwright-dominque-morisseaus-rules-of-engagement/ , accessed 11 May 2022. 70. Myers Interview. 71. Kendi, Stamped, 506-09. 72. Sadiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth- Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20-21. 73. Paul Butler, interview on “All In with Chris Hayes,” MSNBC, 25 June 2015, www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/i-have-no-respect-for-your-ancestors-471529027890 , accessed 18 May 2022. 74. Claycomb, 123. 75. Fisher, 179. 76. Biography.com Editors, “Biography of Bree Newsome,” A&E Television Networks, 26 January 2021, www.biography.com/activist/bree-newsome , accessed 20 June 2022. Newsome herself integrates art and activism in her work as a musician/songwriter. 77. Angela Davis Interview, CBS Sunday Morning , 29 May 2022 . See also John Belluso, inspire.redlands.edu/work/sc/c831d110-5886-42a1-857c-ca69cd7e8738 ; Guillermo del Toro, time.com/5520554/guillermo-del-toro-radicaloptimism/#:~:text=No%20hope%20is%20ever%20too,rebellious%20and%20daring%20and%20vital ; Junot Díaz, www.columbiatribune.com/story/news/education/2018/01/22/junot-diaz-preaches-optimism-during/16028788007/ ; and Ava Duvernay, time.com/optimists-2019/ , accessed 30 May 2022. 78. David Remnick, “Ten Years After the New Jim Crow,” an interview with Michelle Alexander, New Yorker, January 17 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/ten-years-after-the-new-jim-crow , accessed 8 March 2023. [1] NiGen, “Pipeline Decomissioning Process in Oil and Gas,” 29 January 2021, nigen.com/pipeline-decommissioning-process-in-oil-and-gas/ , accessed 15 June 2022. 80. Ed Siegel, " Pipeline Tries To Find Space For The Anger Of Young Black Men At Central Square Theater," WBUR News , www.wbur.org/news/2020/03/11/pipeline-nora-central-square-theater-review 11 March 2020, accessed 14 May 2022. 81. Harvey Young, "Pipeline: Central Square Theater," Performing Arts Journal 129 (2021):44. 82. Kendi, Stamped , 506. 83. Anna Deavere Smith, "Toward Empathetic Imagination and Action, www.annadeaveresmith.org/toward-empathetic-imagination-and-action-2/ , accessed 1 June 2022. See also Schechner, 44. Smith's ideas regarding the transformative power of love resonate with those of the late, celebrated feminist author/activist bell hooks; see especially hooks’s Love Song to the Nation trilogy: All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2018); Salvation: Black People and Love (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2001); Communion: the Female Search for Love (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2002) Footnotes About The Author(s) Cheryl Black is a Curators Distinguished Professor Emerita from the University of Missouri, a Fellow in the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, a Fellow of the Mid-America Theatre Conference, a former president of ATDS, and the author/editor of four books and numerous book chapters and articles. She is also an actor/director/playwright whose current project is directing her Patriot Acts: A Suffrage Pageant for Our Times at Union College, where she holds a visiting position for AY 2023-24. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Read The Natural Landscape of Native Puppetry by Opalanietet Ryan Pierce . Opalanietet is a PhD candidate in Theatre & Performance Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and has been a teacher of Contemporary Indigenous Theatre & Performance at The New School in New York City and SUNY Purchase. He also has taught Classical Theatre at Boston University and World Theatre at Pace University. In addition, Opalanietet holds a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a theatre practitioner in New York City, including being the founder and artistic director of Eagle Project, http://www.eagleprojectarts.org. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Indigenous Stages tah-kōx Visit Journal Homepage 1 Volume The Natural Landscape of Native Puppetry By Opalanietet Ryan Pierce Published: June 10, 2026 Download Article as PDF "Puppetry is already there, in cultural dances, trees.” (Defoe 2025, 1:12:32) This quotation from Anishinaabe theatre artist, Ty Defoe (also called Giizhig in his Indigenous language), encapsulates the organic energy exhibited in the natural world around us that is intrinsic in the craft of puppetry. Yet how does one harness that raw organic energy from the natural world and distill it into what we would consider Native puppet theatre? The first, and perhaps most important, step would be to “Indigenize” the puppets. This is exactly what Ty Defoe demonstrates for us in his puppet theatre play, Skeleton Canoe , created with All My Relations Collective [1] and the Great Lakes Life Ways Institute. Skeleton Canoe is a journey of awakening for the character of Nawbin, a young seeker, who meets and befriends Jimaan, a birchbark canoe who has been buried beneath the water for a very long time. Together, Nawbin and Jimaan, arouse stories accompanying the river, pilot through turbulent weather, and relish each other’s company. Theirs is a relationship that assists in resurrecting a healthy equilibrium with all our relatives of the Earth, evoking within us the sentiment that convalescence is achieved through recollection, relationship, and reciprocity. Before we go any further, however, we must unpack what it means to “Indigenize” something. One way to consider Indigenous, or Indigeneity, is under the guise of the people originally from a place and their right to self-government, or sovereignty. Dennis Claude discusses this in his book, We Are Not You: First Nations and Canadian Modernity , where he appears to prefer the term, “First Nations,” as opposed to “Indigenous” or “Native.” Claude simply states: “First Nations occupied this land first and therefore were sovereign self-governing societies, and that they never gave up their sovereignty” (Claude 1997, 20). With Claude’s emphasis in mind, one way to think of “to Indigenize” something would be to bring it under the influence, or control, of the sovereign government of the people who were there on that land first. I believe that to be true, yet, cultural, what is it about the sovereign government of the people who were on that land first that makes "to Indigenize" something noteworthy? It is not necessarily about the government per se, but a value system and epistemology that cosmologically brings Indigeneity to the forefront. For this, I turn to Jerry Fontaine and Don McCaskill, who, through their book, Di-bayn-di-zi-win (To Own Ourselves): Embodying Ojibway-Anishinabe Ways , talk about other aspects of Indigeneity when discussing the process of research. They express that “some approaches (to research) are grounded in Anishinabe ways of doing and knowing and emphasize the importance of respect, reciprocity, relationship, protocol, holistic knowing, relevancy, story, interpretive knowing, and the experiential related to place, language, and kinship systems” (2022, 101). (I use the spelling, “Anishinaabe,” at the request of Defoe, as it assists with the correct pronunciation.) In this article, I will focus on how Defoe uses Anishinaabe ontologies and epistemologies of relationality to inform the specificity of materiality in Skeleton Canoe . This materiality Indigenizes the puppets and enhances the anthropomorphization of the characters, a process that is a cornerstone of contemporary Native puppet theatre; and I will explore this Indigenizing materiality through three distinct characters in the play whose function and movement directly relate to the essence of life that is water: Rainbow Trout, Turtle Activist Grandma, and the River itself. To anthropomorphize, according to Merriam-Webster, means “To attribute human form or personality to things not human” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2025). Gary Steiner implements this definition into his exploration of the Western, [2] or Eurocentric, judgement of the status of non-human animals in his book, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy . Insinuating it as a more “animal-friendly philosophy,” Steiner explains: “Moved by the desire to establish a more edified view of the moral status of animals than the sense that has prevailed in the Western philosophical tradition, an increasing number of ethologists and philosophers have marshaled insights concerning the evolutionary continuity and physiological similarity between animals and human beings to argue that many animals are conscious, sentient beings that deserve substantial moral consideration” (Steiner 2005, 3). According to Steiner, utilizing the pronoun “who” is a method by which to anthropomorphize the puppets, which thus brings forth the familial attributes that are understood to be inherent (not merely philosophical) in all living things, according to Anishinaabe and many other Indigenous communities. I lean on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s explanation of this belief system as I feel she best contextualizes this worldview in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants . Kimmerer references the fact that in the English-speaking world, we typically do not refer to a member of our family with the pronoun “it.” That would be considered an insult and a sign of disrespect. Kimmerer takes that social rule and demonstrates how and why many Indigenous communities extend that respect to include members of the natural world. Kimmerer says, “ It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family” (2013, 55). Yet what constitutes “the living world,” one may ask? The living world is even more expansive than one may initially imagine. Kimmerer explains: In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate. The list of the inanimate seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people. Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say ‘ What is it?’ And we answer Dopwen yewe . Table it is. But of apple, we must say, ‘ Who is that being?’ And reply Mshimin yawe . Apple that being is. Yawe – the animate to be . (2013, 55–56) The materiality in Skeleton Canoe is a mixture of materials, some of which, like birchbark and porcupine quills, Kimmerer would consider animate, and others, such as plastic bags or recycled materials, that would fall into the inanimate category. Either way, however, given how the materiality is utilized within the play, human form and personality (i.e. anthropomorphization) is endowed onto the puppets, thus enabling them to effectively and respectfully represent some of our non-human family members to a human audience. Relationality is the essential concept that must be developed when discussing contemporary Native performing arts, whether it be engaging in anthropomorphization with one’s puppets and objects, or developing a dance piece as Jacqueline Shea Murphy theoretically describes in her book, Dancing Indigenous Worlds: Choreographies of Relation . While she focuses on the transformational process in Indigenous dance, I believe both the ideological and performative epistemology she discusses directly relates to the foundations of contemporary Native puppet theatre. Murphy states: “the Indigenous dance artists discussed in this book, as I have come to perceive, create dance works that manifest out of ways of being in which relationality undergirds everything. They create these dance works physically and experientially, via human bodies coming and being and moving together in interconnection and exchange” (2022, 1). It is essential, I would argue, to first establish this relationality with one’s own species, fellow human beings. If we cannot establish and experience the agency within our neighboring humans, how can we begin to be interconnected with other living organisms and objects? I believe this is the first step in hosting and utilizing a counter ideology that doesn’t look at our fellow humans as competitors or instruments through which we can obtain something or achieve an objective, but as collaborators in creation and stewardship. Once this concept is developed and accepted, it may then be possible to expand this creational capacity beyond our species. Murphy continues: “it happens in relational interconnections with human as well as with more-than-human beings, like plants and water and ancestors” (2022, 1). Returning to Kimmerer, she assists in crystalizing this relationality when referencing our pronouns for our more-than-human kin: “Saying it makes a living land into ‘natural resources.’ If a maple is an it , we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her , we think twice” (2013, 57). This relational interconnectedness with our fellow non-human beings and entities is foundational for all the characters in Skeleton Canoe . Defoe achieves this transformation to relational interconnectedness through what he calls, “Western puppetry and Anishinaabe values and ways of being” (Defoe 2025: 1:18:30). What exactly could be meant by “Western puppetry”? To start, Stephen Kaplin’s 1999 article, “A Puppet Tree,” provides a basic definition of a puppet: Unlike actors, puppets are objects, defined by Frank Proschan as ‘material images of humans, animals or spirits that are created, displayed, or manipulated.’ These material images reflect an ‘iconicity […] between a material object (sign vehicle) and the animate being for which it stands” (1983:4). But while actors animate a sign vehicle from the inside out, using their own feelings, bodies, and voices, puppet performers must learn to inhabit the sign vehicle from the outside in. (1999, 29) There is a lot to unpack here. Yes, most of the puppets in Skeleton Canoe are, as Kaplin refers to, material images of animals that reflect an iconicity between a material object and the animate being, but the specific materiality used in Skeleton Canoe (for example, the birchbark used for Jimaan or the fan used for Rainbow Trout) that in many ways reflect Anishinaabe values and ways of being, make the puppet itself iconic, not just a reflective image. In addition, it is the specific materiality of the puppets in Skeleton Canoe that comes from embedded and transferred knowledge from one’s community and ancestors that I argue complicates the binary of the “inside out” and “outside in” that Kaplin refers to. One example is birchbark, used for the character, Turtle Activist Grandma, which I will explore in further detail later. While the operating of the puppets may be “outside in,” the creation of the puppet is inspired from the “inside out.” When speaking about puppetry from a potentially more “Western” perspective, I turn to Edward Gordon Craig’s essay, “The Actor and the Übermarionette,” as referenced by Victoria Nelson. Here, Craig gives a description of what we conventionally think of puppets in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Craig explains: “To speak of a puppet with most men and women is to cause them to giggle. They think at once of the wires; they think of the stiff hands and the jerky movements; they tell me it is ‘a funny little doll’” (quoted in Nelson 2001, 24). Since Craig originally made that statement in 1908, one may believe that it is a diachronic perception of a puppet that ceases to exist a century later. Steve Tillis appears to disagree with the sentiment that Craig’s statement has ceased to exist in his book, Towards an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art . Tillis reminds us, “the signs deployed by the puppet are as intentional as theatrical signs can be; their intent, whether or not this is acknowledged by the puppet-artist, is to lead the audience to imagine life while it perceives an object” (1992, 115). The object may not be “a funny little doll” as Craig states, but it is still “an object,” according to Tillis, by which we, the audience, “imagines” life. Yes, the puppets in Skeleton Canoe may contain wires and are operated through manipulation, but through the specific materiality from which the puppets are made, they become not just images, or even “Images” in the likeness of the Creator, they are manifestations of our non-human kin here on Turtle Island. We do not have to imagine life based on the signs presented by the materiality, for in Native puppet theatre, the materiality often is life; and even in the instances when the materiality itself is not alive, it is specifically utilized to accentuate a life-like characteristic that is critical in an Indigenous story or life lesson. In Skeleton Canoe , these non-human kin guide Nawbin, a young seeker, on a transformational adventure. On this journey, Nawbin encounters Jiimaan, a birchbark canoe long embedded under the water. The two bond in friendship as they uncover stories along the river, weather storms, and enjoy each other’s company. As Defoe says: “Together, they restore balance with the beings of the Earth, reminding us that healing comes through remembering, relationship, and reciprocity” (personal communication, July 29, 2025). The emphasis is not on conflict, as is often presupposed in Western storytelling, but on a life journey. We start our journey with the river, as it is the most crucial element in Skeleton Canoe . There is no story and there is no performance without River. While one can certainly argue with legitimacy that rivers provide the essentials for life for civilizations throughout the world, rivers are looked upon as living, breathing relations for many Native/Indigenous communities, including my own. Yet, how does one transform the Western, colonial, Euro/American concept of a river as primarily a watery avenue used to transport products and further commerce into a sentient relative capable of sharing cosmological knowledge with us? The relational interconnectedness that we have discussed is the foundation through which a river can be looked upon as a living, breathing relative and not a mere tool used to achieve an end. Figure 1. Nawbin, Jiimaan, and characters in stories arise along the river. (Photo: Alex U. Griffin, courtesy of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival) River is not what we (and Kaplin) typically refer to as a human, animal or spirit. But they are alive, have agency, and are a crucial part of our community. In the show, the materiality of River consists of recycled materials, such as plastic bags and aluminum cans, as an example, which both acknowledges the importance of our climate crisis and the urgency to protect River, while also permitting River to flow, ripple, and provide a home for the other puppets. The craft of puppetry in Skeleton Canoe , including River, may be informed by what Americans consider to be Western. But it is the Native values, in this case Anishinaabe, that inform the materiality of River, and thus enable River to ontologically function in a way that makes the audience a vessel for River’s stories rather than the other way around. We fundamentally need River more than River needs us, and it is this humble understanding that allows a reciprocal relationship that is critical in Native puppet theatre to exist. This reciprocal relationship becomes visceral when we see different characters in the play, like Nawbin and Turtle Activist Grandma, each attempting to engage in one of the most fundamental activities regarding water: taking a drink from River. When Nawbin goes to River’s edge to have a drink towards the beginning of the play, they let out a cry as they pull a plastic bag from River. They exclaim it is gross and announce that they will attempt to take out every plastic bag from the river. Nawbin proclaims themselves as a water protector, and thus, the relational interconnectedness that Murphy speaks of is implemented by Defoe and endowed onto what otherwise would be deemed as inanimate objects. Figure 2. Turtle Activist Grandma engaging with River. (Photo: Alex U. Griffin, courtesy of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival) Rainbow Trout is one of those other puppets who has a home in River. A colorful fan forms the foundation of Rainbow Trout, providing both the aesthetic and functionality of the puppet. The spectrum of color emanating from Rainbow Trout gives authenticity to its name, while the flexibility of the fan enables the fish to swim, flutter, and dance convincingly. The colors of the rainbow and the ease and freedom of movement assist in making Rainbow Trout a character who serves as a metaphor reminding us of the role of Two-Spirit members in Indigenous communities: bringing love, light, joy, and gratitude to our culture. VK Preston’s reference, in “Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis,” to the symbolic importance of a map in a performance centering familial locations combined with music from a Two-Spirit composer, and the way in which those elements solidify the emotional attachment to place, remind me of Rainbow Trout’s power in Skeleton Canoe . Preston states: “participatory conversation on place inaugurates an epistemic shift of placemaking. This centers and genders pluralism, reclaiming nonbinary gender, partnering, and community’s solidarity in queer Indigenous activism” (2020, 150). According to Preston, the reclamation of geography and gender from binary, colonial classification liberates a plurality of meaning, learning, and kinship. Rainbow Trout, having their home in the river, enhances River as an important place of epistemic knowledge. Rainbow Trout swimming and dancing with a rainbow fan representing Two-Spirit members of Indigenous community centers’ “gender pluralism,” and even though it may be subliminal to some and not so subliminal to others, fosters solidarity within queer Indigenous wisdom. The human artifact that is the colorful fan anthropomorphizes the puppet of Rainbow Trout, thus allowing the character to foster Two-Spirit wisdom, and thereby furthering the interspecies communication that is essential to this Native story. As Claudia Orenstein writes in Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects : “objects and materiality can have their own emotional trajectories constructed into them, and we can experience these physically” (2024, 38). We experience the beauty of Rainbow Trout through the vivid brightness of the colorful fan, and freedom through its movement as it appears to swim and dance effortlessly. Swimming and dancing appear synonymous as the stick that initially permits Defoe to control Rainbow Trout’s movement changes to a string that liberates Rainbow Trout to make much of the stage their dance floor as Defoe circles the string around his body and over his head. The puppet’s movement allows us to experience both a watery environment and a dancing stage, even when it is not in physical water or a disco. Rainbow Trout’s freedom of movement enables interspecies communication by allowing the other swimming puppets and air-breathing mammals, such as a human actor, to speak with Rainbow Trout directly. When interspecies communication does take place, endowing the puppet with Anishinaabe language reinforces the concept of the puppet being alive through anthropomorphization, also referred to as “breathing spirit into the object” (personal communication, April 15, 2025). The combination of Anishinaabe language along with materiality, such as jingles from a jingle dress [3] placed inside Rainbow Trout, collaborate to Indigenize the puppet with the ability to relay Anishinaabe lifeways and ideology onto a captivated audience, whether they be Native or not. Returning to Preston, they say “that settlers’ interest in interpreting Indigenous practice as performance fails to apprehend songs’ or dances’ ontologies otherwise, as law, being, or medicine, erasing and thereby also doing epistemological violence” (2020, 148). The jingles inside Rainbow Trout are an antidote to the epistemological violence that Preston is talking about. They represent medicine and restoration. By placing the jingles inside Rainbow Trout, Indigenizes the puppet in one of the most fundamental ways, one that is not just entertainment, education, or even resistance, but one that is restorative in the transferring of cosmological and epistemological knowledge. Birchbark, however, is the most important aspect of materiality in Skeleton Canoe . It is the material from which the main character in the play, Jiimaan, a canoe, is made. Birchbark serves as a tool to make food and supply transportation, in addition to being the material that would support etchings and writing, which makes it a foundation for communication. Thus, having Jiimaan be made from birchbark is imperative for the play. Birchbark from the tree, in and of itself, contains much knowledge and many stories. Constructing the canoe with birchbark endows Jiimaan with that same knowledge. Defoe says that Jiimaan can be buried and spend as long as four hundred years in the ground. Many stories and much knowledge can be accumulated during that time for living beings, including humans, who are willing to listen and learn. Theresa May, in Salmon is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed , describes the significance of these transferred stories when sharing her experience creating a theatre project with local Indigenous communities. May talks about how theatres serve as “forums where stories, and the wisdom and knowledge they carry, are given authority. Stories preserve and disseminate wisdom, provide historical context, and transmit feelings that have the power to change the listener, easing long-standing social and political polarization” (2018, 7). That is the influence that these stories possess, and it is the materiality that represents the manifestation of the stories in a tangible and sensorial fashion. It is with this knowledge and storytelling ability in mind that the birchbark is seen to contain its own agency. Megan De Roover discusses agency with trees in her 2019 article, “Beyond the Scenic: Trees as Participants in Theatre and Performance.” De Roover begins by unpacking Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” which exposes the moment when “objects” become “things.” De Roover states: “Brown’s ‘Thing Theory’ illustrates this invitation, as he argues that when objects cease to function in predictable manners, they become things , asserting a peculiar kind of power into our interactions with them. In the same way, when trees no longer function as objects (which conform easily to our desires), they shift into things (which can resist)” (2019, 333). I am not insinuating that the birchbark of Jiimaan is “resisting” in any particular fashion, but that the birchbark, through its symbolic and dramaturgical usage, is becoming, according to De Roover and Brown, a “thing.” De Roover elaborates further: “Our relationship to the tree as an object-now-thing transforms from one of control to one of participatory exchange – a transformation that has the potential to alter (however slightly) the norm of unilateral engagement” (2019, 333). The multi-usage and significance of the birchbark to the Anishinaabe people, which then forms the materiality of Jiimaan in Skeleton Canoe , transforms the birchbark, according to De Roover, into a “thing” that defines the relationship with the birchbark into “one of participatory exchange,” not only between the Anishinaabe and the birchbark, but also between Jiimaan and the audience. De Roover concludes “that meaningful encounters with trees as things enables [ sic ] a relationship with trees , rather than a relationship with stories about trees ” (2019, 345). This describes a cornerstone of Native puppet theatre, one in which the materiality of the natural world is being granted its full agency and one where an equal reciprocal relationship is manifested. Thus, when the materiality is granted its full agency, so is the puppet which is constructed from that materiality. That reciprocity can only happen when the interaction with the natural world is as a “thing” with agency and not an “object.” Once our relationship with the natural world is as a “thing” with agency, we then possess the ideology that they are our fellow “kin” with a proper pronoun (as Kimmerer suggests) and not an “it,” an object ripe for exploitation at our whim. The monumental material of birchbark represents so much to the Anishinaabe people that, in the show, it also forms a basket that serves as a shell for the elder character, Turtle Activist Grandma. For many Native communities, including my own, Lenape, as well as Anishinaabe, what Americans frequently refer to as the continent of North America is actually Turtle Island, a vast tract of land that sits on the back of a giant turtle. I, personally, am a member of a Lenape Turtle Clan. The cosmological importance of the turtle and its shell is imperative to many Native creation stories. Thus, having the turtle shell be a basket made out of birchbark Indigenizes the puppet of Turtle Activist Grandma in a way that nothing else would or could. This makes it an ideal material for a puppet who, as Defoe, articulates, is “Creating an environmental movement for a connection between humans and nature” (personal communication, March 12, 2025). While cleaning the water in the play, Turtle Activist Grandma reminds us of one of the most important realities of existence by pulling out a flag that communicates, “Water is life.” Through utilizing her birchbark shell to remove trash and waste from the water and River’s shore, Turtle Activist Grandma represents the significance of environmental stewardship, and that the well-being of the people is synonymous with that of the environment. Having both Turtle Activist Grandma and Jiimaan be associated with the materiality of birchbark (recycled birchbark in the case of Jiimaan), they remind us of the importance of sustainability and the interconnectedness of our shared destiny. Figure 3. Water is Life. (Photo: Alex U. Griffin, courtesy of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival) The use of birchbark as materiality for Turtle Activist Grandma is a prime example of dramaturgical methodology put into practice in order to bring awareness to the current climate crisis. It is an example of Lisa Woynarski’s urgent call for ecologically relevant dramaturgical practice in her book, Ecodramaturgies: theatre, performance and climate change . Woynarski writes: “Intersectional ecologies analyses [ sic ] the ideologies of conquest, colonialism, accumulation and individualism that shape capitalist patriarchy and ecological exploitation” (2020, 35). Woynarski continues with how ecodramaturgy, a product of intersectional ecology, can be an antidote to the separatist individualism of colonialism. She continues: “Ecodramaturgies can counter the abstraction and reduction of these issues (power relations that create injustice) by locating them in potent stories, missing histories, forgotten people and places, and human and more-than-human bodies” (2020, 38). Turtle Activist Grandma wearing a shell made out of birchbark, which is substantive and symbolic for the Anishinaabe people, and having that be juxtaposed with her performing the act of cleaning a river made out of recycled materials, both anthropomorphizes the puppet and includes the dramaturgical intersectionality Woynarski is referring to. A Western style puppet consisting of Anishinaabe materiality with Indigenous storytelling is intersectional in a way that reaches a diverse audience, while at the same time enabling the climate crisis to be an issue that is both universal and relatable. It is also an example of what Peter Eckersall, in Dramaturgy to Make Visible: The Legacies of New Dramaturgy for Politics and Performance in Our Times , calls slow dramaturgy, as “a way to describe how the theatrical forms themselves, as dramaturgical agents made from interactive systems, make visible to spectators the experience of ecological crisis” (2024, 13). Denise Varney, in “Caught in the Anthropocene: Theatres of Trees, Place and Politics,” succinctly summarizes Eckersall’s slow dramaturgy: “a dramaturgy that ‘foregrounds time’ and ‘reorients perceptions’ towards a materialist or political consciousness of non-human agency” (2022, 10). I argue that the sequences with Turtle Activist Grandma harmonize with both descriptions of slow dramaturgy in that the sequences are timeless in regard to the Anishinaabe tradition of birchbark that goes back centuries, as well as current when referencing the critical status of human-induced climate change. The anthropomorphization of the puppets, enabled by the specific material dramaturgical choices, such as Turtle Activist Grandma using her birchbark shell in order to assist in cleaning up River, makes the present ecological crisis both visible and visceral. It also, to channel Varney, “reorients our perception toward a political consciousness of nonhuman agency” by having a turtle clean River up after us. River may be Turtle Activist Grandma’s home, but having her clean her home after human irresponsibility endows this non-human with agency that one would typically assume that we, as humans, would have. This actually implicates the human audience and makes them question whether we as a human race have agency to modify our priorities and fundamentally alter our behavior for a more climate-responsive value system. In this way, the birchbark transfers conventional anthropomorphization from the human audience to the turtle. In order for Native puppet theatre to create an environmental movement for a connection between humans and nature, the relationship between humans and the natural world must go beyond mere transactional reciprocity. Its potential, to quote Varney, can “be a model for non-human-centered ecological theatre, one that features the environment as the foundation of human life and creativity” (2022, 11). By centering the environment, Native puppet theatre can reach into the essence of our identities as living organisms, through the specific materiality of its characters. The materiality of the puppets in Skeleton Canoe is a mixture of items that are symbolic to us as contemporary Americans as well as essential to the traditional culture of Anishinaabe people, all the while centering the environment and its ecological relationality in their usage. This blend of materiality specifically crafted for certain characters anthropomorphizes the puppets in a way that intrinsically makes them a part of us, while simultaneously, through our wonderment at seeing the natural world alive through our creations, makes us a part of them. Notes [1] “All My Relations is a profound concept and artistic collective that I (Ty Defoe) co-created. All My Relations is rooted in Indigenous worldviews. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of all human and non-human beings and underscores a reciprocal responsibility to the land, ancestors, and future generations. This philosophy is central to various Indigenous-led arts collectives that aim to foster community, healing, and cultural revitalization through creative expression.” Ty Defoe, email message to author, April 15, 2025. [2] I use the term, “Western,” in this article to connotate the cultural paradigm that typically refers to anything thought of as colonial and Euro/American. [3] “The Jingle Dress originates from the Anishinaabe people and is rooted in stories of healing. According to tradition, the dress was first created for a young girl in the North who was gravely ill. A vision came to her family instructing them to sew a dress adorned with 365 metal cones—one for each day of the year—and as she danced in it, the sound of the jingles would offer healing. Each cone represents a prayer, an intention, a step toward restoration. Today, jingle dress dancers continue to appear at powwows, community gatherings, protests, and ceremonies—dancing not just in regalia, but in remembrance, resistance, and restoration. The Jingle Dress Dance embodies healing—physical, emotional, and spiritual—and stands as a testament to cultural resilience, the endurance of language and tradition, and the power of community. This is not just performance; it is a ceremony guided by protocol, responsibility, and prayer. Jingle dancers often carry the prayers of those who cannot dance themselves, offering their movement as a gift of collective strength.” (Defoe, personal communication, April 17, 2025.) Image Credits: Alex U. Griffin, courtesy of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival Article References Defoe, Ty. 2025. “The Puppet that Brings Us Together: Thought on Intercultural Puppetry Arts.” The 2025 Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium series, Chicago, IL, January. Video, 1 hour, 53 min. 35sec. https://howlround.com/happenings/ellen-van-volkenburg-puppetry-symposium-1 . Dennis, Claude. 1997. We Are Not You: First Nations and Canadian Modernity . University of Toronto. De Roover, Megan. 2019. “Beyond the Scenic: Trees as Participants in Theatre and Performance.” Theatre Journal 71 (3): 327–346. Eckersall, Peter. 2024. Dramaturgy to Make Visible: The Legacies of New Dramaturgy for Politics and Performance in Our Times . Routledge. Fontaine, Jerry, and Don McCaskill. 2022. Di-bayn-di-zi-win (To Own Ourselves): Embodying Ojibway-Anishinabe Ways . Dundurn Press. Kaplin, Stephen. 1999. “A Puppet Tree: A Model for the Field of Puppet Theatre.” TDR: The Drama Review 43 (3): 28–35. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants . Milkweed Editions. May, Theresa. 2018. Salmon is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed , 2nd ed. Oregon State University Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book71513 . Merriam-Webster Dictionary. n.d. “Anthropomorphize.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anthropomorphize , accessed June 29, 2025. Murphy, Jacqueline Shea. 2022. Dancing Indigenous Worlds: Choreographies of Relation . University of Minnesota Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/99484 . Nelson, Victoria. 2001. The Secret Life of Puppets . Harvard University Press. Orenstein, Claudia. 2024. Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects . Routledge. Preston, VK. 2020. “Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis.” Theatre Journal 72 (2): 143–162. Steiner, Gary. 2005. Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy . University of Pittsburgh Press. Tillis, Steve. 1992. Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art, Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies Number 47 . Greenwood Press. Varney, Denise. 2022. “Caught in the Anthropocene: Theatres of Trees, Place and Politics.” Theatre Research International 47 (1): 7–27. Woynarski, Lisa. 2020. Ecodramaturgies: theatre, performance and climate change . Palgrave Macmillan. References About the author(s) Opalanietet is a PhD candidate in Theatre & Performance Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and has been a teacher of Contemporary Indigenous Theatre & Performance at The New School in New York City and SUNY Purchase. He also has taught Classical Theatre at Boston University and World Theatre at Pace University. In addition, Opalanietet holds a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a theatre practitioner in New York City, including being the founder and artistic director of Eagle Project, http://www.eagleprojectarts.org . Indigenous Stages tah-kōx INDIGENOUS STAGES is the world’s first interdisciplinary academic journal dedicated solely to the theatrical and cultural performance of Indigenous artists and communities from across the globe. Published by The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center at CUNY, the mission of INDIGENOUS STAGES is to foster, survey, and publish the contemporary and historical theoretical discourse surrounding the field. Peer-reviewed articles as well as critical book and performance reviews will contribute to further strengthen Indigenous studies as an academic discipline within theatre and performance studies. Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Indigenous Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The Natural Landscape of Native Puppetry Previous Next Attribution: Table of Contents for this volume

Angela Sweigart-Gallagher St. Lawrence University Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Angela Sweigart-Gallagher St. Lawrence University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Vermont Stage’s production of Cadillac Crew featuring Ashley Nicole Baptiste, Angella Katherine, Monica Leigh Rosenblatt, and Starnubia. Photo: Dan Gallagher. Talley’s Folley Lanford Wilson (26 Jul.- 26 Aug.) at Isham Family Farm Cadillac Crew Tori Sampson (27 Sept.-15 Oct.) And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank James Still (11-12 Nov.) at Temple Sinai and subsequent school tours Winter Tales conceived by Mark Nash (13-15 Dec.) Breakfalls Gina Stevensen (20 Mar.- 7 Apr.) tick, tick…BOOM! Jonathan Larson (book and lyrics) (1-26 May) The Bakeoff 2024: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune Terrence McNally (12- 16 Jun.) Vermont Stage’s 2023-2024 season represented a subtle change in the company’s focus. Previously, the company’s website described itself as Northern Vermont’s home for “contemporary theatre,” but now it reads home for “exceptional theatre.” This small change may explain why this season felt like a shift in programming. The 2023-2024 season opened in July with Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folley produced at Isham Family Farm, a picturesque outdoor location that offered the company a lifeline after audiences proved wary to return to indoor theatre following the pandemic; this now appears to be a feature of Vermont Stage’s early season programming. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning two-hander, which was first produced in 1979 and set in1944, is ostensibly a romantic comedy wherein one of the impediments to the lovers’ courtship is their Jewish/Protestant identities. While not a contemporary play in any sense, the show proved to be well-chosen for the idyllic setting. Scenic Designer Chuck Padula’s boathouse provided just enough space for Patrik Chow’s stage compositions to maintain tension between Matt and Sally, played by Connor Kendall and Leila Teitelman, while still allowing patrons to enjoy the Isham’s gardens. Connor Kendall’s performance of the play’s metatheatrical welcome speech charmed from the start. I saw the production on a particularly warm evening and couldn’t help but feel anxious for the actors as they sweat through Jess Nguyen’s simple yet effective period costumes in the oppressive humidity and blistering early evening sun. I was impressed with the energy of their performances; somehow Matt and Sally managed to convincingly argue, banter, and rekindle their love affair even in the withering heat. In the fall, Vermont Stage returned to Main Street Landing with Tori Sampson’s Cadillac Crew . Sampson’s play spends much of the first two acts focused on the lives and stories of the Black women (and, to a lesser extent, white women) at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement. The play celebrates the legacy and power of their organizing and mobilization and acknowledges their corollaries in the Black Lives Matter movement. While the two first acts of the play are theatrically stronger than the third act, in which Sampson introduces figures from BLM, the dramaturgical purpose of the time and character shifts is clear. Director Jammie Patton helped craft lovely performances by an ensemble cast comprised of four actors making their Vermont Stage debuts. Ashley Nicole Babtiste as Rachel, Angella Katherine as Abby, Monica Leigh Rosenblatt as Sarah, and Starnubia as Dee each had standout moments and managed to create characters that spanned the play’s two timelines effectively. Sarah Sophia Lidz’s costumes captured not only the two time periods (1960s and today), but also the personalities of the characters. Jess Wilson’s sound design and Dan Gallagher’s lighting both beautifully created a sense of time and place. Gallagher’s lighting in Act 2 was particularly effective at capturing the eerie danger faced by four women driving the backroads of Mississippi. Vermont Stage had already programmed And Then They Came for Me before the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, but the show undoubtedly took on greater relevance to the local community when it was presented in November. Vermont Stage described the piece as a “multimedia reading performance , combining videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors Ed Silverberg and Éva Schloss with live actors recreating scenes from their lives during World War II. ” Directed by Wendi Stein, the show had a limited run at a local temple before being made available for tours at local schools. The production was produced in partnership with the Stop Hate Campaign and was followed by a talkback on the rise of anti-Semitism led by a local Rabbi. Vermont Stage’s website included the following: “Please note: there will be a security presence on-site at each performance.” Gina Stevensen’s new play Breakfalls, perhaps the most experimental piece of Vermont Stage’s season, premiered at Main Street Landing in March. Set in a Vermont karate dojo, Stevensen’s play takes its name from a karate technique that allows participants to fall safely. The production was a moving meditation on the mental and physical strategies people use to create a sense of safety which heavily relied on the artistic interplay of Director Delanté Keys and fight coordinator José Pérez IV. Local critic Alex Brown reported that director Keys used the “space elegantly, expressing the meaning of distance visually and, for the characters, sometimes viscerally.” Artistic Director Cristina Alicea directed Vermont Stage’s final production of the season, Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick…BOOM! The musical, which Alicea described as Larson’s “most personal,” featured strong performances by the small ensemble. Coleman Cummings, who played Jonathan, somehow managed to rise above the cloying earnestness of the role. Kianna Bromley as Susan and Connor Kendall as Michael rounded out the cast. Unfortunately, the day I saw the production, it was plagued by technical errors. There were out of sync light cues in which the actors found themselves out of their spotlights, and Kendall’s microphone pack shorted out and had to be replaced mid-song by a stagehand during one of the show’s most poignant musical numbers. Although the technical side of this production was not as effective as the actors’ performances,Padula’s set provided opportunities for Alicea’s inventive staging. A bank of lockers against the back wall opened in various ways, allowing the actors to transform the space into Jonathan’s apartment in one scene, and a bodega in another scene. The lockers also allowed the three performers to seamlessly gather and return props without exiting the performance space. Similarly, Alicea utilized two black benches in a variety of ways to create a piano and bench, a desk in Michael’s office, and a conference room. The actor manipulation of props and scenery added a metatheatrical element and helped keep the show moving. Vermont Stage began its 2023-2024 season with a new management structure in place and a season line-up that reflected a subtle shift in its programming with some older plays and a musical breaking up a season of lesser-known, newer work. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ANGELA SWEIGART-GALLAGHER is an Associate Professor of Performance and Communication Arts at St. Lawrence University. Her scholarly writing and performance reviews have appeared in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre , New England Theatre Journal , parTake , Performance Matters, Performance Research , Theatre Symposium , Theory in Action, and Youth Theatre Journal . Dr. Sweigart-Gallagher earned her PhD in Theatre Research from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

A green city-wide pop-up-park festival of creative, innovative, and inspiring environmental art works in the boroughs of New York City. Free. Outdoors. Off-grid. No electricity. Rain or shine. Bridge Matter / The Reach Bridge Matter / The Reach Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Weather Weather Bridge Matter / The Reach Bridge Matter / The Reach 1/13 Prelude in the Parks performances for the planet SEE SCHEDULE FREE | OUTDOORS | OFF-GRID/NO ELECTRICITY | RAIN OR SHINE A green city-wide pop-up parks festival of creative, innovative, and inspiring environmental art-works by artists addressing environmental & climate change issues. Co-Curated by Frank Hentschker & Robin Schatell / Mov!ngCulture Projects; The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center CUNY. June 7th @ 6pm, June 8th & 9th @ 3pm What's On: Performance I Dance I Music I Theatre I 13 Presentations Where It's Happening: Parks & Gardens City-Wide: Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island – all 5 Boroughs Partners: Bronx River Community Garden; Eastside Outside Community Garden; Manhattan , Hunters Point Park Alliance/Queens ; ID Studio Theater/Bronx ; Social Practice CUNY; Newtown Creek Alliance/Brooklyn ; Roc-A-Natural Cultural Foundation/Staten Island ; Summer on the Hudson/Riverside Park Conservancy/Manhattan What's On Performance I Dance I Music I Theatre I 13 Presentations in 5 Boroughs Friday, June 7 - All performances @ 6pm Brooklyn Pliable Futures Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn Manhattan Devrai (Sacred Grove) Richard Move / MoveOpolis! Riverside Park, Manhattan Manhattan Bridge Matter / The Reach Kinesis Project dance theatre Inwood Hill Park, Gaelic Field, Manhattan Queens Guinean Environmental Stewardship Traditions Sidiki Conde and Tokounou Dance Company Hunter’s Point South Park, Queens Saturday, June 8 - All performances @ 3pm Bronx Land Connections: Reflections with Dennis Dennis RedMoon Darkeem Bronx River Community Garden.,The Bronx Manhattan The Heat Will Kill Everything Keith Josef Adkins Riverside Park South, Manhattan Bronx Dance in Connection ID Studio Theater and Daniel Fetecua Barretto Point Park, Viele Avenue, The Bronx Staten Island Mixed Use | Cyn | M.A. Dennis | Manners and Respect | | Thomas Fucaloro | Tappen Park, Staten Island Brooklyn WATER RISES Artichoke Dance Company Newtown Creek Nature Walk, Kingsland Ave, Brooklyn Manhattan Community Poetry and Tea Tea, Arts & Culture Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan Sunday, June 9 - All performances @ 3pm Brooklyn Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Al Límite Collective Newtown Creek Nature Walk, Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn Brooklyn Resilience Thinking Walkscape Rafael de Balanzo Joue and Daniel Pravit Fethke Endale Arch, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Brooklyn Weather Anh Vo Brower Park, Prospect Place, Brooklyn Locations City-Wide: Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queen Staten Island – all 5 Boroughs Meet The Team Robin Schatell Co-Curator Robin Schatell is a creative producer who works with artists, arts group, cultural and community organizations and city agencies to shape, design, develop, and organize creative visions for activating their public spaces with arts and cultural programming. Co-Founder , Mov!ng Culture Projects, Director of Museum Mile Festival for 20 years, Founder and Artistic Director of Riverside Park’s Summer on the Hudson Festival, Executive Director of River To River Festival, Director of Programming for Madison Square Parks’ Mad Sq Art program, Curator of Public Programs for the Van Alen Institute, Managing Director of Performance Space 122, and Ralph Lemon Company, Founder of The Puffin Room, Manhattan Community Board 3 Member, Contributing Cultural Writer for TheLoDownNYC.com. Gaurav Singh Nijjer Web and Digital Producer Gaurav Singh Nijjer is a theatre-maker, creative technologist and designer whose artistic works explore technology and media in live performance. He is one half of the Indian performing arts collective Kaivalya Plays, and also works as a freelance artist and arts manager with collectives in India and abroad, currently as Digital and Web Producer at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Centre CUNY. He is a former German Chancellor Fellow and a Chevening scholar. He trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Apart from theatre, Gaurav also works as a freelance marketing, design and creative consultant for diverse organizations. Frank Hentschker Co-Curator Frank Hentschker, who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the now legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany, came to the Graduate Center in 2001 as program director for the Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and was appointed to the central doctoral faculty in theatre in 2009. Currently executive director and director of programs at the Segal Center, Hentschker has transformed the center into the nation’s leading forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies; each year, he curates and produces more than forty events—staged readings, lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress, and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries, and emerging voices in the international, American, and New York theatre scenes. Among the vital events and series he founded at the Segal Center are the World Theatre Performance series; the annual fall PRELUDE festival, which features more than twenty New York–based theatre companies and playwrights; and the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series. Hentschker also led CUNY’s nineteen performing arts centers in founding the CUNY–Performing Arts Consortium (C–PAC), producing the consortium’s first joint festival in 2009. Hentschker edited the MESTC publications Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake, Seven Works for the Theatre (2009) and New Plays from Spain (2013), and he served as president of the board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 2005 to 2009. Before coming to the Graduate Center, Hentschker founded and directed DISCURS, the largest European student theatre festival existing today; he acted as Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine, directed by the playwright; performed in the Robert Wilson play The Forest (music by David Byrne); and worked as an assistant for Robert Wilson for many years. Producer, General Operations Manager Teresa Soraka Next Generation Fellow Nurit Chinn For queries, feedback and any more information get in touch with us at segalcenter@gmail.com

The Segal Centre The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC), The Graduate Center , CUNY , is a non-profit center for theatre, dance, and film affiliated with CUNY’s Ph.D. Program in Theatre . Originally founded in 1979 as the Center for Advanced Studies in Theatre Arts (CASTA), it was renamed in March of 1999 to recognize Martin E. Segal, one of New York City’s outstanding leaders of the arts. At the same time, the multi-purpose performing space in The Graduate Center’s new home in the former B. Altman department store was named the Martin E. Segal Theatre. The New York Times called Mr. Segal “New York’s leading cultural power broker.” An extraordinary figure in the arts and education in New York City, he has played a seminal role in many of the City’s most important cultural initiatives. The Center’s primary focus is to bridge the gap between the academic and professional performing arts communities by providing an open environment for the development of educational, community-driven, and professional projects in the performing arts. As a result, MESTC is home to theatre scholars, students, playwrights, actors, dancers, directors, dramaturgs, and performing arts managers, as well as both the local and international theatre communities. The Center presents staged readings to further the development of new and classic plays, lecture series, televised seminars featuring professional and academic luminaries, and arts in education programs, and maintains its long-standing visiting-scholars-from-abroad program. In addition, the Center publishes a series of highly regarded academic journals, as well as single volumes of importance, including plays in translation, all written and edited by renowned scholars. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is a longstanding collaborative partner with the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation where Dr. Frank Hentschker serves as an advisor. This collaboration includes national and international artistic exchanges of archival work, talks, and research regarding the work of Robert Wilson. The Martin E. Segal Theatre is a 70-seat, fully equipped flexible space that provides an intimate venue where both artists and theatre professionals can actively participate with audiences to further the advancement, awareness, and appreciation of the theatrical experience. In addition, the Segal Center presents three annual festivals (PRELUDE, PEN World Voices: International Pay Festival, and The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance) and publishes and maintains three open access online journals (Arab Stages, European Stages, and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre). The Segal Center also publishes many volumes of plays in translation and is the leading publisher of plays from the Arab world. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC) is a vital component of the Theatre Program’s academic culture and creating in close collaboration a research nexus, focusing on dramaturgy, new media, and global theatre. The Segal Center provides an intimate platform where both artists and theatre professionals can actively participate with audiences to advance awareness and appreciation MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER The CUNY Graduate Center Room 3110 New York, NY10016 ph: 212.817.1860 mestc@gc.cuny.edu

Dan Colson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Dan Colson By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF The stage directions for Clifford Odets’s 1935 Awake and Sing! call for a “picture of Sacco and Vanzetti” to be hung in Jacob’s room. [1] The picture signals the play’s investment in 1930s radical politics and foreshadows Jacob’s role: the aging Marxist who hopes to pass his communism onto his grandson. Placing Sacco and Vanzetti as a physical image that haunts the entire play is, of course, unsurprising for perhaps the most prominent radical dramatist of the period. Even eight years after their deaths, Nicola Sacco (1891-1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1927) stood as symbols for the Left. The two men were arrested for an April 1920 burglary and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts. They spent more than seven years in prison as their trial and appeals played out and were executed in August 1927. The story of these two Italian anarchists captured the world’s attention, sparking widespread outrage. Many believed the men to be innocent and far more believed the guilty verdict emerged from a flawed legal process—in the midst of the era’s anti-radical environment, Sacco and Vanzetti were punished for being anarchists, not for any crime they committed. The two immigrants became a cause célèbre for the literary Left, as their perceived mistreatment intersected with the interwar era’s interest in radical politics. In the late 1910s, radical politics were a dangerous proposition: the First Red Scare—culminating with the infamous Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920—saw mass arrests and deportations that sent many American socialists, communists, and anarchists to prison or back to their home countries. [2] This anti-radical environment set the stage both for Sacco and Vanzetti’s arrests and for the outrage that followed: as anarchists, they risked being arrested (and sent back to Italy) at any time, so their arrest for a burglary only a few months after the Palmer Raids appeared to many as too convenient. As their trial unfolded and their lives hung in legal limbo for years, the Left saw in these two purportedly innocent anarchists a rallying cry: their prolonged ordeal reinvigorated the Left, as ardent radicals and soft-hearted liberals found common ground. Amongst those drawn to their plight, we find a large number of the period’s well-known writers: Odets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mike Gold, Lucia Trent, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos and countless others wrote about Sacco and Vanzetti. These writers—from a range of political positions—all cast doubt on the perceived justice of their conviction and eventual execution. While Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive, many writers focused their attention on immediate goals: delaying their execution, winning a reprieve from Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller, calling attention to the trial’s injustice, and swaying public sentiment in ways that might influence the powerful figures who were still in the process of determining the two anarchists’ fate. In short, authors writing up to August 1927 mostly sought to help Sacco and Vanzetti—two men’s lives were at stake. After their deaths, however, writers’ goals shifted. It was too late to save Sacco and Vanzetti, but many Left-leaning writers saw in their ordeal a potent symbol of what was wrong with the United States. This process of interpretation—of establishing the lasting meaning of these events—left us with a number of texts that lament the failures of the American legal system and call for major changes to ensure such a tragic miscarriage of justice would not occur again. None of these works, however, embrace the politics of their subjects. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists; they believed the government was irredeemably broken and that no amount of reform could ever remedy the flaws of American democracy. In fact, they were followers of Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist who openly espoused violent anti-government actions. [3] As radical and progressive writers interpreted the significance of Sacco and Vanzetti’s plight, however, their anarchism tended to disappear—sublimated to other political agendas that rejected the extremes of anarchism. Despite the fact that many people believed Sacco and Vanzetti were treated unfairly precisely because they were anarchists, authors writing after their deaths minimized their politics, turning them into symbols for the writers’ political and artistic visions. In this essay, I focus on Maxwell Anderson, who wrote two plays about Sacco and Vanzetti: Gods of the Lightning in 1928, just after their execution, and Winterset in 1935, when the two men’s legacy had been almost entirely sublimated to others’ political agendas. Anderson is an interesting figure within the body of Sacco-Vanzetti literature. On the one hand, scholars have rightly recognized Anderson’s dalliance with radicalism which makes him a natural author to take up the topic. On the other hand, Anderson underwent a dramatic, yet prolonged, political transformation—a significant shift toward the Right. His two Sacco-Vanzetti plays appeared in the midst of this transition, as Anderson—like many Left-leaning authors from the period—responded to the rise of fascism and began to drift away from the more strident forms of American radicalism. The plays, then, were written in moments when Anderson still saw Leftist politics and economic policy as potential answers to social injustice, yet they were subsequently inflected by a playwright who gradually distanced himself from the Left. Interpretation of Gods of the Lightning and Winterset have been complicated by Anderson’s political transformation (and, in fact, by Anderson’s own understandings of the plays vis-à-vis radical politics). In what follows, I argue the plays—while different in key respects—demonstrate a consistent political fatalism that can help us better understand Anderson’s relationship to the radical Left. In them, he finds little hope for radical politics, as the plays’ plots turn away from anarchism to other, more personal matters and, in the process, tend toward hopelessness. These two plays thus portend Anderson’s disillusionment with the Left, which does not offer the answers he seeks and cannot redress the injustice he laments. At the heart of this fatalism, however, are his thinly veiled representations of two executed anarchists. Anderson builds his fatalistic political vision on Sacco and Vanzetti, an ubiquitous symbol of the nation’s failures. Doing so required, to a certain extent, abjuring their radicalism. As anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti rejected the nation outright. To them, there was no remedying legal injustice; the law itself was injustice. Gods of the Lightning and Winterset minimizes this anarchism, offering instead a mélange of vaguely Leftist politics and individualized, largely apolitical, personal strife. According to many, Anderson makes the anarchism that explained Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution impotent, if not irrelevant, in the plays. In this respect, Anderson’s portrayal of the men distills the broader evolution of their literary depictions: stripped of the specificity of their radicalism, Sacco and Vanzetti become generic symbols, manipulated for the political and literary visions of the authors who deploy their image. Ultimately, analysis of anarchism’s appearance in Gods of the Lightning and Winterset reveals a fundamental rejection of their subjects’ politics. Their anarchism is replaced by a sense of hopelessness, and then by a revisioning of the plays’ import: these are not plays about anarchism or anarchist plays; they are plays that happen to be about anarchists. My argument here thus offers us a better understanding of Anderson’s oeuvre (and the role his politics play in it), but also a clearer look at the ways in which Sacco and Vanzetti were deployed by the era’s literary Left as strikingly non-anarchist symbols of the nation’s shortcomings. Anderson’s Uncertain Politics Anderson’s father was a railroad-worker-turned-itinerant-minister, so Anderson’s childhood was marked by frequent moves, an uneven education, and a large dose of Protestantism (which he almost entirely rejected). Though his family often struggled financially and Anderson himself held a number of working-class jobs in his early adulthood, there are no meaningful radical influences in his social sphere during his formative years. He was early drawn to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, from whom he learned a “distrust for ‘big’ government” and a “sometimes errant individualism.” [4] Then, while at the University of North Dakota, he studied Thorstein Veblen under a socialist professor. [5] In 1912, Anderson, then 23, declared, “I have become a Socialist.” [6] A few years later, in a letter to his life-long friend Upton Sinclair, he describes himself as “Bolshevistic.” [7] During this period, it appeared the “champion of liberty and justice” might embrace the radical Left. [8] Only a few years later, while working for The New Republic , Anderson seemed uninterested in “politics, national or international.” [9] In the 1920s he was a “staunch” liberal “against monopolies and for organized labor.” [10] By the late 1930s, however, he felt forced to choose between “the evils of capitalism” and the “evils of collectivism.” [11] He chose capitalism, and by the beginning of WWII he believed “Communism [was] dangerous,” and a threat to “democratic government.” [12] Eventually, Anderson aligned with Joseph McCarthy and others who contended that “any American member of the Communist Party was a criminal dedicated to overthrowing the government by force.” [13] In Anderson’s authoritative biography, Alfred S. Shivers describes the dramatist as an “individualist and a rebel,” a man with “wide-ranging sympathies.” [14] These sympathies intersected with the Left at moments, but they hardly suggest a man who would write multiple plays about arguably the most famous anarchists in American history. Like many fellow-travelers—individuals who flirted with radicalism, yet never fully embraced the more extreme Leftist politics that largely define “radical literature” from this period—Anderson’s politics transformed as he aged and as his political environment changed. In fact, Anderson’s political journey makes him a paradigmatic example of one type of fellow traveler: he came to socialism early in the twentieth century, when it was the most prevalent brand of American radicalism; he approved of and was drawn to the rise of communism in Russia; he associated with Leftist playwrights such as Odets and the Group Theatre during the 1930s, the heyday of radical literature and theater; he dropped his pacifism during the anti-fascist, pre-WWII era; he turned to American democracy during WWII; [15] and he fully rejected communism during the Cold War. Perhaps predictably then, during the interwar period Anderson’s politics are difficult to define at any given moment. His views were predominantly a mix of American individualism—an anti-institutional, yet malleable distrust for anything that intruded upon one’s “liberty”—and progressive economic ideas (i.e., his prolonged, if incomplete, infatuation with socialism and communism). In some, these dual concerns might combine into an anti-statist, economically egalitarian anarchism (as they did for Sacco and Vanzetti and numerous others from the turn of the century to WWII), but in Anderson, they generated a pendulous politics swinging from radical to reactionary based on the historical moment’s ideological climate. If there is any consistency in Anderson’s political stances, it comes from being “deeply distrustful of all institutional authorities.” [16] At times, this inclination manifests as a belief that the “American government is steadily encroaching on the individual’s rights and independence.” [17] Anderson’s Both Your Houses (1933), for instance, was “intended to be a blast at the Hoover administration.” [18] A critically acclaimed play that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it offers relatively overt commentary on the era’s political milieu—especially the rejection of Hoover’s volunteerism and the increasing sense, amongst radicals and progressives alike, that major changes to the American economy were necessary—even if was not staged until after Hoover left office and the nature of the conversation had changed significantly. Anderson’s anti-authoritarian stance has even led some to label Anderson a “libertarian” and an “anarchist.” [19] But even Anderson’s peers were confused by his politics, with Odets once calling him “‘a damned reactionary, a fascist!” [20] By that time, Anderson himself self-protectively embraced detachment from organized politics, claiming merely, “I vote Democratic or Republican as I please.” [21] To this day, scholars continue to struggle to locate Anderson’s politics. As I detail below, some claim he was a socialist, others an anarchist, while others avoid the question altogether. Russell DiNapoli offers the lengthiest consideration of Anderson’s relationship to anarchism, linking the playwright’s politics to William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and, most strongly, early-twentieth-century American anarchist Benjamin Tucker. [22] In doing so, however, DiNapoli almost entirely distances Anderson from the major threads of American anarchism prevalent during his career. By the 1920s, Tucker’s influence had waned significantly as he turned away from anarchism as a viable political solution. Rather, figures like Galleani, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman held sway in American anarchist circles—they and their followers became the target of anti-radical sentiment because they were the most visible anarchists, and their punishments, in turn, increased their standing within radical circles. This “violent” anarchism, as DiNapoli calls it, achieved ascendency, [23] which is precisely why Sacco and Vanzetti presented such a threat: they were not philosophical anarchists; they advocated for the overthrow of US governance. DiNapoli concludes that anarchism appears in Anderson’s plays more as a “personal philosophy” than an “ideology,” and that “nowhere does the playwright uphold anarchism as it was defined” by prominent anarchists (past or present). [24] In short, Anderson was interested in anarchism, but his politics never reified around it or any other single radical position. Ethan Mordden perhaps sums it up best: “Anderson’s affiliation was anarchist, though he conceded that anarchy [was] out of reach and democracy was flawed but useful.” [25] In keeping with other scholars, Mordden suggests that Anderson was an anarchist who did not really accept the basic premises of anarchism! [26] Ultimately, Anderson is an example of the persistent difficulty in writing about literary radicalism from this period: a dramatist linked to radical and progressive political causes, writing in an era of radical literary politics, but with views detached from the dominant threads of radicalism. Anderson’s plays and his politics embody a not uncommon generic radicalism: though never fully embracing any of the era’s radical ideologies, he was often labeled as radical, and thus is emblematic of intellectuals and writers who drifted left during the period, many of whom were called radical, even when their politics resembled those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt more than Emma Goldman. Like many, the Sacco-Vanzetti affair attracted Anderson, but the motivation for his attraction remains ambiguous. Consequently, scholars who discuss Anderson’s purported radicalism sometimes fall into a type of circular reasoning: they argue that he was drawn to the case because he was a Leftist; therefore, he was a Leftist because he was drawn to the case. His two plays about Sacco and Vanzetti, Gods of the Lightning and Winterset , do not define the complexity of his political journey, nor do they establish him as a staunchly radical playwright. These plays do, however, provide insight into the floating, generic literary radicalism of the 1920s and 1930s. The plays deploy Sacco and Vanzetti as political symbols representative of anarchism, but the nature of these symbols is fragmented and detached from the men’s own lived anarchism. Anderson’s First Anarchists: Gods of the Lightning Gods of the Lightning , which Anderson co-wrote with Harold Hickerson, has been largely forgotten. [27] The play was completed in the spring of 1928, only a few months after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, staged later that year, and published in early 1929. The play immediately prompted a variety of negative responses to its perceived political transgressions and aesthetic shortcomings: “The Chief of the Licensing Division of the City of Boston, J. M. Case, ruled that [it] was practically ‘anarchist and treasonable’ and should not, therefore, be licensed for presentation in that city”; [28] it was dubbed “a failure” precisely because it was based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case and thus “missed a chance to [be] a decidedly finer play”; [29] and it has since been called “an indignantly one-sided and propagandistic account of social injustice that is practically devoid of literary interest.” [30] Nevertheless, it ran at the Little Theater in New York City for 29 performances in October 1928, and the Group Theatre revived it in 1934, signaling some acceptance from Leftist dramatic circles. Anderson and Hickerson attempt to create a one-to-one corollary to Sacco and Vanzetti in Gods of the Lightning : “Vanzetti becomes Dante Capraro, the gentle and humane Anarchist” while “Sacco is greatly transformed into the native-born American James Macready, a militant International Woodsmen of the World leader.” [31] Jennifer Jones argues that Sacco and Vanzetti “are combined in the character of Capraro, a pacifist organizer,” [32] but Macready clearly also reflects elements of their story and their politics, functioning as a rough amalgam of the two anarchists. While the play does privilege the “American man of action,” [33] Vanzetti’s labor organizing mirrors Macready’s union work, and the similarities between the case and the play favor reading Capraro and Macready as representations of Sacco and Vanzetti, even if their reproduction is inexact and overlapping. The plot similarly veils the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the thinnest veneer, reproducing the Left’s widespread message about the men by depicting the arrest, trial, and execution of Capraro and Macready as a heinous injustice in which the mechanisms of law are distorted and misused to eliminate a radical threat. Certainly, the play attacks the legal system’s failures, but it does not offer a cohesive “left wing message.” [34] Jones and others imagine Anderson set out to write a socialist play—they begin with the assumption that Anderson was a radical. [35] They then analyze the play and find it is not particularly radical in comparison to its radical author. This reading, though, is symptomatic of Anderson’s conflicted politics and his concomitant untidy representation of Sacco and Vanzetti. In addition, these critics’ efforts to evaluate a play about two anarchists by comparing it to the author’s purported socialism, inevitably pushes anarchism to the margins. Gods of the Lightning emerges in the historical moment that Sacco and Vanzetti are transformed from living victims to potent symbols: it marks a politically wavering playwright’s articulation of anarchism to a similarly diffuse, and increasingly generic, vision of radicalism. The unsettled role of anarchism in the play occurs initially through Capraro and Macready who each reject government for different reasons. Macready says “government’s nothing so important. It’s a police system, to protect the wealth of the wealthy.” [36] Though linked to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), his critique of government is purely economic. [37] Macready parrots Vanzetti’s economic ideology without embracing his anti-government stance. Capraro’s political views, on the other hand, are simple anti-state anarchism, as revealed by his testimony during the play’s version of the trial: Salter: Do you believe in capitalism?Capraro: No.Salter: You believe that all property should belong to the workers?Capraro: Property should belong to those who create it.Salter: You are a communist?Capraro: I am an anarchist.Salter: What do you mean by that?Capraro: I mean, government is wrong. It creates trouble.Salter: You would destroy all government?Capraro: It will not be necessary. I would rather wait till it was so rotten it would rot away . . .Salter: You are against this government of ours?Capraro: Against all governments. [38] He denies being a communist, rejects government regardless of its implication in economic oppression, and, elsewhere, eschews all violence: “When you take violence into your hands, you lower yourself to the level of government, which is the origin of crime and evil.” [39] Both Macready and Capraro contain elements of Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s specific lives and political beliefs, yet they “represent the gamut of nonviolent anti-government philosophy and action,” [40] a major deviation from the two Galleanists on which they are based. Perhaps reflecting his own conflicted politics, Anderson juxtaposes non-anarchist Leftism with strict anti-government anarchism (while excluding violence almost entirely), creating a field of indeterminacy. Were the play fully dedicated to a propagandistic retelling of Sacco and Vanzetti’s plight, it likely would end with their execution, or perhaps with a reiteration of the anarchist statements the men (primarily Vanzetti) made as their deaths approached. The play, however, does not end with an execution. Rather, it interprets the events for its audience, recasting the meaning of these purportedly unjust deaths. With the anarchists dead, the play’s final lines are given to Rosalie, Macready’s lover. She expresses the drama’s closing sentiment. The remaining living characters wait in the restaurant while Capraro and Macready are executed. There Rosalie speaks the play’s concluding words: Don’t whisper it! Don’t whisper it! Didn’t you hear me say not to whisper any more? That’s what they’ll want you to do—whisper it—keep quiet about it—say it never happened—it couldn’t happen—two innocent men killed—keep it dark—keep it quiet— No! No! Shout it! They’re killing them . . . Mac—Mac—my dear—they have murdered you—while we stood here trying to think of what to do they murdered you! Just a moment ago you had a minute left—and it was the only minute in the whole world—and now—now this day will never end for you—there will be no more days . . . Shout it! Shout it! Cry out! Run and cry! Only—it won’t do any good—now. [41] All but the last line of Rosalie’s monologue gesture toward martyrdom—a bold call to ensure Macready’s death is not forgotten—but her final sentence turns to fatalism: the deaths have no meaning. “It won’t do any good” to shout of this injustice. Rosalie’s despondency has two ramifications. One is political: if Gods of the Lightning is a propaganda piece, a socialist (or anarchist) play (failed or otherwise), her fatalism contradicts the men’s politics and denies Sacco and Vanzetti any legacy. Contrary to Marxian theory and the lived politics of these two anarchists, nothing can be done; all is hopeless, revolution is impossible. The other is personal: the drama is a tragedy playing out against the backdrop of a politicized trial, not a political tragedy. In this case, sharing the tragedy of their unjust deaths is meaningless, because they are still dead, and Rosalie’s individual sorrow will not be assuaged by any political action. As Michael Schwartz argues, the play evokes “the anger and the fatalism” many felt after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. [42] This “ultimate grimness,” [43] however, speaks more about those left to process their deaths than about the two anarchists themselves. By doing so, Anderson recast the men’s potential martyrdom as a reason for despair rather than action. And, he ignored Vanzetti’s own words before his execution: “Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as how we do by an accident.” [44] Despite his looming death, Vanzetti did not give into fatalism, and Gods of the Lightning need not either—Anderson’s politics recast the meaning of these events. Anderson chose to write about two anarchists, but he creates characters who espouse pacifistic anarchism and those who speak for radical labor. He links these two positions through their placement within a legal system that is subject to the play’s critique, yet he concludes by questioning the meaning and the lasting significance of Sacco and Vanzetti’s martyrdom. Anderson chose Sacco and Vanzetti as subject matter, but by exploring their politics through a pseudo-Leftist play that ends on a note either of political fatalism or apolitical loss, he sublimates anarchism. Though his ambiguous political agenda may be tied tenuously to Leftist ideologies, it is clearly not anarchist—it bears little resemblance to its real-life protagonists’ radicalism. Anderson’s Anarchist Trial: Winterset Unlike Gods of the Lightning , Winterset , written and published in 1955, was an immediate critical success, winning the Drama Critics Circle Award, and it continues to hold a secure position in the Western dramatic canon. [45] This success, though, tends to detach all political content from the play. [46] Anderson conceived of Winterset as “an experiment, an attempt to twist raw, modern reality to the shape and meaning of poetry.” [47] In his introduction to the play, he discusses his yearning for a “great theatre in this country,” one that has “outgrow[n] the phase of journalistic social comment and reache[d] . . . into the upper air of poetic tragedy.” [48] While outlining these ambitions, he fails to mention Sacco and Vanzetti. Setting out to write a tragic verse play and thus “establish a new [dramatic] convention, Anderson imagine[d] himself to be participating in a purely literary endeavor with little political import.” [49] According to DiNapoli, Anderson saw the Sacco-Vanzetti subject matter as a sure way to receive publicity in the politically charged 1930s, “and he judged that if he handled the subject in a way that did not infuse the potentially explosive event with newfound political life, a financial success might be achieved.” [50] Steven Richman more generously suggests, “Anderson, long a champion of individual liberties [was] clearly offended” by Sacco and Vanzetti’s plight. [51] Regardless of Anderson’s intent, the notion that Winterset is not a political play has retained remarkable traction: in the seventy-five years since it was written, scholars have focused on the play’s dramatic sources, conventions, and innovations, while frequently minimizing the historical event at its center. [52] It seems that when writing “propagandistic” plays, Anderson established a reputation for “Leftism” that was suspended temporarily when he wrote “pure literature.” [53] Put differently, when considered in the context of dramatic innovation, Winterset is granted a reprieve from the taint of radicalism, but given the overall context of Anderson’s work (including Gods of the Lightning and Both Your Houses ), it is strange to ignore the obvious political overtones in the play. [54] In 1935, Anderson had not yet fully rejected radical politics and he still associated with and was produced by Left-leaning theatre groups. Despite its subsequent sterilization, Winterset no more directly addressed the Sacco-Vanzetti affair and radicalism than did Gods of the Lightning . [55] In Winterset , Anderson again thinly veils his characters. Mio, the play’s protagonist, is the son of Bartolomeo Romagna, a radical fish peddler. Romagna is a conflated image of Sacco and Vanzetti, combining Vanzetti’s vocation (fishmonger) with Sacco’s fatherhood (Vanzetti had no children.). Notably, Romagna never appears in the play’s action: he haunts the text’s dialogue but is not a character; he establishes the link to Sacco and Vanzetti yet is a generic amalgam of both men’s anarchism. Winterset also includes Judge Gaunt, an obvious analog to Webster Thayer, the judge who presided over Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial, rejected several appeals and regularly defended the verdict, and, thus, was subject to particular ire from those who saw the entire ordeal as an injustice. In addition, Garth, Trock, and Shadow represent the real-life Morelli gang who may well have committed the crime for which Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted. [56] Set thirteen years after Romagna’s execution, the play depicts Mio’s search for the truth: he refuses to believe his father capable of murder and having sought the guilty parties for years, he eventually learns of and seeks out Garth, who witnessed Trock kill Romagna. This quest is paralleled by Trock’s efforts to kill anyone who might implicate him in the crime and by Judge Gaunt’s aimless, insane wanderings as he attempts to justify his court’s verdict. These three paths converge on the night of the play’s action, the same night on which Mio meets Miriamne and falls in love, providing a romantic plot which Anderson privileges over the Sacco-Vanzetti backdrop. Radicalism appears early in the play. Trock has come to see Garth, worried that continued interest in the case will lead Garth to confess and implicate him. Garth asks: who wants to go to trial againexcept the radicals? . . .Let the radicals go on howlingabout getting a dirty deal. They always howland nobody gives a damn. [57] Here, Garth gestures toward the continued interest in the Sacco-Vanzetti case but reduces this interest to the “radical” element; many may still take a voyeuristic interest in the case, but only the radicals are still interested in pursuing justice. Mio is aligned with this sustained “radical” interest because he too seeks the truth: No other love,time passing, nor the spaced light-years of sunsshall blur your voice, or tempt me from the paththat clears your name. [58] He seeks the truth because he must: Will you tell me how a man’sto live, and face his life, if he can’t believethat truth’s like a fire,and will burn through and be seenthough it takes all the years there are? [59] Mio does not believe the legal system’s findings, so he rejects them and seeks truth elsewhere; he wants to clear his father’s name, which is all that can be accomplished since Romagna is already dead. At the same time, the judge roams the streets, defending the legal system: Judge Gaunt’s gone off his nut. He’s gotthat damn trial on his mind, and been going roundproving to everybody he was right all the timeand the radicals were guilty—stopping peoplein the street to prove it—and now he’s nuts entirelyand nobody knows where he is. [60] The combination of Mio’s quest for truth contrary to the one produced by the legal system and Gaunt’s insane defense of the trial resemble Gods of the Lightning , suggests a substantive critique of the system that convicted Sacco and Vanzetti. Thirteen years after Romagna’s death (and eight years after Sacco and Vanzetti’s), however, Anderson suspends this critique, reducing it to context for the burgeoning romance between Mio and Miriamne (Garth’s sister), who meet and immediately fall in love. At this point, Winterset ’s attack on the legal system fades as Anderson redirects the action: [61] the play shifts from a pursuit of truth to an establishment of truth secondary to the pursuit of love. Suddenly, the Judge is no longer described as insane and he begins to sound cruel, yet reasonable in his defense of the verdict: I know and have knownwhat bitterness can rise against a courtwhen it must say, putting aside all weakness,that a man’s to die. I can forgive you that,for you are your father’s son, and you think of himas a son thinks of his father. Certain lawsseem cruel in their operation; it’s necessarythat we be cruel to uphold them. [62] As Mio, Garth, Trock, and Judge Gaunt interact, critique of the trial comes to the fore, with the tenement turning into a courtroom: Gaunt slips into his role as judge, calling for Order, gentlemen, order! The witness will rememberthat a certain decorum is essential in the court-room. [63] The fictive Judge Thayer, Morelli gang, and Sacco-Vanzetti family all reenter the legal system, and in this surreal recreation of the courtroom, Mio finds the truth he seeks. Romagna’s innocence and Gaunt’s complicity in the legal injustice are revealed, yet Gaunt still defends the verdict: [64] Suppose it known,but there are things a judge must not believethough they should head and fester underneathand press in on his brain. Justice once renderedin a clear burst of anger, righteously,upon a very common laborer,confessed an anarchist, the verdict foundand the precise machinery of lawinvoked to know him guilty—think what furorwould rock the state if the court then flatly said;all this was lies—must be reversed? It’s better,as any judge can tell you, in such cases,holding the common good to be worth morethan small injustice, to let the record stand,let one man die. For justice, in the main,is governed by opinion. Communitieswill have what they will have, and it’s quite as well,after all, to be rid of anarchists. Our rightsas citizens can be maintained as rightsonly while we are held to be the peersof those who live about us. [65] The romantic plot requires the resolution of critique, so Anderson dramatically retries the case. In the seemingly obvious climax of Mio’s life story, he confirms his father’s innocence, learning that the legal system failed him by succeeding in its main goal, the maintenance of social order. As in Gods of the Lightning , Anderson takes aim at the legal system and finds it corrupt. Mio’s beliefs are confirmed, and he can now spread word of Romagna’s innocence: Wherever menstill breathe and think, and know what’s done to themby the powers above, they’ll know. [66] Just like Rosalie in Gods of the Lightning , Mio calls for the truth to be spread—again dissemination momentarily appears to be the necessary step for redressing legal injustice. Yet Mio does no such thing. From the time he learns the “truth” until the end of the play, Mio’s love for Miramne triumphs over his pursuit for the truth, and the fatalism of Gods of the Lightning reemerges. Winterset ’s fatalism operates on two levels. First, after Mio learns the truth, the value of this truth—and its dissemination—are called into question. Miriamne’s and Garth’s father Edras questions the value of pursuing the issue: What will be changedif it comes to trial again? More blood poured outto a mythical justice, but your father lying stillwhere he lies now. [67] He then fundamentally denies the value of what Mio has learned: “there is no truth.” [68] This dismissal of the play’s revelation intersects with Miriamne’s desire that Mio not reveal Garth’s guilt. She asks Mio to keep their secret and he agrees: I tried to say itand it strangled my throat. I might have knownyou’d win in the end. [69] Second, Mio’s choice of Mariamne over his life-long goal of clearing his father’s name proves meaningless when both characters die at the play’s end. Mio abnegates the hope of “learn[ing] to live like a man . . . to live and forget to hate” and the “truth” for Mariamne, only to lose his life at Trock’s hand. [70] In Winterset , Anderson attacks the American legal system much as he does in Gods of the Lightning , but once again closes on a dual note of personal tragedy and political hopelessness. Any radicalism is sublimated to other concerns. In the earlier play—with its gossamer radicalism mirroring Anderson’s shifting, indeterminate politics—anarchism becomes pacifist, irrelevant, and impotent. In the later one, Sacco and Vanzetti linger as the nearly invisible background for dramatic innovation and poetic tragedy. In both cases, Anderson deploys the anarchists as neutered symbols of injustice: anarchism is sublimated, which in itself is not surprising, nor profound, but in the context of other literature from this period, Anderson’s choices resonate more powerfully. Twice he structured a play around Sacco and Vanzetti; twice he tentatively attacked the legal system’s failures; and twice he minimized the significance of this critique by ending with fatalism. The mere appearance of anarchists in Anderson’s plays does not make him an anarchist. He may have found some aspects of anarchism appealing, but neither of these plays nor his statements about politics suggest that Anderson aligned with the more radical forms of the era’s Left. Rather, he appears as another fellow traveler: someone who flirted with radical politics, yet ultimately sublimated them to his personal, political, and literary vision. Ultimately, Gods of the Lightning and Winterset distill the transformation of Sacco and Vanzetti into potent, yet disarticulated symbols: they continued to signify well after their deaths, but their signification was fully separated from their politics. Their appearance in literature functioned as radical bona fides : touching on the Sacco-Vanzetti affair’s injustice (even briefly) signified attachment to the broadly Leftist movement of the late 1920s and 1930s. Anderson’s plays, though—like much of the literature that shaped the meaning of Sacco and Vanzetti’s legacy—essentially strip anarchism of its power and specificity. Their image is no longer meaningfully anarchist; it simply marks a pseudo-radical shell that could be filled with literary and political content. References [1] . Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays , ed. Harold Clurman (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 40. [2] . For a brief history of anti-radical sentiment and laws from this period (with particular focus on anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti), see Dan Colson, “Erasing Anarchism: Sacco and Vanzetti and the Logic of Representation,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 179-196. [3] . For a detailed analysis of Sacco and Vanzetti’s politics see Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991). Avrich convincingly argues the two men were Galleanists. Even amongst radicals, Galleani stood out as particularly extreme, so Sacco and Vanzetti were neither the naïfs some have claimed nor merely philosophical anarchists—they were aggressively opposed to all state governance and believed violence was justified to achieve an anarchist society. [4] . Alfred S. Shivers, The Life of Maxwell Anderson (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 26. [5] . Ibid., 39. [6] . Anderson to John M. Gillette, 15 September 1912, in Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958 , ed. Laurence G. Avery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 3. [7] . Anderson to Upton Sinclair, June 1919, in Dramatist in America , 13. [8] . Shivers, The Life , 111. [9] . Ibid., 61. [10] . Ibid., 63. [11] . Anderson to Brooks Atkinson, 21 August 1939, Dramatist in America , 90-91. [12] . Anderson to Donald Ogden Stewart, 11 March 1941, Dramatist in America , 110. [13] . Shivers, The Life , 238. [14] . Ibid., 56, 1. [15] . Shivers argues that “Anderson . . . believe[d] that under any conditions except wartime, government was the natural enemy of the average citizen” ( The Life , 198). According to Shivers, “[t]he exigencies of total war had compelled him to reach a truce within his own democratic government” ( The Life , 198). Note the rejection of pacifism linked to the anti-fascism: Anderson was willing to accept both government and war to fight fascism. Like many radicals and progressives from the era, he appears to have accepted the Popular Front logic that moderates, liberals, and radicals must all come together to fight the immediate enemy: the fascists. [16] . Shivers, The Life , 7. [17] . Shivers, Maxwell Anderson (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 137. [18] . Shivers, The Life , 125. [19] Russell DiNapoli, “Fragile Currency of the Last Anarchist: The Plays of Maxwell Anderson,” New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2002): 277, 282. [20] . Hal Cantor, “Anderson and Odets and the Group Theater,” in Maxwell Anderson and the New York Stage , eds. Nancy J. Doran Hazelton and Kenneth Krauss (Monroe, NY: Library Research Assoc., 1991), 34. [21] . Anderson to the editor, November 1944, Dramatist in America , 192. [22] . Russell DiNapoli, The Elusive Prominence of Maxwell Anderson in the American Theater (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2002), 56. [23] . Ibid., 53 [24] . Ibid., 54. [25] . Ethan Mordden, Sing for Your Supper: The Broadway Musical in the 1930s (New York: St. Marten’s Press, 2005), 230. [26] . Turning to Mordden, who does not write extensively about Anderson, captures the ubiquity of this seemingly contradictory view: the notion that Anderson was an anarchist—but one who did not really embrace anarchist views—saturates much scholarship on his plays. [27] . Calling the play “minor,” Shivers’s biography of Anderson almost entirely ignores Gods of the Lightning , and—in a suggestion of how scholars have struggled to deal with the appearance of Sacco and Vanzetti in Anderson’s plays—notes merely that it was “based on an internationally famous legal trial” (Shivers, The Life , 112). [28] . Shivers, Maxwell Anderso n, 106. [29] . Barrett H. Clark, Maxwell Anderson: The Man and His Plays (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1976), 17-18. [30] . Shivers, Maxwell Anderso n, 106. [31] . Ibid. The play also includes Celestino Medeiros, a convicted murder who confessed to the Braintree crime and claimed Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Medeiros’s execution was delayed while Governor Fuller and the Lowell Commission considered his confession alongside other evidence, but ultimately they did not believe his story and he was executed the same night as Sacco and Vanzetti. In the play, “Madeiros [ sic ] is changed into the bleak-minded and fatalistic restaurant owner Suvorin” (Shivers, Maxwell Anderson , 106). [32] . Jennifer Jones, “A Fictitious Injustice: The Politics of Conversation in Maxwell Anderson’s Gods of the Lightning ,” American Drama 4, no. 2 (1995): 83. [33] . Ibid. [34] . Ibid., 107. [35] . Jones, for instance, reads the play as a “socialist drama” that merges “political protest with instinctive American worship of the individual” (89, 83). By claiming Capraro is a condensation of Sacco and Vanzetti and arguing that Capraro’s politics always come second to Macready’s, Jones attempts to demonstrate that the play “eviscerated the beliefs [Sacco and Vanzetti] died for” (94). She builds this argument, however, on the claim that “Sacco and Vanzetti were pacifists,” misreading their anti-war stance as the rejection of all violence (88). Ultimately, she accuses Anderson of focusing on an “American protagonist” at the expense of the “socioeconomic forces of race and class oppression that brought about the death of Sacco and Vanzetti” (93). [36] . Anderson and Harold Hickerson, Gods of the Lightning (London: Longman’s, Green, and Co., 1928), 26. [37] . Jones interprets Macready as an unabashed, liberal individualist who overwhelms Capraro’s anarchism, but Macready is linked to the IWW: he speaks from a political position similar to the one Jones attributes to Anderson. [38] . Anderson and Hickerson, Gods of the Lightning , 78. [39] . Ibid., 26. [40] . Michael Schwarz, Class Divisions on the Broadway Stage: The Staging and Taming of the I.W.W. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). [41] . Anderson, Gods of the Lightning , 106. [42] . Schwartz, ch. 5. [43] . Ibid. [44] . I quote here from John Dos Passos, The Big Money (Boston: Mariner, 2000), 372. Dos Passos regularized the spelling from a reporter’s transcription that originally appeared in the New York World on 13 May 1927. [45] . Winterset was first staged at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1935 and was a “smashing success at the box office” (Shivers, The Life , 149). Its original run lasted 179 performances. The play then toured nationally before returning to Broadway for 16 additional shows. It was turned into a film (directed by Alfred Santell and starring Burgess Meredith) in 1936. The play has not been revived frequently, though it was staged for short runs in Chicago in both 1991 and 2016. [46] . The long-standing tradition of foregrounding Anderson’s purported aesthetic triumphs may well explain the tendency to minimize his play’s political import. [47] . Anderson, “Acceptance Speech for the Drama Critics’ Circle Award to Winterset ,” in Dramatist in America , 295. [48] . Anderson, introduction to Gods of the Lightning , x, vi. [49] . Ibid., xi. [50] . DiNapoli, “Maxwell Anderson’s Misuse of Poetic Discourse in Winterset ,” in Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and the Personal in American Drama , eds. Barbara Ozieblo and Miriam López-Rodríguez (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002), 101. DiNapoli contends that “[Anderson] knew the topic would entice audiences to see the play” (101). He claims that Anderson’s attention to Sacco and Vanzetti “exploited the Sacco-Vanzetti issue for other than artistic reasons” (101). [51] . Steven M. Richman, “ Winterset and the Recrudescence of Ressentiment,” Nova Law Review 18, no. 3 (1994): 1882. [52] . The body of scholarship on Winterset is quite small given the play’s critical reception in the 1930s. What little research there is largely ignores the play’s focus on anarchism in favor of other theatrical/dramatic concerns. The most common trope is to look at source materials and influences. As early as 1946, Samuel Kliger examined “Hebraic lore” in the play (“Hebraic Lore in Winterset ,” American Literature 18, no. 3 [1946]: 219-232). Explorations of other Biblical influences (Howard D. Pearce, “Job in Anderson’s Winterset ,” Modern Drama 6 [1963]: 32-41), Shakespearean elements (Jacob H. Alder, “Shakespeare in Winterset ,” Educational Theatre Journal 6 [1954]: 241-248 and John B. Jones, “Shakespeare as Myth and the Structure of Winterset , Educational Theatre Journal 25 [1973]: 34-45), and classical references (Frances Abernethy, Winterset : A Modern Revenge Tragedy, Modern Drama 7 [1964]: 185-189 and J. T. McCullen, Jr., “Two Quests for Truth: King Oedipus and Winterset ,” The Laurel Review 5, no. 1 [1965]: 28-35), amongst other allusions and inspirations, followed over the next few decades. After about 1980 work on Winterset is virtually non-existent, excepting the scholars I engage with in this essay. [53] . Shivers, The Life , 148 [54] . In part, Winterset ’s reputation emerges from the contradictions of post-WWII literary scholarship. During the Cold War, anti-communist backlash, scholars were forced to reconcile the play’s reputation as one of the best from the 1930s with its subject matter (Sacco and Vanzetti) and Anderson’s dalliance with the Left. Anderson’s rejection of communism makes the reconciliation possible, but scholars who wished to study Winterset were wise to ignore any political significance in the play that might appear radical. Thus, they focused on the fiction of apolitical formal characteristics. This scholarly juggling act may account for the seemingly disconnected reputations of Anderson (still viewed as a Left-leaning fellow-traveler) and Winterset (long considered a brilliant, yet apolitical play that just happens to be about two anarchists). [55] . Shivers claims “the passage of years since Gods of the Lightning gave [Anderson] the aesthetic distanced he needed in handling the Sacco-Vanzetti case” (Shivers, The Life , 148). In other words, Shivers reads Winterset as an aesthetic object worthy of consideration almost in spite of its subject matter, unlike the earlier play which he virtually ignores. [56] . In his confession, Medeiros implicated the Morelli gang, and many of Sacco and Vanzetti’s other defenders insisted the Morelli gang committed the Braintree robbery as well. Winterset obviously taps into this accusation, as its fictionalized Morellis try to avoid the exposure of their crime. [57] . Anderson, Winterset (Washington: Anderson House, 1935), 14. [58] . Ibid., 50. [59] . Ibid., 70. [60] . Ibid., 15. [61] .Richman rightly argues “the play stands for the proposition that a developed legal system may be seriously flawed” (1869), but after establishing its flaws, the play shifts significantly. [62] . Winterset , 73. [63] . Ibid., 95. [64] . Richman claims Gaunt’s depiction is open to a “sympathetic interpretation” (1882), but such an interpretation would have been difficult to sustain at the time, as outrage lingered almost a decade after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. [65] . Winterset , 98-99. [66] . Ibid., 99. [67] . Ibid., 109. [68] . Ibid., 117. [69] . Ibid., 125. [70] . Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dan Colson is Associate Professor of English at Emporia State University. His work has appeared in American Quarterly , American Studies , Radical Teacher , Studies in American Naturalism , Philip Roth Studies , and the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom , amongst other journals. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Sarah Stites, Frank Hentschker | An examination of the censorship of LiIllian Hellman's The Children's Hour. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Intermeddlers Sarah Stites, Frank Hentschker Download PDF Lillian Hellman's The Children’s Hour opened on Broadway in 1934. This drama about two schoolteachers falsely accused of having a lesbian affair was a popular and critical success—but the subject matter caused authorities to ban the play in many locations. This new work combines excerpts from Hellman’s controversial play and material from the 1936 case which sought to have the play banned. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Christine Mok Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Christine Mok By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF “It was built to be super universal.”—Young Jean Lee [1] In counting Young Jean Lee’s contributions to Asian American theatre, We’re Gonna Die is, on the surface, an oblique entry. We’re Gonna Die is Lee’s 2011 cabaret slash indie-pop concert, the antepenultimate production by 13P, which was formed in 2003 by 13 midcareer playwrights to produce each other’s work. [2] With creative and production control in the hands of playwrights, the first production of We’re Gonna Die is a series of songs and interstitial monologues that Lee performed herself, backed by a band, Future Wife. Lee chronicles a meditation on grief, mourning, and loss, as an indie pop paean and elegy to liberal humanism. We are all going to die . Lee sings this refrain, placing her body, marked by race and gender, front and center. While theatre critics and audiences focused on Lee’s own body as the Singer bearing confessional weight in monologues and songs, the 2013 studio album version gave the monologues to a who’s who of white indie rockers to embody, or rather give voice to, the narratives of the play, putting further weight on the body, present and absent, in question/confession. Almost a decade later, the New York revival cast Janelle McDermoth, an African American performer, as the Singer. With each iteration – the first run, album, revival – We’re Gonna Die shifts bodies, playing with surfaces as it moves away from Lee’s Asian American one . By focusing on Lee’s body and her subsequent erasures, I follow Kandice Chuh’s invitation for an Asian Americanist critique such that “taking Asiatic racialization seriously opens and sometimes compels avenues of inquiry and raises questions and creates archives that would otherwise be unavailable.” [3] While performance pieces are oft written to outlive their creators’ embodiment, I propose that Lee’s eventual disappearance informs how we are asked to encounter Lee’s racial surface in her performance. This short essay returns to Lee’s performance in We’re Gonna Die, while holding onto the other productions, in a series of provocations to offer up a deep cut of Asian American dramaturgy that explores the stakes of universal feeling to the aesthetic politics of whiteness. If cut is slang for a track or song, indexing the historical materiality of recording when sound was cut as a groove into vinyl, a “deep cut” refers to the songs deemed uncommercial (not a “single”) and placed “deep” within the album. As a deep cut, We’re Gonna Die is not a play “about” Asian Americans, nor do the stories or songs mine Asian American subjectivities or identifications, yet Lee’s performing body and its subsequent evacuations serve as an obstinate wedge and unwieldy accomplice to the universal feeling and liberal politics of recognition that the piece constructs. Akin to Asian American refusals theorized by Summer Kim Lee, Vivian Huang, and Xine Yao [4] as, in turn, asociality, inscrutability, and unfeeling, the Asian American dramaturgies in Lee’s performing body defy elision, disorienting how we see Asian American and how we know and feel whiteness. If Lee, following Hilton Als, “makes her body the central text of the piece,” [5] I linger on how we as spectators are asked to read Lee’s Asian body as a central text to refashion what Ralph Rodriguez, following Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, names a “surface reading of race” to “attend to what we have before us” [6] on stage. Sincerity Forever What we have before us is Young Jean Lee, playwright as performer. Lee sought to “create a show about ordinary human failings that an ordinary person could perform, experimenting with and subverting a genre that traditionally depends most heavily on star-power and charisma: the one-person cabaret show.” [7] While compelling as herself, Lee is not a virtuosic or trained performer. As an ordinary performer, Lee deploys the affect and effort sublimated in post-Method acting, such that refusal or resistance to emote idealized forms of expressiveness becomes hallmarks of truth and depth of feeling. [8] Lee’s acting instead foregrounds surface. In interviews, Lee remarks that to go beyond surface was beyond her: “I was just totally incapable…even the most basic things. He [director Paul Lazar] really couldn’t tell me to do anything. Also, my default performance mode when I started out was just to stand stock-still like a statue without any facial expression or vocal expression whatsoever.” [9] That the racialized scripts of inscrutability do not overwrite her inexpressiveness hint that something else is at play. Surfaces, as Uri McMillan writes, “register and sense our presence as well.” [10] Alternating between songs and stories, We’re Gonna Die traces the vicissitudes of growing up and growing old. Singer’s stories are populated by biological family (mother, father, grandmother, uncle), childhood frenemies, an ex-boyfriend, and a friend with her own domestic tragedy. They detail experiences of isolation, illness, frustration, and infidelity. The songs are rejoinders to the stories, with advice, mantras, and a letter offered to the Singer as lyrics set to upbeat tempos. These offerings, both by the Singer’s community to the Singer, and now by the Singer to the audience, range from marginally comforting to bleak: “You are not the only one!” [11] “Horrible things happen every day,” [12] and “When you get old/You will Lose your mind!” [13] Yet, reviews index a different affective range closer to the musical key: “sly, weird and thoroughly winning” (Charles Isherwood for the New York Times ); “uplifting” (Adam Green for Vogue ). [14] Perhaps the piece’s winsomeness and uplift reside in theatre’s capacity for what Bruce Wilshire named, “standing in,” whereby the actor stands in for the character, “but the character is a type of humanity with whom the audience member can identify, either directly as a stand-in for his [sic] person, or indirectly as a stand-in for others whom the audience member recognizes and with whom he [sic] can be empathetically involved.” [15] The actor is the lynchpin who stands in for the character and through this standing-in, gives access to spectators who themselves stand in for that character — a riff on Richard Schechner’s “not-me and not-not-me” [16] by way of Sally Fields: (she is) like me/really, really like me. We’re Gonna Die foregrounds this by highlighting a “type of humanity” that rests in empathetic identification, suturing the phenomenological with the confessional conventions of cabaret, the one-person show, or the singer-songwriter. Yet, Lee is explicit in her acting style, interviews, and author’s note that the work is not confessional: “All of the stories in this show are true, but not all of them happened to me…the character of ‘Singer’ is not meant to be me.” [17] Given the deracinated “universal” substance of the stories and lyrics, it is her racial surface [18] that Lee offers to the audience for identification. How then is Young Jean Lee’s Asian body, her racial surface, a type of humanity with whom audience members can identify? Lee’s Asian body poses a problem for standing-in’s seemingly “neutral” processes of empathy and attachment. Asian Americans as performing bodies operate in contradiction. Their performances have been marked as national abjection by Karen Shimakawa [19] and exception by Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson. [20] Their labor is highly visible, theatrical, and spectacular. At the same time, their bodies and national identity are invisible; their racialization subtended to everyday enactments, Ju Yon Kim’s racial mundane. [21] Americans of Asian descent have historically been racialized as both indeterminate and undesirable subjects to the nation-state, seen and unseen, marked and unmarked, though that unmarking is framed by the provisionality of the honorary whiteness of the model minority who, Ellen D. Wu reminds us, was constructed to be “inherently apolitical and therefore definitively not black.” [22] Asian American racialization operates through inversion— not political/not Black— as much by what is invisible as by what is visible. The problem posed by the Asian American body is in whether it is marked by racial difference or elided (provisionally) with honorary whiteness. Junaid Rana foregrounds honorary whiteness as a social performance of collusion, “to pass as…honorary white in the case of the myth of the model minority,” because “racial performance is an important aspect of interpreting structures organized in relationship to whiteness.” [23] On stage, the interpreting structures framing how and whether spectators see “honorary whiteness” is linked to casting. To the ways that “nontraditional,” and I borrow Angela Pao’s terminology for color-blind, racially conscious, cross-cultural, and societal, casting, [24] has reshaped spectators’ apprehension of embodiment, whereby spectators toggle between seeing actors’ bodies as “unmarked” and as “incorporat[ing] their knowledge of racial histories and relations into their experience and interpretation.” [25] Given the mechanisms of intimacy and interiority at play in We’re Gonna Die, how do we feel with and through Lee’s racial surface? When Hilton Als writes that, “by assuming the role of the performer, Lee is taking on the kamikaze-like vulnerability that comes with making your body the central text, thus writing another chapter in her vital and necessary work,” [26] he sees an act of subsumption. While the “texts” of the performance are doubled, the script and lyrics, on the one hand, and Lee’s own body, on the other, both are enfolded into Lee’s own body of work. In Als’ reading, it is the cabaret performer’s “kamikaze-like vulnerability,” the almost suicidal (tinged by etymological Japanese aviators) exposure of interiority that is the challenge he sees Lee taking on. But the “almost, but not quite” vulnerability of We’re Gonna Die resides in the act of “taking on” of the role of performer, as opposed to taking in — as in take (us) in — where both valences, to dupe us into believing and provide the audience cathartic access to the self, are set in contradiction. Self-obliterating vulnerability is a curious counterpoint to the inscrutability that dominates discourse around Asian (American) affect; yet, is it not self-annihilation that is at the heart of Asian American femme racialization, from Madama Butterfly (1904) to Miss Saigon (1989)? Uneasy Feelings We’re Gonna Die is deceptively moving, exceeding its ambitions to provide “a very little bit of comfort,” [27] “in the hopes that [the stories and songs] might help you feel less lonely when you’re in pain— which I hope you’re not.” [28] While the relationship between “I” and “you” is structured by convention (the stage conventions of performer and audience), it is how the performance negotiates “I” and “we” that has a particular entanglement with racialization, surface, and depth. Sara Ahmed, writing on affect and the body, highlights surface’s relationship to emotion: “It is through emotions that…surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others.” [29] Thus, my interest, and suspicion, in both how and whether her racialized body comes to embody the ordinary through the move between “I’’ and “We.” If We’re Gonna Die is taken as memento mori , it is a symbolic reminder of the inexorability of mortality, that life and death are absolute processes that knit humanity together; however, just as we are not equal in life, we are not equal in death—now, more than ever. The shift from singular to plural from “I’m going to die” to “We’re going to die,” is particularly insidious, because what is staged, or rather what I am afraid of, even as I am moved, is how processes of universality, humanism, and whiteness are one and the same. That what happens to Lee’s body, cheerily dressed in yellow skinny jeans, blue Adidas sneakers, and a sweater with a sailboat on it, is a disciplining of the Asian American body through honorary whiteness, with its attendant apolitical-ness and anti-Black racism. As opposed to the difficult politics and aesthetics that Karen Shimakawa corrals in her analysis of Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven , [30] We’re Gonna Die turns to a politics and aesthetics of “easy” feeling that Lee’s racial surface refracts. My unease at the ease through which Lee’s body can be drafted into the liberal politics of recognition hinders standing-in (even when her body and mine share a fungible Asian-ness), thus recoding ordinariness and defamiliarizing deracination. I am not alone in pausing during the final song to wonder at spectators singing along to “We are going to die.” Such dissonance gestures to the ways that Lee’s Asian American dramaturgies are not reparative; they do not smooth over inclusionary and exclusionary mechanisms by which Lee’s Asian body comes to stand-in for a “type of humanity,” when western bourgeois whiteness, or the category of “Man,” as Sylvia Wynter argued, overrepresents itself as universal humanity. [31] Instead, Lee’s performing body shores up what Patricia Stuelke names the ruse of repair, [32] how the reparative turn, though it began as a response to state violence, is put to the service of neoliberal policies and their ideological constructions. Even as it mobilizes reparative feelings to elicit empathetic identification, Lee’s racial surface belies the “feel-good fix” [33] of the show. This ambivalence about the processes of subsumption and self-annihilation are dramaturgical constants in Lee’s work especially when she stages whiteness. From Sheila and Terence in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals , reprised as White Person 1 and 2 in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven , and given full force in Straight White Men , [34] whiteness pervades Young Jean Lee’s work. Or rather, it keeps invading the plays, as if Lee is hell bent on showing her audiences that whiteness abhors not only a vacuum, but also the spaces filled by minoritarian bodies and voices, occupying that space, making glaringly visible whiteness’s presumed invisibility. If, in Lee’s plays, audiences are asked to scrutinize the seemingly totalizing nature of whiteness, that metatheatrical move is evacuated in the studio album of We’re Gonna Die , as displaced as Lee’s own body. No longer the Singer, Lee is relegated to the singer in the band, performing songs backed by lusher orchestrations, while the monologues are portioned to (white) indie rockers including Beastie Boy’s Adam Horovitz, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson. Rather than stories that exceed the singular body of the solo performer, each monologue is isolated to a single voice in recording. If Lee’s own not-white body asks us to consider processes of deracination as the (racial) engulfment [35] of whiteness, the collapsing of narrative into the isolated voice signals not the taking on of universality, but the taking in of whiteness. We are taken in by whiteness, sonically surrounded like noise-cancelling headphones. Jump Cut Lee’s performing body and voice recede altogether from the stage in the revival of We’re Gonna Die. Directed and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly, the show featured Janelle McDermoth, an African American performer. The Second Stage production opened February 25, 2020, and closed early on March 12 when COVID–19 closed NYC stages. I did not see this production, and for some, [36] this is one of the last productions they saw before theatres shuttered. This production is part of poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong’s article, “A Season to Celebrate Asian-American Theater Is Lost to Pandemic,” [37] which marks the lost 2020 season as an Asian American loss. Hong’s collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Racial Reckoning struck a chord during the pandemic, offering public vocabulary for the resurgence of anti-Asian violence. Hong’s minor feelings are “racialized emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” [38] That she comes to minor feelings through Richard Pryor — by way of Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings [39] — enacts Claire Jean Kim’s racial triangulation that, for me, makes McDermoth’s casting as Singer, with Lee as Playwright, provocative. Does a Black woman’s body and voice center We’re Gonna Die ’s Asian American dramaturgies by decentering the (white) universal human subject? Is McDermoth’s skilled and virtuosic performance reparative? Poring over production images I am struck by the transformation of Lee’s original costume design. The sailboat emblazoned on Lee’s chest has become the proverbial heart on McDermoth’s sleeve, a glitter-trimmed sailboat on the arm of her leather jacket. Perhaps McDermoth as Singer with the majority BIPOC musicians as her fellow performers and the possibilities they pose are what set off theatre critic Jesse Green to cling to his individual “specialness” and project his recalcitrance onto fellow spectators at the end of his review: In answer to the central question — “What makes you so special?” — the singer at first answers: “I believe, deep down, with all my heart, that I deserve to be immune not only from loneliness and tragedy, but also from aging, sickness and death.” Surely I was not the only audience member nodding vigorously in agreement at that point. [40] “We” is curiously absent in Green’s rendering of the scene. In his response — in his insistence on himself — Green refuses what he calls the “trick” of the piece, to be moved from special and individual to collective shared experience — that in a few weeks would be inexorable for everyone. How impossible to remain “immune…from loneliness and tragedy…aging, sickness and death” during a global pandemic that continues today. In her performance of the final text, Lee complicates and undercuts the process of honorary whiteness of her performance by focusing on personhood in an interrogation of self that Green fails to register. I return to Lee’s performance and dilate the moment to underscore Lee’s focus on personhood not circumscribed by hierarchy or domination or even millennial “specialness”: “…I asked myself, ‘Okay, so, who do you think you are?’ And the answer was, ‘I think I’m special.’ I believe, deep down, with all my heart, that I deserve to be immune not only from loneliness and tragedy, but also aging, sickness, and dying. But I’m not special. I’m a person.” [41] That statement of personhood, of not being special, different, or marked, frames the final song where Lee makes the transitive and synecdochical move from “I’m gonna die” to “We’re gonna die” to the finality of “We are going to die.” Any trace of a radical politics of personhood is then erased in the album, an act of vocal whitewashing as yellowface. What “very little bit of comfort” that We’re Gonna Die , the album, provides the listener — and a listener attuned to Lee’s Asian American dramaturgies — may reside in the knowledge that white supremacy will in fact die, is in living also dying, even as we might be caught in — and still cut by — its death grip. References [1] John DelSignore, “Playwright Young Jean Lee, We’re Gonna Die, ” Gothamist , 13 April 2011, https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/playwright-young-jean-lee-emwere-gonna-dieem. [2] “Our Mission,” 13 Playwrights, https://www.13p.org. [3] Kandice Chuh, “It’s Not About Anything,” Social Text 32, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 125–134. [4] Summer Kim Lee, “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality,” Social Text 37, no. 1 (2019): 27–50; Vivian Huang, “Inscrutably, Actually: Hospitality, Parasitism, and the Silent Work of Yoko Ono and Laurel Nakadate,” Women and Performance 28 no. 3 (2018): 187-203; Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). [5] Hilton Als, “Body of Work,” The New Yorker , 11 April 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/11/body-of-work-hilton-als. [6] Ralph Rodriguez. “In Plain Sight: Reading the Racial Surface of Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings” in Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 87-106. [7] DelSignore, “Playwright Young Jean Lee.” [8] Shonni Enelow marks this style in contradistinction to Method acting’s “iconography of emotional expression, in which everyday repression gives way…to outpourings of powerful feeling.” Shonni Enelow, “The Great Recession,” Film Comment, September/October 2016. See also: Shonni Enelow, Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015). [9] DelSignore, “Playwright Young Jean Lee.” [10] Uri McMillan, “Introduction: Skin, Surface, Sensorium,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no. 1 (2018): 1-15. [11] Song: “Lullaby for the Miserable” in Young Jean Lee, We’re Gonna Die (New York: Theatre Communications Group [TCG], 2015), 21. [12] Song: “Horrible Things” in Lee, We’re Gonna Die , 39. [13] Song: “When You Get Old” in Lee, We’re Gonna Die , 29-30. [14] Charles Isherwood, “Amid Catchy Choruses, Personal Tales of Life’s Brutal Verities,” New York Times, 10 April 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/theater/reviews/were-gonna-die-by-young-jean-lee-at-joes-pub-review.html; Adam Green, “Stage Notes: We’re Gonna Die Spins Tales of Hot Pain in Cool Tones,” Vogue, 14 August 2013, https://www.vogue.com/article/theater-music-stage-notes-were-gonna-die-spins-tales-of-hot-pain-in-cool-tones [15] Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as a Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 22-23. [16] Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 92-93. [17] Young Jean Lee, “Author’s Note,” We’re Gonna Die (New York: TCG, 2015), 7. [18] For more on racial surface: Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sean Metzger, Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Uri McMillan, “Introduction: Skin, Surface, Sensorium,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no. 1 (2018): 1-15; Colleen Kim Daniher, “Yella Gal: Eartha Kitt’s Racial Modulations,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no. 1 (2018): 16-33. [19] Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). [20] Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013). [21] Ju Yon Kim. The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (New York: New York University Press, 2015). [22] Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 256. [23] Juniad Rana, “Race,” Keywords in Asian American Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 204. [24] Angela Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-Casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. [25] Ibid., 29. [26] Hilton Als, “Body of Work,” The New Yorker , 11 April 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/11/body-of-work-hilton-als. [27] Lee, We’re Gonna Die , 39. [28] Ibid., 21. [29] Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 10. [30] Shimakawa turns to Sianne Ngai’s ugly feelings to unpack the “affective ‘difficulties’” that are “directly and intimately related to its ‘difficult’ politics and aesthetics.” Karen Shimakawa, “Young Jean Lee’s Ugly Feelings About Race and Gender: Stuplime animation in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven ,” Women & Performance 17, no. 1 (March 2007), 92. [31] Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003), 257-337. [32] Patricia Stuelke, The Ruse of Repair (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). [33] Ibid., 30. [34] Patricia Ybarra’s essay explores, through an analysis of realism, how an early workshop of Straight White Men “stages the performance of the straight white male self under neo-liberal capitalism” (514). Patricia Ybarra, “Young Jean Lee’s Cruel Dramaturgy,” Modern Drama 67, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 513-532. [35] For more on racial engulfment, see Denise Ferreira DeSilva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). [36] I am grateful to Peter Kim, Brian Herrera, and Darren Gobert for recounting their spectatorial experiences. For reviews: Dan Venning, “ We’re Gonna Die,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 43, no. 3, (September 2021): 60-62; Benjamin Gillispie, “ We’re Gonna Die by Young Jean Lee,” Theatre Journal 73, no. 2 (June 2021): 245-247. [37] Cathy Park Hong, “A Season to Celebrate Asian-American Theater Is Lost to Pandemic,” New York Times , May 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/theater/asian-american-playwrights.html. [38] Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020), 55. [39] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). [40] Thank you, Brian Herrera, for teasing out the contrarian closing of Green’s review. Jesse Green, “Review: In ‘We’re Gonna Die,’ Pop Songs for the Reaper,” The New York Times, 25 February 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/theater/were-gonna-die-review.html. [41] Lee, We’re Gonna Die , 39. Footnotes About The Author(s) Christine Mok is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Rhode Island. She has published in Theatre Survey , Journal of American Drama and Theatre , PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art , Modern Drama ,and the Journal of Asian American Studies . She is co-editor with Joshua Chambers-Letson of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital (Bloomsbury, 2021). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

​The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. ​​ The Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. 2026 Festival Read More Segal Film Festival returns for its 10th edition from May 28–June 5 in NYC, presented with Anthology Film Archives, featuring global performance films and a Robert Wilson retrospective. Film Festival 2026 10th edition View Festival Lineup Film Festival 2022 7th edition View Festival Archive Film Festival 2025 9th edition View Festival Lineup Film Festival 2024 8th edition View Festival Lineup About The Festival The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. From its inaugural edition in 2015 to its present-day hybrid avatar, The Segal Film Festival for Theatre and Performance (FTP) has served as a platform for recorded works that span the length and breadth of the performing arts. Festival Founder and Executive Director of the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, Frank Hentschker shares his inspiration for creating the festival: “Film and digital media are an integral part of theatre and performance. I am surprised that there is not a film festival out there right now focusing on theatre and performance. I thought ‘why not create one’?” In the time before Corona, the Segal Film Festival had evolved into the premier US event for new film and video work focusing on theatre and performance. Its mission was to invite experimental and established theatre makers to present work created for the screen – not filmed archival recordings – to audiences and industry professionals from around the world. Now, after a year and a half of digital and hybrid theatre offerings, the festival must take on a new meaning. The festival has held on to its mission of being a free and open-to-all event accessible to everyone. The 7th edition of the festival was held digitally in March 2022, and featured 80 films from 30 countries, whilst the 8th edition was held in a hybrid format in May 2024 with in-person screenings in NYC and digital streaming.

By Cory Tamler | An experiment in writing about performance from the conviction that our entire beings (thoughtbodies) make theory and politics. < Back More Information & Order Details Publication date: December 2022 Hardcover, 179 pages, 5.25 x 8.3 inches ISBN: 9781953892072 Design by Rafal Kosakowski Retail price: $25 Published by special arrangement with the Laboratory for Social Choreography To order this book, click here (https://forms.gle/HXqK4N87HDCNbbJE6) or email corytamler@gmail.com . Available for in-person purchase: Unnameable Books and Quimby’s (Brooklyn), b_books (Berlin). A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography Cory Tamler Download PDF A work of social choreography. A training ground for the imagination. A psychedelic experience without substances. A technology for cleaning social relations. A proposal for embodied civic duty. A journey into the realer real that gives back to the real—as if it were possible to bring an object from the dream world into waking life. A lifeboat. Over the past decade, at least a thousand people (among them philosophers, office workers, professional dancers, scientists, students, artists, and the author-editor of this book) have participated in Parliament sessions from Athens to NYC. For all its potency, Parliament resists being written about, starting from any attempt to describe what it is. It resists authorship too. Choreographer and artist Michael Kliën prefers to say he discovered it, or wished for it, from within “a felt urgency that things are just not sustainable.” In this book, Parliament writes out of itself. Artist and writer Cory Tamler holds the container, editing together her memories of her own experiences as a participant, excerpts from conversations with Kliën and from his personal archive, theoretical propositions for the way Parliament could go to work in the world, and reflections from other participants in Parliament over the years. An annotated bibliography makes visible the framework of ideas—from art and choreography to systems theory and political theory—within which Parliament sits. This text is an experiment in writing about performance from the conviction that our entire beings (thoughtbodies) make theory and politics. It is meant for readers who, whether familiar or unfamiliar with Parliament, are interested in how the social is formed and in bodies as key agents in its formation. Contributors: Michael Kliën with Catherine Cabeen, Mallory Catlett, Blythe Davis, Barbara Dickinson, Jeffrey Gormly, Floor Grootenhuis, Frank Hentschker, Vitoria Kotsalou, Steve Valk, Shuntaro Yoshida. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Curtis Russell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage Musical Theatre Books Curtis Russell By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF Actor-Musicianship . Jeremy Harrison. London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 220. The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals . Dan Dietz. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015; Pp. 591. Musical Theatre Song . Stephen Purdy. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 284. A relative newcomer to theatre studies, musical theatre scholarship has proven a fertile and comprehensive field of inquiry, as three recent publications illustrate. Though none is a monograph, each makes an important contribution. Dan Dietz’s The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals is a historical compendium that will prove a useful source for historians, practitioners, and enthusiasts, while the other two books, Actor-Musicianship by Jeremy Harrison and Musical Theatre Song by Stephen Purdy, are how-to guides for performers, each jumping off from a clear historical perspective. Including The Complete Book of 2000s Broadway Musicals , published this year, Dan Dietz has now chronicled seven decades of Broadway musical theatre history. This period doesn’t represent the entirety of the genre, but it does encompass its crystallization as a quintessential American art form, and The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals covers the decade often seen as, to use Dietz’s own word, “seminal” (xi) in that development. In his introduction, Dietz repeats the common assertion that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) represents the institutionalization of the so-called integrated musical (though he doesn’t use the term), which “utilized plot, character, song, and dance to create a unified evening of storytelling” (xi). Scott McMillin, David Savran, and others have refuted this idea, pointing to the Kern-Bolton-Wodehouse Princess Theatre musicals of the 1910s, Sissle and Blake’s Shuffle Along (1921), Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat (1927), and shows with music and lyrics by the Gershwin brothers such as Girl Crazy (1930) and Of Thee I Sing (1931) as earlier examples of the integrated form. As Dietz’s volume makes clear, however, no decade prior to the 1940s produced such a large number of canonical productions. These include Cabin in the Sky (1940), Pal Joey (1940), Lady in the Dark (1941), Carousel (1945), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Street Scene (1947), Brigadoon (1947), Finian’s Rainbow (1947), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), and early “concept musicals” like Allegro (1947) and Love Life (1948). These shows, as well as the other 261 musicals that opened on Broadway during the 1940s, receive the same detailed consideration in The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals as in Dietz’s other historical volumes. Listed in chronological order, each entry includes the following information about the musical: theatre name, opening and closing dates, number of performances, advertising tag lines, creative team and performer names, number of acts, setting information for book musicals, musical number titles, source material information where applicable, details on revivals or London transfers, award information, and publication and recording information. Most of this data is, of course, available online, but nowhere is it obtainable in such concise, accessible fashion. What sets the series apart, though, is Dietz’s expository critical writing for each entry. His mini-essays summarize critical reception of the plays and offer historical context. Unfortunately, there isn’t much social or analytical commentary, which would be generative for a decade that included so many shows that broke new ground for how they represented race and gender. In addition, the tome features a bibliography and several appendices, including chronologies by season and classification (revue, book musical, etc.), a list of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas performed during the period, a discography, a list of other productions of the decade that employed music, a list of published scripts, and a grouping of shows performed by venue. If the chronicle doesn’t in any way trouble the notion of what qualifies as a “Broadway musical,” the sheer amount of information on display and ease of use justifies its value. Jeremy Harrison’s much slimmer, practice-oriented Actor-Musicianship also employs a historical lens, but explores a performance convention rather than a specific time period. Exemplified in recent American theatrical production by John Doyle’s Broadway stagings of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (2005) and Company (2006), the phenomenon of the actor-musician, according to Harrison, is as old as the theatre itself. He traces its contemporary iteration in chapter one, “From the Bubble to Broadway,” though to the “counter-theatre movement” embodied by Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl’s Theatre Union (later Theatre Workshop) in 1936. There is an understandable British bias to the book; Harrison is a British performer-scholar currently running the Acting and Actor Musicianship program at Rose Bruford College in London. Littlewood and MacColl, who had extensive experience in the British folk tradition, sought to reverse what they saw as a separation of actor and musician, “informed by the gradual emergence of specialism in the processes of theatre making” (1). Harrison traces a line from the Theatre Workshop to the work of Glen Walford’s Bubble Theatre in 1972, which toured to London’s outer boroughs with The Blitz Show . Like the Theatre Workshop’s Oh, What a Lovely War! , The Blitz Show had an explicitly populist political agenda and was designed to appeal to both working- and middle-class audiences. Harrison identifies the guitar-playing actor-musicians in The Blitz Show as being key to its populist appeal, because of the conceit’s “simplicity and connection” (5). John Doyle’s actor-musician staging of classic American musicals at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury emerges in Harrison’s narrative as central to the institutionalization of actor-musicianship, previously a marginal, leftist practice, as “the British take on the American musical theatre form” (26). In chapter two, “Jack and Master,” Harrison attempts a definition of the actor-musician: is she “an actor who plays a musical instrument; or is she a musician who acts” (37)? For him, this question is of more pragmatic than phenomenological importance because it affects labor conditions and contracts, and the ways in which a performer positions herself relative to the “pervasive notion of specialism that has shaped the processes and pedagogies that apply to theatre and production” (37). He doesn’t come down firmly on either side, but he acknowledges that this is a much more pressing issue in the UK than in the US; in the United States “musicianship has simply become another skill to acquire or brush up” (56). Chapters three through six, filled with exercises developed by Harrison over the course of his long career as an actor-musician, make up the practical portion of the book: “Training the Actor-Musician: An Introduction,” “Directing Actor-Musicianship,” “Choreographing Actor-Musicianship,” and “Musically Directing Actor-Musicianship.” Chapter seven, “A Young Theatre,” is somewhat capacious despite being only a few pages long. It is a grab bag of ideas that didn’t fit elsewhere in the book, looking at youth theatre case studies, beatboxing as actor-musicianship, and Philip Auslander’s Liveness as an argument for actor-musicianship. Actor-musicianship is clearly making inroads in professional practice; last season it was an essential component of both staging and story in two new musicals on Broadway, School of Rock and Bandstand . Harrison’s volume should then be of interest to anyone studying, teaching, or training in contemporary acting practice. Musical Theatre Song , by Stephen Purdy, is subtitled “A Comprehensive Course in Selection, Preparation, and Presentation for the Modern Performer.” The book also begins with a historical survey, this time of the musical theatre genre itself, from 19 th century minstrelsy up to the 2013-14 Broadway season. Its title gives a good indication of Purdy’s verbose, welcoming tone: “Introduction to Song Selection and Historical Context: What You Should Know (and Why You Should Care).” Harrison makes the same specious argument as Dietz does about Oklahoma! , but this chapter, nearly a quarter of the entire book, makes a strong and refreshing argument for thinking historically as a performer. Purdy’s presumed audience is “the modern professional and aspiring professional theatrical singing actor,” for whom the path to “stage worthiness…is…the mysterious concoction of labor and love that it has always been to dyed-in-the-wool devotees,” (xxi) but now requires a higher level of versatility and virtuosity than ever before. Purdy’s system is organized with the goal of de-mystifying that path. The book is divided into three sections: I. Song Selection, II. Song Preparation, and III. Song Presentation. Each chapter includes a portion called “Get It Done,” which has questions and activities based on the chapter’s content. Further chapters break the process down in minute, step-by-step detail, covering everything from table work to interior monologue and objectives to posture. Purdy employs song examples both canonical (“Maria” from West Side Story , “Much More” from The Fantasticks ) and non-canonical (“Perfect” from Edges , Journey’s “Separate Ways”). The book’s contemporaneity is most evident in its discussion near the end about song performance on social media and YouTube. Far from bogging the performer down with minutiae, though, Purdy’s system is meant to help her “[B]e the pot of gold. Be the inexplicable ‘it.’ Be the surprise” (276, emphasis in original). With its combination of historicity and practicality, Musical Theatre Song , like Actor-Musicianship , will be of interest to both educators and performers. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Curtis Russell The CUNY Graduate Center Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre By Bart Pitchford Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF In May 2016 the town of Saraqb, Syria lay in ruins from constant bombing by the Syrian regime. Buildings toppled and reduced to rocks were unrecognizable for the structures they once were. This town which lay about an hour south of Aleppo and twenty minutes east of Idlib was caught in between factions of ISIS and Jabat al Nusra (1) who fought for superiority of the region. From the top of one building that still stood, Mohammed from amateur theatre makers Youth Group of Saraqb gave me a tour of the area over Skype (2). He pointed out the building where he and his family lived before the war and each building they moved to throughout the violent conflict. From the mediated perspective it seemed like the building Mohammed was broadcasting from was the only building standing in the entire neighborhood. As he stood on the roof talking about the progression of Assad’s bombing campaign on Saraqb, regime planes flew overhead. Mohammed did not flinch because he knew the planes were on the way to Aleppo. At this point Mohammed was able to distinguish between bombing raids meant for Saraqb and those meant for another city. Amid so much trauma and destruction, resilience and survival are tightly bound to the present. The ability to continue existence in such a perilous and uncertain environment relies heavily on desire. For Youth Group of Saraqb, to move from moment to moment in their city required them to develop tactics for existence that responded to the fluidity of the situation. Rather than simply reacting to anything lacking in their lives like security or food, The Youth Group of Saraqb interacted with their current social and political environment to create unexpected modes of resistance that inverted the climate of violence and poverty in which they lived. Instead of feeding the endless war the Youth Group of Saraqb created theatre. While their will to live may speak to a larger hope at play, the tactics of simply making it through each day were produced through desire. Play from Saraqb Youth Group, 2015. Printed with permission of photographer. In this article I explore two case studies where desire produces and is produced by the theatrical moments in the work of displaced Syrians—theatre in education practice in a refugee camp and an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with a cast of Syrian children both in and outside Syria. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of desiring-production as a positive and primordial drive necessary for the survival of humans, I contend that amid unspeakable violence and trauma the artists discussed below carved alternative paths or ‘desire lines’ to their own survival through the act of theatrical creation. Countering an epistemological regime from Plato to Lacan that viewed desire as a “lack of the real object,” Deleuze and Guattari understood desire as a drive whose subject is real but not fixed. Desire does not develop because of the object that is missing. Rather, the object is a by-product of the flights of desire. Put simply, desire in humans exists, not because of unfulfilled needs, but rather because of human existence. Taken this way, it is desire that generates needs and not the converse. In addition to desiring-production, I intertwine a concept that arose from the physical geography field of study. French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, in his 1959 work “The Poetics of Space” spoke of “ Les chemins du désir ,” (desire paths). Over time, scholars in in the world of landscape architecture have morphed the terminology into desire lines. According to Urban Studies scholars, Naomi Smith and Peter Walters, desire lines are literally, “the grassy or muddy path inscribed in space where people have created their own route outside of those prescribed by abstract place makers” (Smith 8). Desire lines occur when people improvise movement from point A to point B ignoring, or in some cases subverting sanctioned pathways. Throughout this paper I refer to the tactics used by the artists as improvisatory because they are reacting to conditions by developing new and unsanctioned paths around official rules or obstacles. Like the Youth Group of Saraqb, the other examples I cite in this article inverted their circumstances to enact resilience, resistance, or joy in the present moment with little regard for any future impact. The first of the two case studies concerns the brave work of a camp resident using theatre to teach feminist thought in a Syrian camp in Jordan named Azraq. This teacher, Zabeida, constructs dramatic scenes based on internationally renowned women leaders from around the world throughout history, to provide alternative visions of womanhood that rival the early marriage model prevalent throughout the displaced population. She asked that I not use her name out of concern that camp officials would remove her from working if they discovered the lessons she taught. For that reason, I am using the pseudonym “Zabeida” in this article. Zabeida’s desire to teach combined with the Jordanian government’s refusal to allow displaced Syrians employment in the formal education system created the conditions which allowed Zabeida to design her own curriculum. By diagnosing her circumstances, Zabeida realized that her position in the informal NGO education system gave her freedom that was not possible in the state-run system which maintained a strict curriculum and did not allow displaced Syrians to teach. Working through the more liberal development system allowed Zabeida to address topics considered too controversial for Jordanian schools like sexual assault and female empowerment. For the second case study, I enter the digital space between Amman, Jordan and Homs, Syria where I examine an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that made use of unregulated video conferencing in order to perform a play with children on both sides of the border. Young actors at a recovery facility in Amman and in sieged area outside Homs used Skype to connect two locations through a single performance, while evading detection by the Syrian authorities. The lines of communication that enabled this production transgressed space regulated by the Syrian government. Desire, as a reaction force does not adhere to established pathways. It creates shortcuts outside, and often counter to, regulations governing private and public space. Romeo and Juliet Separated by War used satellite connections secured illegally by Free Syrian Army forces to house the video feed. This performance, which placed the actors in Syria at risk, also allowed them to reconnect with the world outside of Homs. Both programs discussed in these case studies formed through improvisation based on the desire to reestablish a sense of stability and belonging. Desire is fluid and unstable. It operates as a tactic from points of opportunity and then moves as quickly as it arrived. Neither Zubeida’s program nor the production of Romeo and Juliet were sanctioned or connected to official systems. They both grew organically from momentary conditions. The characteristics of desire open possibilities for the contestation of power precisely because it appears in unpredictable ways and spaces. Desire leaves traces that can point the way toward new forms of social interaction. The artists in this chapter answer to and produce new circumstances. Finding Crevices in the Map to Teach Feminism The ability to “make do” by finding the small tactical spaces in which to operate is driven by desire. As an affect, desire has a powerful potential to focus our attention on an immediate object. While the object of a specific desire may simply be a target of opportunity that produces desire by its presence and accessibility, sometimes the object of desire has been long sought and remained dormant only because there was no possibility for fulfilling it. 43-year-old teacher, Zabeida had long wanted to change the power dynamics between men and women in rural Syria. Zabeida fled from Dara’a with her husband and children during the war. First, she lived in Za’atari camp, but after two years her family was resettled into the desert camp in Azraq. Once in Azraq, Zabeida used her experience as an English teacher prior to the war to secure employment with Relief International’s remedial education program. Through her work as a teaching assistant in the camp, Zabeida drew from her experiences as a child bride to encourage her female teenage students to find their own power. The desire for independence and equality Zabeida had buried for decades now fueled her class curriculum. I met Zabeida in 2016 while conducting field research for my dissertation, Hela L’Wein: Performing Nationalisms, Citizenship, and Belonging in Displaced Syrian Communities . During the five-month period that I was in Jordan, I had the opportunity to meet and work with several different organizations and individuals working with displaced Syrians in Amman, Za’atari, Zarqa, and Azraq. Although I was only able to travel to Azraq for one day, it was incredibly instructive to see the stark differences between the camps in Za’atari and Azraq. Za’atari formed organically with little government oversight initially. By the time I went to Za’atari it was Jordan’s 4th largest city complete with a shopping area jokingly named Sham Elysees. Azraq, on the other hand, was conceptualized by UNHCR and the Jordanian government. It was a sprawling camp laid in grid squares with fences dividing sectors. In comparison to the frenetic energy of Za’atari, Azraq felt like a sterile suburban town. Prior to my visit in 2016 some of the key issues facing the residents of the camps were sanitation, education, and early marriage. While there were organizations working with the Jordanian government to teach traditional school curricula, many children were ineligible for these programs. According to Ministry of Education law, any child who had not attended school for three or more years, was not allowed to return. The ministry was concerned that children this far behind would not be at the same level as children their age. Additionally, the age discrepancy for children in this situation would be too great for them to be in class with children on their academic level. In other words, the ministry worried about putting thirteen-year-old children in the same class as ten-year-old children. To provide some form of curriculum to children unable to attend school, several international NGOs created a “life skills” curriculum to address areas of concern. Life skills, according to UNHCR, consisted of teaching proper hygiene with a strong focus on hand washing and personal cleanliness, conflict mitigation, professional development, and strategies to combat sexual violence. This last subject, sexual violence, was perhaps the most contentious because part of the curriculum addressed early marriage. Life skills instruction fell underneath UNICEF’s “Makani” program. Makani, which is Arabic for “my space,” provided a comprehensive learning space for children and teenagers. In the varied areas of the Makani program, students had access to support services, skills building programs, psychosocial support, on-site water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), and educational support ( UNICEF ). One of the primary organizations UNICEF tasked with maintaining Makani sites in Azraq and Zaatari was Relief International. Part of Relief International’s mandate was to provide “non-formal” education classes to students who were not allowed to attend the official Jordanian schools because of the amount of time they had been out of school. The “Drop Out” programs led by UNICEF aimed to prevent Syrian children from falling out of the educational system entirely. In coordination with the Ministry of Education, the non-formal education programs conducted by Relief International and other similar organizations, would allow graduating students to receive a tenth-grade equivalency rating in Jordan. This at least allowed the student to participate in vocational training and enter the work force. Additionally, Relief International operated a remedial education curriculum that provided extra education opportunities to students who were allowed to attend official Jordanian schools but struggled maintaining grade level standards. Relief International’s responsibilities primarily included space administration, program assessment, and training teachers in the specific curriculum (3). Neither Relief International, nor the other organizations administering remedial or non-formal education programs, were allowed to determine the specific curriculum or provide the teachers. The Ministry of Education in Jordan demanded that all classroom instruction level decisions remain in their purview. While there were likely other factors influencing the ministry’s control over traditional school curriculum, fear of job loss amongst Jordanian teachers was a primary driver. Like the anti-immigrant rhetoric seen in the United States, many Jordanian employment sectors, including education, worried that Syrian immigrants would displace Jordanian workers. In response to populist anger by Jordanian citizens over the influx of displaced Syrians and Iraqis, the government established migrant work laws that prevented noncitizens from holding certain employment positions. The “Closed Professions List” limited the ability of both migrants and Palestinian permanent residents from obtaining employment in jobs where Jordanian citizens preferred to work. The list, which the Ministry of Labor published in October 2016, named teaching amongst other high skilled professions such as banking, engineering, and business professional ( Briggs 14 ). This meant that no Syrian teacher residing in Jordan could teach without receiving express permission from the Ministry of Labor, which was only given in extreme circumstances. No matter how desperate the need or qualified the teacher, Syrians were not to be employed in this capacity, even in the camps. The inability to employ Syrian teachers in camp education programs weighed heavily on the international NGOs working in the education field. Although the Ministry of Education claimed to hire enough teachers, with enrollment sizes reaching 1000 students per space for primary and secondary levels, classrooms often went long periods without official instructors. According to Danijel Cuturic, Relief International’s Jordanian country office director, while there were many dedicated teachers working at the schools, it was common for several teachers to simply not show up at all. In order to ensure that the classroom had at least one instructor present, Relief International paied qualified Syrian teachers a small stipend to work as “volunteers.” While this circumvention allowed Relief International to place Syrian teachers in the classrooms, they were not allowed to pay the same salary to the volunteers as the Jordanian teachers received. Furthermore, Relief International could not remove any Jordanian teacher for failure to attend or accomplish educational benchmarks. This task, like hiring, fell exclusively to the Ministry of Education. Despite the inequality in pay, many of the volunteers appreciated the opportunity to teach the Syrian children. Not only did their positions allow them to earn a small amount of money, but they enjoyed feeling productive and needed. In some situations, the volunteers filling in for ghost teachers were able to treat the classroom as their own, adjusting the curriculum delivery method to suit their personal style of instruction (4). This was the situation for Zabeida. Her experience as an English teacher prior to the war qualified her to volunteer for Relief International as a remedial education assistant. According to several staff members at the Relief International Makani, Zabeida was one of their most successful teachers. As an English and History teacher, she regularly used theatre as an integral part of her pedagogy. For example, Zabeida recalled to me that back in Dara’a she regularly taught Shakespeare’s history plays as a way access European history and create links to Syrian history. In some class exercises she had students take on the characters of Henry V or Richard III to explore ideas of patriotism or political corruption. Zabeida intersected her belief in the tenets of Islam with a quiet fierce feminism that grew from her life experiences. At the age of 14, Zabeida’s father arranged for her to marry an older man in neighboring town. Although she dreamed of attending university and becoming a teacher, she followed her father’s instruction to marry. Early marriage in the southern province of Dara’a, was a common practice. Zabeida’s options, therefore, were limited both by the culture in which she grew up and her belief in the importance of respecting her family at all costs. Nevertheless, Zabeida successfully pleaded with her husband to let her finish school. In the first several years of marriage, while finishing school, Zabeida also gave birth to their first two children. In all, Zabeida and her husband eventually had seven children, all of whom fled to Jordan with them. Despite maintaining her duties as a wife in a conservative Syrian family, Zabeida continued her education eventually earning her bachelor’s and teaching certificate before becoming an English literature teacher at secondary level in Dara’a. Shakespeare, Zabeida insists, was her inspiration for continuing to teach and for incorporating theatre into her pedagogy. Due to her experience as a young mother, Zabeida makes women’s issues, particularly early marriage a primary focus in her classes with teenage girls. Despite being allowed to continue her education and eventually work as a teacher, Zabeida’s marriage, especially in earlier years was difficult. “At fourteen,” Zabeida offers, “I was not old enough to be a mother. No young girl is. She should be allowed to finish her education” ( Zabeida ). In fact, part of the reason that Zabeida believes she was able to complete her school was that her husband had another wife, and so he was not at the house much of the time. Zabeida’s theatre in education practice, I contend, is indeed a tactical strategy that uses the map of humanitarian assistance to empower a new generation of Syrian women with values that extend beyond the duties of motherhood. In one exercise, Zabeida assigns her students powerful historical women to research. Examples of figures Zabeida mentioned are: Oprah, Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth II, and Queen Zenobia (5). After a period of research, her students must craft a monologue or scene where the historical person is interviewed on camera by other girls in the class. Dressed in costumes that draw form their research, the girls answer questions related the history of the character. For instance, in one video, the student playing Queen Zenobia sits in a chair that has been decorated to look like a throne. Wearing flowing fabric covered with a layer of green chiffon, the student assumes an air of confidence and authority. Out of the frame, a person posing as a reporter asks her questions about her life as the queen of Palmyra: “How did you feel when your husband Odaenathus was murdered,” and “How did it feel to be in charge of everyone, even the men?” ( Zabeida ). Through this exercise, Zabeida hoped that her students would learn that women can have power and accomplish similar goals as men. Historical knowledge and generalized empowerment were not the only messages that Zabeida included in this lesson, however. In addition to the historically based questions, she also encouraged the students to ask the characters about more personal quotidian issues. For example, in the same scene where the student acted as Queen Zenobia, one question the reporter posed was about how the Palmyrenes viewed menstruation and how did they maintain hygiene during this time every month. In the Cleopatra scene, the student playing Cleopatra talked about how using make-up helped her feel powerful. Many of these questions would be considered taboo to discuss in public areas such as a school. Indeed, Zabeida claimed that many of the girls in the camp were not being taught about these issues at home. Perhaps the most daring scene that Zabeida shared with me was a video of a student who researched Oprah Winfrey. Zabeida explained that she and her students admire Oprah for her independence, intelligence, and charitable works. Many of the questions the reporter asked Oprah centered on questions about creating her own show, acting, living as a single woman without children. The most revealing moment occurred, however, when the reporter asked the student playing Oprah about her life before becoming a talk show host. Without trepidation, the young student playing Oprah recounted the poverty that Winfrey endured as a child, including having to wear burlap sacks for clothing. She also discussed, in character, being raped by men from her family and being pregnant at a young age but losing the child. She completed her scene by recognizing that even in the worst circumstances, a woman can use her intelligence and education to improve her life without the need for a husband. As theatrical practice in general, the scenes Zabeida asks her students to play seem tame. Theatre in Education texts are filled with examples of this type, where scene work intersects with history to open up previously unexplored questions about historical figures. When placed in the cautious camp environment, however, Zabeida’s pedagogy is not only tactical, it is subversive. While she recognized the danger of teaching material that questioned societal norms, Zabeida also understood that the change she sought for young Syrian women required a high level of risk. Because of the anxious nature of a refugee camp, organizations providing support services to the residents often refrain from approaching any subject that may seem sensitive or political in nature. While this sort of careful posture is prudent in many cases, it can also inadvertently strengthen certain forms of oppression. In both Zaatari and Azraq, discussions around normative gender roles was certainly one area that required organizations to be hyperattentive to cultural sensitivities. To their credit, organizations such as Relief International certainly did attempt repeatedly to open the debate over early marriage. In fact, the same day that I interviewed Zabeida, Relief International held a family day that included a skit about the danger of early marriage followed by testimony of several Syrian women who were married early. At the same time, discussions about feminine hygiene, sex before marriage, and rape were anathema to the patriarchal ethos and thus considered appropriate only between a mother and her daughters. For Zabeida to tackle such issues in the confines of the classroom, stretched the limits of propriety in Azraq. If officials outside of Relief International discovered the content of some of her lessons, she could have been forbidden from teaching in the future. Even worse, she may have been threatened from more socially conservative figures within the camp. Taken as a subversive action, Zabeida’s classroom scene exercise reconfigures the geography of patriarchy at play in the camp space of Azraq. The map of propriety for Azraq consists primarily of structures conceived, built, and institutionalized by the male dominated culture of southern Syria negotiating its own marginalization with the neoliberal powers of Western development organizations. Men must first approve any space displaced women might claim for security or growth. That does not mean that Syrian women in the camp are resigning themselves to the control of either the patriarchal or neoliberal forces. It is to say that women who wish to push against these boundaries must do so from temporary niches recessed within the corners and shadows of Azraq. Even as Zabeida uses a space provided by a Western organization, controlled by the Government of Jordan, and only with the permission of her husband, she inscribes in that space a politics of desire that generates a new understanding of gender roles in a traditionally conservative society. She plants seeds of feminist empowerment in a patriarchal landscape that will trace her presence and make visible a path for young Syrian women to follow. Virtual Desire Lines In Azraq, Zabeida marked a space in between the cultural patriarchy, governmental authority, and international development regime where young women could explore feminist topics in safety. Her use of theatre in education relies on the immediacy and instability of desire. Zabeida created lines of desire through her physical presence interacting with feminist tactical opportunities. Similarly, the second case study, Romeo and Juliet Separated By War , relies on the improvisatory nature of desire, but explores the transgression of authorized space through virtual lines of desire. With the help of satellite equipment stolen from the regime by the Free Syrian Army providing bandwidth for Skype communications, young actors under siege in the suburban area, al-Waer, that lies just to the east of Homs, Syria were able to perform a play with young actors displaced in Amman, Jordan. Driven by the desire to touch even if digitally, their homeland, several children living in a recovery facility in Amman rehearsed an adapted version of Romeo and Juliet. At the same time, another group of children, driven by the desire to imagine an existence outside of the violence and war surrounding them, secretly rehearsed in an apartment in al-Waer. Eventually the two casts met through a combination of computers, cameras, and screens. Their rehearsals and performances opened momentary pathways through borders and conflict zones allowing the children to make a unified plea for the violence and killing to stop. Souriyat Across Borders is a hospice for war wounded Syrians who are recovering from severe injuries suffered as a result of the war. The nonprofit center was founded and continues to be run exclusively by Syrian women who were themselves displaced to Jordan. Located near the University of Jordan in Amman, Souriyat houses Syrians of all ages with physically debilitating injuries. The older residents staying in the hospice have a decidedly pro-revolution political affiliation. In fact, many of the audience members present for the performances of Romeo and Juliet arrived at Souriyat after being injured in skirmishes with the Syrian Army or al-Dawlah al-Islamïyah (Islamic State). At the same time there were children living in Souriyat who fell victim to the barrage of barrel bombs dropped from the Syrian and Russian planes. For example, the eleven-year-old boy who played Romeo lost the full use of his right leg when he ran to escape a falling bomb. Image of children in Homs performing Romeo and Juliet Separated by War with children in Amman over Skype, 2015. Still taken from video by Nawar Bulbul. Syrian actor and director Nawar Bulbul, who is more widely known for his work in Middle Eastern Ramadan dramas like Bab al Hara or films like Demashq Tatakallam developed the idea in 2013 after completing his notable project Shakespeare in Zaatari (6). Bulbul, who is from a notable theatre and opera family in Homs, Syria (7), chose to work at Souriyat for this production because UNHCR and the Jordanian government prohibited him from continuing to work with the children in Zaatari because he was not a licensed NGO. Still wanting to work with Syrian children, Bulbul approached Souriyat with his idea for producing Romeo and Juliet over Skype with children in Homs. Considering that one of Souriyat’s primary focuses is on the children wounded in the Syrian war, the board allowed Bulbul and the actors to use the roof of the facility which had a large empty storage room. Bulbul worked to secure a performance space and adapt the script while Abu Ameen, a drama teacher and pro-revolution activist, worked with his teenaged students to make masks and develop rules to maintain their anonymity. Most of the young cast lived in Homs, but Abu Ameen fled Homs which was under the occupation of the governmental forces to the Free Syrian controlled suburban enclave al-Waer. By January of 2015, the regime forces in Syria had taken control of the entire city of Homs. Serving as the heart of the revolution, Homs had initially resisted attempts by the military to quell the 2011 marches. Because of their resiliency, citizens in Homs gave life to the revolution after the protests temporarily died out in Dara’a. But with Hezbollah reinforcing the Syrian military, the Free Syrian Army were forced to evacuate Homs in May 2014 ( Zuhur ; Sherlock and Samman ). While the most vocal and known activists moved with the Free Syrian army to al-Waer, other anti-Regime citizens remained in Homs living under a cloud of suspicion from Syrian intelligence. The Syrian regime forced people remaining in the city to sign a declaration of loyalty to President Bashar al Assad. Although many people signed it, they remained silently hopeful that the revolution would succeed. This included the parents of the children participating in Romeo and Juliet. Any activity deemed subversive likely would be met with prison, torture, and possibly death. The regime intelligence apparatus likely would have considered any theatre potentially subversive. But performing theatre over the internet in collaboration with Ameen and Bulbul, who were considered dissidents, would certainly have registered as an act of treason against the regime. Nevertheless, the parents allowed their children to make the treacherous journey from Homs across oppositional lines to al-Waer five times per week for four months ( Ameen ). Over those four months, Ameen and Bulbul rehearsed Romeo and Juliet with both groups of children. In the mornings, Bulbul traveled to the Souriyat building and rehearsed with the Amman group for three hours. Working in a small activity room with speckled brown concrete floors and white walls lined with the children’s artwork, the cast in Amman traded positions reading the lines played by the actors in al-Waer. Then between noon and three in the afternoon, Ameen brought the children to his temporary apartment for rehearsal. The timing varied daily in order to avoid creating a predictable pattern of movement that could make capturing them easier. Returning home from Souriyat, Bulbul waited for an email from Ameem to say that the children were ready. Then Bulbul would call Ameen on Skype for the group to begin rehearsal. While Bulbul directed, Ameen took notes and read the Amman casts’ roles. After two months of meeting in this way, Bulbul and French scenographer, Jean Yves Bizien, cleared the rooftop of Souriyat, and multimedia designer, Hassan Muhra, completed the Skype projection installment. This allowed the two casts to rehearse together for the first time. Until this point, the children in Amman and Homs had not met each other. The first meeting, which Muhra captured on video, was a moment of joy for both those in Amman and al-Waer. Bulbul had the children standing in a group behind him in Amman, while in al-Waer Ameen kept the children out of camera frame. After a few minutes of adjusting the camera image so that it was clear, and ensuring that the sound preferences were all correct, Ameen instructed the children in al-Waer to enter the frame. As soon as the two groups saw each other they both giggled coyly. Ameen noted that the children in Syria desperately wanted to make this connection with other Syrian children living outside of the war. At the same time, Bulbul explained that seeing the children in Syria for the first time, reminded the children in Amman that they were still connected to the country. The giggling, Bulbul speculated, was a combination of the children processing these complex emotions bound up with the romantic connotations at play in Romeo and Juliet. After a few moments of feigned embarrassment, the children composed themselves and Bulbul introduced the actors from Amman. Ameen followed by introducing the actors in the al Waer apartment. For two months following this initial introduction, the children forged a virtual bond necessary for the performance and psychological benefit of each. The ability for the children to meet and perform Romeo and Juliet relied on a confluence of tactics and technologies that created enough space for the project to exist temporarily and then leave traces in the act of its disappearance. In a physical way, the Syrians involved in creating Romeo and Juliet located pockets in the crevices of the map, from which they could contest power. In al-Waer, just outside of Homs, under the protection of the Free Syrian Army, Ameen and the children worked from a private apartment. The regime, however, continued advancing towards this suburban enclave from its regained position in Homs. This meant that during rehearsals and performances the group endured regular shelling from mortar rounds and barrel bombs. In a particularly tense moment during the first performance, when the siege was audible in the background, the internet connection severed leaving the audience in Amman to wonder if the apartment in al-Waer had been struck. Adding to the already perilous situation of producing a play while under bombardment, the four children participating lived in a regime held neighborhood in Homs. As mentioned earlier, regime forces captured Homs a few months prior to the beginning of rehearsals. For four months, five days per week, Ameen drove through the front line between opposition and regime forces in order to pick the children up for rehearsals. Describing his drive back from Homs, Ameen noted that there was one road on which he had to travel where the regime forces positioned snipers on the rooftops. Both entering and exiting the area on this road, Ameen recalls having to drive quickly in a specific lane because it created a difficult angle for the snipers attempting to shoot. Additionally, he varied the days and times of the rehearsals, some days picking the children up at 2pm, then the next day at 5pm. In this manner he avoided predictability making it more difficult to become a target ( Ameen ). During a documentary produced by Arte TV called Jordan: Romeo and Juliet, Love at War , Ameen drove a reporter through the streets of al-Waer after dropping the children off following rehearsal. The landscape was littered with debris from the war, crumbling buildings that the Syrian forces destroyed, and charred automobiles parked wherever they had been when the fighting began. Ameen, acknowledged the risk he and the children took by performing this play on the internet. At the same time, he argues that to be silent in the face of oppression would be the same as agreeing with Assad’s brutality. The children’s parents, according to Ameen, agreed and were excited that their children were working with him and Bulbul. Of course, both Bulbul and Ameen admit that at the time of the play, all involved still believed that the revolution would be successful. Russia had not yet committed its full presence and the Free Syrian Army still held major areas in the south and east including Dara’a, Idlib, and Aleppo ( ARTE GEIE ). The apartment they rehearsed and performed in did not belong to Ameen, nor anyone else involved in the play. Its owner had allowed Ameen to live there with his family so that he could escape Homs when the regime took control. Prior to living in the apartment, Ameen moved seven other times to escape the regime forces who actively looked for him. In the camera frame, two rooms were visible. The room where the actors performed looked to be a small living room. In some of the videos and images a couch and other furniture was visible. The room in the background, which was separated from the living room by standard double door frame passage, was an office. During the performance, however, Ameen converted this room into audience seating. On the frame over the doorway, he and the children crafted a brick façade that mimicked Bizien’s scenography in Amman. Meanwhile, in Jordan, Bulbul and the children carved out space on the roof of a private building so that they would not have to worry about being censored by Jordanian authorities for presenting potentially political material. When Bulbul began working on the adaptation for Romeo and Juliet , he intended for it to be performed in Zaatari. When those plans were scuttled by UNHCR and camp authorities, he searched for another space. There are performance spaces in Amman belonging to the Ministry of Culture that Bulbul could have used. In fact, a friend of Bulbul’s from the High Institute of Dramatic Art in Damascus, managed one of these spaces. But using a government owned space meant exposing the show to the eye of the Jordanian censors. While the play was not explicitly political, at least not in a manner that would cause concern to the government, Bulbul’s experience with censors in Syria followed by his recent run in with Jordanian authorities in Zaatari meant that he was overly cautious in the way he viewed access to the work. Moreover, even if the Jordanian authorities did not attempt to censor the play, there was always the risk that Syrian intelligence would create problems for the production if it were held in a public location. According to Bulbul, following the media coverage of Shakespeare in Zaatari he felt certain that Syrian intelligence was surveilling him in Amman. He did not want to risk them creating a conflict that would derail the performance or harm the children. For that reason, he sought a place that had controlled access. This would be a tactic Bulbul repeated for his next play Love Boat (2016) which was performed in the French Institute in Amman. The spatial tactics Bulbul and Ameen employed linked separate spaces while evading the official flow of power. For Bulbul and the cast in Amman, the ability to operate in a space outside Jordanian authority meant that a performance absent government intrusion was possible. For Ameen and the cast in Homs, moving in the shadows and working from the apartment reduced their risk of imprisonment, torture, or death. In Syria’s current state of exception, the regime heavily regulates the landscape. Even though the group was in al-Waer this space was not entirely safe from the state. As Giorgio Agamben notes, in the state of exception there is no space free from government intrusion ( Agamben ). It is quite literally a matter of one’s life that under the suspension of the rule of law, those seeking to subvert an oppressive state create their own map of shadows with trajectories that travelled in between them. Ameen’s use of satellite communications in order to generate anti-regime theatre is, by itself a production of desire that uses the structures and geographies of the powerful tactically to reach beyond the map of the Syrian revolution into the international sphere. Ameen, operated from space within the Syrian borders. Although the Free Syrian Army defended this position from the Syrian regime, under the logic of the nation-state, it still belonged to the government. Using defense terminology, the land under Free Syrian Army Control was occupied by illegal opposition forces. Al-Waer, the area from where Ameen broadcast Romeo and Juliet was cordoned off on all sides by regime forces (ACAPS). The only option for the children in Homs and Ameen to connect with anyone outside of the nation’s border, was through the internet. Even with proxy servers, using the regime’s infrastructure to propagate anti-regime material meant both being in regime-controlled areas and risking detection due to the surveillance of online traffic by the Ministry of Information. Using satellite communications, therefore, was the group’s only alternative. Furthermore, the technology required for this communication, although currently in the possession of the Free Syrian Army, originally belonged to the regime. Members of the Syrian Army took the equipment when they defected to the Free Syrian Army once Assad began assaulting civilians. Romeo and Juliet , therefore, relied on equipment purchased by the regime in order to cross regime-controlled territory into Jordanian communication space. This re-appropriation of equipment is commonplace in insurgency situations where the oppositional forces requisition regime equipment for operational communication. What is most extraordinary about this tactical use of regime technology is that it was employed in service of theatre as a revolutionary apparatus. In insurgencies communications are an essential element to the success of operations. The Free Syrian Army, as the primary insurgency force in this area, recognized the political value in this theatrical project, and enabled it through use of critical satellite resources. The Tactics of Desire Beyond its own cartographic inversion, Romeo and Juliet Separated by War circulates within a larger milieu of work that argues effectively for the revolutionary value of theatre. That the Free Syrian Army in al-Waer saw it as important, underscores the ability theatre has in crafting scenarios that imagine life inside and beyond the revolution. One production alone did not create this understanding though. Romeo and Juliet Separated by War must be viewed in concert with other anti-regime productions such as Shakespeare in Zaatari and Love Boat. These works must also be coupled with the activist performances by artists such as the late May Skaff who helped lead the effort to collect over 300 artist and scholar signatures on the “Milk Statement,” which responded to the initial crisis in Dara’a by demanding that humanitarian aid supplies be delivered to those under siege in the southern Syrian province ( Ziter "Clowns" 140, 45 ). Even more important is to place these performances besides others that have yet to be told. All these individual performers and groups are led by desire to produce. In one example, Zabeida’s revolution applied broadly to an oppressive patriarchy rather than to a dictatorial regime or failed international humanitarian response. Zabeida working in Azraq wanted to show the teenage girls in her class that they did not have to accept the role of caretaker assigned to them by the male dominated culture. Through performance she created a vocabulary for the girls to find value in their intellectual capacity. In the other example, the children in Homs and Amman, along with Ameen and Bulbul, operated within and counter to physical and technological limitations. Both groups needed to connect—Homs with those outside Syria and Amman, those within. Furthermore, they had a drive to scream to the world about the violence occurring in Syria. The desire to produce for both groups mentioned in this article worked instinctually to push life forward despite desperate circumstances. Although each of their desires manifested in some sort of cultural product, neither the product, nor accumulation of any object, was the focus of their desires. For Zabeida, desire produced an opportunity to teach young women about their value. This need to teach for Zabeida recurrently appeared in her life as a displaced Syrian in both Azraq and Zaatari. Of course, in Azraq it led her to seek a volunteer position in teaching with Relief International. Prior to this experience, however, Zabeida lived in Zaatari with her family. While there she adopted five siblings whose parents were killed during the war in Syria ( IRC ). Likewise, Bulbul, Ameen, and the children of Romeo and Juliet Separated By War wanted to connect with each other and remember what it was like to play and enjoy life as Syrians. The children in Homs needed to imagine a life outside of the daily bombardments and violence. The children in Amman needed to know that Syria still existed. Neither Zabeida’s theatre in education practice nor Romeo and Juliet Separated By War originated in a desire aimed at an object or accumulation. These moments of performance were born from desire. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Jabhat al Nusra was the name for an Al Qaeda affiliated militia in Syria that was active in the war. In late 2016 this militia changed in name to As Jabhat Fatah al Sham. Although Mohammed publicly posts anti-regime skits on Facebook regularly, I am using only his first name out of respect for his safety. According to the 2017 Terms of Reference for Service Contracting, the NGO Questscope was given sole teacher training responsibility for the Drop Out program. A ghost teacher is a teacher that is on the official record for the Ministry of Education as teaching at a specific school, is being paid for this position, but does not actually report to work. This is often used as a method for ministry officials to provide a salary to relatives or friends. Palmyrene queen in from 240 – 274 AD. Shakespeare in Zaatari was Nawar Bulbul’s first creation with displaced Syrian children in Jordan. This play included over 100 children in Zaatari Refugee Camp performing an altered version of King Lear . It was first performed on March 27, 2014. See: Pitchford, Gerald Barton. 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"Reading Two Greek Refugee Plays in the Season of the Syrian Refugee Crisis." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 33.1 (2018): 9-29. Print. Ziter, Edward. "Clowns of the Revolution: The Malas Twins and Syrian Oppositional Performance." Theatre Research International 38.2 (2013): 137. Print. Ziter, Edward Blaise. "The Syria Trojan Women: Rethinking the Public with Therapeutic Theater." Communication and the Public 2.2 (2017): 177-90. Print. Zuhur, Sherifa. "The Syrian Opposition: Salafi and Nationalist Jihadism and Populist Idealism." Contemporary Review of the Middle East 2.1-2 (2015): 143-63. Print. References About The Author(s) Bart Pitchford is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Directing at the University of Montevallo. In 2019, He graduated with his PhD in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin. Bart’s scholarly focus is on Syrian theatre after the 2011 revolution, particularly the work of Nawar Bulbul. Bart also writes about the intersection of theatre, war, and the military. Some of Bart’s invited speaker engagements include Howlround Military and the Arts Convergence, Great River Shakespeare Theatre Festival, and Texas Creative Forces Arts and Military Conference. Bart’s publications include multiple essays and articles in American Theatre Magazine, Theatre Topics, and chapters in the books Performance in Militarized Cultures (2017) and Arabs, Politics, and Performance (Expected Publication in 2022) . Bart is also a cofounding member of the Middle Eastern Theatre focus group at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Previous Next Attribution:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre By Tiran Manucharya Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre . By Amina ElHalawani. London and New York: Routledge, 2024; pp. 170 + x. Reviewed by Tiran Manucharyan Amina ElHalawani’s monograph Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre is a detailed study of the transformative potential of theatre in the political development of a country through the examples of intersections between theatre and politics in Egyptian and Irish contexts. Clearly, an essential inspiration for the author is the unique place of the play Waiting for Godot (1952) by the Irish-born playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1959) in Egyptian theatre tradition. A notable example of Beckett’s influence in Egypt is the frequent comparison, including by ElHalawani, of one of the country’s most influential plays, The Farfurs (1964, Al-Farafir ) by Yusuf Idris (1927-1991), with Beckett’s masterpiece. References to Beckettian characters and scenes are abundant in the work of many of Idris’s compatriots of his time, some of whose work is incorporated into ElHalawani’s study. Today, too, Beckett’s work continues to speak to issues within Egyptian society, evidenced by the periodic revisits to his plays on Egyptian stages. The 2015 production of Waiting for Godot , directed by Ahmed Sobhi, or the 2024 production of Endgame (1957), directed by El-Saeed Qabil, both on the stage of Cairo’s E-Taliaa Theatre, are only a couple of such examples. This significant and ongoing influence of Beckett on Egyptian theatre indicates that the topic of ElHalawani’s monograph has the potential to make a timely and pertinent contribution to the study of Egyptian theatre. ElHalawani’s take on Beckett’s work is in line with the almost canonized perception of it among Egyptian playwrights and directors, interpreting Waiting for Godot as a play that turns theatre into “the arena in which rebellion is not only suggested but performed” (90). In this stance, the author is inspired by the highly prominent Egyptian playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim’s (1898-1987) experiments with the Theatre of the Absurd, in which life is depicted “as constant struggle” (75), and Michael Y. Bennett’s reading of Waiting for Godot as “a recast myth of Sisyphus” (76). Building on this standpoint, ElHalawani’s book narrates a convincing history of direct and indirect dialogue between the Irish and Egyptian theatres of rebellion. The monograph incorporates comparative analyses of the work of a handful of Egyptian and Irish playwrights. Egyptian theatre is represented with plays by Tawfiq al-Hakim, Mikhail Roman (1924-1973), Yusuf Idris, and Salah Abdul-Saboor (1931-1981), and Irish theatre with those by Brian Friel (1929-2015), Frank McGuinness (b. 1953), Christina Reid (1942-2015), and Samuel Beckett. Given the significant development and influence of Beckett’s work beyond Irish shores, the inclusion of his work in the scope of a book, which discusses specific national theatres, with a stress on the word ‘national’, is a bold decision by ElHalawani. Yet this is well argued: it is an attempt “to complicate the relation between the centre and periphery exactly through such ambiguous figures [i.e. Beckett and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)]” (11). The study strongly emphasises the belief in theatre’s potential to “effect change” (5). As ElHalawani clarifies, her book “presents a gesture of reading global modernist texts in local contexts, which gives way to new approaches of understanding complex moments of social change entangled within global histories of colonialism and decolonization” (12). The book opens with the story of the Irish playwright and theatre manager Lady Augusta Gregory’s (1852-1932) visit to Cairo, and her acquaintance with and admiration for the Egyptian nationalist Ahmed ʿUrabi, the leader of the 1879-1882 revolt in Egypt against the political leadership of Egypt and British and French control of the country. As the author states, Lady Gregory and Yeats’ project of national theatre has been inspirational for similar endeavors among Egyptian cultural practitioners. In her introduction, the author specifically mentions the most prominent examples of such attempts in Egyptian theatre, undertaken by al-Hakim and Idris. She highlights al-Hakim’s emphasis on how indigenous Egyptian cultural forms were redefined by modernist cultural movements of the time. At almost fifty pages, Chapter One is the longest chapter of the book and makes up one third of it. Such length is necessary to provide the reader with the socio-political context to justify the comparative discussion of Irish and Egyptian theatres. Here, ElHalawani elaborates further on the development of cultural nationalism in Irish cultural production and Yeats’ involvement in it. The author stresses the difference between colonialist nationalism, which looks at “local cultures [of those colonized] as unworthy, primitive and backward”, and the nationalism of liberation movements, which attempt “to reassert themselves and the right of their nations to self-government” (23). In her analyses, ElHalawani incorporates references to and discussions of a wide range of examples from Egyptian and Irish literature, music, and theatre, placing the developments in theatre within the framework of the wider socio-political context and trends in the cultural production of the two nations. Among others, one of the most interesting sections in this chapter is that concerned with the involvement of women practitioners in the theatre scenes in Egypt and Ireland. The section starts by reflecting on the Egyptian playwright and director Laila Soliman’s (b. 1981) 2016 play Zig Zag , which returns to the attack carried out by the British army on an Egyptian village called Nazlit al-Shubak in 1919 and to the stories of the women raped by British soldiers during this attack. ElHalawani interrogates the absence of these women’s stories from Egyptian nationalist discourse—and their availability only in the archives of the British Foreign Office—as underscoring “issues of women’s rights and citizenship” (39). The author draws a parallel with the Irish director and playwright Louise Lowe’s 2011 play Laundry which revisits the infamous Magdalene Laundries, focusing on “the violence and oppression the women and children [in them] went through not only at the hands of the British Empire but even more painfully under the rule of the Irish Free State” (39). As she suggests, the disappearance of women’s narratives and names from the canonical narratives in history “brings to the forefront the question of the missing female names from the theatre canon itself” (41). The next three chapters analyze the key texts chosen by the author for her study. Chapter Three focuses on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , al-Hakim’s Fate of a Cockroach (1965, Masir Sursar ) and Roman’s The New Arrival (1965, Al-Wafid ). Through this selection of plays, the author aims to investigate the Egyptian playwrights’ interpretation of Beckettian absurdist tradition. According to ElHalawani, the Egyptian writers approached the Theatre of the Absurd as a mode that allowed them to perform rebellion in an era of gradually growing disillusionment during the 1960s, which contrasted to the atmosphere of euphoria and hope that the 1952 revolution brought to Egypt in the previous decade. The overarching argument that ElHalawani develops is that the shared “sense of despair in an existing world order” in these plays does not equate to “a despair in life itself” and does not deny “the possibility for man to give it new form.” Moreover, according to ElHalawani, interpreting them as performances of rebellion inside the theatre suggests that “a sense of contagious collectivity pushes for a new world order to be negotiated” (90). In Chapter Three, the discussion is driven by ElHalawani’s attention to the self-reflexive quality of Idris’s The Farfurs , Friel’s Faith Healer (1980), and McGuinness’ Carthaginians (1988). The self-referential quality of these plays, as ElHalawani explains, allows her “to examine the vision of three overtly committed writers concerning [the] transformative nature of the performative act and the different ways in which it can be achieved” (92). Engaging with Idris’s masterpiece, ElHalawani revisits one of the central, almost eternal, questions in Egyptian theatre, which concerns its form and content: what makes theatre Egyptian? This question has long perturbed Egyptian theatre circles, most prominently since the 1960s thanks to al-Hakim’s and Idris’s preoccupations, but arguably since its beginnings in the second half of the nineteenth century. As ElHalawani concludes, Idris’s play is in fact “a complex hybridity” that is “inspired by Western theories of theatre without denying its own authenticity as an Egyptian play” (94). ElHalawani’s conclusion regarding its content follows the same logic, suggesting that in it “the local is made global and then is reduced back to its specificity” (100). What unites these plays, according to the author, is that, through their self-reflexive essence, they enabled the playwrights to reflect on how they saw the role and the responsibility of theatre “to react to the past and present” and to “shape the future” (116). In Chapter Four, engaging with Reid’s Did You Hear the One About the Irishman…? (1985), Abdul-Saboor’s Musafir Layl (1969, Night Traveller ), and Beckett’s Catastrophe (1982), ElHalawani investigates “the correlational dynamics involved in performing oppression and revolt”, considering theatre’s power to turn its audiences into “a communal force” (119). The author argues that in these plays the playwrights are united in prioritizing “a more politically active audience” (121). As she explains, through their liminal quality and by breaking boundaries these plays bring reality and imagination together, turning theatre into “a space in which transformations are possible and where people can redeem their agency”. She goes on to conclude that the outcome is the transformation of theatre into “an interactive endeavour,” which empowers “the audience’s agency both in the theatre and in the public sphere” (137). As well as being a thorough study of the key texts from Irish and Egyptian theatre traditions, ElHalawani’s monograph is a rare example of scholarly writing with an engaging narration. This is enriched by the author’s inclusion of various theatre-related anecdotes, such as Lady Gregory’s above-mentioned encounter with ʿUrabi or Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (in power 1954-1970) involvement in a school production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar . Thus, a valuable addition to the scholarship for researchers and students engaged with theatre, comparative literature, and the intersections between arts and politics, ElHalawani’s book can also attract readers curious about Irish and Egyptian theatres and the role of theatre in the resistance movements of the two nations. Lastly, the appendix of the book provides those who teach or study Egyptian theatre in English with much anticipated first translations of Idris’s opening remarks to The Farfurs and al-Hakim’s introduction to his Qalibu-na al-masrahi (1967, Our Form of Theatre ), a book in which the playwright manifested his vision of how a truly Egyptian theatre could develop. As a final note, I would like to highlight the recently rekindled encouraging interest of English language publishers in Egyptian and Arab theatre in general. One hopes this will result in additional publications on the subject, since—despite its not very long documented history—theatre in the Arabic language has produced a huge number of brilliant texts, many of which may help us to make sense of some of the crises we witness today, not only in the region but also beyond it. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Tiran Manucharyan is a Lecturer in Arabic at the School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews. Tiran holds a PhD in Arabic from the same university. His thesis looked at politically and socially engaged Egyptian theatre in the second half of the 20th and in the early 21st century. Published in 2024, his first monograph, titled Of Kings and Clowns: Leadership in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre since 1967 , builds on his PhD thesis, focusing on the work of the Egyptian playwrights Yusuf Idris, Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny, Lenin El-Ramly, and Fathia El-ʿAssal. Tiran is currently working on a British Academy-funded project devoted to the work of late-twentieth-century Egyptian women playwrights. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Patrizia Paolini Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF In April 2023, my work became the object of censorship—both indirectly and a posteriori . The precipitating incident involved a late middle-aged male performer appearing in a vest, a pair of cowboy boots, and a slightly grubby yet arguably innocuous pair of Y-fronts. The body reveal of such a character had been carefully constructed. It was informed by an aesthetic I share with my ensemble Jesus Paolini Park (JPP), and which makes satirical and critical reference to the biased perception of female versus male and young versus senior bodies. I am a theatre and live performance practitioner who has been based in the UK since 1997. Since 2016, my practice has been linked to Hoxton Hall, an original music hall in the East End of London. At Hoxton Hall, JPP and I developed Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret , a “deconstructed cabaret” and the focus of my doctoral research on “Post-Variety & Cabaret,” a theoretical, self-made term describing what I do: a form between genres. Extracts from that work, including the “Y-fronts,” were chosen by the artist and producer Margot Przymierska for inclusion in a programme designed to animate an evening in April 2023 at the Polish Cultural Institute in London. The adverse reaction of The Polish Cultural Institute (“a part of Polish diplomatic mission, dedicated to nurturing and promoting cultural ties between the United Kingdom and Poland”) to the material contrasted strongly with Margot’s judgment and with the work’s reception at numerous showings in Hoxton Hall. It was described by the event’s organizers as “obscene.” It was claimed, by the same organizers, that it had triggered a “recurring nightmare.” The sight of a mature male in Y-fronts was labelled as indecent. As a consequence, Margot was banned from the Institute and her fee significantly reduced. The ramifications of this night, a detailed account of which appears in Cabaret and Decency: How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped By Censorship have not just landed me in the thick of a continually evolving debate on censorship and propelled me into wider-ranging research on the correlation between contemporary censorship and the perennial “high versus low” cultural divide in the UK,(1) but have also caused me to reflect on how the experience may resonate globally, more particularly with the readership of JADT , as well as with the wider theatrical community of the U.S. Philip Fisher’s remark that “excessive behaviour [in the U.S.] is likely to be mirrored by equivalent extremists [in the UK] before too long” prompts the question as to whether the two countries could be mirroring each other, and therefore potentially learning from each other.(2) As Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “global cultural flows” has taught us, the phenomenon of globalization means that theories and ideas are spreading worldwide, from one place to another, with ease.(3) We are both countries where free expression is supposed to be enshrined in law. As a slew of recent articles in the British press point out, in both countries, censorship is creeping in and disturbing arts and artists, causing them to wonder how, or if, to act.(4) What, if anything, can the U.S. learn from the UK? Perhaps the relevance and potential usefulness of my own experience for the American artistic community is to be found in the insights that my reflection offers and the ensuing conversations that were held, rather than in a particular strategy or solution that should be immediately adopted by artists and scholars in the U.S. Any reaction to censorship, it could be argued, is particular to the context and may be dependent on a specific funding situation. Can we afford, in other words, to speak out? As Nicholas Serota told the Financial Times , “the role of Arts Council England is to act as a protector of artistic freedom, and if we don’t have that freedom, then we move towards living in a country where liberty of both thought and voice is constrained,”(5) adding that “we see plenty of places – look at the US now – where direct funding can be withdrawn as a result of a change of government.”(6) The unexpected reaction to what I call “the Y-fronts episode” has led me, both as a researcher and practitioner, to reflect on the current dynamics of censorship in all societies and how: “What we believe about censorship often reveals how we understand society and the self.”(7) In this regard, it would be useful to summarize at the outset the salient aspects of contemporary censorship discourse centered around New Censorship Theory (NCT). In Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After , Matthew Bunn offers a critical analysis of NCT. Emerging in the latest decades of the twentieth century, NCT’s central objective has been “to recast censorship from a negative, repressive force, concerned only with prohibiting, silencing, and erasing, to a productive force that creates new forms of discourse, new forms of communication, and new genres of speech.”(8) Bunn argues that in this way the controlling effect of censorship [conceived to prevent offences] has been shifted from state control of production and distribution [of speech], onto self-censorship and its dependence on the “market.” It is my hope that by raising questions and offering reflections, the conversations that follow with fellow practitioners and professionals will draw attention to the current censorship discourse and its significance to practitioners and the wider sector. The interviewees introduced below were each asked about censorship as part of the process of my questioning about what actually happened on that April evening in 2023.(9) TESTIMONIES The interviewees responded identically to two aspects of the subject.(10) Firstly, the word “censorship” itself provoked a whole series of hesitations: “Oh! Umm…”, “Oh, dear!”, “Umm!”, “Well... in which sense?”, “Really?”, “Hemm!” and “What do you mean?” This unanimous reaction to the term suggests censorship is not an appealing subject for discussion. Secondly, none of the interviewees were familiar with NCT. Both these reactions seem to indicate that arts professionals in the UK are reluctant to engage with notions of contemporary censorship. While leaving it to the reader to consider the questions that could follow on from this initial observation, it seems significant to note that, before proceeding with the interviews, I received the distinct impression that censorship was not their favourite subject. Interviewees were all asked identical questions. Rather than transcribe the full interview of each interviewee, I report each interviewee’s most distinctive approach to the issue. I have grouped together those who shared the same approach and highlighted similar and contrasting views. Benevolent Approach Expressed no concerns about censorship. John Callaghan British musician, writer, and performance artist. PATRIZIA: Have you ever been censored? JOHN: I don't think my stuff is susceptible to censorship, particularly because…I'm not swearing. I'm not attacking any particular government. I'm just being me.(11) Kieron Jecchinis Classically trained English actor. Graduated from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1979. Film: Full Metal Jacket (1987). Theatre: West End. Member of JPP ensemble, played Y-front character. PATRIZIA: What do you think about censorship? KIERON: When I go and see some theatre I just find it so refreshing. You just think. Oh, ****. They can say that! And to be able to say that…it's just so affirming. PATRIZIA: …And the Y-Fronts? You’ve become a recurring nightmare to some staff. KIERON: I think there must have been some misunderstanding between the Institute and Margot.(12) Sarcastic Approach Approached the conversation with sarcasm. Margot Przymierska Performer, writer, facilitator and creative producer born in Białystok (Poland) and based in London (UK). Producer of PolBud Cabaret, commissioned by Polish Cultural Institute, leading up to the indirect and a posteriori censorship April 2023 . PATRIZIA: Do you think it makes sense to implement censorship in whatever capacity? MARGOT: …it makes complete sense to have censorship if you want to own the narrative or perspective on a particular thing. And if you want to silence the artist, maybe all the voices that disagree with your point of view. So it's a very useful tool. And, less sarcastically, MARGOT: I think if you want to have censorship, you have to put in place a clear mechanism. As Margot, was the direct recipient of the Y-fronts a posteriori censorship, our conversation expanded: PATRIZIA: What do you think about how the Polish Cultural Institute treated you? MARGOT: A real exercise of power and authority…they needed to appear like they're taking the complaints from the audience members seriously and they have to show to them that they have punished the person who's responsible … They told me – “You breached the contract…if I went to you and I've ordered something and you gave me a different product, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on. We would then refer to that contract. Like we didn't order this.” – Yeah, but, I don't make sausages in Tesco.(13) You cannot order something off the shelf because it doesn't exist. I'm making it fresh, fresh performance and it's not as finite as a sausage.(14) Reactionary Approach Strongly disapprove of censorship. Claire and Roland Muldoon Artists, entrepreneurs, partners in work and in life. Core members of CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre), UK counterculture and alternative comedy pioneers. PATRIZIA: NCT sees censorship as a positive tool to be used in society, as it facilitates the best way of expressing something without offending anyone… CLAIRE (in a gentle yet direct manner): It can hurt…It hurts people who are the right people to hurt. It is important to express what has to be expressed. ROLAND: I can't imagine it [NCT] working, really. Referring to their long career: PATRIZIA: So, you really were quite troublemakers? ROLAND and CLAIR (finishing each other’s sentence): Oh yeah, usually yeah. Performing, I mean, what else is there? Otherwise there is no point … that's the function (of performing) otherwise…You know, it turns into Hollywood.(15) Subtle, Necessary Approach The following interviewees are both heads of arts and cultural organizations. Stuart Cox Current director of Hoxton Hall, the music hall in Shoreditch, London, originated in 1838, and which has hosted my work since 2016 . PATRIZIA: Since state censorship had been abolished (in the UK), in 1968, who should decide how to control expression these days? STUART: You have to do it….Or the audience will let you know…the artist has to be cautious and question very honestly what might be the impact of their work. PATRIZIA: How do you approach circumstances related to censorship in your role as chief director of Hoxton Hall? STUART: … that basically is my role, in every aspect. So like you know … Do I pay this person this amount of money? What's the impact of that? Do I take this piece on? What's the impact of that? I'm looking at this piece and I see something that had caused me a worry about whether that is right…I have to really think about the decision around things, and that includes why you're telling a person they can't do that at this stage and just be very…true to who you are and those decisions…And I think I would hope that always when I'm facing those decisions, I try to do it with thought. And consider everyone in that process. Inspired by the Muldoon’s opposing view, I say: PATRIZIA: Maybe, rightly or wrongly, I'm sure, it may happen that there may be the need to…or maybe the feeling that it would be right… like we need and want to “break” something. They, the artist wants to do something that…it is a risk because it could…in fact, offend somebody, because it may be important to do so… STUART: You know, I get what you're saying. But…I still think that you have to kind of talk to everyone. You kind of like involve the artists themselves in this conversation…There has to be, I think…to move on something in the centre…and then make the kind of decision about that … In a positive way…(16) Karena Johnson Former Artistic Director and CEO of Hoxton Hall. Since 2022 Head of Creative Collaboration & Learning at the Barbican.(17) PATRIZIA: What’s your thought about current censorship? KARENA: I think it's a tricky time … the Internet and all that … although we might be in a live performance space, actually we still work within a digital landscape and the digital world allows you to say anything you want uncensored. And so the idea that you can behave as you would digitally in real life is not really … A tenable thing to do. PATRIZIA: Did you ever have to enforce censorship? KARENA: I think no, I've never really had to censor anything. Because, I think the work finds the audience that it speaks to… no one is going to come and pitch me something that’s going to be, like racist or sexist or homophobic, because all the organisations I've ever worked in are very clear about that and my politics have aligned very clearly with those institutions. However, it's only in bigger institutions … It's because of visibility. It has other things to deal with like, you know, like funders, like sponsors, like patrons ... Yeah. And I think that conversation, comes up when you have to deal with the bigger institutions... PATRIZIA: Who exercises control, censorship these days? Institutions or culture itself? KARENA: Yeah … big institutions, maybe are controlling or looking after or leading their culture, having different level of responsibility than you do when you've got a fringe venue … Also, I think that there's a very big difference between what an institution and what and artist might think is censorship or not. Is censorship saying you can't do that thing? Maybe, … or … It's not for me. I would say that's just a choice. But for the individual artist … [it] is important … that nobody should ever say no, and that if you're saying no, it's censorship. But I don't think that is actually censorship.(18) Within the industry, Cox’s and Johnson’s professional roles differ from the other interviewees (all artists), in that they operate in a realm between artists and institutions. This seems to influence their similar approach to censorship. To counterbalance the Cox-Johnson approach, we’ll look at another professional in a leading role at a cultural organization: Will Gompertz. The former artistic director of the Barbican Cantre and a former BBC arts editor clarifies his position on censorship by identifying “cancel culture as the greatest challenge facing the arts.”(19) In an interview in Prospect magazine, he responds to the question “What is the greatest challenge facing the arts industry today?” by saying: … it has to be cancel culture. The purpose of the arts is to question, challenge, reflect and enlighten. Great art reveals a truth, and debate and disagreement about the nature of that truth is a function of art. But such is the rallying power of social media, debate is being stifled by self-censorship and fear of disagreeing with the prevailing orthodoxy. Previous generations have fought hard for free speech; so must we.(20) Gompertz held his position as director of the Barbican Centre, from 2021 to autumn 2023. His appointment and resignation were surrounded by controversy. The beginning of his time at the Barbican, when the Centre was dealing with serious accusations of racism within the organization coincided with the need of a “long journey of cultural change at the Barbican”(21) as indicated by The City.(22) Dex reports: “The Centre’s director of Arts and Learning, former Tate and BBC man Will Gompertz, has been hastily elevated to ‘joint interim managing director’”, which lead to Gompertz’s final appointment as artistic director. Shortly before his departure, the Barbican cancelled Resolve Collective’s exhibition in the wake of “anti-Palestinian censorship.”(23) As reported, collective artist Yto Barrada’s statement, “We cannot take seriously a public institution that does not hold a space for free thinking and debate, however challenging it might feel to some staff, board members, or anxious politicians,”(24) indicates the complexity of the event. In a joint statement with Claire Spencer, Gompertz said: “During the run of their exhibition, Resolve Collective and their collaborators have been subject to a number of unacceptable experiences...…we are taking this situation extremely seriously and are currently working with the broader Barbican team to understand the details of what happened.”(25) A few months later Will Gompertz left the Barbican Centre for a much less prestigious position. Official declarations on the reasons for his sudden departure are unavailable. Gompertz’s relevance to this observation is his clear position on censorship, as reported by Prospect in 2023, a position not commonly shared or expressed by people of his profile. Coincidently, Will Gompertz, with the aim of making the Barbican a more inclusive and diverse center for art, education and enterprise, created the position of Head of Creative Collaboration & Learning at the Barbican to which the last interviewee, Karena Johnson, was appointed. Conclusion By bringing together the interviewees’ testimonies, this piece has raised several questions. On the one hand, we have The Muldoons encouraging a self-censorship that aims to protect the “trouble making” nature of the material; “otherwise there is no point.” On the other hand, we have Cox insisting on the importance of self-censorship as a way of being in control of the impact of what the practitioner says, in respect of all involved. Consequently, self-censorship could promote or have an adverse effect on what would be expected to be a controlled outcome. Is it possible, then, contra NCT, that what is called self-censorship could promote unwanted reactions? As a practitioner, it seems necessary to remark on the noticeable division between the Cox-Johnson approach and that of the other interviewees. The preoccupations and responsibilities of heads of arts and culture organizations seem closely correlated with the person in charge of these organizations. Gompertz’s case is a good example of the complexity of control at that level. The Y-fronts episode has unveiled artists’ inability to predict all possible reactions to their work. Also, applying self-censorship could paralyse the artist’s practice altogether if all possible offences should be considered by the artist. The vivid testimony of the final interviewee would perfectly elucidate my thinking. Factual Approach Ridiculusmus A multi award-winning theatre company led by David Woods and Jon Haynes that has been producing seriously funny theatre since 1992. PATRIZIA: What do you think about the Y-fronts episode? And what about censorship currently defined by NCT? JON: It makes me think about a walkabout act David and I did in Dublin in the 1990s. I think he’d nicked the idea from somewhere else. We walked through the streets following each other, joined by a rope tied in a noose around each of our necks. It seemed to be going well. Then a woman sidled up to me and said, “I find what you’re doing offensive because my brother committed suicide the other week.” How could you have applied NCT to that? Just not to have done the act, I suppose. One has to go about one’s practice under the assumption that with anything you do there is always going to be someone somewhere who will find what you do offensive (“And not in a good way,” as the saying goes). But then, following on from that, there will always be someone somewhere who finds the watered down, safe and possibly more insipid version of your original (or nicked) idea offensive as well. Which means that in the end you’re frozen and can’t do anything.(26) References Patrizia Paolini, “How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped by Censorship,” Comedy Studies 16, no. 1 (2025): 118-133. Philip Fisher, “Censorship Rears its Ugly Head”, British Theatre Guide , February 17, 2023, accessed June 4, 2025. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/features/censorship-rears-its-ugly-head-592 . Arjun Appadurai. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 296. Natasha Tripney, “Cancel Cultures: Theatre Censorship Around the World”, The Stage , March 8, 2024, accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/cancel-cultures-theatre-censorship-around-the-world ; Lyn Gardner, “How Will Artistic Freedom Endure as Political Tides Shift?” The Stage , April 28, 2025, accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/how-will-artistic-freedom-endure-as-political-tides-shift-arts-council-lyn-gardner ; Kate Maltby, “Artistic Freedom in our Theatres is Being Lost to Fear and Self-Censorship,”’ The Guardian , October 12, 2024 accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/artistic-freedom-in-theatres-lost-to-fear-self-censorship . Arts Council England is a UK government-funded body. Founded in 1994, it is dedicated to promoting the performing, visual and literary arts in England. Nicholas Serota, quoted in Franklin Nelson, “Axing Arts Quangos Risks ‘Liberty of Thought’ Says Nicholas Serota,” Financial Times , April 18, 2025, accessed June 4, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/4229bcfe-80a4-4a62-b5f8-ec8f11d99976 . Matthew Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 29. Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” 26. The interviews were conducted in accordance with the ethical requirements put in place by the University of Kent. The interviews included in this essay were conducted with ethical approval through the University of Kent, UK. Each participant provided written consent for their names and interview contributions to be published in this essay. John Callaghan, interview by Patrizia Paolini, August 27, 2024 Kieron Jecchinis, interview by Patrizia Paolini, December 7, 2023 A renowned UK superstore. Margot Przymierska, interview by Patrizia Paolini, October 8, 2023. Claire and Roland Muldoon, interview by Patrizia Paolini, August 28, 2024. Stuart Cox, interview by Patrizia Paolini, November 3, 2023. The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London. It is owned, funded, and managed by the City of London Corporation. Karena Johnson, interview by Patrizia Paolini, February 2, 2024. Harriet Sherwood, “Will Gompertz to Become Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum,” Guardian , August 4, 2023, accessed November 20, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/04/will-gompertz-to-become-director-of-sir-john-soanes-museum . Prospect Team, “Will Gompertz: Cancel Culture is Stifling the Arts,” Prospect , May 10, 2023, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/music/61326/will-gompertz-barbican-cancel-culture-arts . Robert Dex, “Racism Row at the Barbican - How Did It Start and What Happens Next?,” Evening Standard , November 15, 2021, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/racism-row-barbican-centre-what-happens-next-b966025.html . The City of London Corporation is the governing body of the Square Mile, dedicated to a vibrant and thriving City. The Barbican Centre is in part of this governing body. Garreth Harris. 2023. “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of 'Anti-Palestinian Censorship' Row,” The Art Magazine , June 23, 2023, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Lanre Bakare, “Two Artists Withdraw Work from Barbican Show in Row Over Gaza Talk,” Guardian, March 8, 2024, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/08/two-artists-withdraw-work-from-barbican-show-in-row-over-gaza-talk . Garreth Harris, “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of ‘Anti-Palestinian Censorship’ Row,” The Art Magazine , June 23, 2023, accessed November 18, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Ridiculusmus, Jon Haynes, and David Woods, interview by Patrizia Paolini, November 28, 2023. Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 295–310. Bakare, Lanre. “Two Artists Withdraw Work from Barbican Show in Row Over Gaza Talk.” Guardian , 8 March 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/08/two-artists-withdraw-work-from-barbican-show-in-row-over-gaza-talk . Bunn, Matthew. “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After.” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 25-44. Callaghan, John. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 27 August 2024. Cox, Stuart. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 3 November 2023. Dex, Robert. “Racism Row at the Barbican - How Did It Start and What Happens Next?’. Evening Standard , 15 November 2021. https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/racism-row-barbican-centre-what-happens-next-b966025.html . Fisher, Philip. “Censorship Rears its Ugly Head.” British Theatre Guide . 17 February 2023. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/features/censorship-rears-its-ugly-head-592 . Gardner, Lyn. “How will artistic freedom endure as political tides shift?” The Stage . 28th April 2025. https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/how-will-artistic-freedom-endure-as-political-tides-shift-arts-council-lyn-gardner . Harris, Garreth. “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of ‘Anti-Palestinian Censorship’ Row.” The Art Magazine , 23 June 2023. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Jecchinis, Kieron. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 7 December 2023. Johnson, Karena. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 2 February 2024. Itzin, Catherine. “CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre).” In Stages in the Revolution , Routledge, 1980 Maltby, Kate. “Artistic freedom in our theatres is being lost to fear and self-censorship”. The Guardian . 12th October 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/artistic-freedom-in-theatres-lost-to-fear-self-censorship . Muldoon, Claire, and Roland Muldoon. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 28 August 2024. Nelson, Franklin. “Axing Arts Quangos Risks ‘Liberty of Thought’ Says Nicholas Serota.” Financial Times , 18 April 2025. https://www.ft.com/content/4229bcfe-80a4-4a62-b5f8-ec8f11d99976 . Paolini, Patrizia. “Cabaret and Decency: How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped by Censorship.” Comedy Studies 16 (2024): 118-133. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040610X.2024.2404298?src= Prospect Team. “Will Gompertz: Cancel Culture is Stifling the Arts.” Prospect , 10 May 2023. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/music/61326/will-gompertz-barbican-cancel-culture-arts . Przymierska, Margot. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 8 October 2023. Ridiculusmus, Jon Haynes, and David Woods. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 28 November 2023. Sherwood, Harriet. “Will Gompertz to Become Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum.” Guardian, 4 August 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/04/will-gompertz-to-become-director-of-sir-john-soanes-museum . Tripney, Natasha. “Cancel Cultures: Theatre Censorship Around the World.” The Stage , 8 March 2024. https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/cancel-cultures-theatre-censorship-around-the-world . Footnotes About The Author(s) PATRIZIA PAOLINI (she/her) is a theatre maker and live performance practitioner with over twenty-five years’ experience. Currently, she is working on a practice-based research PhD project, ‘Post Variety & Cabaret,’ at The University of Kent. Her broad career includes many original productions and collaborations. Since 1999, she has been an associate of Ridiculusmus, the award-winning theatre company that has produced, among other acclaimed works, The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland . Since 2016, her deconstructed cabaret, Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret, has been regularly programmed at Hoxton Hall, London. Her practice is the invaluable, rich terrain, base of her research which focuses on popular performance, the ‘high - low’ cultural divide, and social class dominance’s dynamics. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Michael Y. Bennett Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat Michael Y. Bennett By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Edward Albee’s 2002 play, The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy) , centers around Martin—a very successful, 50-year-old Pritzker Prize-winning architect—and how his family (i.e., his wife of many years, Stevie, and his gay, teenage son, Billy) and his best friend, Ross, react to the fact that Martin has been having an affair with a goat named Sylvia. In short, Ross turns on and betrays the confidence of Martin, Billy is beyond embarrassed and angry, and the once-playful-and-witty Stevie, ultimately, kills Sylvia, dragging the dead, bloody goat across the stage at the end of the play in a scene befitting of Greek tragedy. With these three characters vying for Martin’s attention, this play contemplates the fact that one cannot look in two different directions at once. Humans have stereoscopic vision: we have two eyes, but we can only see one image. Love is being seen, and that is why it is so significant that the moment, according to Martin, when Martin locks eyes with Sylvia is the moment that he knew he was in love with her. And the moment their eyes locked, nobody else (neither his wife, nor his son, nor the familial unit as a whole) could be seen. So, too, in Jesus’s telling of the parable, “A Certain Man had Two Sons,” more commonly known as “The Prodigal Son,” the elder son does not feel seen. The elder son realizes that he is not being seen or heard not just in the moment when his father would not answer his question, but the elder son realizes then, too, the fact that he never was seen during all of his years of being a good son and responsible person. Unlike the other parables of Jesus (which are, largely, didactic ), and unlike the other plays of Albee (which are, largely, tragicomic ), I argue that both “A Certain Man had Two Sons” and The Goat are, ultimately, tragic parables , as love and attention can be focused on a single entity, with everyone and everything else left to fall, unloved and unseen, by the wayside. The following four ideas open up Edward Albee’s The Goat to a biblical reading: 1) the name “Jesus” and “Jesus Christ” are uttered numerous times in the play; 2) Martin’s best friend, Ross, is called “Judas”; 3) John Kuhn suggests that there is a “ leitmotif of religious imagery” [1] in this play; and 4) in his earlier play, Tiny Alice (1964), Albee critiques the illogical nature of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, Kuhn has called the baby-on-the-lap story in this play, a “parable.” [2] However, the baby-on-the-lap story is not just a parable; I argue that the play as a whole, is the parable. I am referring to the the most complete and complex of Jesus’s parables: “The Prodigal Son,” or as biblical scholars call it by its first line, “A Certain Man had Two Sons.” POOF! And then it hits you: Billy, the son, is not a reference, necessarily, to a “Billy goat,” but to the prodigal, “Billy the Kid.” In Albee’s retelling of the parable, all of the characters in the play vie for the father’s (Martin’s) love, a goat/kid is sacrificed, and the father has two “kids.” Albee’s play, then, is a modern adaptation of “The Prodigal Son,” or, rather, Albee’s play is A Certain Man had Two “Kids,” where the focus remains on the impossibility of loving two things at once. In short, both Albee’s The Goat and Jesus’s telling of “A Certain Man had Two Sons” are cautionary damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t tragic parables , where the only learning that occurs is to try to avoid that which cannot be avoided: both trying to love two things at once and loving just one thing, yields tragedy. Current Scholarship on The Goat The Goat premiered on Broadway on March 10, 2002, directed by David Esbjornson and led, most notably, by Bill Pullman (Martin). The play immediately garnered a tremendously positive critical response, racking up major nominations (e.g., a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize) and receiving major awards (e.g., 2002 Tony Award for Best Play and 2002 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play). European (Vienna’s English Theatre, 2003) and UK (Almeida Theatre, 2004) premieres quickly followed, directed by such notable directors as Pam McKinnon and Anthony Page, respectively. While The Goat is over fifteen years old, the field has yet to fully coalesce around a single, central issue involving Albee’s play. Although, in part, because of the title and subtitle (and its call to understand tragedy), scholarship has revolved around two general concerns: the relationship between animals and humans and the nature of different theatrical genres. Deborah Bailin examines the relationship between humans and animals in Seascape (1975) and The Goat to show that what is at stake in this ambiguous relationship is what it means to be human. [3] Brenda Murphy also discusses the relationship between humans and animals in relation to Seascape and The Goat to demonstrate the ways in which anthropomorphism allows The Goat to reverse generic expectations. [4] Tony Stafford deals with genre in invoking the American Pastoral tradition with a nod to the relationship between animals and humans. [5] In “Getting Albee’s Goat: ‘Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy,’” Kuhn argues that, with The Goat , “Albee’s definition of tragedy reaches an intricate fullness.” [6] I, too, make this argument, but Kuhn and I argue it in different ways. Kuhn carefully shows how The Goat fits within the model of Aristotelian tragedy. Kuhn makes seven key points: 1) “Calamity couples with heroic achievement in a tragedy”; 2) Martin is a falling hero whose behavior threatens the heroic acts of a lifetime; 3) the play is a “double tragedy” for both Martin and Stevie; 4) Martin and Stevie’s hubris was “blinding pride”; 5) the play has a classic structure; 6) Albee clearly had the ancient tragedies in mind as he references the “Eumenides” and includes phrases like “tragic farce” and “flaw,” and Martin the hero is always onstage; and 7) “The play generates intellectual and moral insight.” [7] Kuhn further argues that “Philosophically, the Absurd is that existential disconnect between cause and effect which both Stevie and Martin describe: ‘nothing has anything to do with anything.’” [8] Elsewhere I have suggested that the plays of the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd” are ethical parables that guide the viewer to make meaning of his or her own life, which, I later call “absurd tragicomedy.” [9] Kuhn and I have different takes on the absurd in Albee’s early, “most substantial tragedies,” as Kuhn calls them. [10] In The Zoo Story , even though it seems irrational to Peter, Jerry makes sense of his murder-suicide. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) George and Martha are in an absurd situation: they want children, but the world will not give them children. But the play is not (solely) tragic as George and Martha, ultimately, make sense out of their situation and realize that they have each other and that that might be enough. Here, I disagree with Kuhn and want to elaborate on my previous observations. I argue that The Goat is a tragic parable because Albee created a situation, too absurd , too hopeless, out of which meaning cannot be made , moving beyond contradictions that can be resolved, and, thus, the characters live with an unresolved tragic situation. Just like at the end of “The Prodigal Son”—when the father’s answer to his elder son does not rectify the feelings of unequal treatment—in The Goat , the situation cannot be resolved, even with the death of Sylvia. Albee’s play is not only a commentary on social mores and contemporary views of sexuality and the limits of those views, but The Goat also forces us to re-evaluate the parable, which is possibly the most influential piece of short literature in the Western world. But while this article will spend some time re-interpreting this biblical parable, it does so to help us understand, not necessarily “The Prodigal Son,” but to further illuminate Albee’s tragic parable in The Goat and his conception of tragedy. Shedding light on how the parable is tragic reveals how Albee similarly sees the story as tragedy in The Goat . “The Prodigal Son,” or The Elder Brother: Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy In Interpreting the Parables , Craig L. Blomberg summarizes the three main approaches scholars have used in analyzing the parable of “The Prodigal Son” or “A Certain Man Had Two Sons.” First, there are those—especially Wilcock and Arndt—that argue that there is one point coming out of the parable: sinners should repent regardless of the gravity of their sins. Second, scholars such as Danker and Talbert understand the end of the parable as an argument that one needs to celebrate the salvation of others. Third, in what Blomberg contends is the most common interpretation, Thielicke, Schweizer, and Marshall suggest that the parable speaks to the power of the father’s love and patience for both sons. [11] Brad H. Young, in The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation , reads the parable as a “crisis of broken relationships”: By dramatizing a family tragedy the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) focuses on the crisis of broken relationships between a human being and God. A person living without God is like the younger son running away to a far country. But the elder brother living at home with his father is no better off. He is much like a religious person who misunderstands the divine nature and lacks a meaningful relationship with God. The elder son does not show love for his father and struggles, perhaps unsuccessfully, to forgive his brother. He cannot share the joy of his father over the return of the runaway. [12] Young is right that this is indeed “a crisis of broken relationships,” but he places the blame on the wrong family member. He assumes that it is the elder brother who “misunderstands the divine nature.” However, is it not the father who grants the prodigal son his request, symbolically creating two “dead” beings? As David Wenham argues in The Parables of Jesus: Their Art and Use , since the son is “dead” and has lost his “sonship,” the prodigal son’s return is a rebirth: he is “born again,” which accounts for the joy at the return of the prodigal son. [13] What neither Wenham nor Young consider is that the return of the son is also the return of the father. [14] Because the allocation of a person’s belongings is usually saved for after his death—thus, the father commits a symbolic suicide [15] —the return of one’s progeny re-establishes the father as a father. The father, to use Wenham’s language, is symbolically “born again,” as well. The rebirth of the father solves the connective problem between the first and second parts of the parable and provides a cause and effect. The father symbolically declares himself “dead” when he gives away half of his goods and dies not just for his younger son, but for his elder son, as well. As the elder son explains, “Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Luke 15:29). His father, in other words, was no father to him. The play on words with “kid” furthers this idea. In other words, thou never gavest me, not just a goat to eat, but you never gave me a brother to love and enjoy with my friends. The elder son did not know love from his own father, so how, in turn, can the father expect the elder son to love his younger brother, a “dead” son ? The elder son certainly did not bask in his father’s love, but in his father’s “commandments.” The rebirth of the father, with the return of the prodigal son, transformed the father from a law-abiding (or, rather, commandment-abiding) Pharisee to an open-armed and loving Christian. The key to this lies in the father’s symbolic “death” and “rebirth.” One wonders what exactly transpired during the father’s “death.” The elder son suggests that the father set up a series of commandments to be obeyed (“thy commandments”). The death of the fatherly impulse—the impulse to nurture—resulted in the birth of a Pharisaic being. Diverging from Young, then, this would suggest that it was the father who “[misunderstood] the divine nature.” The elder son, then, merely mirrors what he had seen and experienced. The parable raises the question of how one should rectify a bad situation. The standard interpretation of the parable’s answer to this question is through compassion and forgiveness. [16] However, the ending—the elder son’s silence—suggests that compassion and forgiveness do not solve all problems, and in cases such as this, create others. Forgiveness is not the be-all and end-all and responsibility is the foundation on which Christianity is built. In other words, forgiveness is a patch, but responsibility builds solid foundations. The younger son is irresponsible in kind with his youth. The father lacks foresight and, in turn, irresponsibly bestows enormous wealth upon a youth; he enables his son to become a profligate. Symbolically, both father and son become “dead” through the father’s bequeathment of his son’s inheritance. The prodigal son should have contrasted his father; instead, he mirrored him. When the younger son leaves, the father’s actions only confirm his own irresponsibility. If one chooses to be a father, he must accept the responsibility of nurturing his offspring, which the father never does. He never rewards the elder son for his good behavior. “The Prodigal Son” is a cautionary and tragic parable. The father’s irresponsibility causes two deaths: the prodigal son is reborn as a profligate and the father is reborn as a Pharisee. It took the younger son’s “rebirth” to jolt the father into responsibility. It is the younger son who first acts responsibly when he finds himself out of options and goes home and repent. The father simultaneously 1) greets the rebirth of his younger son through repentance and 2) is reborn himself by changing from a Pharisee to a loving Christian. The tale is cautionary in that because the father was not always ready to greet God (or the second coming—the rebirth—of his “son”), his elder son is affected by the father’s Pharisaic ways and may never be able to forgive first and experience the same rebirth that his younger brother and father experienced. Though both prodigal son and father are “born again,” the elder brother remains the parable’s lingering casualty because he has yet to be reborn. From Absurdity to Tragedy: Billy Goats, or Martin’s Two kids, or “Getting one’s goat” There are a number of possible allegorical readings of The Goat : one such possible reading being that, like Judas, Ross betrays of Martin’s confidence and friendship; Sylvia represents Jesus, as she dies for man’s (Martin’s) sins at the end of the play; and Stevie, similar to Pontius Pilate, crucifies Sylvia (Jesus). Of course, there is also a potential non-biblical allegorical reading which equates the forbidden love of a goat with a man’s once forbidden love of another man. As interesting as these allegorical readings are, they do little to help us better understand the play and, more specifically, understand tragedy, which is invoked in the subtitle of Albee’s play (i.e., Who is Sylvia? or [Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy] ). Instead, I suggest that the intellectual thrust of The Goat and “A Certain Man had Two Sons” are similar, and that the nature of these plays is tragic. The Goat starts out, in typical Albee fashion, with a series of relatively mundane questions which are only answered by a roundabout and circuitous dialogue. And, of course, much like many of his plays, it takes place in “ A living room .” [17] Why is the living room significant here? I have recently argued that Albee comes from a line of great American living room tragedians (e.g., Hellmann, O’Neill, Miller, Williams, etc.), with Albee’s innovation being that he introduced the tragicomic worldview to this classic living room tragedy particularly in his 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [18] If we think back to this play, the talk and ethos of the living room in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is clearly tragicomic, much like the dialogue and ethos of this living room in The Goat . Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is sort of a reversal of the Oedipal complex, where the “son” is killed off by the father, in order for him to sleep with/love the mother. This death of the “son” allows George and Martha to produce happiness, or at the very least, a new world that is based on reality. In Albee’s plays, sacrifice—especially with religious overtones—is prominent, which produces an effect of absurd tragicomedy . In The Zoo Story (1958) Jerry is a Jesus-like savior who runs into the knife, killing himself to wake Peter up from his bourgeois illusion of comfort, hoping to yield enough knowledge and awareness in Peter for him to live a better and more meaningful life. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the “son,” or the “kid”—like Jesus—is sacrificed and dies for the sins of George and Martha, allowing for the rebirth, not of the son, but their marriage and life together. While there is pain from the sacrifice, it is for their souls, as there is now hope for salvation, or at least, for saving and/or salva(ging) their marriage. The end is painful, and Martha is scared and experiences emotional pain, but the sun is also rising, and it is both literally and figuratively a new day for George and Martha. The tragicomic ethos that has produces both laughter and pain throughout the night appropriately produces a bittersweet ending: sad, uncertain, but also filled with new possibilities. In contrast, in having sexual intercourse with Sylvia, it is not Martin who dies—his wife, Stevie, mentions numerous times how she is going to kill him—but his sexual death is accompanied by Sylvia’s actual death at the hands of Stevie. The bloody stage at the end of the play is more typical of a Greek tragedy. Here, Stevie kills off the “kid” to attempt to save/salvage her own marriage, but with this animal sacrifice, everyone involved loses innocence, and all are irrevocably changed, but unlike George and Martha and Nick and Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Peter in The Story , without any redemption or hope of a better future. Martin’s Death and Rebirth Martin first becomes a father through a sexual death with Stevie. Billy is the resulting son, the kid, who is at the pivotal age of seventeen—the last year before adulthood and, presumably, leaving for college. Billy, his kid, is not “prodigal” in the traditional sense of the word as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary : he is neither “extravagant; recklessly wasteful of one’s property or means” nor a “reckless or wayward person; a returned wanderer.” But Martin, and certainly Ross, approach Billy’s homosexuality with a mindset from another era, believing that he may grow out of his sexuality: ROSS: Passing phase. Have you had the old serious talk?MARTIN: The “You’ll get over it once you meet the right girl” lecture? Nah, I’m too smart for that, so’s he, so’s Billy. I told him to be sure. Says he’s sure; love it, he says. [19] There is an implication here that Billy is having sex, and a lot of it. Here, Billy is at fault for the two maxims—“nothing to excess” and “surety brings ruin”—that follow the famous inscription, “Know thyself” at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. But, here, Billy does know himself. Apollo is the judge and features prominently in the Eumenides and within one page of the first mention of “Eumenides,” Albee riffs on the famous inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, “Know thyself”: ROSS: OK? Ready? Ready Martin; here we go; just…be yourself.MARTIN: Really?ROSS ( A tiny bit testy ): Well, no; maybe not. Put on your public face. [20] This has the same tenor as a famous Jewish joke: A man goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doctor, I am so unhappy, I just do not know what to do. Can you give me some advice?” The doctor replies: “Just be yourself. Unless you’re a schmuck, though, then be someone else.” In the Eumenides , Orestes is being driven mad and wants the agony to stop: “I sing this song over the sacrificial victim, a frenzied, wild, song, injurious to the phrên , the hymn of the Furies [Erinyes], a spell to bind the phrenes , a song not tuned to the lyre, a song that withers mortals. Relentless destiny spun out our fate…” [21] Unlike Orestes, though, Martin does not want it to stop, and in many ways, the agony only really starts for Martin at the end of the play when Sylvia becomes the “sacrificial victim.” But with the death of the “kid,” Billy, the other kid in the play, no longer has competition and Martin is, in a sense, reborn as a father who can focus his attention on his single son. But the tragedy is two-fold: Martin appears to be a broken man and there needs to be a “sacrificial victim” for Martin to become a better father. In The Goat , the murder of Sylvia is tragic, and the tragedy of the act breeds further unhappiness for everyone. Nothing is going to improve, and every character is worse off. Unlike the deaths of the other so-called children in Albee’s plays, namely the “son” in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and “the baby” in The Play About the Baby (2000) which bring an end to illusions that obscure reality, Sylvia’s death in The Goat does not accomplish anything but death. There are loose ends, though: how will Martin, Stevie, and Billy function afterwards? But unlike in The Zoo Story , Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , or The Play About the Baby , neither the characters nor the audience learn anything from the death of Sylvia, and, thus, Sylvia’s death is meaningless. To Albee, it seems as though suffering can make sense, but only if it yields a newfound rationality to approaching life and the world. While the ending of The Goat provides no way to grow or learn from the tragedy—which makes the play is a tragic parable—for much of the play, Martin is simultaneously the most logical and most illogical character. Architecture happens, initially, by imagining the immaterial in one’s head, before transforming the immaterial to a material reality; builders and construction workers deal in the material, but Martin deals in the immaterial. Martin’s status as the youngest Pritzker Prize winner ever, indicates that Martin is something of a precocious genius. Martin’s youth (i.e., for a Pritzker Prize winner and for someone who thinks they may have Alzheimer’s), and his naiveté about his situation with Sylvia suggest that Martin is immature for his age. An immature male who deals in immaterial realities, however, describes most teenage boys, like Martin’s son, Billy, and Ross’s son, Todd, but does not often describe a 50-year-old man at the height of his career. Prior to the unraveling of the familial unit, Martin appears able to logically compartmentalize and understand all of the love and affection that he can dole out. This ability to bracket one’s emotions in a logical manner is a sign of nuanced thinking and maturity. Martin sees no contradiction in loving both Stevie and Sylvia. For Martin Stevie and Sylvia are not mutually exclusive lovers, not because he is polyamorous, but because Stevie and Sylvia are not in competition with one another. Each of his two lovers provides entirely different sorts of affection and worth. Stevie is a traditional spouse in that she is Martin’s best friend and lover. As Martin quips in a backhand compliment, Martin does not replace Stevie with someone else: STEVIE ( Quite matter-of-fact ): If you are seeing that woman, I think we’d better talk about it.MARTIN: ( Stops. Long pause; matter-of-fact ) If I were …we would .STEVIE ( As offhand as possible ): If not the dominatrix, then some blonde half your age, some…chippie, as they used to call them…MARTIN: …or, worst of all, someone just like you? As bright; as resourceful; as intrepid; …merely…new? [22] Sylvia is not a replacement; she supplements what Stevie does provide. Stevie gives Martin all the love, support, and intellectual stimulation that Martin needs. Sylvia, however, satisfies Martin’s love of female goats. Stevie will never be able to offer Martin what Sylvia provides; as Stevie rightfully observes later, “But I’m a human being; I have only two breasts; I walk upright; I give milk only on special occasions; I use the toilet.” [23] And the tragedy is Stevie is right. Though Martin believes that he and Sylvia fell in love with one another when they first locked eyes (“…and there she was, looking at me with those eyes…” [24] ), Martin and Sylvia are unable to lock eyes during their intimate acts. Martin is oddly correct when he says to Ross, “I’m seeing her.” [25] Sylvia, however, does not see Martin or any of this intimacy; Martin only sees the intimacy and not Sylvia. [26] While Martin believes that he and Sylvia are consensual partners—because Sylvia supposedly backs up into him, and not vice versa—during sexual intercourse, Martin (literally) can see only Sylvia’s backside, as she faces the opposite direction. The tragedy is that while everyone is jealous of Sylvia, Sylvia cannot even appreciate the love; she has no idea what love even is. This only adds insult to injury. Everyone is jealous of a goat, a being that cannot even process (or see) what she has. Conclusion In “A Certain Man had Two Sons,” Jesus tells a parable of the ultimate display of forgiveness through a father’s deep love of his son. Albee creates a parable that displays the capacity to immensely love, not just humans but any two beings who feel mutually seen by one another. But Martin misreads or, like a Greek tragic hero, blind himself to the situation: Martin never considers the base and simple emotion of jealousy. It is important that Billy is an only child, as until now, he has been the sole object of parental attention. But now there is another “kid” in the house, and everyone is jealous. Stevie is jealous of Sylvia. Billy is jealous of Sylvia. Even Ross may be jealous of Sylvia (since he loses his best friend because of her). Martin may be the smartest guy in the room, but he misses the most basic things (e.g., he forgets the name of his best friend’s son; he never even sat in the chair sitting right in his living room, etc.). So, too, our “certain man” justifies giving his younger son his inheritance and shows mercy is mercy by forgiving his son and welcoming him with open arms, but just like Martin, he never accounts for jealousy. The “certain man” of the parable cannot seem to fathom why his elder son is not excited by his brother’s return despite his failure to address the concerns of his elder. And the elder brother cannot imagine why the father does not understand his feelings because he twice asks why he has not been rewarded. And this is the tragedy of both parables: a display of love and attention begets jealousy. The greatest joy on earth, love, cannot exist without enacting pain on someone else, and this is the greatest tragedy of all: free love is never free. References [1] John Kuhn, “Getting Albee’s Goat: ‘Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy,’” American Drama 13, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 5. [2] Ibid. [3] Deborah Bailin, “Our Kind: Albee’s Animals in Seascape and The Goat: Or, Who is Sylvia?,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 18, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 5. [4] Brenda Murphy, “Who is Sylvia?: Anthropomorphism and Genre Expectation,” in Edward Albee and Absurdism, ed., Michael Y. Bennett (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 174-185. [5] Tony Jason Stafford “Edward Albee and the American Pastoral Tradition,” in Edward Albee and Absurdism, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 95-110. [6] Kuhn, “Getting Albee’s Goat,” 2. [7] Ibid., 3-29. [8] Ibid., 25. [9] See Michael Y. Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Michael Y. Bennett, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). [10] Kuhn, “Getting Albee’s Goat,” 1. [11] Michael Wilcock, The Savior of the World: The Message of Luke’s Gospel (Leicester and Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 149-57; William F. Arndt, The Gospel According to St. Luke (St. Louis: Concordia, 1956), 350. Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (WestPoint, InterVarsity Press, 2012), 172; Frederick W. Danker, Jesus and the New Age: A Commentary on St. Luke’s Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 275; Charles H. Talbert, Reading Luke (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 147; Blomberg 172-3; Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father (London: J. Clarke; New York: Harper Bros., 1959), 17-40; Eduard Schweizer, The Good News According to Luke (Atlanta: John Knox; London: SPCK, 1984), 247-8; Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke (Exeter: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 604; Blomberg 173. Working from the scholarship of Cadoux (A. T. Cadoux, The Parables of Jesus: their Art and Use [London: J. Clarke, 1930; New York: Macmillan, 1931], 123.) and Stock (Alex Stock, “Das Gleichnis vom verlorenen Sohn,” Ethische Predigt und Alltagverhalten, ed. Franz Kamphaus and Rolf Zerfass (München: Kaiser; Mainz: Grünewald, 1977), 82-6.), Blomberg argues that the parable makes a separate point with each character: 1) With the “prodigal son,” one can always return home and repent one’s sins, 2) The father is like God in that he forgives anyone as long as they are willing to accept it, 3) The older brother should have rejoiced in his brother’s “reinstatement.” Those “who claim to be God’s people” should take joy in the fact that God extends his grace to the “undeserving” (174). As Blomberg argues, parables, and this one in particular, have allegorical meanings. The characters are allegorical in that “each character clearly stands for someone other than himself” (Blomberg 175). [12] Brad H. Young, The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, LLC, 1998), 130. [13] David Wenham, The Parables of Jesus (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1989), 111. [14] This surface-level reading which poses the question: “Should children be given their inheritance when they are young?”—opens the story and leads us to deeper meanings. First, this question works as extended metaphor: it is a question of what a parent owes a child, when a parent owes a child, what a child deserves from a parent, and when a child deserves something from a parent. With this request, a practically impossible situation arises for both the son and the father. The exchange of money is possible. What is impossible is that the father can no longer give his son something when he dies. This is also a reversal of expectations and a paradox, at least in our culture. Fathers usually give to their sons (money, wisdom, love, etc., which is not to say that the sons do not return love to their parents); there is an implied hierarchy. Therefore, when the father gives half of what he has to his son, part of him will no longer exist after that he gives the money away. The balance of capital changes the balance of power. It also changes the burden of responsibility. The father can no longer be financially responsible for his son. This practical quandary raises an ontological quandary. In the end, the father decides to throw a feast for his returned son. This is when his other son gets angry: “Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Luke 15:29). The father has been thrown into an impossible situation; how do you please one son while not offending the other, or how do you shower one child with affection when there is another child waiting to receive an equal amount of affection? How can a father be a loving parent and please two children at once? This question, like in many parables, is never answered. We are left with the moral injunction to forgive those who have sinned, but the question of how to love is still left up to the reader. The reader must decide how the father should act in this case, or how they should act with their children. [15] Bernard Brandon Scott argues that “The son’s division of the property kills the father” (Hear then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989], 111). Again, I see it more as a suicide since, although the idea was planted in his head by the son, it was the father who carried out and executed the plan. [16] In suggesting that “A Certain Man had Two Sons” is a tragic parable, I am not arguing the parable does not praise forgiveness: one only has to look to “The Unmerciful Servant” (Matthew 18:21-35) and “The Two Debtors” (Luke 7:41-43). What I am arguing is that in “The Prodigal Son,” Jesus says that forgiveness is necessary, but that responsibility is mandatory. If the father was responsible, neither son nor father would have been “dead.” And, maybe more importantly, the elder son would not have adopted the Pharisaic nature of the father. Though, of course, “The Prodigal Son” is closely aligned, thematically, with “The Unmerciful Servant” and “The Two Debtors,” this new reading also aligns “The Prodigal Son” with “The Ten Virgins” (Matthew 25:1-13), “The Faithful and Unfaithful Steward” (Luke 12:42-48; Matthew 24:45-51), and “The Householder and the Thief” (Matthew 24:43-44; Luke 12:39-40). These three parables focus on how one must be ready and responsible, so that one will be able to be judged well when God comes at his unexpected hour. [17] Edward Albee, “The Goat: or, Who is Sylvia? (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy)” in The Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1978-2003 (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005), 538. [18] Michael Y. Bennett, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (London: Routledge, 2018). [19] Albee, “The Goat,” 551. [20] Albee, “The Goat,” 552. [21] Aeschylus, Eumenides, trans. Hebert Weir, rev. Cynthia Bannon, rev. Gregory Nagy, n.d., https://uh.edu/~cldue/texts/eumenides.html. [22] Albee, “The Goat,” 546. [23] Albee, “The Goat,” 575. [24] Albee, “The Goat,” 568. [25] Albee, “The Goat,” 568. [26] This does raise the question of whether or not Martin rapes Sylvia, as consent, for numerous reasons, is impossible to obtain from a goat. While it may be pertinent to some readings of the play, this question is beyond the scope of this essay. Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Sergi Belbel, Lluisa Cunielle, Pau Miro, Marion Peter Holt, Sharon G. Feldman | A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Barcelona Plays Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Sergi Belbel, Lluisa Cunielle, Pau Miro, Marion Peter Holt, Sharon G. Feldman Download PDF A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights Barcelona’s theatre has experienced a remarkable renaissance in the years since the end of the Franco dictatorship. First, performance groups such as La Fura dels Baus, Els Joglars, Dagoll-Dagom, and la Cubana flourished with distinctive productions in which spectacle and movement predominated. In 1976, the Teatre Lluire began to set new production standards with a repertory or international plays. Soon the Catalan language, suppressed for more than three decades, became the vehicle of expression for new playwrights who challenged the performance groups with a “teatre de text”. The new plays in this collection represent outstanding playwrights of three generations. Benet i Jornet won his first drama award in 1963, when he was only twenty-three years old, and in recent decades he has become Catalonia’s leading exponent of thematically challenging and structurally inventive theatre. His plays have been performed internationally and translated into fourteen languages, including Korean and Arabic. Sergi Belbel and Lluïsa Cunillé arrived on the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with distinctive and provocative dramatic voices. The actor-director-playwright Pau Miró is a member of yet another generation that is now attracting favorable critical attention. This collection includes: Josep M. Benet i Jornet: Salamander Sergi Belbel: Strangers Lluisa Cunielle: Barcelona, Map of Shadows Pau Miro: It's Raining In Barcelona Translated and Edited by Marion Peter Holt & Sharon G. Feldman Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage (W)here comes the sun? Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Tamás Jászay Image Credits: Article It's almost a family atmosphere: we spectators, barely a hundred of us, sit around the empty space. Office lights hang high above, from which a cheap paper screen is lowered from time to time, projecting still or moving images. This projection is one of the essential elements of this refreshed, dusted-down, updated Ibsen production, Solness , which premiered on the studio stage of the Örkény István Theatre in Budapest in autumn 2022 and, due to great interest, has been performed at the Szkéné Theatre from February 2024. On the screen, we see the building plans of the master builder and his student, which were never realised, and which are commented on with admiration or hatred. The shadows of the characters projected sharply onto the screen inadvertently add comments and stories to the projected images. If you happen to be sitting on the other side of the screen, you can see the images indelibly projected onto the desperate, pleading, explaining faces, not just their shadows. The screen becomes a time gate. Plans that never materialize transport us to an imagined, idealized futur e, but as we approach the finale, the canvas also becomes a powerful means of bringing the past to life. Suddenly we are watching a family home video, a private documentary of the past half century; the period when Pál Mácsai, playing Solness, became one of Hungary's best known and most admired actors. We peek, we peep into his life, as we have done so many times during the performance, and the (self-)ironic audio commentary is provided at this point by the video's protagonist, Mácsai-Solness himself. Finally, the screen is the "protagonist" in the bombastic finale: we see a projection of Hilde Wangel, who entered previously Solness's ordered yet infinitely lonely life, taken by the master builder as a vampire. From the short introduction, it is clear that Solness , directed by Ildikó Gáspár, plays with different stakes than the usual interpretations of Ibsen's late drama. The director can do all this here and now because the theatrical reception of Solness , written in 1892, is negligible in Hungary. This is worth emphasizing because Henrik Ibsen is clearly the most Hungarian of the Nordic playwrights. The climaxes of his extensive oeuvre are an inescapable cornerstone of the Hungarian repertoire: A Doll's House , Hedda Gabler , The Wild Duck , and even Peer Gynt , which focuses on the totality of the world rather than on a family, regularly appear on stages in Budapest and the provinces. The Master Builder Solness , considered by many to be one of the finest achievements of Ibsen’s oeuvre, is a rare visitor to our region. Yet the first Hungarian-language premiere was already in 1905, relatively early on: part of the ars poetica of the very first Hungarian independent theatre group, the Thália Society, was to introduce contemporary foreign drama to Hungarian audiences. However, theatre memory records fewer than ten (!) Hungarian-language Solness performances in the more than a hundred years that followed, and none of these became canon-shaping performances. In this way, Ildikó Gáspár's production stands lonely in Hungarian theatre history, while loneliness is a prominent theme of the production. Solness. Photo © Judit Horvath This is by no means an over-interpretation: the performance plays with the thematization and problematization of the relationship between the dramatic text written by Ibsen, translated into Hungarian and shortened by the director herself, the reality/present time of the theatrical performance and the reality off stage. We are a long way from, say, Shakespeare's meta-theatre: here, the speech about the theatre does not become a stand-alone (performable) insertion. Instead, from the first to the last moment of the performance, the theatre as a phenomenon becomes an integral part of the plot written by Ibsen. This Solness speaks about the theatre as a political institution, about the perceived or real conflicts between the different generations that run the institution, about the challenges of maintaining the influence acquired in cultural life, about the proper management of a common legacy. It speaks about the Örkény István Theatre itself, its current and renewed artistic leadership, and the chances of young theatre-makers in an unsupportive environment. And it does all this while telling the story of Ibsen's master builder Solness virtually in full. In this sense, the performance is therapy. The psychologizing of Ibsen, of the family, is somewhat relegated to the background in order to make the spectator realize that it is possible, even necessary, to reflect on certain traumas of the community space through the tools of the theatre. Readers who have not seen the show might have reason to believe that Solness in Budapest is a show for gossip-hungry "experts" who are sensitive to the internal affairs of the theatre world, but they could not be more wrong. Since the context around the performance is as important as the text of the performance in this case, some further information needs to be shared before I get to the performance itself. The director Ildikó Gáspár has evolved from a successful and remarkable dramaturg and translator into a director known mainly in Hungary, but also in German and Scandinavian-speaking countries over the last decade. In her performances, she analyses classical and contemporary dramatic texts with both insight and sensitivity, leads her actors in an inspiring way, and always with a highly emphatic and meticulously elaborated visual and musical world. It is difficult to find a common denominator between the two dozen productions of her directing career that began in 2011. Regardless of the period of the drama and its author, the problem-sensitive interpretation of the text, always carefully crafted to bring it as close as possible to the viewer of the present day, is a characteristic of each of her productions. Ildikó Gáspár is a founding member of the Örkény István Theatre, which opened in downtown Budapest in 2005. She became a key member of the theatre as a dramaturg and made her debut as a director here. Örkény's situation is unique in many respects: of all the municipal theatres in Hungary with a permanent company, repertoire and venue, we can think of no other theatre that has undergone such a significant change in profile in such a short space of time. The theatre, which for decades until the early 2000s presented solely comedy and cabaret, has now become one of the capital's most important theatres, with a highly successful ensemble working with the best directors to build a profile that is mainly, but not exclusively, prose drama. The first 'master builder' of the Örkény's image is the actor-director Pál Mácsai, who has been the theatre's director since its foundation. Pál Mácsai in 2025 will hand over his position to Máté Gáspár after 20 years of management. The latter name is familiar to many in the context of another memorable ensemble: it was he who, together with Árpád Schilling, laid the foundations for the international success story of the Krétakör Theatre as manager in the early 2000s. Alongside Máté Gáspár, Csaba Polgár, the theatre's leading male actor, will take over the artistic directorship of the Örkény Theatre from January 2025. The same Csaba Polgár who plays Ragnar, the dreaded adversary of Mácsai's title character in Solness . Ragnar's mother, Bertha Brovik (originally a male character) is played by Judit Pogány. The actress has been a major figure in Hungarian theatre and film since the 1970s and 1980s. And although she turned 80 in 2024, she is still performing in ten different productions at the Örkény Theatre. They are joined by the fourth generation: as the haunting Hilde Wangel, we see Mária Szaplonczay, who graduated from the University of Theatre and Film in 2024. Ildikó Gáspár's direction does not directly talk about this system of relations, which may seem complicated at first sight and not necessarily transparent to the outsider. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the above-mentioned relationships are evident to the regular theatregoer in Hungary even if they are not stated. Having mentioned before projection and the different layers projected onto the screen, by bringing these relations (theatrical and generational) into play, it is as if a new filter has been added to Ibsen's drama, showing more and different aspects of the familiar story. Let's return to the starting point. We, the audience, sit around an empty office or living space. In the first few minutes, we see the same brief scene play out four times in quick succession between Ragnar and his mother Bertha, and Ragnar's fiancée Frida. The old Brovik is not feeling well, and the young people, at first gently, then increasingly irritated and impatient, want to send her home, which the old woman clearly takes as an attack: she accuses the youngsters of wanting to get rid of her for good. The playful yet nervous opening (with an annoying background noise coming from the invisible speakers: like the sound of blood pounding in your ears in a particularly tense situation) identifies and sets the main theme of the performance: the communication gap between young and old. There is, of course, no small amount of didacticism in the way Ibsen arranges his formula: Solness, at the height of his career, has once pushed Brovik from her position, and now his daily life is filled with the dread of his disciple, Brovik's son Ragnar, rebelling against him. The performance does not support the latter, however: Ragnar probably 'just' wants to work, has a family and a decent living, and does not seem to be a man with world- conquering ambitions. But then, it's not him who's important here, but Solness himself: the performance seems to take place 'inside his head', where dreams, desires, memories, visions and hallucinations are lined up in a whimsical order. Solness is the center of the universe he creates and sustains: he is the sun (cf. sol), which shines in solitude (cf. soleness). Everyone is dependent on him: old Brovik, Solness's predecessor; her son Ragnar, Solness's disciple; Frida, Ragnar's fiancée, Solness's employee and lover; Aline, Solness's wife, with whom he has never been able to come to terms with the tragedy of their loss of their children. The family doctor circulates as a lonely satellite around them. And then the asteroid Hilde Wangel unexpectedly strikes, upsetting the delicate balance. The emphasis is on making the relationships between the characters as clear as possible: this is helped by the layout of the space. The actors sit between us, next to us: when they enter a scene, they speak from an intermediate position that subtly blurs the boundaries between stage and auditorium and then return to that position at the end of the scene. We sometimes feel as if we could be the characters ourselves, if only because the problems succinctly expressed are a strong reminder of our own concerns and questions. Apart from Bertha Brovik, who only appears at the beginning of the performance, all the characters are present in the space throughout. As is often the case with Ibsen, two characters usually share their thoughts about a third. The pair then almost provocatively stand in front of the 'object' of their conversation, while (s)he listens to them with silent attention. It is worthwhile for the viewer to observe the actors who are not acting, their expressions, their gazes, to discover their small reactions to what they see and hear: it is as if they were voyeurs, like us. The performance plays with this too: the family friend, a doctor, takes (seemingly) random shots with his old camera and flash. He is the one who, already in Ibsen, Solness accuses of secretly watching his every move. Solness. Photo © Judit Horvath The creation and maintenance of an everyday atmosphere is an integral part of Luca Szabados' simple(seemingly) visual world. Solness and his successor Ragnar wear the same black leather jacket: who is copying or imitating whom, who is adapting to whom, or whether it is the 'uniform' of the architect's office, is left unclear. The basic color of the other characters' costumes is brown or drape, all of them earthy - a nice rhyme with the constant, desperate preoccupation of Solness's wife Aline with her potted houseplants. The only one who stands out is Hilde Wangel, who unexpectedly enters: a slightly worn white ballet skirt, which soon turns out to be a wedding dress, peeks out from under a bright red hoodie covering her upper body. Let's take a close look at Hilde's arrival! This is one of the first episodes where the story is emphatically out of its original flow, and the viewer becomes suspicious. There is something unrealistic and erotically exhilarating about the meeting of the grey-haired Solness and the brash young Hilde. The girl no one expects, but who is known to almost everyone in one way or another, claims and demands to be a fairytale creature: ten years to the day before, Solness promised her a kingdom, and she has come to make that promise a reality. Throughout the performance, the strictly cut text follows Ibsen's original drama, but here it is enriched with a new element. When Hilde begins to talk about Solness kissing her several times when she was twelve, the architect goes into a fit of rage. He shoves her out of the room; while looking the mute spectators in their eyes, he explains that everything the girl says is a lie: he certainly doesn't kiss children. Suddenly Hilde reappears in the space, but by then everything has changed: Solness' carefully constructed statue has been destroyed in an instant. And the sensitive viewer is left with a vivid reminder of the way in which Hungarian public discourse has (not) dealt with #metoo issues - both in and outside the theatre. A typical he said/she said situation: the performance does not clearly state who is right, i.e. what really happened between the two. The scene written by Ibsen remains intact, but thanks to the sensitive dramaturgical and directorial intervention, it is enriched with a new, touchingly contemporary layer. (And we realize too that in the late 19th century, it was not shocking for an older man to have an intimate relationship with a child. In the 2020s it is impossible to ignore it.) Solness-Mácsai is aware of us, the audience, from the very first scenes, and while we know, in the spirit of the theatrical pact, that his utterances to us are not those of the actor but of the character, the dissonance of the boundary crossing is felt early on. When Solness says he is lucky, Mácsai could say the same. Or when he gazes dreamily at the women in the audience and then admits to the doctor that he has had many women in his life, whose "line" is that? The profile of the successful master builder is not only embossed on his portrait but is inseparable from the profile of the successful actor, director, theatre manager. And when he begins to speak condemningly of the young people who are demanding space for themselves at all costs (he even gets one of the spectators out of his seat), one cannot help thinking that Solness-Mácsai is (perhaps) talking about himself. For example, that in Hungary theatre directors are not appointed for a few years, but often for decades. Consequently, entire generations are left out of the theatre cycle without having gained any experience of leadership and without realizing their own vision of how a theatre or ensemble should operate. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, this is not an accusation against Mácsai, who has built one of the country's most high-quality theatres, but merely an outline of the context. Mácsai Pál’s Solness is an acting masterpiece. He portrays a burnt-out, tired, cynical and self-reflective character who, despite his achievements and successes, lives on his enduring charm even after the age of sixty. He talks to everyone in a slightly condescending, lecturing way. He knows a lot and has seen a lot, which is why he is acutely aware that his time is coming to an end. The scapegoating, which has probably been going on for some time, has had a reassuring result: young people are to blame for everything. Solness's world is bewilderingly round: just as he got rid of Brovik, the new generation will want to get rid of him. A man of this type needs a 'court' that fears and adores him, and whose members are all weaker than he is. His narcissism knows no bounds: he even teaches the audience a song about himself. The old and sickly Brovik (Judit Pogány) is no longer a real opponent, just a toothless lion. His son Ragnar (Csaba Polgár) seems to be a more difficult case, but Solness is probably overthinking things: Ragnar does want a place for himself, but not against Solness, rather just beside him. Ragnar's fiancée Frida (Emőke Zsigmond) is impressed by Solness's interest and affection, but he sees her as a disposable object, a tool. Solness's wife Aline (Gabriella Hámori) seems to be a confused, introverted, lonely figure, but she sees and senses everything that happens around her. The loss of his children is the great tragedy of her life, which she tries in vain to explain away as God's will, but in reality, she blames herself. At the moment of the children's death, the relationship between Aline and Solness is at a standstill, and they are unable to move on from there: they have nothing more to say to each other. The doctor (Sándor Terhes) observes and registers: Solness considers him both his confidant and his enemy, sent by Aline to kill him. Young people are dangerous, Solness repeats again and again, and the most beautiful illustration of the theme is the intrusion of Hilde Wangel (Mária Szaplonczay) and her attempt to break the equilibrium. Yet she does nothing but take seriously an irresponsible statement, a promise made to a child ten years earlier. In his eyes, Solness is a hero, whom he endows with supernatural powers and from whom he expects to enliven his own ordinary, boring life. But Hilde can not only be a new beginning for Solness's empty marriage, she can also replace his dead children. Solness, a great manipulator, effectively involves his wife, Aline, in this game, who takes care of the girl immediately after Hilde's arrival and puts her in one of the old children’s rooms. In the first half of the hundred-minute performance, the sensitive relations of the Solness- universe are sharply depicted, before the focus narrows to the internal conflicts of the Solness-Mácsai figure and Solness's relationship with Hilde. The home video, mentioned at the beginning of the text, thus becomes a memorable inset to the performance. Selections from the video archive of the Mácsai family show Pál Mácsai's parents, his brother and, of course, himself as a child and young adult. And so we arrive at the spring of 1994, when Pál Mácsai recited the poem Highly Esteemed Overlords by the 19th century revolutionary poet Sándor Petőfi in front of 10,000 people in the Budapest Sports Hall. It is without exaggeration that this is the emblematic material of the Hungarian- language YouTube, which has more than one and a half million views, and Mácsai adds a self-deprecating audio commentary to his own recital from 30 years earlier. Hilde literally walks into the picture: she clicks repeatedly, the recording stops, starts again, while she re-enacts Mácsai's (Solness’s?) striking gestures in front of the screen. In the finale, when Solness, who has a fear of heights, climbs to the roof of the house to place the wreath, against the strong protests of her relatives and Hilde's insistence, the girl and the master builder are also placed in the center. The video spins again: climbing a ladder to the rooftop above Budapest, Hilde in her wedding dress and (Solness-)Mácsai, wearing a costume and make-up clearly evoking Bela Lugosi's iconic Dracula. The old master, terrified of the power of youth, yet morbidly attracted to it, sucking the blood of youth and drawing strength from it, reaches the top - but at what cost? The sun, known to have a harmful effect on vampires, shines over the rooftops at dawn, and the cast choruses the re-envisioned Beatles song—here comes the sun... Solness. Photo © Judit Horvath References References About the author(s) Tamás Jászay (45), theatre critic, editor, university lecturer, curator. Since 2003 he's been working as a freelance theatre critic: in the last 20 years he published more than 1200 articles (mostly reviews) in more than 20 magazines all around the world. Since 2008 he is co-editor, since 2021 editor-in-chief of the well-renowned critical portal, Revizor ( www.revizoronline.com ). Between 2009 and 2016 he was working as the co-president of the Hungarian Theatre Critics' Association. In 2013 he defended his PhD thesis on the history of Krétakör Theatre (Chalk Circle Theatre). He regularly works as a curator too: Hungarian Showcase (Budapest, 2013), Szene Ungarn (Vienna, 2013), THEALTER Festival (Szeged, since 2014), dunaPart (Budapest, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2023). Since 2015 he's been teaching at Szeged University, since 2019 as an assistant professor. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum By Amir al-Azraki Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages, ISSN: 2376-1148, Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 1-26 Abstract: This article repositions Mesopotamian ritual and dramatic practices within a broader cross‑cultural history of ancient performance, challenging theatre historiographies that have traditionally marginalized non‑Greek traditions. Instead of seeking to establish beginnings or precedence, the study examines Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian performance forms as complex and historically situated practices that combine ritual action, mythic narration, embodied movement, and structured dialogue. Drawing on linguistic evidence, ritual sequences, archaeological contexts, and a substantial body of Iraqi scholarship rarely acknowledged in Western discourse, the article reinterprets the Akitu festival, the Sacred Marriage, the Descent of Inanna, city laments, and Sumerian disputation poems ( adamin and tesitu ) as examples of organized performative expression shaped by distinct social, political, and religious environments. Particular emphasis is given to the dramaturgical sophistication of the disputation poems, which function as competitive and adjudicated verbal contests and display striking affinities with contemporary modes of agonistic expression. By foregrounding interconnection, mutual influence, and the plurality of ancient performative traditions, the study argues for a more inclusive and intercultural theatre historiography. This approach positions Mesopotamian performance within a continuum rather than a linear narrative of development and underscores how ancient societies used embodied and communal practices to negotiate meaning, authority, and identity, demonstrating that theatricality has emerged through multiple overlapping cultural trajectories. Keywords: Mesopotamian performance, Sumerian disputations , Akitu Festival , Sacred Marriage , Inanna/Ishtar, Ritual drama, Theatre historiography Introduction The theatrical traditions of Mesopotamia—the ensemble of ritual-dramatic and festival performances attested in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian contexts from the late fourth to early first millennia BCE—constituted a sophisticated performative culture. These traditions included impersonation and role-taking in ritual dramas, structured dialogues and disputations, lamentations with choral leadership, sacred-marriage enactments, and mythic re-enactments. They were performed in designated spaces (temple courts, processional routes, and festival houses), using codified movements, costumes, and props. Yet early 20th-century scholarship made few references to Mesopotamian drama and theatre, often dismissing the culture as "pre-theatrical." In 1925, for example, German Assyriologist and ancient Near Eastern religions expert Alfred Jeremias asserted that the development of myth into drama is only evident in traces within the Sumerian-Babylonian cultural cycle. [i] His limited examples included Chaldean festival performances, in which the myth of the dragon fight was enacted comedically; Assyrian festival plays, in which the king assumed the role of the dragon-slayer; and an Assyrian-Babylonian dialogue between a master and his servant, referred to as the “Dialogue of Pessimism.” [ii] Moreover, conventional theatre historiographies credited ancient Greece as the birthplace of drama, largely overlooking the possibility that theatre existed in other ancient cultures. This marginalization or ignorance of Mesopotamian theatrical traditions, despite their ritualistic origins that parallel those of Greek theatre, reflected a Eurocentric bias that historically prioritized Greek theatre as a source and a foundational model. This bias not only shaped and distorted European scholarship on ancient theatre traditions, but also influenced scholarly discourse in Iraq, where a majority of Iraqi theatre scholars—especially those educated in Western institutions during the mid-twentieth century—embraced Eurocentric historiography with little critique. Modern Iraqi theatre was founded by scholars and Christian clergy trained in the West, such as Sami Abdul Hamid, Haqi al-Shibli, Ibrahim Jalal, and Hanna Habash, whose reliance on European models for teaching, translation, and production practices often reinforced colonial frameworks, even as a smaller group of voices pressed for recognition of indigenous traditions. As Khalid Amine points out, colonialism fostered divided loyalties and contributed to epistemic violence, a “Eurocentric eclipse, if not exclusion, of other peoples’ performance traditions” within theatre studies: “Borrowing western historiographical models without critiquing their claim of universality and exclusivist tropes,” Amine argues, “amounts to a new kind of colonialism.” [iii] Other obstacles have also contributed to gaps in scholarly understanding of Mesopotamian theatre traditions. One such obstacle is disciplinary compartment-alization: the archaeologists and field epigraphers who recover and publish sites, and the philologists and linguists who edit and translate cuneiform sources, are rarely in dialogue with theatre historians and performance theorists. Another obstacle is that the field of Mesopotamian studies is vast, and scholarly focus has often been on other aspects of the culture, such as religion, politics, and social structures, leaving the performative dimensions of Mesopotamian material underexplored. Political instability, and destruction due to wars, invasions, and natural disasters, has further complicated the study of Mesopotamian theatre, posing significant obstacles to archaeological efforts. The volatile political climate has made it difficult for scholars to access important sites and artifacts that could provide crucial insights into ancient performance practices. Moreover, under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government's nationalist agenda influenced how Mesopotamian heritage was presented and researched, sidelining certain aspects of cultural history, including theatre. Even today, financial, logistical, and security challenges continue to limit archaeological work on Mesopotamian heritage. Former Minister of Culture, Tourism, and Antiquities Dr. al-Hamdani indicates that Iraq is currently home to approximately 15,000 archaeological sites, of which less than 2% have been excavated, and with the potential for additional discoveries in the future. [iv] Promising sites for further exploration include some documented yet still under-analyzed ceremonial structures: the bit akitu at Babylon, the Eanna precinct at Uruk, and the Ekur temple complex at Nippur. While well known in Mesopotamian studies, these sites have not yet been systematically examined through the lens of theatre and performance history. Future research that integrates archaeological, philological, and performance-theoretical methods could reframe them as central nodes in the history of ancient theatre, rather than as ancillary ritual space. Yet it would be misleading to suggest that scholarship on these issues is completely absent. A substantial body of research has traced Near Eastern mythic and ritual continuities into Greek literature [v] and has examined performance elements within Sumerian and Akkadian texts. Moreover, a number of Iraqi historians, archeologists, and theatre scholars, utilizing evidence from early twentieth-century Western archaeologists and historians, have long argued for the significance of Mesopotamian theatre. [vi] Among the most significant contributions are those of Awni Karomi, Fawzi Rashid, and Mohammed Sabri, whose works remain untranslated into English but collectively advance an important counter-narrative. Karomi argues that ancient Iraq possessed dedicated performance spaces, most notably the Bayt al-Tamthil (“House of Performance”) at Uruk, which he reads as evidence for a theatrical tradition structurally distinct from temple ritual. [vii] Rashid postulates that theatre existed in ancient Iraq prior to Greece, proposing that the Descent of Inanna reflects an early performative tradition necessitated by limited literacy and the need to integrate myth with communal life, and citing 1967 excavations at Uruk as material evidence of ritual spaces potentially linked to dramatized representations of the underworld. [viii] Sabri goes further by theorizing the Babylonian theatre as an indigenous innovation predating Hellenistic influence, describing it as a multifunctional structure for ritual, spectacle, and athletic display. [ix] While these works constitute a crucial foundation for any inquiry into Mesopotamian performance, my approach diverges in both scope and intention. Unlike Karomi, Rashid, and Sabri, whose studies sought to challenge the aforementioned Eurocentric bias by demonstrating that theatre existed in Mesopotamia prior to ancient Greece, I am not concerned with questions of origins or precedence. Rather, I aim here to reframe Mesopotamian theatre traditions within a cross-cultural continuum of ritual and performative expression that emphasizes interconnected developments, reciprocal influences, and shared performative vocabularies across ancient civilizations. I examine Mesopotamian theatrical traditions as a historically specific constellation of practices that can be usefully studied through the lens of more recent advances in performance and theatre history, particularly cross-cultural approaches that situate ancient performance within interconnected ritual and cultural systems, and that highlight the emergence of performance traditions as a widespread and multifaceted human phenomenon rather than as the innovation of any single civilization. By illuminating the significance of underrecognized research, including Iraqi scholarship, on Mesopotamian theatrical traditions, and by interrogating the intersections of Sumerian dispute texts, ritual enactments, linguistic and architectural evidence, this article provides new and innovative observations, such as the striking parallels between Sumerian disputation poems and contemporary battle rap, which highlight unexpected continuities in performative traditions and underscore the enduring relevance of Mesopotamian cultural legacies. Linguistic Evidence for Mesopotamian Theatre Traditions Lexical evidence preserved in the Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary suggests the presence of organized performance practices in ancient Mesopotamia. [x] A cluster of terms relating to performative activity including epšētu (n. act), epāšu (v. perform), mašālu (v. mime), mēlulu (actor or player), riqdu (dance and dancing), aluzinnu (clown/jester), [xi] mupaggianu (n. mimic), and gendered performers such as mummillu (actor) and mummiltu (actress or dancing-girl), may indicate that performance was recognized as a distinct form of social and ritual behavior, potentially extending beyond entertainment into broader religious and communal contexts. Terminology associated with material culture and performance settings further supports this interpretation, as terms such as kuzippu, nalbašu, talbuštu, and tēdiqu (costume), kutmu (mask), šumaku (prop), duʾu and hutû (platform), and lulīmu and mardītu (stage) imply designated performance environments. Likewise, taklimtu (drama and spectacle), alongside distinctions between dabūbu (dialogue), and dāgilu (spectator), suggest formalized presentation and performer–audience interaction. The distribution of these terms across general lexical compilations, rather than within single literary or ritual texts, suggests that performance-related vocabulary formed part of wider linguistic usage. Although such evidence cannot confirm the existence of theatre in the modern sense, it supports the hypothesis that Mesopotamian societies maintained structured performative traditions involving specialized performers, audiences, spatial organization, and staged or ritualized presentation. One possible contextual illustration of the broader semantic and cultural range of performance-related terminology may be found in literary and theological interpretations of the goddess Inanna–Ishtar. R. Harris has drawn attention to the significance of play ( mēlulu ) within the characterization of the goddess, suggesting that playful and performative elements formed part of her divine persona across multiple spheres of activity. The interrelationship between play, performance, and ritual underscores the goddess’s multifaceted role in transcending social norms and reasserting divine order. As Harris notes, “Play ( melulu ) is an integral part of Inanna-Ishtar's personality. She is ‘the player ( mummiltu ) par excellence.’ The semantic range of the Akkadian word for play includes dancing and acting and […] involves the arena of war, for her playground was the battleground.” Harris quotes, among other things, a text in which the phrase “the play of Ishtar” is used as a euphemism for “battle,” and also highlights the connection between “play” and the carnivalesque elements of the festival of Ishtar. [xii] Moreover, play and performance are framed as vital elements of Mesopotamian ritual, as evidenced by the presence of portable stages, referred to as littum riqdi . [xiii] These platforms were used during performances that had religious, ceremonial, and possibly theatrical functions, reinforcing the idea that the act of performance was central to religious worship and social rituals. The littum riqdi suggest that these performances were more than artistic expressions; they were instruments for enacting divine narratives, involving both gods and humans in the broader cosmological drama. Another word that relates to theatre props is melammu , masks, which were associated with gods, royals, or demons (see Image 1). A.L. Oppenheim explores the Akkadian concept of melammu , traditionally understood as a supernatural aura, and argues that it also refers to physical masks used in religious performances. He associates melammu with ritual practices in which priests donned masks to embody divine or demonic beings during ceremonies, including instances where priests wore these masks in cultural theatrical representations before the worshippers of Ishtar. [xiv] Thus, melammu not only signified divine radiance but also played a key role in theatrical and ritualistic performances in Akkadian culture. Image 1: Clay mask of the demon Huwawa [Humbaba]. Old Babylonian period (c. 1800–1600 BCE), from Sippar (Abu Habba), Iraq. British Museum, Museum No. 1883, 0118, AH.2598. Credit: ©Trustees of the British Museum Shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license , no changes made to image. Oppenheim mentions different types of masks, including lion masks ( zumar labbi ) and fish masks ( zumar nune ), used by priests in ritual performances. He references Akkadian texts describing how specific priests, particularly the kurgarru and assinnu , wore masks as part of ceremonial and theatrical enactments. For example, in the Ishtar festival in Uruk, priests appeared as "lion-men" (i.e., wearing lion masks) in ritual performances. Moreover, he notes that some priests, such as those involved in exorcisms or magical rites, donned masks to embody supernatural beings, likely to intimidate spirits or symbolize divine presence. Oppenheim connects these masked performances to broader Mesopotamian religious practices, arguing that the masks served not only as disguises but also as tools to invoke divine power and create awe in ceremonial contexts. [xv] Performance of Rituals and Myths The roots of Mesopotamian drama trace back to early agrarian and pastoral communities of the Neolithic and Ubaid periods, where ritual practices were intertwined with hunting, herding, and the first stages of organized agriculture. In these early communities, ritual performance provided a medium for engaging with deities, ancestors, and non-human forces. Through song, dance, masking, and procession, participants enacted relationships with the natural and divine worlds. Rather than representing a linear evolution from ‘animism’ to more advanced forms, these practices reveal layered cosmologies in which new political and theological emphases (such as royal ideology) were grafted onto longstanding performative grammars. As Mesopotamian urban life developed, anthropomorphism took center stage, and rituals evolved. By the second millennium, kings and community representatives acted in these dramas, with love and marriage symbolizing the bond between the people and the fertility powers, strengthening social and psychological ties. [xvi] The history of Mesopotamian performances reveals how older traditions persisted while being reinterpreted to meet new political and religious needs. Fertility rites, lamentations, and mythic reenactments continued to coexist, but rulers and temple elites adapted these forms strategically to assert authority, consolidate communal identity, and dramatize cosmic order. For Thorkild Jacobsen, this shift mirrors a broader transformation in Mesopotamian religion from a nature-based system to one dominated by political forces, moving from democratic pluralism to monarchies and, eventually, exclusive nationalist ideologies. [xvii] In this sense, dramatic expression developed not through linear evolution but through the appropriation and exploitation of existing practices to serve changing cultural and political agendas. A parallel can be observed in fifth-century Greece, where inherited ritual and mythic frameworks were re-purposed to sustain civic ideology. This framing emphasizes continuity and adaptation, situating Mesopotamian theatre within a dynamic continuum of performance responsive to specific historical conditions. As we shall see in the following sub-sections, examples of this adaptive process are found in Babylon’s Akitu festival, where the king ritually embodied Marduk to dramatize divine victory and legitimize his own rule, and in the Sacred Marriage rite, where older fertility rituals were re-staged to anchor royal authority in cosmic order. Similarly, Battle Drama reconfigured inherited mythic motifs into a political performance celebrating the birth of the nation. These cases provide insight into the cultural fabric of Mesopotamian society, and illustrate how Mesopotamian drama appropriated existing ritual forms to serve shifting cultural and political agendas. Enuma Elish and the Akitu Festival Enuma Elish (also known as The Seven Tablets of Creation ) is the Babylonian creation myth, the title of which is derived from the opening lines of the piece, “When on High.” Composed in Akkadian during the late second millennium BCE and preserved most fully on seven tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, Enuma Elish was ritually performed at the Akitu festival. The Akitu , the origins of which go back to the third millennium BCE in Sumerian cities such as Ur and Lagash before becoming central in Babylon, functioned as both a religious and political spectacle. [xviii] In the third millennium BCE, Sumerian Akitu -type festivals were often celebrated twice yearly, at both the spring and autumn equinoxes. By the first millennium BCE, however, the Babylonian Akitu had become standardized as a spring festival in the month of Nisan (the start of the Babylonian New Year), when the Enuma Elish was performed. [xix] The myth tells the story of the great god Marduk's victory over the forces of chaos and his establishment of order at the creation of the world. Marduk, the chief god of the city of Babylon, defeats the elder goddess Tiamat and brings order to chaos, and thus becomes the Lord of the gods of Heaven and Earth. In analyzing elements of cultic drama at Akitu festival, Erich Ebeling asserts that “the events were not only pantomimically represented but also made comprehensible to the devout audience through a more or less detailed dialogue between the main characters and the chorus.” [xx] Although the evidence is fragmentary, a number of scholars have proposed reconstructions in which the Enuma Elish and related mythological narratives were integrated into cultic performances during the Akitu festival. Ritual texts and later scholarly interpretations suggest that these narratives were not confined to silent symbolic action but may have involved structured spoken exchange and ritualized dialogue. On the basis of fragmentary ritual texts, Ebeling argued that elements of the creation myth were enacted within a cultic drama, involving verbal interaction between principal divine figures and a group of priests functioning in a chorus-like role, rather than through pantomime alone. [xxi] Within this framework, mythic events were made intelligible to participants and observers through a combination of recitation, lamentation, and symbolic ritual action. Descriptions of the Babylonian Akitu festival emphasize its visual and performative dimensions; as Lauren Ristvet notes, “the resulting spectacle was imposing, colourful and even comic.” [xxii] Lexical and ritual references, including terms such as littum riqdi , further suggest that these performances could unfold in temple courtyards and along processional routes rather than in a single fixed space. As the Akitu was a civic-religious festival central to urban life, such ritual performances likely addressed a broader public audience, including priests, officials, and assembled citizens. While these reconstructions remain necessarily speculative, they support the interpretation of the Enuma Elish as functioning within a large-scale public ritual framework that combined “demonstrative and performative acts” with formal recitation and symbolic enactment. [xxiii] The drama begins when Belet‑ili, dispatched by Marduk's consort Zarpanitum, embarks on a frantic search for the god. Along the way, she encounters a priest from Borsippa, who joins the search as rumors spread of Marduk’s vanishing. Meanwhile, the citizens of Babylon, fearing the loss of their divine protector, cry out for Marduk’s return, praying to Shamash and Sin (gods of the sun and moon, respectively) for intervention. The turning point occurs when Marduk’s lifeless body is discovered at the Bab Ka-bu-rat gate, with a goddess mourning by his side. The nature of his death remains unclear, but symbolic rituals suggest the involvement of chaotic forces. This revelation triggers civil unrest in Babylon, with rebellion and grief overtaking the city. Marduk’s death is reported to Zarpanitum, whose intense mourning underscores the tragedy. In response, rituals are performed to restore Marduk’s strength and to petition Shamash and Sin for his return. Although the Akitu festival unfolds through a sequence of ritual actions that parallel themes of crisis and restoration found in the Enuma Elish , these actions are best understood as cultic ritual rather than theatrical drama. [xxiv] The king was ritually identified with Marduk, although only at specific points within this sequence, rather than across the entire narrative arc. The disappearance, mourning, and symbolic endangerment of Marduk belonged primarily to the mythic and liturgical register of the festival and were articulated through recitation, lamentation, and ritual gesture, not through direct enactment by the king. The king did participate explicitly in the ritual, however, most notably on the fifth day of the Akitu, when he underwent the well-attested humiliation rite before the statue of Marduk in the Esagila. During this rite, the high priest would remove the king’s regalia, strike his cheek, and compel a declaration of innocence; the king’s ability to shed tears functioned as a divinely evaluated sign of Marduk’s continued favor: “if the tears flow, Bel is friendly; if no tears appear, Bel is angry.” [xxv] This moment does not dramatize a mythic battle or represent Marduk’s combat with chaotic forces but instead ritually enacts the king’s submission to divine authority at a moment of cosmic uncertainty, establishing the conditions for the subsequent restoration of order. Later in the festival, particularly during the procession to and from the Akitu house and the ritual “taking of the hand of Bel” (Days 8–11), the king appeared in a restored and legitimized role that reflected Marduk’s reassertion of cosmic and political order. These actions aligned the king symbolically with Marduk’s victory over chaos, yet they remained ritual affirmations rather than mimetic reenactments of combat with figures such as Kingu or Tiamat. The king’s role was thus episodic and symbolic, embedded within a broader sequence of cultic actions rather than constituting a continuous dramatization of the creation myth. Early claims that the Akitu festival involved a dramatized representation of Marduk’s death and restoration derive largely from the interpretive framework of the early twentieth-century Myth–Ritual School. Within this paradigm, cultic action was assumed to function as a ritual reenactment of mythic narrative, and the Babylonian New Year was accordingly reconstructed as a dramatic performance of Enuma Elish . The most influential formulation of this view appears in the work of Svend Aage Pallis, who argued that the Akitu festival as a whole was “represented dramatically,” with priestly personnel, processions, and symbolic acts rendering the myth present through ritual performance rather than through narrative recitation alone. [xxvi] Pallis’s reconstruction drew attention to the festival’s ordered sequence, embodied actions, and public intelligibility, and for much of the twentieth century it provided the standard point of departure for discussions of Akitu ritual form. Subsequent scholarship, however, has increasingly qualified these claims. The evidence for the staging of the Akitu ritual remains fragmentary and largely indirect. The primary sources consist of Seleucid-period cuneiform ritual instructions, references to the recitation of Enuma Elish , and associated liturgical prayers, all of which prescribe ritual actions (such as the humiliation of the king, the removal and restoration of regalia, and the procession of divine statues between cultic spaces), without supplying stage directions or narrative cues sufficient to support a mimetic dramatization of myth. Archaeological evidence, including the Processional Way and the Akitu house outside Babylon’s walls, confirms the existence of architectural settings designed for movement and public ritual visibility, but it does not preserve evidence for dramatic props, costuming, or enacted divine combat. Later Assyriological scholarship has rejected interpretations of the Akitu as theatrical re-enactment, viewing its rites instead as symbolic affirmations of divine and political order. This position was later synthesized and reframed by Jonathan Z. Smith, who emphasized the festival’s function as a historically contingent ritual of cosmic and political rectification. [xxvii] Within this framework, the description of the Akitu as a “performance” refers to the bodily, public enactment of symbolic gestures, movements, and speech acts, rather than to theatrical drama in the modern sense. Sacred Marriage The Sacred Marriage appeared in the third millennium BCE as a Sumerian cultic rite through which the king enacted a bond with Inanna to secure fertility and well‑being. [xxviii] Public elements (offerings, processions, ritual purification, and adornment) preceded a private union enacted by the king and a designated priestess representing the goddess. The ceremony was accompanied by a love‑song repertoire whose dialogic and lyrical form indicates performed speech and song, rather than silent recitation. [xxix] Comparative evidence indicates that the hieros gamos functioned as ritual drama, staged by kings, priests, and cult personnel (singers, dancers, musicians) and articulated through processions, spoken exchanges, and chorus‑like refrains. [xxx] Within the Sumerian corpus, the Sacred Marriage is likewise voiced and embodied: organized love‑song cycles (marked by performative rubrics such as balbale , tigi , kungar ) present dialogues/monologues with responsorial refrains, embedded in a sequenced choreography—processional approach, ritual bathing and adornment, bed preparation, and the king’s escorted entry to the goddess’s inner space (often at Eanna)—after which the festival reopens, to banqueting, music, and public rejoicing. [xxxi] Read together, these sources warrant interpreting the Sacred Marriage as efficacious ritual performance: codified actions, roles, and sounds whose enactment renews agricultural abundance and confirms kingship in the public, cultic sphere. This framing helps clarify how later scholars have interpreted the rite’s evolution. Thorkild Jacobsen argues that this Sacred Marriage Drama was an early immersive ritual which later developed into a highly structured performance, reflecting broader shifts in Mesopotamian society. To describe the later iterations of the Sacred Marriage as a “performance,” however, is not to suggest that it lost its ritual efficacy or became aesthetic spectacle alone. The hymns, processions, and liturgies continued to be understood as acts that ensured fertility, divine favor, and cosmic balance. What changed was not the belief in efficacy but the mode of enactment: from a participatory rite in which participants embodied Inanna and her spouse Dumuzi, to a temple-centered performance where king and priestess acted as representatives of the gods. Like the Dionysian plays in classical Greece, which invoked a god and effected catharsis through language and ritual action, later iterations of the Sacred Marriage retained a performative force that linked the community to divine powers. The distinction, therefore, is not between “real” ritual and “aesthetic” performance, but between different ways of staging divine presence. As Richard Schechner has argued, performance is best understood as a continuum that encompasses ritual, play, and theatre, all grounded in what he calls “restored behavior,” that is, twice‑behaved, rehearsed actions that can be replayed and recombined across ritual and performance. [xxxii] From this perspective, the Sacred Marriage was not “mere ritual” or “mere theatre,” but a hybrid enactment whose force lay in both efficacy and representation. As Mesopotamian society became increasingly urbanized and politically stratified, religious thought shifted toward more anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine. Gods that had once been experienced through diffuse forces and direct embodiment were now imagined as distinct personified beings, often organized into divine “families.” Yet this was not a clean break. Traces of earlier animistic traditions persisted in healing rites, local practices, and temple ceremonies, and elements of direct divine embodiment remained possible within the liminal space of ritual. By the third millennium BCE Sacred Marriage ceremonies became increasingly institutionalized under temple authority and within temple settings, accompanied by formalized hymns, musicians, and priestly oversight, thus aligning religious performance with emerging urban political structures. By the first millennium BCE, earlier fertility enactments had developed into new forms such as the Battle Drama, which Jacobsen describes as a “political drama celebrating and reaffirming the birth of the nation as a divine achievement.” [xxxiii] Surviving hymns and liturgies from the Sacred Marriage provide glimpses of these performances: songs of Inanna’s desire for Dumuzi, ritual dialogues between king and priestess, and choruses that integrated the wider community into the drama’s effects. Descent of Inanna into the Underworld The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld is a Sumerian myth that narrates the descent of the goddess Inanna (Ishtar, in Akkadian) into the Underworld to overthrow its ruler, her sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Dead. However, following the removal of her adornments, Inanna perishes, and her corpse is suspended on a nail. The god Enki restores Inanna to life, but she must deliver another living human in exchange for her freedom. She selects Dumuzi, her spouse, who is abruptly transported to the Underworld. In response to the pleas of Dumuzi's sister, Geshtinanna, his circumstances are somewhat ameliorated: he is permitted to remain in the Underworld for only a portion of the year, with his sister assuming his role for the remaining duration. Iraqi historian and archaeologist Fawzi Rashid argues that theatre existed in Iraq before the Greeks, using the myth of Inanna’s Descent as evidence. He suggests that, given the limited literacy in ancient Mesopotamia, the myth must have been performed, rather than merely read, in order to engage the public and to connect everyday life with religious teaching, thereby increasing social cohesion. [xxxiv] Indeed, the mythic text contains dialogic exchanges, role substitutions, and ritual laments that are inherently performative in structure and would lend themselves to live enactment. To further support his argument, Rashid refers to archaeological findings in Uruk in 1967, where excavations uncovered a structure with three concentric stone walls, which he proposes may have symbolized the entrance to the underworld in a public performance. [xxxv] Additionally, as Karomi notes, the Bayt al-Tamthīl (“House of Performance”) at Uruk, though situated near the temple of Inanna, is architecturally distinct from the cultic precinct, indicating a space deliberately demarcated for communal gathering and spectacle (hence its name), rather than exclusively for worship. [xxxvi] Similarly, the Babylonian theatre associated with Nebuchadnezzar II offered a large, multifunctional arena used for ritual dramas, athletic events, and mythological reenactments during civic festivals such as the Akitu . While these are structurally distinct from Athenian theatres, they nonetheless represent performance spaces—arenas intentionally structured to accommodate audiences and enactments—which substantiates the claim that Mesopotamian culture embedded performance within both civic and sacred life. As many scholars have noted, narrative and mythic performance forms occur in virtually every ancient culture, from Egypt to Anatolia and beyond. To avoid conflating these diverse traditions, this study uses the term “theatre” in a specific sense: not merely the existence of story or ritual, but the development of architecturally or socially demarcated spaces where communal enactments were staged before an audience. This distinction allows us to separate general ritual or narrative expression (practices shared widely across ancient societies) from the more focused phenomenon of theatre, where myth, ritual, and spectacle intersect in settings designed for spectatorship. In this light, Mesopotamian examples such as the Bayt al-Tamthil or the Babylonian theatre can be considered “theatrical,” while also acknowledging that their forms and functions differed from the later Athenian model. To further support his argument that theatre existed in Mesopotamia before the Greeks, Rashid also outlines potential connections between the myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld and early Greek plays such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia . His analysis suggests that recurring motifs shared by Inanna’s Descent and The Oresteia , such as neglect, substitution, divine intervention, and sibling loyalty, may point to thematic continuities or indirect cultural echoes from Mesopotamian traditions, raising the possibility that Greek tragedy was shaped in part by earlier Near Eastern performance forms. [xxxvii] Nonetheless, while the parallels with The Oresteia are suggestive, the Eleusinian Mysteries (and their mythic focus on Demeter and Persephone) provide a far more convincing and historically grounded analogue to Inanna’s Descent , since they ritualized the katabasis motif within a performative cultic context rather than a later dramatic retelling. Recited and ritually enacted during the Mysteries, the Hymn to Demeter staged the cycle of loss, katabasis , and renewal in a manner strikingly parallel to the Sumerian narrative: both traditions employ ritual substitution, seasonal suffering, and the cyclical return of fertility. As Walter Burkert has shown, the Mysteries drew on a repertoire of descent motifs that circulated across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, with katabatic themes functioning not only as mythic narratives but as ritual dramas of transformation enacted before communities. [xxxviii] Burkert emphasizes that antiquity itself recognized these resonances, with Greek tragedy (such as the choral invocations in Seven Against Thebes ) reflecting patterns known from Mesopotamian ritual laments and healing ceremonies. [xxxix] From this perspective, the Demeter/Persephone cycle offers a closer and more productive comparative frame than sibling motifs alone, since its ritualized performance within the Eleusinian Mysteries directly parallels the communal dramatization of cosmic order, divine suffering, and seasonal renewal found in Inanna’s Descent . Epic of Gilgamesh The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of world literature, survives in multiple languages and recensions because it developed over nearly two millennia across different Mesopotamian cultural and linguistic contexts. Originating in the late third millennium BCE as independent Sumerian poems about the hero “Bilgamesh” (later known as Gilgamesh), these narratives were later synthesized into an Akkadian epic during the Old Babylonian period and subsequently adapted into Hurrian and Hittite translations in Anatolia. The best-known form, the Standard Babylonian version edited by Sin-leqi-unninni (ca. 1300–1000 BCE), represents a deliberate literary reworking of earlier material that shaped the epic’s theological and philosophical emphases. Scribal copying, translation, and editorial revision across centuries produced the textual plurality evident today, preserved in hundreds of fragmentary tablets from Nippur, Ur, and Nineveh. This complex transmission history explains why Gilgamesh reaches us in divergent forms that reflect the evolving linguistic, religious, and intellectual traditions of the ancient Near East. The epic follows Gilgamesh, a powerful yet tyrannical ruler, whose friendship with the wild man Enkidu transforms him through shared adventures: most notably their defeat of Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest, and the slaying of the Bull of Heaven sent by the goddess Ishtar. When Enkidu dies as divine punishment, Gilgamesh is overcome by grief and fear of mortality, prompting a quest for eternal life that leads him to the immortal flood survivor Utnapishtim. Ultimately, he learns that immortality is reserved for the gods and that human meaning lies in wisdom, compassion, and the lasting works of civilization. Across its many recensions and translations, the epic reflects evolving Mesopotamian conceptions of kingship, friendship, mortality, and the search for understanding in the face of death. Image 2: Relief, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slaying Humbaba at the Cedar Forest . Photo credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, via Wikimedia Commons. Shared under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license , no changes made to image. The Epic of Gilgamesh was not only transmitted through written tablets but also rooted in the ritual and performative culture of ancient Mesopotamia. While there is no textual evidence for formal or Western-style stage dramatizations of the epic, the ritual contexts of Mesopotamian festivals (particularly the Babylonian Akitu ) suggest that mythic narratives were embodied symbolically through processional and ceremonial performance. As Judith E. Filitz argues, the Akitu ritual demonstrates how ancient ceremonies could occupy a liminal space “between ritual and theater,” combining corporality, multi-sensual ostentation, event, and representation within a religious framework. [xl] Such performative qualities help explain how mythic stories could be enacted through gesture, music, or costume as part of communal expressions of cosmic renewal. Professional singers ( kalu ) and lamentation priests ( naru ) likewise performed mythological and royal compositions in temple settings, emphasizing the oral and performative dimensions of Mesopotamian literature. Iconographic scenes of Gilgamesh wrestling a lion (emblems of divine kingship and cosmic order) echo this tradition, showing how the epic’s imagery participated in a broader culture of ritual performance rather than in Western-style theatrical dramatization. Mohammed Sabri argues that artifacts such as cylinder seals, clay tablets, and carved stone figures further illustrate the theatricality of these performances. [xli] This argument highlights the performative dimension of Mesopotamian myth, in which artistic representations of figures such as Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Humbaba convey movement, gesture, and symbolic embodiment (see Image 2). Cylinder seals frequently depict scenes that correspond to episodes from Gilgamesh (most notably the hero’s combat with the monstrous guardian or the divine bull)—compositions that evoke ritualized struggle, rather than static illustration. While none of these objects can be shown to represent actors or staged performances, their iconography (muscular confrontation, divine insignia, and recurring motifs of heroism) suggests that Mesopotamian art visualized mythic action as part of a broader ceremonial and religious aesthetic. The existence of terracotta masks of Humbaba, such as those discovered at sites like Sippar and Nippur, further supports the idea that ritual impersonation and embodiment played a role in Mesopotamian religious practice. In this sense, Sabri’s notion of “theatricality” captures the experiential quality of these representations: they translate myth into embodied form, revealing a ritual imagination that predates but anticipates later traditions of performative storytelling. The epic’s moral and theological dimensions cannot be attributed to the early Sumerian religious framework nor to any single belief system, however. Much of the material known to us has been transmitted through later Akkadian, Babylonian, and even Hittite versions, reflecting centuries of adaptation across Mesopotamian and Anatolian cultures. Its exploration of human defiance against divine limits, the pursuit of immortality, and the redemptive power of friendship and loss reflects a dynamic dialogue between changing cultural values rather than a static doctrine. Its enduring themes transcended local religious orthodoxy, allowing Gilgamesh to remain a living and evolving part of the Mesopotamian ritual and cultural imagination. Adamin/Tesitu : Sumerian Battle Rap Certain Sumerian-language literary texts preserved in Old Babylonian manuscripts were composed and transmitted with performance in mind. As Paul Delnero observes, a key distinguishing feature of these texts is their likely intended use for performance. This is demonstrated by the presence of “performative rubrics and subscripts in the texts themselves,” “a highly syllabic orthography to indicate how the words in the text were to be pronounced during performance,” and an “Old Babylonian liturgical source which includes musical glosses.” [xlii] Oral recitation was a pervasive feature of ancient textual culture: apart from administrative or inventory lists, nearly all Mesopotamian compositions were read aloud to listeners. Yet, as Delnero’s analysis makes clear, the Sumerian disputation poems differ from ordinary oral reading in their formal design and explicit performative cues. Their alternating dialogue structure, ritual refrains, and notations referring specifically to a-da-min-se, “the performance of a disputation,” reveal that these were not simply pedagogical recitations but dramatized enactments, probably staged within temple-schools ( edubba ) or at cultic festivals. In this sense, they represent a specialized form of performance that bridges the worlds of ritual, education, and theatrical expression, embodying a more deliberate and structured dramatization than other texts examined here. While reading about early Sumerian literature and theatrical practices in ancient Iraq, I was struck by a fascinating performative tradition that resonates with what in modern terms is known as battle rap, a genre where performers engage in verbal duels, trading boasts and insults in rhythmic, improvisational exchange. This is not to suggest that such forms are uniquely modern; on the contrary, the art of competitive verbal performance appears across a wide range of ancient and contemporary cultures. From the Sumerian adamin and tesitu disputations to the Greek agon , the Arabic munafarat and naqaʾid , Norse flyting , and West African griot rivalries, verbal contest has long served as both entertainment and a test of intellect, memory, and creativity. The analogy to battle rap is therefore not meant flippantly, but rather to illuminate the enduring human impulse to dramatize competition through public poetic exchange, a performative continuity that bridges ancient Mesopotamia and the modern stage. The Sumerian genre of "dispute" ( adamin; tesitu in Akkadian), studied in the edubba (the Sumerian tablet-house or school, dating back to before 2000 BC), shares striking similarities with battle rap. Tesitu was performative, burlesque, and often described as "contests (between) two" or "contests in speech"—that is, disputation poems, meant to be performed in communal occasional and festivals. Enrique Jiménez notes that external evidence for such performances, while limited, does exist: two Ur III documents mention deliveries “for the performance of a disputation” ( a-da-min aka ) and “for a disputation” ( a-da-min-se ). These documents probably refer to the enactment of a disputation performed in the context of a cultic or festival event. [xliii] From the first half of the second millennium BC, eight fascinating Sumerian disputation poems emerge, each with a notably theatrical flair. In these dramatic verbal duels or dialogic drama, two rivals face off in a battle of words, each striving to prove their superiority. The structure of these contests echoes the format of a stage performance, with carefully crafted exchanges designed to showcase wit and rhetoric, and with a judge (a god, like Enlil or Enki, or a human authority figure, such as king or a schoolmaster) delivering a final verdict on the contest. The participants often represent contrasting elements of the world, creating vivid and symbolic characters: the Tree squaring off against the Reed, or the Hoe battling the Plow, each antagonist embodying its own essence in the contest. These verbal sparring matches extend beyond the agricultural sphere, with dramatic confrontations between metals (Precious Metal vs. Copper), seasons (Summer vs. Winter), and even professions (Farmer vs. Shepherd). Some disputes involve more complex roles, such as school personnel and graduates, or animals (Bird vs. Fish). At times, the poems present unexpected pairings, such as a crop plant confronting a Ewe, in a clash of categories. Adil Hashim, professor of ancient Iraqi history, postulates that ancient Iraqi society was marked by significant ethnic diversity, with the indigenous Sumerians alongside the Semitic peoples who migrated from neighboring regions. Over time, these groups merged to form a unified culture. However, Hashim argues that conflicts and differences occasionally emerged, both between and within these groups. These societal tensions, such as the clash between urban and nomadic lifestyles or class and profession divisions, were often symbolically represented in Mesopotamian literature, especially in the form of debates/ adamin . [xliv] One particularly striking example presents a showdown between two city lords, Enmerkar and Ensuhkešdanna, where the entire city becomes a stage for their intellectual and political contest. Claus Wilcke examines the theatrical dimensions of this poem, arguing that it blends elements of epic narration with dramatic performance. He identifies four internal textual features that point toward performative enactment, each observable within the text itself. First, the repeated use of demonstratives and deictic pronouns. For example, when the narrator commands, “ Let him come here! ” or says, “ There he stands before the gate of Aratta! ” the phrases function like stage directions, orienting audience and performers in space. Second, the ergative marking of animals (e.g., “The ox drives the plow,” “The lion seizes the prey”) may signal that these actions were represented mimetically by human actors. Third, the absence of a dominant central character allows fluid shifts in voice and perspective, supporting multiple speakers or roles. Finally, rapid scene and character changes (e.g., moving from Enmerkar’s city to Ensuhkešdanna’s court and back again) suggest a performative sequencing of acts. [xlv] Taken together, these textual markers lend credence to Wilcke’s claim that Enmerkar and Ensuhkešdanna was not simply recited but staged, as a kind of civic or ritual performance. Another example is a verbal duel between school staff and graduates, where two characters take turns delivering speeches in which they boast of their virtues while hurling insults, often escalating into harsh and abusive exchanges. This exchange was meant not only to display rhetorical skill but also to entertain and amuse, perhaps as a way to offer relief from the otherwise monotonous routine of classroom life. These compositions were invented by Sumerian scribes, who would compose, copy, and have them read by students. [xlvi] Among the well-known disputations are those between school graduates named Enkita and Enkihegal, in one case, and Enkimansi and Girnishag, in another. To illustrate the performative dynamics of Sumerian disputation poetry, the following example pairs a passage from Enkita and Enkihegal with a rap-like reinterpretation that reimagines its rhythm and verbal combativeness in a modern idiom. Formal translation of the Sumerian text: You have a harp, but know no music, You who are the ‘water boy’ of your colleagues. Your throat can’t sound a note, You stutter your Sumerian, can’t make a straight speech, Can’t sing a hymn, can’t open your mouth— And you are an accomplished fellow! [xlvii] My “rap-ified” translation: You got a harp, but no music to show, Water boy to your crew, that's all you know, Your throat can’t hit a note, you’re fallin' apart, Stutterin' in Sumerian, can't even start, You can’t sing a hymn, can't open your mouth, When you try to speak, all we hear is a drought, And you call yourself accomplished, man, what a sight! Similarly, battle rap operates as an agonistic performance form, structured around confrontational verbal exchanges in which two or more MCs, typically from the African-American community, assert dominance through verbal dexterity, creative wordplay, and strategic insult. Just as tesitu was designed to entertain and display rhetorical prowess, battle rap serves a similar purpose in contemporary culture, providing a space for performers to showcase their linguistic skills, often pushing the boundaries of humor and aggression. Both forms, in their respective eras, seem to recognize the power of words not only to challenge and insult but also to entertain and bond the participants and the audience through a shared appreciation of verbal artistry. More importantly, tesitu can be seen as both entertainment and social criticism. School sketches often depict exaggerated characters like the complacent professor, obsequious students, and bullying teachers, figures that serve as satire rather than reality. [xlviii] This satirical tone suggests that tesitu was not just about competition, but also a critique of societal norms and the power dynamics within education. Similarly, battle rap today uses sharp wordplay and insults to address issues like inequality and identity, offering both entertainment and social commentary. Both tesitu and battle rap employ exaggeration and humor to critique societal flaws, using verbal contests as a form of both performance and social reflection. The comparison to modern battle rap is not meant to suggest a direct historical lineage but to serve as a heuristic analogy for understanding the performative nature of Sumerian disputation poetry. Both forms rely on competitive verbal display, improvisation, audience response, and performative embodiment, core elements that precede and anticipate later theatrical traditions. In the context of a pre-Greek performance culture, adamin and tesitu can be viewed as proto-theatrical genres, in which social, political, and ritual tensions are dramatized through staged verbal contest rather than narrative representation. The analogy to rap performance thus tries to sharpen my central argument: that ancient Mesopotamian literature possessed a developed sense of performative competition, role-play, and audience engagement that laid the cultural groundwork for theatrical expression. The Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur The Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur is an ancient Sumerian poem that mournfully describes the destruction of the city of Ur, lamenting the fall of its civilization and blaming the gods, particularly Enlil, for the devastation, with the goddess Ningal often depicted as weeping and pleading for mercy on behalf of her people. It is considered a prime example of a "city lament" from ancient Mesopotamia, detailing the city's desolation and the suffering of its inhabitants after the catastrophic event. As John Jacobs explains, the Sumerian city laments were “historically embedded texts, designed for repeated performance at a specific time and place,” to ritually reenact the death and the rebirth “not only of the city per se but also of the house/temple-city-universe.” [xlix] Through this performative lamentation, the city itself becomes a speaking, suffering figure: “over the course of the evolution of the genre… the personified city comes to lament its own fall.” [l] Moreover, as Mary R. Bachvarova argues, key motifs first expressed in Mesopotamian city laments were later adapted in the Iliad , where earlier versions of Troy’s destruction were absorbed into its epic narrative. [li] The Lamentation, a 435-line Sumerian text drenched in sorrow and divine anguish, illuminates the ritual roots of performative expression, where religious practice and dramatic storytelling intersect. Composed in response to the fall of Ur (c. 2000 BCE, with the lament composed shortly thereafter), the work extends beyond literary lament to a ceremonial act of grief and supplication, belonging to a ritual performance tradition: Sumerian lamentation priests ( gala ) chanted such compositions aloud within temple contexts, employing formal vocal techniques, and likely accompanied by ritual instruments, alongside communal participation. The lament’s structure (with its alternating voices, refrains, and responsive cadence) suggests a choral mode of delivery that guided collective emotion, akin to the Greek chorus. While the text does not explicitly record gestures, ritual mourning practices in Mesopotamia included weeping, raising hands in prayer, and prostration, widely attested in liturgical sources and visual depictions of lament rituals. [lii] Thus, the text’s vivid imagery and emotive language would not have remained confined to the page; it functioned as an embodied, communal expression of grief before the gods, where speech, voice, and gesture merged into a sacred performance. In many ways, The Lamentation echoes the hallmarks of Greek tragedy. The heightened emotional intensity of the dialogue, the deep sense of divine justice, and the human suffering that results from it resonate with the works of Sophocles and Euripides. As Edith Hall observes, the Greek vision of suffering was one element within a wider cultural sensibility shared across the eastern Mediterranean, where diverse ethnic and linguistic groups interacted two and a half millennia ago. In this context, Greek tragic poetry, with its themes of divine wrath and human vulnerability, shows clear affinities (e.g., tone and content) with older traditions, including Mesopotamian literature such as Gilgamesh as well as the Old Testament. [liii] Just as in Greek plays, the gods here are active participants in the drama, not distant figures, and the cosmic consequences of their actions unfold before a suffering human populace. Yvonne Rosengarten has argued that The Lamentation is not merely a religious or liturgical piece, but rather an early form of drama, akin to Greek tragedy. She highlights several key aspects that suggest the text was intended for performance, rather than just recitation (the latter implies the oral and often solemn and formulaic delivery of text, while the former suggests a more embodied and communal act, involving stylized vocal delivery, emotional expression, musical elements, and ritual staging within a sacred setting). These aspects include the text’s vivid emotional content, the use of choral lamentation and the use of the chorus to guide the audience’s response, and the central role of the goddess Ningal, who interacts with the divine in a manner similar to a theatrical protagonist. The text's emotional range and repetitive and symbolic language, along with musical accompaniment, further support the idea of a staged event. Ultimately, Rosengarten proposes that The Lamentation should be seen as an early form of religious theatre, possibly performed in Sumerian temples, and predating Greek tragedy. This challenges the traditional view of the text as solely a religious document and invites consideration of the dramatic and performative elements in early Mesopotamian culture. [liv] Karomi, who directed a staging of The Lamentation in 1974 at the Academy of Arts Theatre in Baghdad, highlights the enduring power of the ancient text in performance: the production, he said, “proved its performative potential—which knows no limits—and affirmed that its philosophical idea remains relevant to this day”—no mean feat for a text written in 3000 BCE. [lv] In these ancient lines, one does not merely encounter expressions of grief over the fall of a city; rather, one witnesses the emergence of a dramatic tradition. The Lamentation shows how early Mesopotamian communities used embodied, communal performance to stage crisis, mourning, and renewal—practices that resonate with, but are not reducible to, later Mediterranean forms. Architectural Evidence of Mesopotamian Theatres Iraqi scholars have proposed that the Bayt al-Tamthil at Uruk, the Akitu House, and other urban venues reflect early Mesopotamian performance architectures. As already noted, the city of Uruk reveals evidence of a dedicated performance space in the vicinity of Inanna’s temple that functioned independently of religious drama. Moreover, while the extant theatre at Babylon is Hellenistic in date, some scholars read it as a hybrid structure layered onto long-standing local performance traditions rather than a purely exogenous import. Theatre professor Mohammed Sabri takes the argument a step further, arguing that the Babylonian theatre was not built under Alexander the Great, nor was it a replica of Greek or Roman theatres. Instead, according to Sabri, it was an independent and innovative Mesopotamian structure, designed for religious rituals, performances, and athletic events. [lvi] The site under discussion lies within the ruins of Babylon, roughly 85 kilometers south of modern Baghdad. Excavations led by Robert Koldewey between 1899 and 1917 uncovered the remains of a Hellenistic-style theatre near the Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate. Stratigraphic and architectural evidence identified the building as a Seleucid or early Parthian construction, dating between the mid-2 nd and early 1 st centuries BCE, [lvii] and later investigations confirmed that assessment: the Nebuchadnezzar-stamped bricks should not be taken as evidence that the building dates to the sixth century BCE. As Olof Pedersén explains, the theatre “was constructed in the south-western part of the Homera hills, which … consisted of fills from the demolition of the ziggurat before its planned rebuilding … where a Greek theatre was constructed on part of the fill.” [lviii] Yet these findings may indicate that the theatre at Babylon was a cultural hybrid, reflecting both Hellenistic architectural forms and the needs and traditions of the local Babylonian community. Nevertheless, Mohammed Sabri’s interpretation provides a postcolonial rereading of this evidence. He acknowledges the Hellenistic form of the extant structure but emphasizes the continuities with indigenous Mesopotamian performance practices that pre-dated Greek colonization. Thus, the Seleucid theatre did not appear ex nihilo ; rather, it was superimposed upon an existing local tradition of ritual and communal gathering, transforming the space into a hybrid arena that merged Greek theatrical conventions with Babylonian ceremonial functions. Such a synthesis aligns with broader cultural patterns of the Hellenistic Near East, where Greek civic architecture often absorbed and recontextualized native symbolic forms. Sabri’s argument thus reframes Babylon’s theatre not as a Greek import but as an instance of cultural adaptation, expanding the discussion of ancient performance beyond a Eurocentric narrative of Greek origin to a more intercultural history of theatricality in Mesopotamia. Conclusion Before Athens institutionalized theatre in the 5 th century BCE, Mesopotamian societies had cultivated rich performative traditions that intertwined ritual, myth, and dramatic spectacle. These traditions, embodied in the Akitu festival, the Sacred Marriage, The Descent of Inanna , the Sumerian disputations, and The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur , demonstrate a deep awareness of performance as both sacred act and communal expression. Figures such as Ebeling, Karomi, Rashid, and Sabri have each illuminated different facets of this performative world, from the ritual re-enactments of cosmic renewal to the architectural and linguistic traces of dramatic practice. Together, they reveal a culture in which performance was not peripheral to social or religious life, but central to the articulation of cosmic order, kingship, and identity. The purpose of this study is not to replace one narrative of origin with another, nor to position Mesopotamia as a rival to Greece or any other ancient culture. Rather, this paper argues for the recognition of Mesopotamian performance traditions as part of a broader, interwoven history of theatricality that spanned multiple ancient civilizations. When viewed through this wider lens, the dramatic and ritual performances of Mesopotamia, Greece, and elsewhere in the ancient world appear not as competing beginnings, but as parallel articulations of the same human impulse to perform meaning into being. Recognizing Mesopotamian drama, therefore, expands the frame of theatre historiography. It invites us to move beyond linear genealogies and toward a more plural and dialogic understanding of performance history; one that acknowledges exchange, convergence, and independent innovation. As archaeological discoveries continue and collaborations between theatre historians, archaeologists, and philologists deepen, further evidence may emerge to clarify how these early practices intersected across regions. In this broader vision, the Mesopotamian contribution to theatre history lies not in claiming primacy, but in demonstrating that the performative imagination (ritualized, communal, and creative) has always been a shared human inheritance, reframed here as one that transcends civilizational boundaries. From this perspective, re-centering Mesopotamia within this interconnected landscape may enrich our understanding of world theatre as a complex, evolving network of traditions rather than a single, Western-centered lineage. Performance, as these early cultures reveal, has never belonged to one civilization alone; it has always been a dialogue among many voices, each shaping the art of theatre in its own time and form. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [i] Alfred Jeremias, Babylonische Dichtungen, Epen und Legenden (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1925), 30. [ii] The “Dialogue of Pessimism,” a Babylonian poem dating from around 1000 BCE, is often interpreted as both an existential reflection and a comedic satire targeting social hierarchies and the educational system. Franz Marius Theodor de Liagre Böhl suggests that the Master-Slave Dialogue may have functioned as a form of ritual comedy performed during the Babylonian New Year Festival, akin to the Roman Saturnalia. This reversal of roles, where the slave assumes the position of the master, points to a theatrical performance infused with satirical commentary. See Franz Marius Theodor de Liagre Böhl, Anthropologie réligieuse , ed. C. J. Bleeker (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 47–48; “Dialogue of Pessimism,” Electronic Babylonian Library , Corpus L II.4 (Standard Babylonian recension), trans. Benjamin Read Foster, https://www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/2/4/SB/ . [iii] Khalid Amine, “Decolonizing Theatre History in the Arab World,” Horizons/Théâtre 12 (2018): 10-25, at 12. [iv] Abdul Ameer al-Hamdani, “Iraq’s Heritage: An Update,” online lecture, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, 6 January 2021, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDrca7zbGH0 . [v] Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age , trans. Margaret E. Pinder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Martin L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). [vi] Awni Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah al-Iraqi al-Qadeem” [A Thesis on Ancient Iraqi Theatre], al-Aqlam , no. 6 (March 1979): 3–7. [vii] Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah,” 5. [viii] Fawzi Rashid, “al-Masrah Babili wa Lais Ighriqiyan” [Theatre Is Babylonian, Not Greek], al-Mawrid 16, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 66–67. [ix] Mohammed Sabri, “al-Masrah al-Babily: Tarikhuhu, Tirazuhu wa Khasa’isuhu” [Babylonian Theatre: History, Design, and Features], Al-Academy , no. 74 (February 2016): 74–75. [x] I do not claim expertise in the languages of ancient Mesopotamia, but I have consulted Simo Parpola, ed., Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary: Cuneiform Edition (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press/Eisenbrauns, 2023), 4, 11, 25, 30, 33–34, 37, 41, 80, 82, 94, 96, 101, 121–22. [xi] For more on this term, see Maddelena Rumor, who points out that the aluzinnu was a Mesopotamian comic performer (an early jester) whose role centered on parody, mockery, and boastful incompetence. He appears in temple and court contexts, performing songs, dances, humorous recitations, and satirical impersonations of experts such as healers, diviners, and scholars. Rumor further postulates that this figure is directly connected to the Greek ἀλαζών ( alazôn ), noting that the Greek term has no convincing Greek etymology and closely matches the phonetic shape and comic function of aluzinnu . She argues that both characters share the same defining traits—exaggeration, deception, and comic pretension—and that the Greek braggart likely reflects a cultural and linguistic borrowing from the earlier Mesopotamian tradition. Maddalena Rumor, “There’s No Fool Like an Old Fool: The Mesopotamian Aluzinnu and Its Relationship to the Greek Alazôn ,” KASKAL 14 (2017): 187–207. [xii] Rivkah Harris, “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of Opposites,” History of Religions 30, no. 3 (1991): 261–78, at 274. [xiii] Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, “An Oration on Babylon,” Altorientalische Forschungen 18, no. 1 (1991): 9-22, at 19–20. [xiv] Adolf Leo Oppenheim, “Akkadian pul(u)ḫ(t)u and melammu ,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 63, no. 1 (1943): 31–34. [xv] Oppenheim, “Akkadian pul(u)ḫ(t)u and melammu ,” 31–34. [xvi] Thorkild Jacobsen, “Religious Drama in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Unity and Diversity: Essays in the History, Literature and Religion of the Ancient Near East , ed. Hans Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 76–77. [xvii] Jacobsen, “Religious Drama,” 77. [xviii] Wilfred George Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 3–6; Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others , rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xvii–xviii; Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 167–77. [xix] E. A. Speiser, “The Creation Epic,” in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament , edited by James B. Pritchard, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 60. [xx] Erich Ebeling, Tod und Leben nach den Vorstellungen der Babylonier , Part I: Texts (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1931), 41. [xxi] Ebeling, Tod und Leben , 41. [xxii] Lauren Ristvet, “Between Ritual and Theatre: Political Performance in Seleucid Babylonia,” World Archaeology 46, no. 2 (2014): 264. [xxiii] Sam Mirelman, “The Babylonian Akitu Festival and the Ritual Humiliation of the King,” ANE Today 10, no. 9 (September 2022), https://anetoday.org/mirelamn-ritual-humiliation-king/ . [xxiv] By “ritual” and “theatrical performance” I refer to analytical aspects of the same Akitu festival sequence, not to separate events. Following Richard Schechner, ritual and theatre may be understood as points on a continuum of performance rather than mutually exclusive categories; see Richard Schechner, Performance Theory , rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 70–74. The Akitu is fundamentally a cultic rite of renewal characterized by fixed procedures and ritual efficacy, while also exhibiting embodied, demonstrative, and public dimensions that can be described analytically as performative, rather than theatrical in the modern sense. [xxv] Jonathan Zittell Smith, “A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams,” History of Religions 16 (1976): 1–17, at 3. [xxvi] Svend Aage Pallis, The Babylonian Akitu Festival (Copenhagen: Hovedkommissionær A. F. Høst, 1926), 253–65. [xxvii] Smith, “A Pearl,” 6–8. [xxviii] Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite: Aspects of Faith, Myth, and Ritual in Ancient Sumer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 49–50. [xxix] Kramer, Sacred Marriage Rite , 63–66, 67–78. [xxx] Inge Nielsen, Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama: A Study in Regional Development and Religious Interchange Between East and West in Antiquity (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2002), 39–41. [xxxi] Pirjo Lapinkivi, The Sumerian Sacred Marriage in the Light of Comparative Evidence (Helsinki: Neo‑Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2004), 30–47 (for the performative rubrics balbale , tigi , and kungar ; and for alternating voices and responsorial refrains), 92–106, 151–66 (for ritual sequencing: the processional approach; bathing/adornment; the nuptial bed; Ninšubur’s escort into the goddess’s inner space at Eanna), 185–206 (for the post‑union banquet, music, rejoicing); cf. Inge Nielsen, Cultic Theatres , 39–41 (for processions, spoken exchanges, chorus‑like refrains; and the roles of kings, priests, and cult personnel), 52–53 (for the major processions, including the city‑to‑ Bīt Akītu route). [xxxii] Schechner, Performance Theory , 324. [xxxiii] Jacobsen, “Religious Drama,” 77. [xxxiv] Rashid, “al-Masrah Babili,” 66. [xxxv] Ibid. [xxxvi] Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah,” 5. [xxxvii] Rashid, “al-Masrah Babili,” 71–72. [xxxviii] Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 68. [xxxix] Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 109–10. [xl] Judith E. Filitz, “At the Threshold of Ritual and Theater: Another Means of Looking at a Mesopotamian Ritual,” in Teaching Morality in Antiquity: Wisdom Texts, Oral Traditions, and Images of Virtue , ed. T. M. Oshima and Susanne Kohlhaas (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 233–34, 241–44. [xli] Mohammed Sabri, al-Masrah al-Iraqi al-Qadim [The Iraqi Ancient Theatre] (Baghdad: Dar al-Arif, 1991), 38. [xlii] Paul Delnero, “Translating the Untranslatable: The Role of Akkadian in the Sumerian Liturgical Corpus,” plenary talk presented at the American Oriental Society Annual Meeting, Portland, 18 March 2013, 8. [xliii] Enrique Jiménez, The Babylonian Disputation Poems: With Editions of the Series of the Poplar, Palm and Vine, the Series of the Spider, and the Story of the Poor, Forlorn Wren (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 15–16. [xliv] Adil Hashim, personal interview, 18 March 2025. [xlv] Claus Wilcke, The Sumerian Poem Enmerkar and En-suḫkeš-ana: Epic, Play, or? Stage Craft at the Turn from the Third to the Second Millennium B.C. (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2012), 18–33. [xlvi] Christopher J. Lucas, “The Scribal Tablet-House in Ancient Mesopotamia,” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1979): 305–32. [xlvii] Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 222–23. [xlviii] Cyril John Gadd, Teachers and Students in the Oldest Schools (London: University of London, 1956), 36. [xlix] John Jacobs, “The City Lament Genre in the Ancient Near East,” in City Lament: Commemorating Destruction in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond , ed. Ann Suter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 16, 19. [l] Jacobs, “The City Lament Genre,” 30–31. [li] Mary Rosalie Bachvarova, “The Destroyed City in Ancient World History: From Agade to Troy,” in City Lament: Commemorating Destruction in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond , ed. Ann Suter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 36–78. [lii] Mark E. Cohen, Balag Compositions: Sumerian Lamentation Liturgies of the Second and First Millennium B.C. (Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1974), 5–7; “The Lament for Sumer and Ur,” Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), University of Oxford, text no. c.2.2.3, https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section2/tr223.htm . [liii] Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10. [liv] Yvonne Rosengarten, “Au sujet d'un théâtre religieux sumérien,” Revue de l'Histoire des Religions 145 (1968): 117–60. [lv] Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah,” 5. [lvi] Sabri, “al-Masrah al-Babily,” 74. [lvii] Daniel Thomas Potts, “The politai and the bīt tāmārtu : The Seleucid and Parthian Theatres of the Greek Citizens of Babylon,” in Babylon: Wissenskultur in Orient und Okzident , ed. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum et al. (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2011), 244. [lviii] Olof Pedersén, Babylon: The Great City (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2005), 158. References About The Author(s) Amir Al‑Azraki is an Arab‑Canadian playwright, literary translator, and theatre scholar whose work explores war, exile, and identity. A practitioner of the Theatre of the Oppressed, he collaborates with artists, educators, students, and equity‑seeking communities to foster dialogue and social change. His plays have been staged internationally, and his translations have introduced contemporary Iraqi drama and Arabic poetry to English‑language audiences. Al‑Azraki is co‑author of Theatre in Iraq under Occupation, 2003–2011 and co-translator/co-editor of Contemporary Plays from Iraq . He is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures at Renison University College. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. 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