Watch Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths by Catappum! Collective at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. The Catappum Collective retraces the steps of Benjamim de Oliveira, revisiting the places where he lived, performed, and left his legacy. The journey began in Pará de Minas and Belo Horizonte—his hometown and starting point—where the group interviewed local artists, accessed historical documents, and delved into the memory of our Black clown’s presence. In São Paulo, the collective visited the Museum of Circus Memory and explored key moments in Benjamim’s path to success. As the first clown to record a music album in Brazil, he made history in the capital through performances filled with chulas and lundus, playing a pioneering role in the evolution of Brazilian entertainment. The journey continued to Rio de Janeiro, a historic site of Black resistance and home to the region known as Little Africa. It was there that Benjamim found support and cultural vitality during the formative years of his artistic rise.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Catappum! Collective Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the short films selection) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language Brazilian Portuguese Running Time 36:17 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film The Catappum Collective retraces the steps of Benjamim de Oliveira, revisiting the places where he lived, performed, and left his legacy. The journey began in Pará de Minas and Belo Horizonte—his hometown and starting point—where the group interviewed local artists, accessed historical documents, and delved into the memory of our Black clown’s presence. In São Paulo, the collective visited the Museum of Circus Memory and explored key moments in Benjamim’s path to success. As the first clown to record a music album in Brazil, he made history in the capital through performances filled with chulas and lundus, playing a pioneering role in the evolution of Brazilian entertainment. The journey continued to Rio de Janeiro, a historic site of Black resistance and home to the region known as Little Africa. It was there that Benjamim found support and cultural vitality during the formative years of his artistic rise. About The Artist(s) Group, Collective, or Production Resume The Catappum Collective began its research in 2015. In 2019, they premiered their first show, also titled Catappum. Between 2019 and 2023, they performed in more than 50 neighborhoods across all five regions of São Paulo and its countryside, reaching nearly 10,000 people from various social classes and age groups. From 2020 to 2022, the group took part in several in-person and online festivals, including the 2nd Festejo Raízes do Riso, the 2nd Saruê International Circus Festival, two editions of the Brincando no Parque Festival, the 3rd Dona Ruth Black Theater Festival of São Paulo, the 6th São Paulo International Circus Festival, and the Preta Leste Festival in Itaquera. In 2022, they were awarded funding through the 6th Circus Promotion Program, during which they held 12 performances of Catappum for over 3,000 people. They also offered workshops on Black comic traditions, engaging both artists and audiences in discussions about laughter, comedic expression, and racism through conversation circles. Also in 2022, the collective published an article titled “Black Popular Cultures in the Media” in Folha de São Paulo. That same year, they taught in the Humor course at SP Escola de Teatro, the institution where the collective’s founders were previously trained. Additionally, they participated in Brazil’s 1st Black Circus Research Symposium, contributing to the panel on Black Clowning, Circus, and Education. In 2023, they performed at SESC Registro – SP with a double feature: the Catappum show and the storytelling piece Pulú, the Little Black Boy Who Jumped Far, which was also written by the collective. That same year, they inaugurated the noon programming slot at Grande Lona do Mundo do Circo in Parque da Juventude (formerly Carandiru), presenting Catappum. Still in 2023, they were selected in the 42nd edition of the Theater Promotion Program for the City of São Paulo, which enabled them to create the group’s second show, Na Lona de Benjamim, a tribute to Benjamin de Oliveira, the great Black clown and circus artist of the early 20th century. In 2024, the Catappum Collective received the Picadeiro Trophy from the State Government in the category of Best Clown Show for their work Catappum. Get in touch with the artist(s) contatocatappum@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/cata.ppum/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 14 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Sonali Pahwa Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Zeina Salame Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Marjan Moosavi Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Sami Ismat Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Samer Al-Saber Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Areeg Ibrahim Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Marina Johnson Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Tiran Manucharyan Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly Iman Ezzeldin Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Katherine Hennessey Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Edward Ziter Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Sami Ismat Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Areeg Ibrahim Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Suzi Elnaggar “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Matthew Randle-Bent Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber George Potter Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Suzi Elnaggar Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Hassan Hajiyah 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

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 20, Spring 2025 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Steve Earnest Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Adam Pelty Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Steve Earnest Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Steve Earnest The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Marvin Carlson Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Marvin Carlson Mary Said What She Said Alex Lefevre The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Thomas Irmer Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit Dan Poston The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

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 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025: Konfrontacje Festival 2025, The Cyrkulacje Festival of Circus Arts and If I Had A Gun I’d Take Them All Down in Lublin and AlphaGo_Lee. Theory of Sacrifice at Studio Theatre and Waiting for Godot at the National Theatre Warsaw. AlphaGo_Lee at Studio Theater, Warsaw. Photo by Natalia Korczakowska Located in eastern Poland, just 100 KM or so from the Ukrainian border is the city of Lublin. The city has a strong legacy of support for people of the Jewish faith as well as being a regional leader in artistic production. The Konfrontacje Festival began as a film/theatre/arts festival in the 1970’s and has now risen to the point of being a major arts festival that attracts numerous art forms, but primarily live performance. Held in Lublin every October, the festival features the work of Polish and international artists and presents the best new trends in European theatre. The Aerial sculpture “The Grodzka Street Man” in Lublin, Poland 2025 Festival centered on Janusz Oprynski, a celebrated Polish director, writer and theatre artist whose work has been featured at the Provisorium Theatre in Lublin for 50 years. Like Grotowski, Oprynski’s production style focused on experimental and “poor” theatre with radical confrontations of political systems. Eventually known for his staging of novels, Oprynski’s best known works include Ferdydurke (from Witold Gombrowicz), The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), The Kindly Ones (Jonathan Little) and Ice by Jacek Dukaj. Co-founder and artistic director of the Konfrontacje Festival, Oprynski has received numerous European awards for his work including the Konrad Swinarski Award as well as a special award for artistic merit by the City of Lublin in 2025. The Lublin Centre for Culture presented the Theatr Provisorium production of Oprynski’s Ward 6 on the festival’s opening night. Like many of his previous works, Ward 6 featured something of a library setting. Oprynski’s work has been characterized by an “addiction to books” as the post show discussion revealed, but the work itself considered the nature of mental hospitals and the nature of rights and freedoms that had been taken away from (historically) Polish citizens who found themselves imprisoned by Russians into these confined situations. The performance was based on Chekhov's famous short story, "Room No. 6" which was very important for Polish people fighting for freedom for many years and showed how the "abnormal society" locked normal people in hospital. Set in the land of Ulro, (borrowed from Blake) or the land of spiritual suffering, the characters of Ward 6, named only as Mr. G and Dr. R were inhabitants of the land of Ulro, where they suffer for their individuality. They were guarded by Mr. N and spent their whole lives in passionate reading; making their world is a great theater of imagination, a theater of reading books. "By eating books," they swallow the "bitter wisdom" that makes them poignantly lonely. It was Oprynski’s belief that the abnormal society fears such people and locks them up in hospitals and prisons. The performance featured extremely minimalist or “poor” theatre techniques, but the nature of the space allowed for numerous possibilities. The use of projections created a huge library of books on the white paper strips that dangled from the ceiling. Physical books were also included in piles all around the stage as the actors made reference to them throughout. Oprynski noted in the post show discussion that his was a “theatre of books” and that there were both good and bad books in the world. He noted how the works of Dostoyevsky had both been an inspiration for him but also had haunted him for his entire adult life. Janusz Oprynski on the set of Ward 6 post-performance. Photo: Steve Earnest If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down was presented in a smaller studio space at the Lublin Centre for culture and relied only on a video background for its scenic elements. The one-man show was directed by Paul Bargetto and performed and co-conceived by Michael Rubenfeld. Rubenfeld offered the following summary of the plot: “ The play follows the character Time, a Kyiv-based narrator who guides the audience through the city’s streets, weaving together contemporary wartime reality with a century of political violence, memory, and resistance. As spectators walk alongside him, Kyiv becomes both stage and character—a living archive where fences, boulevards, and monuments summon stories of empire, occupation, and the city’s continual fight for self-determination. The frame is intimate and conversational, collapsing the distance between past and present: every location contains a hidden rupture, every building holds the echo of a struggle. At the center of the historical thread is Dmitry Bogrov, a young Jewish Ukrainian anarchist who, in 1911, assassinated Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin at the Kyiv Opera House. The play reconstructs Bogrov’s world—his radicalization, his ideological turmoil, his entanglement with the Okhrana secret police, and his profound loneliness. As the narrator retraces Bogrov’s final movements through the city, the story reveals a man pulled between ideals of justice and the brutal realities of revolutionary violence, culminating in the chaotic moment of the assassination and his swift execution. Running parallel to Bogrov’s story is the narrator’s own life, marked by activism, disillusionment, flight, and return. He recounts encounters with political art movements, the Euromaidan revolution, the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine, and the personal cost of resistance—including the loss, exile, and moral ambiguity that accompany armed struggle. Contemporary Kyiv appears simultaneously ordinary and surreal: a place with street musicians and gardens, yet also a place where journalists are assassinated, dissidents are hunted, and air-raid sirens punctuate daily life. Throughout, the play interrogates the ethics of violence, the meaning of freedom, and the weight of memory. It juxtaposes Bogrov’s anarchist dreams with modern Ukraine’s ongoing fight against Russian aggression, questioning what—if anything—political murder can achieve. The piece ends not with resolution but with solidarity: a collective gesture of singing, looking into one another’s eyes, and recognizing shared vulnerability. In this final moment, the audience stands in the city as it is now—scarred, defiant, and alive—asked to consider their own place in history’s ever-tightening circles.” (Michael Rubenfeld) Michael Rubenfeld in If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down. Photo: Paul Bargetto. The production was inspired by the true story of Dmitry Bogrov (1887–1911) – a Ukrainian-Jewish lawyer, double agent, and revolutionary who, in 1911, assassinated Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (1862–1911) at the Kyiv Opera House. Bogrov was arrested, tried, and executed shortly thereafter. Michael Rubenfeld in If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down. Photo: Paul Bargetto. Through innovative use of video and sound design, the performance immersed the audience in both historical and contemporary Kyiv; retracing the path that led the young Bogrov to his final act, while at the same time reflecting the author’s personal experiences of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Rubenfeld’s epic nearly two-hour monologue performance was extraordinary. As he led the audience on the journey through space and time of the play’s story his delivery was both informative from a reporter’s standpoint, but also highly personal as one who was invested in the story as an actual participant. Given the nature of the works travel (primarily a walking tour) through the streets of Kyiv, the camera work and Rubenfeld’s careful stage placement blended incredibly well. The resultant cinematic journey allowed the audience to experience the story in real time. Rubenfeld’s personal connection to the material was dynamic, personal and highly moving. If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down was a relevant and compelling performance, especially considering the nature of world events in 2025 when it was presented. Michael Rubenfeld in If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down. Photo: Paul Bargetto. Sponsored by the European Capital of Culture Lublin 2029 and the Adam Mickiewicz Foundation of Poland, our group consisted of numerous theatre scholars, producers and other artistic personnel from New York, Chicago, South Carolina and California and engaged in many events related to the history of Lublin but especially of the historically Jewish nature of the city. Many of the areas that we toured and the sites that were visited are featured in the 2024 movie A Real Pain . The study tour was arranged and coordinated by Tomek Smolarski on behalf of the European Capital of Culture Lublin 2029 and included the numerous performances but also visits to various sites in Lublin as well as neighboring cities like Kazimierz Dolny a medieval settlement with an important Jewish History. The event also included access to several additional performance events. One of these was the Cyrkulacje Festival presented at the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures in Lublin from October 4-10, 2025. Two works were available to be seen by our group – a work by Common Ground and Diaries in Motion, a physical theatre work by a group of young women from numerous European countries. The Cyrkulacje Festival brought together artists living in or originating from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine, and Slovakia. The festival is defined by diversity — of styles, aesthetics, and creative voices. The festival is built on exchange and dialogue, creating space for discovery, curiosity, and artistic circulation (yes, that’s where the name comes from!). The festival also hosts discussions, artist talks, and meetings with the jury. These encounters allow audiences to better understand the creative process and offer artists a chance to hear from their audience — and from each other. The program features both full-length productions and short-form pieces. From intimate solos to large-scale ensemble works, the festival showcases the depth and variety of the region’s circus voices. Since its beginnings in 2013, Cyrkulacje has helped contemporary circus artists grow, connect, and take the next steps in their careers. It’s a platform for experimentation, development, and recognition — a space that encourages originality, celebrates craftsmanship, and supports ambitious work. As part of the festival certain participants receive main prizes and special awards, including Best Trick, Audience Award, Media Award, Youth Award, and Partner Engagement Prizes. In 2019, Cyrkulacje was awarded the EFFE Label – a mark of excellence granted by the European Festivals Association. This recognition places Cyrkulacje among Europe’s most innovative and artistically significant cultural festivals. Stunt work with wooden blocks by the members of Common Ground. Photo: Steve Earnest Common Ground is a physical theatre artist collective based in Belgium with members from across Europe, North America and Asia. Performers include Andreas Bartl, Lisa Rinne, Emma Laule, Marius Pohlmann, Evertian Mercier and Zinzi Oegema. The group features immensely skilled physical artists in the areas of trapeze, human stunt work, devised work with physical objects, gymnastics and other related activities. Their hour-long exhibition (not given a specific title for the festival) included the use of numerous hollow wooden squares of various sizes that were carefully designed to create immense stage pictures while supporting (at times) a sizeable amount of weight. The artists manipulated the stage area with long poles, ropes and pulleys to form trapeze areas, climbing areas and shapes and carefully configured areas for the achievement of human stunts. Stunt work with poles and wooden shapes by Common Ground performer. Photo: Steve Earnest Diaries in Motion was produced by Daniel Burow with direction and artistic coaching by Christine Dissmann and Stacy Clark . Four artists from circus schools in Berlin, Montpellier, and Kyiv ( Lera Kutsenko, Daniela Levina, Alina Scharbl, Daria Ilnytska) attempt to answer these questions through the language of contemporary circus . The ninety-minute performance really had no story but certainly aimed toward meaning as the performers took the audience on a moving journey through “dreams and struggle, led by the desire for freedom,” as stated in the program. According to the production team the work aimed to tell the story of a generation forced to stand up for its most essential values - a performance that tells a tale of transformation from isolation and constraints to rebellion and collective strength. The four female artists were all highly trained acrobatic artists capable in the areas of floor work including German wheels and other rolling devices, flying work with a lyra, silks and other aerial devices in addition to any other related physical performance related elements including general stage movement and delivery of occasional lines of text. The nature of the work was based in strong athleticism and skill and the main goal, in addition to the potential story aimed at by the tone and nature of the background music, was the pure display of learned skill in the various disciplines. The performers measured up to the highest of world standards with their abilities in these areas and the sold-out audience witnessed breathtaking feats of physical work that can be achieved by only a small percentage of the world population and the highly athletic nature of the event appealed to both lovers of performance works as well as those more interested in sports and the display of highly skilled athletes. The blending of these two worlds was what characterized Diaries in Motion . Diaries in Motion Performers. Photo: Steve Earnest Diaries in Motion performers on a lyra. Photo: Steve Earnest The city of Warsaw is something to behold for all lovers of European travel and the National Theatre firmly represents the Polish nation’s desire to present theatrical art at the highest world level. The Royal Palace of Science and Culture include numerous theatre spaces with one company named, the Studio Theater. However, some confusion exists at times because the National Theatre of Poland, about fifteen minutes away by car or train, also has a Studio Theater. Both companies are included in the following section. AlphaGo_Lee at Studio Theater, Warsaw. Photo by Natalia Korczakowska Located in the beautiful Palace of Culture and Science in the city center of Warsaw AlphaGo_Lee : Theory of Sacrifice was presented at the Studio Theater. Directed by the company’s Artistic Director Natalia Korczakowska, the work considered a popular Korean board game – AlphaGo and dealt with the actual historical story of the 2016 match between Korean Go master Lee Sodal and the computer program itself in an AI format. The event, which took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, represented the fight between humanity (represented by Lee) and Artificial Intelligence, as represented by the AlphaGo game. The stage production detailed the events of the actual historical occurrence of the event, which was organized by Google and streamed live to the very large Chinese market who wanted to witness the ultimate battle between humanity and AI. The work is based on research by Natalia Korczakowska, who visited Seoul, Tokyo, and London, meeting with Go experts such as Prof. Chihyung Jeon (KAIST), Prof. Chihyung Nam (Myongji University), and members of the Korean Baduk Association. Their insights inform the production’s symbolic texture, embedding the Korean perspective at its core. Lee Sedol’s philosophical reflections—his belief that Go is an art form created from nothing by two human minds—resonate as the emotional heart of the piece. Korczakowska’s incredible conceptual approach was supplemented by lighting and live video by Rafal Paradowski, animation by Marcin Kitty Kosakowski, choreography by Sung Im Her, spacial arrangement and costumes by Marek Adamski and music by Marcin Lenarczyk and Dominik Ossowski. The production featured the use of an onstage camera crew that captured the scenes using 2 – 4 onstage cameras from various angles with the camera feed then projected onto numerous screens in live time. The lighting, sound and staging all contributed to an extremely well realized visual mise en scene that very capably revealed both very intimate scenes in addition to very high energy dance and public scenes that really stretched the nature of the performance. The stage itself became a monumental gaming space where the characters’ lives became the source of the game. Behind the scenes power plays by the leaders of Google DeepMind (based in London) were contrasted with bursts of dance, technological imagery and humans grappling with the depth and power of artificial intelligence. Intense dance scenes in AlphaGo_Lee . Photo by Natalia Korczakowska Presented at the Studio Theatre of the National Theatre of Warsaw, Waiting for Godot was presented in the Studio Space of the National Theatre Warsaw. The production played to sold out audiences for nearly three years and featured numerous well renowned Polish actors, many known for their numerous film and television credits, in addition to their stage credits in major Polish theatre companies. The work was directed by Piotr Cieplak with scenic, lighting and costume design by Andrzej Witkowski . The Studio Theatre of the National Theatre has a specific (and quite unusual) physical layout. Consisting of a 300-seat frontal view theatre that seemed to be designed with the Elizabethan theatre in mind, it had doors on either side of the backstage wall and a rather large discovery space in the middle. The discovery space was quite large in both size and depth, and several scenes were realized in that area, though the effect was not always successful as the concept of place was not clearly designated in the work. In addition, a stage left door, just past the entry area for audience members, was a part of the physical space but was used at numerous times in the production. This spacial arrangement was curious as it blurred the concept of place, awkwardly blending the practical nature of the exit with the world of the play. Mariusz Benoit (Estragon), Jerzy Radziwiłowicz (Vladimir), Bartłomiej Bobrowski (Lucky), Cezary Kosiński (Pozzo). Phot. Marta Ankiersztejn So many elements of this performance were surprising, and the work took on an usually serious tone with very little comic action. From the outset Estragon’s struggle to take off the boot seem a bit disingenuous and unrealized. The actors seemed to stand outside of their roles and comment on them in quasi-Brechtian fashion, which given the background of director Cieplak, would offer some explanation for the stylistic choices made. Mariusz Benoit and Jerzy Radziwilowicz seemed oddly cast in the roles as the as their performances were very dry and highly understated. Pozzo and Lucky (Cezary Kosinski and Bartlomiej Bobrowski, respectively) did little to rescue the dryness of the production’s tone. Anytime I see Waiting for Godot , it is with the intent that I am seeing an amazing universal work that, at its center, speaks so clearly to so many areas of the human experience and condition. I was incredibly hopeful but not completely satisfied in the overall achievement of this production. Sadly, I feel that much of the difficulty of the production came from the unusual and rigidly defined nature of the Studio Theatre space. Mariusz Benoit (Estragon), Jerzy Radziwiłowicz (Vladimir), Bartłomiej Bobrowski (Lucky), Cezary Kosiński (Pozzo). Phot. Marta Ankiersztejn The study tour curated by Smolarski was incredibly stimulating and included numerous theatrical and historical events worthy of a much longer and more detailed report. This rather short overview just manages to offer a partial view of the highly invigorating and varied nature of the arts scene in just two of Poland’s important centers for the arts and the brief nature of the trip (only 6 days) only allowed for a short glimpse into the incredibly diverse and highly supported work that happens in Poland. The country clearly prioritizes the arts and that spirit permeates all work that is both produced or presented there. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. 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 Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Reas by Lola Arias at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Yoseli has a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her back and has always wanted to travel, but she was arrested at the airport for drug trafficking. Nacho is a trans man who was arrested for swindling and started a rock band in jail. Gentle or rough, blonde or shaved, cis or trans, long-term inmates or newly admitted: in this hybrid musical, they all re-enact their lives in a Buenos Aires prison.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Reas At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Lola Arias Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue, NY 10003) on Sunday May 18th at 3pm. RSVP Please note this film has a ticketed entry and is being screened at Anthology Film Archive. Click on the button above to visit the AFA website to reserve your seats. Country Argentina, Germany, Switzerland Language Spanish Running Time 82 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Yoseli has a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her back and has always wanted to travel, but she was arrested at the airport for drug trafficking. Nacho is a trans man who was arrested for swindling and started a rock band in jail. Gentle or rough, blonde or shaved, cis or trans, long-term inmates or newly admitted: in this hybrid musical, they all re-enact their lives in a Buenos Aires prison. About The Artist(s) Lola Arias is a writer, theatre and film director and performer. She collaborates with people from different backgrounds (war veterans, former communists, Bulgarian children, etc.) in theatre, literature, music, film and art projects. Her productions play with the overlap zones between reality and fiction. Get in touch with the artist(s) N/A and follow them on social media @gema.films, @madavenuepr Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

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 22, 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Published: July 15, 2026 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article The Summer 2026 edition features productions from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Germany, Portugal, Lithuania and Romania and considers a variety of approaches from both new and established directors. Numerous works from some of Europe’s most respected companies as well as several new and relatively unknown theatre producers are considered, and many great photographs help to tell the story of these fantastic productions. Julian Hetzel’s Three Times Left is Right made its way throughout Europe in Summer 2026 – appearing at Berlin’s Theatertreffen but also in Düsselldorf, Switzerland and the Netherlands. One of Robert Wilson’s final productions, Seven Solitudes , also gets an early review in this issue, and special thanks to Tomek Smoliarski for his assistance in the translation of the review. Of special note in this issue is the work of editorial board member Professor Kalina Stefanova who spearheaded five of the articles featured here. Having access to these Eastern European productions satisfies the mission of European Stages to the highest level, as western European productions are sometimes featured more prominently. Our goal is to continue to find a balance that includes as many European countries as possible. Many thanks to all of the authors from around the world who contributed these works during the summer months in order that we at European Stages can continue to investigate and provide content to the international scholarly community in the area of theatre and performance. Their dedication to the mission and support of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is greatly appreciated. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. 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 Review of 'In The Heights' at the Teatro Variedades Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Spring in Europe – Beyond the Theatertreffen Power, Shame, Vanity and Opportunism – Productions of the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen “The more I give to thee, the more I have…” 15th edition of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Robert Wilson Beneath a Cabbage Leaf: 7 Solitudes at the Nacionalinis Kauno Dramos Teatras NE:BITEF 2025: The Festival that Refused to Disappear Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights Staging Tradition, Testing Form: The Second Showcase of the National Theatre of Sofia Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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Watch PACI by JULIETTE ROUDET at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Choreographer and film director, Juliette Roudet returns to the Island Corsica after a long absence. She wants to question her estranged uncles about events in the past but when that doesn't work, she tries to find the truth through dance. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents PACI At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by JULIETTE ROUDET Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film Program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country France Language French Running Time 33 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Choreographer and film director, Juliette Roudet returns to the Island Corsica after a long absence. She wants to question her estranged uncles about events in the past but when that doesn't work, she tries to find the truth through dance. About The Artist(s) Juliette Roudet is a versatile artist. Trained at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, she was quick to seek out other avenues of interpretation and creation. She was admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique de Paris (CNSAD), and has since performed under the direction of David Bobée, Jean Bellorini, Pierre Rigal, Laurent Laffargue, Caroline Marcadé... Since 2016, she has been teaching at the CNSAD and working with numerous artists and directors as a choreographer. In cinema and television, she has appeared in films by Alain Tasma, Manuel Flèche, Gérard Mordillat, Jérôme Cornuau and Ionut Teianu. In 2024, with “Paci”, she signed her first documentary film. Get in touch with the artist(s) dmorel@tsproductions.net and follow them on social media ✨https://www.instagram.com/julietteroudet/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Dominic Finocchiaro  Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Dinosaurs Dominic Finocchiaro By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF April Mathis, Kathleen Chalfant, and Elizabeth Marvel, photo by Julieta Cervantes The Dinosaurs By Jacob Perkins Directed by Les Waters Playwrights Horizons New York, NY February 19, 2025 Reviewed by Dominic Finocchiaro If the ever-present countdown clock in Oedipus was the defining image on Broadway this past season, a much more inefficacious timekeeper demanded attention Off-Broadway: the cheap, broken wall-clock that hung on the wall in Les Waters’s premiere production of Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs at Playwrights Horizons. The piece of scenery, easy to disregard in its anonymity, managed, in its inutility, to hold within itself the very dramaturgical structure undergirding the production. The world presented to audiences on the Judith O. Rubin Theater stage was one in which time was not linear but broken open and palimpsestic, containing both past and future in the eternal here and now that is the life of the addict in recovery. Perkins’s play is an addiction recovery play, a genre highly present onstage recently in the form of Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir , Joe White’s Blackout Songs , and Sean Daniels’s The White Chip, among others. However, it is perhaps more useful to place Perkins’s play in conversation with Annie Baker’s Infinite Life and its abiding interest in formally exploring the liminal spaces of recovery (from illness in Baker’s play) and the ways that such spaces fracture and distort one’s experience of time. The Dinosaurs follows the Saturday Survivors, a weekly AA support group for women, as they prepare for and undertake one of their meetings. The women (portrayed by Kathleen Chalfant, Elizabeth Marvel, April Mathis, Mallory Portnoy, and Maria Elena Ramirez) are of various ages and ethnicities, similar only in their addiction. A newcomer to the meeting, Reyna, or Buddy (Keilly McQuail), arrives briefly at the top of the play before quickly skittering off (although she will reappear later). Everything is set-up for a hyper-naturalist, minimalist, real-time drama to unfold. dots’s design further established this expectation in the audience: their set was perfectly banal, painstaking in its recreation of the anonymous, threadbare, and utilitarian nature of the rooms in which AA meetings are often held. The folding chairs were mismatched, and stray items were neatly lined up against the back wall—a period painting (whose subject cheekily evokes The Dinosaurs ’s origin as a Clubbed Thumb prompt about The Decameron) , exercise mats, cardboard boxes—as if to showcase the various and random usages that the room was in service to. And let’s not forget that broken clock. Perkins’s characterizations, like the set, are relatively sparse on the page, underscoring the importance of anonymity to the addict in recovery; although every addict’s story is different in its details, at their core they are all the same, and to engage meaningfully in the work of recovery is to throw off the uniqueness of the individual self and accept being one of many. The women all have names that start with the letter J, further signaling this lack of individuality. Waters and the ensemble offset this sense of anonymity somewhat through the specificity of their work, but the sparseness of Perkins’s text resists too much actorly embellishment. Indeed, the performances that seemed to push hardest against this simplicity of characterization are the ones that risked dissonance vis-a-vis the larger vision of the production. Perhaps the most unadorned—and strongest—performance was Mathis’s as the gentle, conciliatory Jane; in giving over to the text completely, Mathis exuded a quiet but resounding presence that reverberated in its utter simplicity and helped ground the production. Maria Elena Ramirez and Elizabeth Marvel, photo by Julieta Cervantes The Dinosaurs was the first production in Playwrights Horizons’s new Unplugged program, which aims to promote new plays in simple realizations with low-production values, focusing on the creativity of the work itself rather than the spectacle afforded by large design budgets. A one-location play set at an AA meeting is a smart choice for such a program, but the fact that Waters was directing gave audiences a hint that the realm of pure naturalism was not this play’s likely home. Waters’s oeuvre is perhaps most striking in his productions’ ability to manifest psychogeography, to create haunted, liminal atmospheres so rich in emotion and memory that they become another character in themselves—his recent, deeply moving (and deeply underappreciated) staging of Eliya Smith’s Grief Camp at the Atlantic was a prime example of these tendencies. For Waters, a room is never just a room—certainly not a room with as much embedded memory as one that has housed a support group for over fifty years. What audiences came to realize, little by little, in Waters’s production was that what they were witnessing was not a single meeting, but in fact fragments of many meetings over many years. The first significant evidence of this (besides the broken clock) was the reappearance of Reyna during the group’s three-minute silent meditation and the asynchronous conversation she had with Jane that went unacknowledged by the other women. Another example was Joan’s (Marvel) days of sobriety ricocheting from forty-five days to twenty-seven to ten to five to one to thirteen years, all in the span of a single minute. Later, Jolly (Chalfant) vanished from the stage without fuss and was spoken of in fond remembrances by Joan, mourning her passing. This was a world in which time is a tenuous, fragile thing that is as uncertain as each character’s hard-fought sobriety. Time in this room, then, was a purgatorial time that flattened. If, as Thornton Wilder writes in his essay “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” theatrical time is always now, then so is it the case in recovery, with its emphasis on living in the moment and on being in “the present tense,” as Perkins’s characters often reiterate. Recovery is anti-teleological, the inherently cyclical time of eternal return—every day is a new day, but every day is also the same struggle, and the women in the play must, as they cheerily invoke, “keep on coming back” to this same room. What Perkins and Waters attempted to do, therefore, was to give to such an experience a theatrical form attuned to its psychological truth; while a more linear structure that moved towards a climactic resolution would be false for the addict in recovery, the production’s dreamlike distortions of time recreated the addict in recovery’s ongoing relationship with their own addictions. It is a relationship whose routines are so repetitive that they blur together into an endlessly occurring, singular present. Although the play refuses dramatic resolution, Perkins does offer audiences something to grasp onto at work’s end. Reyna returns after having been integrated into the group. Chalfant then arrives back on stage, only this time, she is a new character. The eldest member of the group now embodies the newbie, and Reyna has moved from newbie to welcoming veteran. The names and roles have changed, but the cycle continues in the empty room. The two women then left to meet the others at a nearby diner, and the audience was left with the room itself, in a silence that screamed. The room will be there after these specific women have gone, and it will continue to hold their love, their care and generosity for each other. Waters succeeded at creating another of his haunted spaces, the ghosts that inhabited it not fearsome but friendly, guides rather than demons. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DOMINIC FINOCCHIARO is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on late 20 th  and 21 st  century anglophone plays and playwrights, with a particular emphasis on queer theatre. As a playwright, his work has been developed and produced nationwide, including at Clubbed Thumb, the Kennedy Center, the New Group, and the Roundabout Theatre. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. 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 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction By Edward Ziter Published: May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) 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 Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution:

Amy Mihyang Ginther 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 Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Amy Mihyang Ginther By Published on May 19, 2022 Download Article as PDF “I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.”—Saidiya Hartman [1] Using theatre to generate empathy for characters and narratives has been a longstanding goal in Eurocentric drama and a strong argument for this medium to be a tool for larger social change. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, sparked largely by the unjust deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, theatre makers are exploring alternative ways to represent Black, brown and other historically excluded narratives, which are too often exploited as trauma porn. In this essay, I offer dramaturgy of deprivation, or 없다, as an alternative to dramaturgy of empathy. I contextualize this concept theoretically and practically, and use examples from my own practice to illustrate how 없다 is potentially effective in dramatizing narratives from my own positionalities as an Asian American and as a transracially adopted person from South Korea. Critique of trauma porn and sentimentalized narratives While white representation is afforded abundance and complexity, “ethnic and racial others live in an economy of narrative scarcity.” [2] Theatre has long had the power to disrupt this scarcity but often only in the form of providing the previously invisiblized or marginalized narrative for an audience to elicit empathy. Performance studies scholar/ethnographic theatre maker Nikki Yeboah asks in our current moment, “is empathy enough, or does our work reify power more than disrupt it?” [3] Particularly in relation to Black and brown suffering, how can we dramatize characters’ experiences in ways that do not re-traumatize people of color or leave white audiences feeling passively satisfied for having empathy, therefore perpetuating the white and colonial gaze of surveillance, voyeurism, fetishism, and possession, [4] something Yeboah critiques as “not an inherently radical act”? [5] Theorists from Black and decolonial studies indicate that highlighting the historiographical absence of people or obfuscation of narratives illustrates how forces such as white supremacy and colonialism have dehumanized or invisiblized them. Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino argue that metaphoricity is a crucial part of Black enslaved identity and that its “political indecipherability … exemplifies the violence of slavery itself.” [6] If “what slavery-as-metaphor offers is an opening to tarry with unknowing, to increase frustration,” [7] then what impacts can this type of depiction have on a theatre audience? Can frustration and unknowing provoke stronger actions that will result in social justice after the performance? Yeboah argues for dramaturgy that leaves the audience with the kind of frustration Garba and Sorentino refer to because “collective action requires agitation. Collective action is fueled by feelings of unrest, anger, and dissatisfaction so strong that they cannot be contained. It emerges out of turbulence. It draws strength from a people unsettled.” [8] Saidiya Hartman seems to agree: “the loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited.” [9] Hartman’s idea of narrative restraint as a way to “respect the limits of what cannot be known” [10] contrasts with the dramatic urge to present such narratives with explicit specificity and detail for contemporary white audiences as a way to compensate for their invisibilization. Although greater representation and embodiment of these stories and characters are still important, is there a dramaturgical alternative that complicates these depictions and denies audiences satisfaction? These questions inspire me to think about the Korean verb 없다, which roughly translates to “there are none; (to be) lacking; (to be) nonexistent,” [11] not dissimilar to faltar in Spanish. [12] How do we create dramatic experiences of loss or absence for an audience so they feel the grief and rage needed to take action towards a more just world, instead of feeling passively good about themselves for empathizing with victims/survivors of oppression? Rather than working to perform and prove my humanity for the audience, how can I compel them to feel the irreconcilable loss of self and/or history so we can be inspired to make collective change? Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview and Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop are excellent recent examples that engage with more complex representations around racialized trauma. As an audience member, I felt the unrest, anger, and hunger that Yeboah and Hartman hope to evoke in their work; both shows created strong desire within me to experience their characters and narratives more fully, and I felt a renewed urgency to fight for them offstage. In the next section, I will argue that the uniqueness of transracially adopted Asian American identity is suited for 없다 and provide examples from my own work. Racist Love : Asian American and adopted Korean representation This essay takes inspiration from a performative response on Zoom that I gave to Leslie Bow’s working introduction to her book, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy . [13] Bow argues that the US’s racialized relationship with Asian American identity can be illustrated through its abstracted affection or desire for nonhuman proxies (such as objects) and that this partly stems from a “deliberate absence of Asian people.” [14] This resonated with me as both an Asian American and a person who was transracially adopted from South Korea. “Transracial” does not mean white women trying to pass as Black or brown. In this context, it means being adopted into a family whose race differs from theirs (often Black/brown folks being adopted by white folks), and it has been an established term in adoption studies for decades. [15] Directly following the Korean War in the 1950s, a time when the US was strengthening its anti-Asian immigration policies, [16] adoptions from countries like South Korea increased. I argue that this is because US society and its adoption industrial complex viewed adopted children as dehumanized objects that allowed them to project the same kind of abstracted affection and longing that Bow highlights. White US families often adopted South Korean children because they were deemed acceptable as a model minority [17] in ways that are consistent with Bow’s assertions that the US looks “outward to Asia for its ‘bit’ of the other, for the object that makes satisfaction possible while imperfectly concealing racial anxiety.” [18] The larger AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) immigrant community often fails to be in solidarity with transracially adopted people from Korea [19] (who make up 10% of the Korean-US diaspora) while their white parents disregard their racial identity often with the intention to assimilate them. [20] Because “adoption is a series of transactions—legal, social, and financial [and] … those with the most power get to define the terms and create the policies and practices that most benefit them,” [21] white parents as major actors in these transactions tend to further objectify adopted people as nonhumans. The Korean government and its counterparts in countries like the US that make up the adoption industrial complex commodify adopted people; they were a literal export, because “US adoptive laws were designed in the context of free market capitalism and based on children as property.” [22] Agencies duplicated, interchanged, and manipulated our records to make us more marketable/adoptable. I was one of likely thousands of adopted people whose status was changed to orphan on my paperwork, a lie to appease the US government’s scant overseas adoption policies at the time. Instead of wanting to prove my humanity as an Asian American and transracially adopted person, my impulse was to move in another direction: to depict myself as literal Asian objects. Utilizing the Zoom format, I used Snapchat filters that stir Western desire such as food, toys, and appropriative clothing/costume. I leaned into my own objectification and used filters that intentionally obscured most of my face in the hopes that the audience would strain to see more of my personhood and be present to this less comfortable sensation. Fig. 1. Screenshots of Ginther (taken by the author) during her Zoom performance, using Snapchat filters. Clockwise from left to right: 1. As a dumpling, 2. As an old-fashioned Orientalist doll, 3. As a Geisha in full makeup, 4. As a boba tea. As I presented using a boba tea filter, for example, I talked about how experts estimate that South Korea made somewhere between 15-20 million dollars a year at the height of Korean adoption. [23] Using my own birth year, 1983, and adjusting for inflation and the pricing for my favorite bubble tea place in Santa Cruz, I shared with the audience that I cost about 1,315 boba teas. I hoped that in highlighting the loss of my story and personhood through anti-Asian American racism and the international adoption industrial complex that I would generate hunger, agitation, and unrest in ways that Yeboah and Hartman imagined. Attendees described my performance as “playful,” “incisive,” and “disorienting.” Another reflected, “Mainstream representations of ‘Asian-ness,’ like dumplings, ‘Geisha’ makeup, and boba tea, seen all together in aggregate made for a compelling visual argument of how we consume and project, literally on our faces, cultural iconography and object.” These responses suggest that I effectively performed alienation and objectification. My work: between and No Danger of Winning My first solo show, between , explored Korean adopted identity through multiple characters that centered my search for my first family. [24] Many adoption narratives use reunion as a form of climax, [25] but I intentionally deprived the audience of this dramatic moment, telling them: There was no grand moment that led me to my family in Korea.Perhaps that’s what you were hoping to find here.Meeting my family in Korea did not complete me.Reunions are not ends. They are middles. [26] I did not consciously know it at the time, but I was exploring ways we can withhold representation from audiences for sociopolitical reasons. I remarked that I had intentionally resisted this type of resolution scene because “I think this dilutes the complexity and richness of the experience that the continuously progressing relationship demands and deserves.” [27] In addition to depriving my audience of a realistic depiction of my reunion, I realized that my inability to “authentically” portray a Korean woman also deprived Korean audience members in Seoul of the ethno-national identity that was taken from me through the trauma of my transnational adoption. This is particularly important because transracially adopted people “are seen as suspect in their communities of origin or seen as not authentic,” [28] so a more supposedly “accurate” depiction potentially misses an opportunity to convey a more complex truth. I reflected: I want the audience to fully believe that I am this Korean mother before them, but I have accepted the fact that, to a Korean-fluent audience, there really is no amount of voice work I can do to achieve this. … you’re not the only one to intimate that part of what is moving about this performance of Ki-Bum is how hard and perhaps how imperfectly I, as an adoptee, am trying to portray this character to audiences here in South Korea. [29] Being unable to achieve this character’s accent with believable mimesis originally felt like a failure in my performance. With between , I am interested in the impact of my inability to fully embody Koreanness for Korean audience members. In feeling deprived of this more authentic portrayal, perhaps they will be moved to support policies such as family preservation so as to not perpetuate this discomfort they feel. The theory I cite in this essay, my previous work like between , and pieces like A Strange Loop and Fairview have inspired the ways I am writing and dramaturging my current project, the book for No Danger of Winning , a verbatim musical based on my interviews with ten former contestants of color who were eliminated on The Bachelor/ette . It is a meta-musical where a character, Joy, based on me as the playwright, navigates the complex ethics of trying to represent the people she interviews in ways that are more humanizing than the reality television depictions. In some ways, she is exploring the same questions as this essay through a more dramatic, embodied medium. Originally, one of our major dramaturgical goals was to humanize the contestants in ways that the reality TV did not and to illuminate the ways they suffered as a result. When one Black audience member commented at our first workshop reading, “I don’t need an entire musical to tell me that these reality shows are racist,” [30] it became clear to me, the composer (Thomas Hodges), and our developmental director (Lisa Marie Rollins) that providing literal/mimetic depictions of the characters’ experiences simply to replace the racist televised versions was not sufficient representation. The musical needed to disrupt the conditioned white gaze of the audience. After six Asian/Asian American women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta in March 2021, the stakes of representation and its deadly consequences resonated with me in a deeply personal way, adding to the heightened despair and fear so many of us in the AAPI community were feeling since the pandemic and its racist consequences emerged. [31] I wanted to depict the way this event shifted my (Joy’s) making of our musical—but how? How can I represent the responses of my Asian American and transracially adopted Asian communities through my theatre making in ways that do not reify trauma or leave a white audience feeling sated with their empathy for us? There is a moment where my character, Joy, seeks comfort after the tragic news by having an intimate and romantic moment with the presumed Asian male contestant she interviewed from The Bachelorette. I offer this staging as a possibility of something because the scenario of two Asian people experiencing romantic love does not happen often on The Bachelor/ette . However, it becomes increasingly apparent through his lines that this Asian actor is actually playing Joy’s white boyfriend; along with Joy, the audience experiences this possibility of romantic love dissolve. No matter how much agency Joy has as a playwright, she is unable to generate this narrative in her real life. Using this reveal, I aim for the audience to feel deprived of what a romantic love story between Joy and an Asian American partner may look like and the ways whiteness can feel insufficient in supporting partners of color during/after racist trauma. Conclusion Adopted writer Mary Kim Arnold reminds us: “being visible is not the same as being seen.” [32] Too often, audiences leave shows “feeling good about feeling bad” [33] for a character of color who experienced oppression or trauma as part of the dramatic narrative. While representation is important, and this may be arguably better than continuing to exclude these narratives from our canon, I believe there are ways we can reimagine dramaturgy that can move audiences beyond a passive experience of empathy that does little to change power dynamics and the world at large. In my theatre making, I aspire to deprive the audience of my full personhood and its related narratives in an effort to generate feelings and experiences of irreconcilable loss: a traded commodity through cute Snapchat filters; a yearned-for reunion scene; an “authentic” Korean character; or a loving, healing, romantic relationship between two Asian Americans. I dream of emancipatory ways Korean adopted people and other people of color will be seen onstage. Perhaps one of the ways to do this is to deprive an audience of what could have been, to compel them to experience our grief, our losses, our irreconcilability, so they rage with us, fight for us, and do something in the world that generates actual justice. References [1] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 11. [2] Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 203. [3] Nikki Owusu Yeboah, “‘I know how it is when nobody sees you’: Oral-History Performance Methods for Staging Trauma,” Text and Performance Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2020): 132. [4] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2003), 6. [5] Yeboah, “Oral History Performance Methods,” 149. [6] Tapji Garba and Sara‐Maria Sorentino, “Slavery Is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,’” Antipode 52, no. 3 (2020): 776. [7] Garba and Sorentino, 777. [8] Yeboah, “Oral History Performance Methods,” 46. [9] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 8. Hartman’s essay is known for laying the foundations of critical fabulation, the praxis of filling in the gaps of historical data with creative, semi-fictive accounts, particularly in relation to Black trauma in the US. This is already being referenced in dramaturgical processes in productions. See Calley N. Anderson and Holly L. Derr, “Using Critical Fabulation for History-Based Playwriting,” Howlround, 3 March 2021, https://howlround.com/using-critical-fabulation-history-based-playwriting. [10] Hartman, 4. [11] “Google Translate,” Google, https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=%EC%97%86%EB%8B%A4&op=translate. [12] “Google Translate,” Google, https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=faltar%20&op=translate. [13] Bow’s remarks and my response to them were part of the Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities, sponsored by University of California: Santa Cruz, 2021. [14] Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 10. [15] For more on this, see: JaeRan Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption: Historical Legacies, Current Issues, and Future Challenges,” in The Complexities of Race: Identity, Power, and Justice in an Evolving America , ed. Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 104-125; Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Andy Marra, “An Open Letter: Why Co-opting ‘Transracial’ in the Case of Rachel Dolezal is Problematic,” Medium, 16 June 2015, https://medium.com/@Andy_Marra/an-open-letter-why-co-opting-transracial-in-the-case-of-rachel-dolezal-is-problematic-249f79f6d83c. [16] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 109. [17] Kim, Adopted Territory , 28. [18] Leslie Bow, “Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy” (presentation, Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities, Santa Cruz, CA, 19-20 February 2021). Bow said this as part of the draft she presented at the conference. It was later deleted for the final version of her book’s introduction. [19] Kim Park Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 96. [20] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 110. [21] Ibid., 104. [22] Ibid., 112-113. [23] Kim, Adopted Territory , 33. [24] I wrote between as part of my undergraduate thesis at Hofstra University in 2005. Its World Premiere was at the Edinburgh Fringe (Gilded Balloon) in 2006. Because of its themes and production locations, audiences were predominantly white and/or had some personal/professional interest in adoption. There were more Korean attendees when the show premiered in Seoul in 2011, but still many white audience members because the show was co-produced by an expat theatre company. [25] Family reunion is commonly used to resolve many media narratives in general that are not adoption related, spanning from Finding Nemo to Avengers: Endgame . One adoption-focused example of reunion being used as a resolution is the Netflix documentary, Found (2021). [26] Amy Mihyang Ginther, between (unpublished script, Club After Mainstage, Seoul, 9-17 April 2011). [27] tammy ko Robinson, “Korean Adoptee Explores Roots In One-Woman Show,” Imperial Family Companies, October 2011, https://charactermedia.com/october-issue-korean-adoptee-explores-roots-in-one-woman-show-2/. [28] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 115. [29] Robinson, “Korean Adoptee.” [30] No Danger of Winning talkback , book by Amy Mihyang Ginther, music and lyrics by Thomas Hodges, Shetler Studios, New York, 11 July 2019. [31] Anti-Asian racism, violence, and xenophobia has a long history in the US; this has intensified significantly since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. [32] Mary-Kim Arnold, Litany for the Long Moment (Buffalo, NY: Essay Press, 2018), 29. [33] This phrases references Lisa Nakumura, “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial Empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64. This piece critiques the goal of empathy in virtual reality (VR) documentary work specifically, and is impacting my current VR project, Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산), which is about my illegal abortion in South Korea. Details about this are beyond the scope of this essay, but I anticipate publication about it in the future, along with its VR release in exhibition space. Footnotes About The Author(s) Amy Mihyang Ginther (she/they) is currently an assistant professor within the Department of Performance, Play & Design at UC Santa Cruz. She is a queer, transracially adopted theatre maker and accent designer who publishes and performs around themes of identity, embodied trauma, power, and representation. Ginther’s edited volume, Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and decolonial actor training , is due 2023 (Routledge) and she is currently working on a musical, No Danger of Winning . Ginther is a Master Teacher of Acting and Singing with Archetypes, and is a certified teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork and Tectonic Theater Project’s Moment Work™ devising method. 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.

Alex Ferrone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Appropriate Alex Ferrone By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate. Credit: Joan Marcus. Appropriate By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Directed by Lila Neugebauer Helen Hayes Theatre New York, NY November 30, 2023 Reviewed by Alex Ferrone A prolonged blackout opens Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate , so it is through sound—the tremulous hum of “ a billion cicadas ”—that the audience first encounters the yet unseen world on stage. In Lila Neugebauer’s production at the Hayes Theatre, the play’s first time on Broadway, ten years after regional co-premieres in Louisville and Chicago, sound designers Bray Poor and Will Pickens immersed the audience in a surround-sound cicada song that seemed almost to overwhelm the senses. I say senses (plural) because the soundscape’s penetrative quality was intended to exceed audition: as Jacobs-Jenkins explains in the stage directions of the play’s prologue, the sound “ sweeps the theater […] over and beyond the stage – washing itself over the walls and the floors, baptizing the aisles and the seats, forcing itself into every inch of every space, every nook, every pocket, hiding place and pore until this incessant chatter is touching you. It is touching you .” We were thus meant to feel the sound on our bodies, on our skin. When the lights finally came up on the meticulously cluttered interior of an old two-story Arkansas plantation house, designed by the collective Dots, the play’s premise was deceptively familiar: the semi-estranged family of a dead white patriarch reunites to auction off the property and divide the assets, but their long festering resentments soon dominate the proceedings and cause irreparable fissures. Appropriate knowingly riffs on the American tradition of the family reunion play, inviting easy comparisons to plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Buried Child , and August: Osage County —a tradition Jacobs-Jenkins admires and also problematizes for its racial exclusivity. “No one ever talks about Raisin in the Sun as a family drama,” he told Diep Tran in the December 2023 issue of Playbill : “It’s always ‘a social allegory about race and class.’” Jacobs-Jenkins expressed a similar misgiving in American Theatre nine years earlier, the first time Appropriate was mounted in New York in an off-Broadway production at the Signature Center: “there were a lot of triggers for me in hearing people list and describe the ‘great American family dramas.’ I’d look around and be like, ‘There’s no people of color on these lists.’ […] Who has access to this idea of ‘family’ as a universal theme?” Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. Of course, the Lafayette family drama was front and center at the Hayes Theatre for Appropriate ’s almost three-hour runtime. The cast, led by an indomitable Sarah Paulson, traded endless verbal (and eventually physical) assaults as they aired their grievances and exposed each other’s indiscretions. Supporting performances were uniformly excellent: Corey Stoll, as the absent, entitled son for whom care entails merely signing checks, and Nathalie Gold, as his apprehensive wife who struggles as an outsider in the family, were standouts; so was Michael Esper, as the prodigal son whose serial transgressions alienate those close to him; Elle Fanning was especially memorable as his suspiciously young girlfriend, whose new-age spiritualist word salad was a consistent source of humor. But the evening belonged to Paulson: she gave an astonishing performance as the eldest daughter Toni, at times beset with exhaustion, at others ferociously stalking the stage, her fierce commitment to her family barely concealing both vulnerability and venom. If there is familiarity here, soon comes the curveball, a series of disturbing discoveries as the family sorts through Daddy’s things: first, an album of lynching photos; then, jars of “weird stuff” that resembles human remains; finally, a Klan hood over the head of the youngest grandchild, which, when I saw the show, drew the night’s loudest combination of belly laughs and horrified gasps. It is a rupture the family is determined to avoid, as they downplay and outright deny Daddy’s obvious involvement in anti-Black violence. But their insistence on centering themselves, on claiming victimhood at each other’s hands, wilfully sidelines the Black victims of racist violence whose traces continue to crop up on the family estate. And so the photo album shifts signification, no longer a physical record of heinous racist violence but a commodity worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars” whose sale would enact yet another indignity on the murdered Black people among its pages. While the family cannot fathom calling Daddy an outright racist (gasp!), daughter-in-law Rachael points out that the Antebellum South is “the soil upon which his worldview was fashioned.” This mention of soil is no coincidence, for the vast property includes two burial grounds: one, a cemetery for generations of the Lafayette family; the other, the unmarked graves of generations of enslaved people who worked on the plantation. Even unseen, they are nevertheless there. And so we return to the cicadas, whose characteristic life cycle confines them to the soil for thirteen years at a time. In Appropriate , the cicadas never left, their low thrum pulsating through the theatre for the full length of the show. (In the text, Jacobs-Jenkins specifies that they “ fade to a place just beyond us but never disappear ,” and, sure enough, the stage directions that end each scene reinvoke their continuous presence.) It is an unnerving element of the sound design, something the audience acclimates to, often drowned out by the onstage histrionics, but never absent—an ongoingness that recalls Christina Sharpe’s figuration of “antiblackness as total climate” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Ultimately, little is resolved by the end of the play. Instead, Jacobs-Jenkins pulls another narrative trick (and maybe exacts some revenge) by absenting the Lafayette family altogether: generations whoosh by (“ it is some day – any day – tomorrow – thirteen years from now – twenty-six years from now. It is the future. It is the present. It is any present. Is the past – any past – now ”), and, in a stunning coup de théâtre , the house falls apart before our eyes. Jane Cox’s dazzling lighting produced a cinematic timelapse as shelves collapsed and windows shattered and a chandelier swung from a rope. Finally, a colossal tree grew from the ground, its wide trunk and full branches stretching out of view, high up into the fly space—radical growth after so much decay. Neugebauer’s final image departed from the text, but it was perhaps in direct conversation with the titles of the play’s three acts, not reproduced in the Playbill. Where Act II, “Walpurgisnacht,” gestures to paganism and witchcraft (and surely to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , another “family drama” in its own way), Acts I and III, titled “The Book of Revelations” and “The Book of Genesis,” take us from the end of the world back to the beginning, to the garden and the great flood, to regeneration. The production’s final scene, with its spectacular collapse and its magnificent tree growing through (or perhaps from) the ruins, beautifully captured the extent to which Appropriate is not really about the Lafayettes at all: it’s about the house and about the land on which it stands and eventually falls. It’s about the soil. Sarah Paulson in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Alex Ferrone (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at l’Université de Montréal, where he teaches dramatic literature, theatre history, and performance studies. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Springer, 2021), and his articles and reviews have been published in Theatre Survey , Theatre Journal , and Comparative Drama . 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 America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Resilience by Juan David Padilla Vega at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Globally renowned drag, circus, performance, and dance artists share their personal stories of resilience through captivating manifestos. From a French aerialist’s life-saving journey of gender euphoria through circus to a Canadian dancer’s defiant resistance against shadeism, and a Colombian queer refugee artist’s poignant revelation of silenced asylum struggles, these inspiring artists come together to share stories that not only positively transformed their lives but also greatly impacted their communities. Blending documentary and art film, 'Resilience' captures vibrant performance manifestos born from a shared creation residency. Through visceral movement and powerful words, the film invites viewers to contemplate the beauty of human strength.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Resilience At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Juan David Padilla Vega Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th at 1pm and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Canada, Colombia Language Spanish, English, French Running Time 70 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Globally renowned drag, circus, performance, and dance artists share their personal stories of resilience through captivating manifestos. From a French aerialist’s life-saving journey of gender euphoria through circus to a Canadian dancer’s defiant resistance against shadeism, and a Colombian queer refugee artist’s poignant revelation of silenced asylum struggles, these inspiring artists come together to share stories that not only positively transformed their lives but also greatly impacted their communities. Blending documentary and art film, 'Resilience' captures vibrant performance manifestos born from a shared creation residency. Through visceral movement and powerful words, the film invites viewers to contemplate the beauty of human strength. About The Artist(s) Juan David Padilla Vega is a Canadian-Colombian transdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose versatile portfolio spans film, photography, and video installations intertwined with performing arts such as circus, dance, drag, and music. Based in Montreal, his artistic practice explores the challenges faced by visible and invisible minorities, the emergence of new diasporas, self-exploration through inherited memories, and human movement. Among his most notable works is Resilience, a project supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (CAC) and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ). Initially conceived as a social art initiative, it evolved into his first experimental documentary feature, which had its world premiere at Montreal's International Festival of Films on Art (Le FIFA) in 2025. His latest project, the multimedia installation Titre de Voyage, debuted as a solo exhibition at the Council for the Arts in Montreal and was later showcased at the Maison de la culture Claude-Léveillée during the Festival LatinArte, as well as on St-Hubert Street for Latin American Heritage Month, reaching an audience of 38,000 spectators. Additional highlights include Betty Garcés, the Voice of the Pacific Littoral, a documentary short about Afro-Colombian opera singer Betty Garcés, and Nostos, Urniator & Dor, a multimedia art installation presented at Cali’s International Dance Biennale and the Teatro Colón Bogotá. Get in touch with the artist(s) distributionresilience@gmail.com and follow them on social media SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCTION COMPANY Insondable Studio IG: @insondablestudio Urniator Studio IG: @UrniatorStudio FB: https://www.facebook.com/urniatorstudio SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTOR Juan David Padilla Vega IG: @juandavidpadillavega FB: https://www.facebook.com/juandavidpadillavega LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-david-padilla-vega-4b5b301a2/ SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCER Philippe-Alexandre Jacques IG: @paj_philippe FB: https://www.facebook.com/philippe.jacques.505 SOCIAL MEDIA DISTRIBUTOR Lucía González García IG: @luciagoga FB: https://www.facebook.com/achsoluciag/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luciagonzalezg/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Scene Partners Benjamin Gillespie By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, Carmen M. Herlihy, and Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners. Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre Scene Partners By John J. Caswell, Jr. Directed by Rachel Chavkin Vineyard Theatre New York, NY November 8, 2023 Reviewed by Benjamin Gillespie Scene Partners , written by playwright John J. Caswell, Jr. (author of the critically acclaimed play Wet Brain ), is a non-linear exploration of memory and trauma that riffs on both the hopes and fears of its aging protagonist, Meryl Kowalski. Developed during the COVID-19 pandemic (while Caswell was in residence at the Vineyard Theatre), and directed by Rachel Chavkin, the play centers on the journey of 75-year-old Meryl, who attempts to become a Hollywood movie star as a septuagenarian—an unlikely feat considering the movie industry’s notoriously ageist reputation, especially toward older actresses. Over the course of the play, Meryl travels from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, finds an agent, and ends up in the starring role of a movie about her own life. Embodied by a (then) 75-year-old Dianne Wiest, actress and character are the same age, significant for a play that, in many ways, is about the resilience of aging. Wiest brought a wisdom and strength to the role that helped to center a purposefully fragmented, though often perplexing, production which celebrated the possibility of an artistic third act for its determined heroine. Meryl’s backstory is told piecemeal to set up the play’s present tense in 1985. Meryl was born around 1910 in Los Angeles. At a young age, her parents separated, and she lived with her insensitive mother who relocated them to Wisconsin, where her mother then remarried. As we come to find out, Meryl’s stepfather repeatedly raped her as a child, but neither her mother nor stepsister, Charlize (played as an adult by Johanna Day), acknowledged this pattern of sexual abuse. Around 1930, Meryl married another abuser named Stanley Kowalski (“I know what you’re thinking” Meryl says. “I have no idea who’s responsible for feeding the details of my life to Mr. Williams for his little play! But my Stanley, he was so much worse, in every possible way”). Her ungrateful daughter, Flora (played by Kristen Sieh), is a drug addict dependent on her mother’s support to survive. The play begins just after the death of her husband (“that motherfucker!” she exclaims), at which point Meryl has had enough and decides to head west to become a Hollywood film star. But this is only the backstory, with the action of the play taking place in the present tense of 1985, but also (at least partially) in Meryl’s imagination. Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners . Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre. The play presents the often painful, albeit revelatory, journey of a woman trying to process a lifetime of hardship in order to discover herself for the first time after spending three quarters of her life in abusive relationships. The fragmented reality of her mind (and consequently, the play) often leaves audiences with more questions than answers. But in a way, this is the point. The poetic, dream-like world of Scene Partners is contrasted by the harsh realism of Meryl’s life; anchored by the strength and tenacity of its aging central character, played expertly be Wiest, Meryl is akin to the great female roles of Tennessee Williams (who, as mentioned above, is directly evoked in the play several times). Deciding whether what’s happening in front of us is “real” or not misses the point: the focus here is rather for audiences to see Meryl telling her own story in the way that she (finally) wants and gets to tell it. But memory is a funny thing, and Meryl’s is as fragmented as it comes, not only blocking out experiences of trauma but also facing an unnamed neurological disorder that suggests she is losing cerebral control. “Is this like a memory play?” asks one of her acting classmates who Meryl recruits to act in her life story. “Do you want realism or should it be more like whoa! ?” “All of the above” answers her director/acting teacher. “It’s a work in progress” Meryl replies. Work in progress is an apt description for the play and production as it often loses its footing in between worlds, sometimes taking on the air of a rehearsal. But this does not detract too much from the beauty of Wiest’s performance or the stylish and dynamic staging by Chavkin, supported by a superb design team. The fragmentation of the play was emphasized through the innovative scenic and video designs by Riccardo Hernández and David Bengali, respectively, who utilized shifting screens and projections to illustrate the fluidity of Meryl’s memories. The use of large, moving screens not only bifurcated scenes but also served as a visual metaphor for Meryl’s fragmented, layered remembrances. However, while visually striking, this design choice occasionally created navigational challenges for the actors: on the night I saw the performance, one moving screen ran into Wiest mid-scene, though the seasoned stage actress hardly flinched and kept going without missing a beat. Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, Carmen M. Herlihy , and Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners . Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre. Scene Partners seems to be a memory play, but not a traditional one: the world is split between “real” (or perhaps more appropriately live ) performance sequences along with pre-filmed screen performances. Sections of the play are created with projected films on the large screens that shift in and out of frame to represent different environments on Meryl’s journey. In fact, the production opened with an enormous projection of Wiest’s face on screen introducing herself, reassuring audiences, “This is exactly how it happened!” But we are never sure if the play is supposed to be perceived as being composed in the present tense, or if this is a more traditional memory play. “My life starts now!” she says. And perhaps it is through Meryl’s newfound artistic license that we should understand it all. The facial projection of Meryl shifts to black as words populated the screen with character names, like a script being written in real time, which is then read in voiceover as changes and corrections happened “live” in front of us. A sudden crash brings the lights up on Weist as Meryl descending from the heavens in a white chair before getting stuck in what seems like a chairlift (from where, no one knows) so that Wiest’s body could only be seen from the waist down. Stuck halfway between a dream and reality, in hindsight, this signaled where we would remain for the entire play. We later find out this process of getting stuck is a recurring dream Meryl has that she is performing for the film, but perhaps also dreaming. Half the fun of Scene Partners is putting together who is really there and who is only imagined by Meryl. In fact, the generic title of the play is a reference to metatheatrical roleplay, as we never fully understand when characters are just roles inside Meryl’s head or if they are actually there. The audience’s collective logic is often challenged when characters appear and disappear at pivotal moments in the production—is that really her sister in the interview scene or a figment of Meryl’s imagination?—not dissimilar to Florian Zeller’s award-winning play The Father . One thing is sure: Meryl is hellbent on being a great actress, but the trauma of sexual and physical abuse from the men in her past haunts her throughout the play. Again, Scene Partners is highly metatheatrical, beginning with Meryl’s first entrance, reminiscent of Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days (a role Wiest played at Theatre for a New Audience in 2017). This initial scene sets the tone for a production that constantly questions the boundaries between reality and fiction. The play-within-a-play and film-within-a-play structure allows for a complex narrative that keeps the audience questioning what is real and what is imagined throughout. Indeed, Caswell’s directive in the script that “people and things should seem to suddenly materialize and vanish” adds to this sense of disorientation and surrealism. Determined to tell her story on her own terms, Meryl faces ageism and skepticism on her journey to Hollywood from those around her. She is told by all (including her daughter and would-be agent) that she will only play old women in stereotypical roles. “I have been acting all my life. It’s time to get paid for it!” she replies. “There’s a market for durability. I’ll play a queen! Those roles are mine!” After receiving a suggestion to improve on her acting from her agent, Meryl enrolls in acting classes where her teacher “discovers” her and decides to help her develop a series of monologues that will be the basis for her life story in a series of films, each representing a different decade in her life. “I’m a maximalist at heart!” she says, which could also be a mantra for the expressionistic approach to Caswell’s writing, which created mixed reactions from viewers. Scene Partners is a compelling exploration of a woman’s struggle to reclaim her own narrative and identity against the backdrop of Hollywood’s unforgiving landscape, and society more broadly. A rich and multi-layered theatrical experience, the play is a significant contribution to contemporary theatre focusing on age and aging outside of the typical narratives of decline we see so often in mainstream culture. While the production was, at times, a little wayward, Wiest’s portrayal of Meryl was both poignant and powerful, capturing the character’s complexity and depth, her humor and kindness, but also her confusion and sadness. Her interactions with other characters, including her abusive deceased husband Stanley (who keeps returning in Meryl’s nightmares) and her over-the-top acting teacher-cum-director, highlight the various challenges she faces with unwavering resolve. Performance Review: Scene Partners © 2024 by Benjamin Gillespie is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International References Footnotes About The Author(s) Benjamin Gillespie (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . 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 America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! 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 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY By Zeina Salame Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY: THREE PLAYS BY MONA MANSOUR: THE HOUR OF FEELING; THE VAGRANT; URGE FOR GOING. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. 162 + xi. By Zeina Salame, University of Vermont Mona Mansour’s The Vagrant Trilogy edited by Hala Baki and Michael Malek Najjar, includes The Hour of Feeling , The Vagrant , and Urge for Going . Much in conversation with other texts (co)edited by Najjar such as Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays , The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi , Six Plays of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict , and Four Arab American Plays , Baki and Najjar thoughtfully curate an insightful volume which notably contributes to a growing body of work by artists of Arab, Middle Eastern, North African, and Southwest Asian heritage in the American theatre. These three one-hour dramas tethered by a common protagonist follow Adham from Palestine to London to a refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The first play offers audiences a portion of his origin story; the subsequent two plays illuminate each of two possible realities of what his life might be like, all depending on one important choice he faces – whether to stay in London or to return to Palestine. The book’s prefatory pages include a forward by Mark Wing-Davey, NYU Arts Professor, longtime collaborator to Mansour, and director of the New York Premiere of what he describes as this “major American trilogy” (ix). Following that, an introductory essay co-authored by Baki and Najjar gives relevant context on the playwright’s own life, her research, and details on the piece’s journey toward production in its current form. They next skillfully and succinctly introduce vital political background, especially surrounding historical events in 1967 which both, “reshaped the Middle East” and the events of the play (3). Finally, they offer summary of major plot points and foreground key themes in Mansour’s trilogy. In “Displacement and Its Dilemmas: The Hour of Feeling ” they describe the “difficult and life-altering” decision Adham has before him, finding himself “caught between the life he has in Palestine and the life he dreams of escaping to” (3). In “Exile and Discontent: The Vagrant ” they explain the pressure Adham faces to “be the voice of his people” and personal and professional retaliation he faces when his students and colleagues “misconstrue” his perspective (5). In “Liberation Lies Elsewhere: Urge for Going ” they observe that “Adham would have been unable to find happiness no matter what occurred,” but that there may be hope for his daughter Jamila (7). In “Conclusion: Hope for a Better Future” Baki and Najjar posit that in “humanizing Palestinian characters, Mansour challenges the dehumanization of Palestinians” as seen in mass media representation (9). In the “Author’s Notes” Mansour explains that each of the plays as featured herein is an edited down version crafted so that the three may be more easily presented together on a single evening. She suggests that all roles be portrayed by the same company of four men and two women, ideally all Middle Eastern, noting her “joy” in discovering what happens when “actors of color play the white people in England” (13). In “Part I – The Hour of Feeling,” set in 1967, Adham, a promising young Palestinian scholar with a passion for the English Romantics (especially Wordsworth) has been offered an opportunity to give a keynote speech at an academic conference in London. His overbearing but deeply loving mother, Beder, invites their entire village to a party in his honor. While avoiding the gathering, he meets Abir, a captivating young woman. After a brief courtship and despite his mother’s discouragement, they marry. Abir accompanies Adham to London. After a simultaneously warm and intimidating reception from his English hosts, Adham’s speech goes incredibly well. On the same evening of his success, they hear news of the beginning of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. Adham and Abir must choose whether to stay in London long-term so Adham can pursue a fellowship, or to return to the Middle East and attend to family matters. The young couple argues, Adham chooses to stay, and Abir leaves him. In “Part Two – The Vagrant,” set in 1982, Adham has his PhD and is an instructor at the university. In this thread, Adham also struggles with bouts of anxiety and haunting memories of his past. He and Abir have been divorced for twelve years but remain friends. She is now engaged to an English-raised Palestinian man who Adham resents for his privilege. Abir and Adham argue because she feels he should be trying harder to bring his brother, who has been in poor health, to London. Adham is up for a promotion to Professor and receives ongoing pressure from senior colleagues to explore his Palestinian identity more in his approach to analyzing poetry. However, after a student accuses him of sympathizing with the IRA because of his Palestinian perspective, he is denied tenure. Mysterious dropped phone calls turn out to be from his older brother Hamzi whom he has not seen since young childhood when their mother fled the refugee camps with Adham. Hamzi was reaching out to check on Adham since he heard there had been bombings in London; he shares his great pride in and love for his little brother. Sometime later, the BBC news reports a massacre at the refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila and Adham understands his brother to be dead. “Part Three – Urge for Going” is set in the 2000s, in a refugee camp in southern Lebanon. We learn, “this is a different Adham, a different life, a whole different reality, had Adham taken a different ‘fork in the road’ …” (105). In this reality, Abir successfully convinces Adham to return home to see to his mother after his keynote speech in London. They, like thousands of displaced Palestinians, end up in a camp. They live there with each of their brothers and their college-aged children. Loving, warm, and distinctly comic family banter is juxtaposed with the harshness of the setting. We meet Jul, Adham and Abir’s son, who showed great academic promise and who they dreamed might be a doctor someday until he suffered brain damage after taking a beating for taunting a soldier. Jamila, their clever daughter, is desperate to register for her Baccalaureate exams so she stands a chance at going to college. After Adham refuses to try to go to the West Bank to renew his passport so Jamila can register for her test, they argue and Abir tries to use her own papers to get her daughter registered instead. Jamila is successful and the play ends bittersweetly as she prepares to leave her family and pursue a life beyond the camps. Following the plays is English Professor Diya Abdo’s Critical Essay: “Conditional Texts, Conditional Lives: Mona Mansour’s The Vagrant Trilogy . ” Abdo describes Mansour’s trilogy as “conditional” and Adham’s “conditional condition” as one which “mimics the Palestinian one” (147). She offers that the questions audiences witness Adham negotiating are questions many Palestinians living in diaspora painfully face – should they stay, or should they leave, and what are the implications of these decisions? Abdo subsequently shares a deeply intuitive and beautifully articulated close reading of these three plays, further opening-up Mansour’s project with displacement, tokensim, and identity for Adham and his family. Abdo’s perspective is an invaluable addition to this volume; her brilliant unpacking of Adham’s vagrancy as illuminated by Mansour’s engagement with Wordsworth’s vagrant character in “The Ruined Cottage” is a must-read. The book concludes with an interview between playwright Mona Mansour and the book’s co-editors, Baki and Najjar. It gives unique insight into the writer’s positionality and journey crafting these pieces. Mansour discusses her American upbringing, including some brief remarks on her family background and her father’s Lebanese diaspora story. She observes that she found herself “writing into that injustice” experienced by Palestinians living in refugee camps without options to change their circumstances (154). The three then go on to discuss Palestinian and immigrant narratives in the American theatre, some of the creative processes and collaborations which supported this piece, and additional topics and themes in The Vagrant Trilogy . Readers will especially benefit from this volume’s adroit synthesis of complex sociopolitical histories offered in the supplemental essays. These work well together to enhance appreciation for the richness of Mansour’s storytelling and the complexity of the issues addressed in the worlds of these plays. The plays themselves utterly avoid the didactic; they rather present purposefully flawed and distinctly human characters. Their failings intertwined with their lovingness and then contextualized by the fraught and tragic circumstances through which they exist make for compelling and relevant drama. Baki and Najjar’s edition of The Vagrant Trilogy will be of particular interest to scholars and students of contemporary American theatre and MENA/SWANA theatre and cultural studies. It is also an essential reader for any producing entities enthusiastic to mount Mansour’s work. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Zeina Salame (PhD, MS, MA) is an artist/scholar and Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of Vermont. She is a director, a performer, and a dramaturg. Recent collaborations include: Eugene O’Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference and National Music Theater Conference, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Artists Repertory Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Golden Thread Productions, Noor Theatre, Commonwealth Theatre Center, the Guthrie Theater’s Level Nine (New Arab American Theater Works), and the National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation (Pangea World Theater & Art2Action). Zeina’s writing on theatre is published in Études , Al Jadid , Arab Stages , and Howlround . Her monograph building from her 2020 dissertation “Carried in One Woman: Reflections on Arab American Female Solo Performance” is forthcoming. Zeina is also a co-founder of Florida based theatre company, The 5 & Dime. 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 Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Encounter Rafael de Balanzo Joue and Daniel Pravit Fethke's work Resilience Thinking Walkscape in Brooklyn, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Social Practice CUNY. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Resilience Thinking Walkscape Rafael de Balanzo Joue and Daniel Pravit Fethke Interactive Performance Sunday, June 9, 2024 @ 3pm Endale Arch, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Meet at Endale Arch / Grand Army Plaza entrance. Social Practice CUNY 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 A meditative group-walk through the northern end of Prospect Park that is designed around thinking through ecologies of resilience. Following an infinity-loop pathway, participants will begin making quiet observations about sites in the park both spectacular and mundane. As the walk continues, the group will focus more on radical collaboration and the creation of new liberatory communities. Touchpoints will include utopian urban planning, histories of queer cruising, and ways of seeing Prospect Park as a radically resilient public sphere. Rafael de Balanzo Joue and Daniel Pravit Fethke Rafael de Balanzo, MLA, Ph.D. in Sustainability Science, is the founder of the Urban Resilience Thinking Design Studio. He is currently a faculty of the Math & Science Department (SLAS), at the Graduate Center of Planning and Environment (GCPE) at Pratt School of Architecture (SoA), senior researcher for the Pratt NSF-funded project, Exploring Transdisciplinary Approaches to STEM Teaching and Learning and active collaborator of the Pratt Public Sphere. His research in Sustainability science used the resilience thinking design approach by understanding the social-technological-ecological systems dynamics and cycles of change in linked complex adaptive systems such as cities, communities, and buildings. He is a member of the Habitat Action Without Borders Work Program of the Architects Without Borders International (ASF-int), he received the 2021-2023 Russell Sage Research Project Grant Award and the 2022-23 CUNY Interdisciplinary Research Grant. He previously received architecture awards from the Belgium Government and the Associations of Spanish and Catalan Architects and he was the recipient of the 2019 Colombia Fulbright Chair for Urban Resilience at Del Tolima University, Ibague, Colombia. He is also a Social Practice CUNY Graduate Center fellowship 2022/23, adjunct professor at Queens College, CUNY; EINA School of Design at the University Autonoma de Barcelona and visiting professor at ENSAP School of Architecture and Landscape in Bordeaux in France and Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He taught previously at the University Pompeu Fabra, ELISAVA School of Engineering and Design, Barcelona, Spain, and the University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art, UK. https://www.pratt.edu/people/rafael-de-balanzo-joue/ Daniel Pravit Fethke is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator from New York's Hudson Valley. He has exhibited work internationally in Bangkok, Berlin, Barcelona, and domestically at the Yale School of Art, Recess Art Space, and the Knockdown Center. Daniel was a resident at the Wassaic Project (2024), and will be a Culinary Resident at the Ox-Bow School of Art (2024-25). Teaching is a central part of his practice, and Daniel regularly facilitates workshops, cooking classes, and creative gatherings that center food and recipes as ways to explore identity and culture. He co-founded the mutual aid food pop-up Angry Papaya, and has hosted workshops at Dia:Beacon, the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Ox-Bow School of Art. He has published writing in the Berlin-based Soft Eis Magazine, as well as with Commercial Type's online catalog. Daniel received his B.A. in Modern Culture & Media Studies from Brown University in 2015. He recently published an autobiographical Thai-American cookbook through Pratt Institute, where he also received his MFA in Fine Arts in 2023. He currently lives and works in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. https://danfethke.com/ Visit Artist Website Location Meet at Endale Arch / Grand Army Plaza entrance. Social Practice CUNY The SPCUNY educational network amplifies the collective power of socially engaged artists, scholars, and advocates throughout the City University of New York’s rich tapestry of faculty, staff, and students working for social justice. Based at the CUNY Graduate Center, SPCUNY’s theory of educational transformation fosters structures for diverse creative leaders who will empower New York City as an inclusive, justice-driven cultural landscape. This initiative is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Visit Partner Website

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL By Marina Johnson Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL . Produced by Al-Harah Theater. Twenty performances at various venues in the Old City of Hebron, Bethlehem, and Beit Jala, OPT. August 27-29, 2023. Reviewed by Marina Johnson, Stanford University Between the 27 th and the 29 th of July I had the pleasure of watching the second edition of the Bethlehem Site-Specific Theater Festival, produced by Al Harah Theater in Beit Jala in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This year’s festival took as its foundation stories personal to the communities within which they were performed, a concept introduced at each performance by General Manager Marina Barham or Deputy Manager and Artist Nicola Zreineh. These stories were rooted in hakawati and storyteller Sally Shalabi’s interviews with community elders; after collecting the narratives, Shalabi summarized them, and directors prepared each piece for the stage. By placing the local stories in specifically chosen locations, in the town from which the story itself emerged, the pieces took on a layered meaning, allowing the setting to become an additional character in each performance. The festival included twenty different performances in nine total locations throughout the Old City of Hebron, Beit Jala, and Bethlehem. Each play was overseen by a new director who had received training from the Scottish theatre company Grid Iron, which specializes in creating site-specific and location theatre, and from Unga Clara Theatre in Sweden. Six of the directors who participated in these workshops were selected to participate in the festival. The festival highlighted the beauty and history of meaningful buildings in urban settings, showcasing the richness of the old cities while pointing toward a bright artistic future led by the newly minted directors. In addition to the beautifully showcased artistry, Al Harah Theater noted on their social media that through this festival, they were able to employ 50 artists and 10 technicians part-time, a sizable feat. Three stand-out pieces include I Was There , written and directed by Mo’Tasem Abu Hasan; The Freedom Fabric , written and directed by Sham Yousef; and Bokjeh , written and directed by Majeda Subhi. All of the pieces were performed in Arabic; the translations in this review are my own. I Was There opens with an Egyptian detective questioning a man from Bethlehem, Peter (Mo’men Sadi), who has gone to Egypt to study medicine and ends up in Iraq. Peter’s ambition is significant: الطموح فيه جريمة والاصرار انتحار، والوجود بحد ذاته انتصار. مع كل مرة كان في سقوط ونهاية، كان في اصرار اكبر على اني اكمل، وكلمة مستحيل ما كانت موجودة في قاموسي. In ambition there is a crime. Insistence is suicide. Existence is itself a victory. With each instance, there is a fall and an ending. I had greater insistence to continue, and the word impossible didn’t exist in my dictionary. The detective, a recorded voice, ominously informs Peter that he will be surveilled and insists that he follow a straight and narrow path: “لا شمال ولا يمن ، دغري بس” (“No right, no left, just stay straight”). The piece plays with time, providing glimpses of Peter’s life in Iraq and his membership in the Baath party; the detective’s continued presence in his life; Farid Al Atrash’s influence on Peter, first through his music, and then through their friendship; and the emotional core of the play, his father (Nabil Al Raee), who stands by silently throughout much of the piece, showing that he was in fact “there.” The warm and watchful presence of renowned actor Nabil Al Raee emanated through the room, creating a feeling of home even while the character Peter struggles with his place in the world. This performance took place in a historic home, emptied of all its contents, and the emptiness allowed for surprise after surprise. The play began in a room directly inside the entryway of the building, and the two subsequent scenes each drew the audience deeper into the house, simultaneously revealing more of the characters’ psychology as more architecture was revealed. Mo’Tasem Abu Hasan’s brilliant direction turned the home into an arena of potential, with moments of discovery as nooks and crannies revealed themselves to be areas rich with storytelling possibility. Issam Rishmawi’s design and lighting drew the audience’s attention to areas of transition, like the stairs, doors, and windows, and incorporated candles, flashlights, and the natural light of the early evening in ways that underscored the theme of hope in persistence. Image 1: Actors Mo’men Sadi (right) and Nabil Al Raee (left) as Peter and his father, respectively, in I Was There, directed by Mo’Tasem Abu Hasan. Photo credit: Ma’moun AlHerimi. Courtesy of Al Harah Theater. While I Was There features a group of men, The Freedom Fabric features a team of women, skillfully directed by Sham Yousef. The mother, Ferial (Salwa Nakkara), begins the play by looking for her children, particularly her daughter Arwa, whose birthday it is. She rolls dough to make a special dessert playfully called lisan al-asfour (bird’s tongue), while telling the audience in hushed and loving tones about how she learned to make it. As Ferial’s hands devotedly roll the dough, she reminisces about her late husband, who passed his love for this treat on to their daughter. This performance took place outside, on the steps of the Bethlehem Centre for Cultural Heritage. Sunlight shone on Nakkara’s face, bringing her eager eyes to life, and casting shadows on the stairs upstage of the playing space. As the script progresses, it becomes clear that Ferial is hallucinating. An unnamed female character (Hala Salem) joins her onstage, presenting probing questions and challenging Ferial’s memories, and gently guiding her to realize the truth—these stairs are not her stairs, this home is not her home, and Arwa is no longer alive. As the mother’s memories disintegrate, the other character, a surrogate for Arwa, performs a fast-paced and emotionally charged dance, showering the area around her with flower petals, as her mother murmurs words that describe the dissonant experience of invasion: Strike - He did not do anything - But he- Did not do anything - Arrest - Gas - Beating - Fear - Violation - Turn off the light - Anyone here? - On the roof - Forbidden to enter – Do not dare - Raise - Your hand - On the wall - Get out of here - Worry - Siege - Medal of Courage. As these lines—fragmented memories of the mother’s conversation, possibly with the soldier who killed her family—cease, the mother again calls for her children, effectively looping back to the beginning of the play, implying that the cycle continues. Image 2: Salwa Nakkara (left) as Ferial and actor and choreographer Hala Salem (right) as the unnamed female character in The Freedom Fabric, written and directed by Sham Yousef. Photo credit: Ma’moun AlHerimi. Courtesy of Al Harah Theater. In a similar vein, hakawati Majeda Subhi’s story Bokjeh asks the audience to follow the story of a family from the 1948 Nakba to the present moment, detailing moments of hardship and separation and what it means to navigate the Occupation as a family. Subhi directly addressed the audience, modulating her speech as she painted a vivid picture of the family being forcibly removed from their homes. Her soft, pleasant voice brought the audience into the story of the family who, in the days that followed their expulsion, took refuge in the YMCA. She underscored the mother, Um Faiza’s, desperate attempts to return to her home one last time to retrieve her children’s belongings and her prized sewing machine, which would later help her make a living. Um Faiza removed the items from her home and carried them in a bokjeh , a large piece of cloth in which Palestinian women would wrap clothes, food, and other belongings, tying it with a knot on top and carrying it on their heads. Subhi reminds the audience that “we see [the bokjeh ] in the scenes of the Nakba and of Palestinian alienation, and it has become a metaphorical term in which we express the search for a homeland.” This moving piece deftly divulged the family’s history to a cross-generational audience, children sitting in the front rows on cushions while older audience members sat or stood behind them. One of three hakawati who performed in the festival, Subhi’s storytelling is part of a hakawati lineage that shares oral history and tradition with members of subsequent generations. Image 3: Hakawati Majeda Subhi performing Bokjeh. Photo credit: Marina Johnson. Throughout the festival, intergenerational and community connection became apparent when the family members whose stories were being performed onstage were acknowledged after each play. Emotional plays took on a new meaning when family members who had allowed their story to be shared with the audience sat in the front row, visibly moved. The festival relied on audience and community attendance and response, which was overwhelmingly positive; most plays included a “standing room only” section for audience overflow. Al Harah means “neighborhood” in Arabic, and Al Harah Theater knows how to draw an audience and move them emotionally, and also physically, across time and space. Connections formed between performers and audience members as they moved from site to site together, breaking down hierarchical barriers, and activating the sidewalks and streets in imaginative ways. Personally, I will not be able to walk past any of these locations without remembering the stories I heard there. These newly acquired narratives are part of the embodied memory that these artists shared with me. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Theatre and Performance Studies Department at Stanford University. Marina received her MFA in Directing from the University of Iowa. She is the co-host of Kunafa and Shay, a podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons. Johnson is a member of Silk Road Rising’s Polycultural Institute and is a dramaturg with Golden Thread Productions’ 2023 ReOrient Festival. Prior to beginning her Ph.D., she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Beloit College for three years. For more, see Marina-Johnson.com . 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 Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 16 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Marina Johnson Performance Review: The Tutor Hala Baki, California Polytechnic State University Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Areeg Ibrahim Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Kari Barclay 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

By Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Rafael Spregelburd, Jean Graham-Jones | This book brings US readers cutting-edge work from one of Latin America’s most vibrant theatrical scenes: < 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 BAiT: Buenos Aires in Translation Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Rafael Spregelburd, Jean Graham-Jones Download PDF 4 Plays from Argentina This publication of the four plays presented at New York’s Performance Space 122 2006 festival, BAiT: Buenos Aires in Translation, brings US readers cutting-edge work from one of Latin America’s most vibrant theatrical scenes: 1. Women Dreamt Horses Daniel Veronese’s drama about a dinner where siblings argue over the fate of the family business. 2. A Kingdom, a Country or a Wasteland, in the Snow Lola Arias’s tense tragedy about two sisters struggling to survive in a postapocalyptic landscape, and the wild man who disrupts their lives. 3. Panic Inspired by horror flicks, Rafael Spregelburd’s drama follows mother who attempts to recover her safe-deposit-box key from the hand of a corpse. Directed by Brooke O’Harra of the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf. 4. Ex-Antwone A dreamlike play by Federico León, in which memories and fantasies overlap when a man navigates a labyrinth. With plays from Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Rafael Spregelburd Translated and Edited by Jean Graham-Jones. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Esther Kim Lee Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Esther Kim Lee By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF When I was writing my dissertation in the late 1990s, I would tell anyone who would ask that my topic was Asian American theatre. I was ready with my elevator speech tinged with obligatory graduate student’s anxiety, but mostly, I was excited to share how I was interviewing artists around the country for the project. “Actors, playwrights, communities, and producers!,” my voice would rise. Some people politely responded with “that’s interesting,” which could mean many things, but often, I would get an answer that ran something like, “oh, I love kabuki!” I would have no choice but to smile and say, “me too” because it was true and because I had to think about my follow up response. How aggressively do I explain that Asian theatre is different from Asian American theatre? How do I detail the links between Asian American theatre and other American ethnic theatres? Should I describe the stereotype of the perpetual foreigner and how it represents the exclusion of Asian Americans in the imagining of America? Or do I present a crash course on the East West Players, the first Asian American theatre company founded in 1965 in Los Angeles? Depending on the circumstance and my mood, my response varied, but generally, I tried my best to explain the significance of documenting a part of American theatre history that had been overlooked. While I grew tired of explaining my project, I also fantasized about titling my yet to be written book “Strangers Onstage” to recall Ronald Takaki’s seminal book, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1990). Most Asian immigrants crossed the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic. Because of their visual and geographic strangeness compared to European immigrants, they were excluded from citizenship, accused as disloyal, interned, and disenfranchised from all sectors of the society. Theatre was no exception. American theatre, as Karen Shimakawa has brilliantly argued, has functioned as a major site of “national abjection” of Asian Americans. Feeling like a stranger myself, I wanted to tell the story of other strangers who collectively built Asian American theatre while hoping to bridge different disciplines, including Asian American studies and theatre and performance studies. On that metaphorical bridge, I had the fortune of meeting scholars, both senior and emerging, who shared my scholarly mission and who also felt like strangers in a field that was still not legible to many. Together, however, we knew the field had much potential for multiplicity of research agendas, theoretical growth, and critical intervention. In the past five years, several books have been published as a full demonstration of that potential. The titles include: Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns’ Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (2013); Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson’s A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (2013); Sean Metzger’s Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (2014); Eng-Beng Lim’s Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (2014); and Ju Yon Kim’s The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (2015). The books showcase innovative interdisciplinary approaches and nuanced understandings of how race, body, geopolitics, history, and performance intersect. It is an incredibly formative time for those of us writing about the relationship between performance and “Asia.” I believe we are witnessing the emergence of a new field that has yet to be named. I can try to name it, although none of them are completely satisfactory: Asian diaporic performances; transnational performance in the Asias (to borrow Lim’s plural noun); and Asian/American performances (although I wince at the thought of using the slash). The difficulty in naming the field stems from the fundamental shift in how the authors pose their questions. Two decades ago, the questions I asked about Asian American theatre were about representation and empowerment onstage: for instance, how can we let Jonathan Pryce perform in yellowface makeup in Miss Saigon when talented Asian American actors do not even get to audition for the role? While such questions of representation and empowerment are still relevant, the books I mention above ask readers to look beyond the stage and to reexamine all concepts. Performance, for instance, is not simply a mode of representation, but it is an episteme. Instead of looking at performance as an object of study, as I did for my dissertation, the authors use performance as a methodological tool to examine how meaning is created both on and off stage. Similarly, Asia is not a stable geographical location but a constructed concept that connotes power structure and positionality. The books examine the interplay between the quotidian and the theatrical and between racialization and the performative to address broader questions of gender, sexuality, politics, and law. For instance, Burns uses the term puro arte to explore how the Filipino/a performing body is central to understanding the US-Philippine imperial relations. Metzger, on the other hand, focuses on fashion to trace how American perception of China has changed in the past 150 years. In all of the books, the performance of everyday, or what Kim calls the mundane, is central to identifying what is a stake in body politics. Indeed, what is at stake now? Perhaps an answer to that question can be found in how all of the authors variously describe their subjects of study as ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities. Lim, for example, describes the Asian native boy during colonial encounters as a “critical paradox” because he embodied contradictory fantasies and fears and because his identity can be described only as queer and performative, both of which are paradoxical concepts to begin with. Chambers-Letson focuses on the legal paradox of demanding assimilation of Asian Americans while passing exclusionary laws. What can we learn from these paradoxes? Come to think of it, “stranger onstage” is also a paradoxical idea. The theatrical stage demands an illusion of reality that promises to make the stranger familiar. The stranger is still onstage, the recent books seem to say collectively, except the stage is much broader, and the stranger has many questions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Esther Kim Lee is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland. She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (2006) and The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (2015). 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 Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Nathalie Aghoro Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Nathalie Aghoro By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Musical variations, the pursuit of belonging, and a persistent specter: These constitutive elements of the three experimental plays by Quiara Alegría Hudes known as the Elliot Trilogy speak of tragedy. They are imbued with the trauma of war, nostalgia, and alienation—a theme that George Steiner identifies as crucial for the dramatic form in his article “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered.” For Steiner, “the necessary and sufficient premise, the axiomatic constant in tragedy is that of ontological homelessness . . . of alienation or ostracism from the safeguard of licensed being. There is no welcome to the self. This is what tragedy is about.” [1] Hudes’s central protagonist Elliot seeks to recover a sense of home in a society removed from the realities of war he experienced as a soldier in Iraq. Over the timespan covered by the three plays Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (2012), Water by the Spoonful (2012), and The Happiest Song Plays Last (2014), the playwright redefines tragedy when she sends her hero on a quest for redemption after a fatal error in judgment. But even when he seems on the cusp of overcoming it, the haunting echoes of his past as well as a family curse catch up with him and threaten to shatter his world. The tragic is at the center of the Elliot Trilogy ’s plot, but formally the primary dramatic impulses are theatrical experimentation with form and the inclusion of musical variety as each play focuses either on the classical fugue, free jazz, or classical Puerto Rican music. The plays differ in their structural composition and their aesthetic concerns, an instance that reflects the formation process of the trilogy. In an interview with Anne García-Romero, Hudes explains that she “did not set out to write a trilogy, but a few years after . . . Elliot , . . . [she] felt there was still more story to tell, and more structural and stylistic experimentation . . . to do in regards to music and playwriting.” [2] The plays reflect this evolution of the creative process, since they work effectively as standalone productions as much as they present a conceptual and topical arc that unites them into a three-movement oeuvre. Both a composer and a playwright by training, Hudes combines her vocations in the 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue by developing a musical structure for a theatrical staging that poetically reflects on loss and suffering. The second play, Water by the Spoonful , won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 because of its “imaginative . . . search for meaning” that emerges from an experimentation with virtual, actual, and theatrical space and an exploration of family and community in the twenty-first century. [3] The tragic dimension in Water by the Spoonful is realized as there is no escape from past fatal mistakes—neither in real life nor online. While in the first two plays Elliot is haunted by the first person he killed as a soldier in Iraq and struggles with the untimely and avoidable death of his little sister as a child, The Happiest Song Plays Last marks a departure from tragedy that still retains the tragic, but merely as one among other more prominent themes. As Hudes explains in a video interview for the 2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Elliot is “poised to overcome” his past troubles in the last part of the trilogy and the play explores this orientation toward the future from a personal and social perspective. [4] This becomes particularly apparent in the renewed formal engagement with music as an auditory medium that, for Hudes, is capable of uniting people in celebration while simultaneously addressing grave social conditions with critical lyrics to promote political change. [5] Indeed, the drama does not lose the nostalgic undertones and dissonances established in the previous plays. However, a bittersweet hopefulness—uncommon for classical tragedy—takes over with the Puerto Rican troubadour tradition that Hudes introduces into performances of The Happiest Song Plays Last through the sound of the cuatro which is the national instrument of Puerto Rico. This article will explore how the Elliot Trilogy reconceptualizes traditional elements of tragedy—such as the psychological isolation of the tragic protagonist or the intersections between the worldly affairs and the realm of the dead—for twenty-first century concerns with formal experiments that link the classical genre to the contemporary stage. The Elliot Trilogy repositions the isolated, tragic subject in a network of human connections by highlighting the intersubjective threads that run into danger of being unacknowledged or hidden from view and by exposing the dynamics of alienation in the process. When the tragic intersects with theatrical experiment in the Elliot Trilogy , apparently incompatible spheres converge, harmonize, and sometimes clash, challenging what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible,” of “what is visible or not in a common space.” [6] This productive friction in Hudes’s plays turns the stage into a space for the negotiation of contemporary communal concerns and thus invites us to think about tragedy’s sociocultural significance today. Therefore, I will discuss how the dramatic usage of music echoes the characters’ alienation, how the supernatural and other virtual dimensions resonate with an actual world of suffering and fate, and how formal experimentation in the Elliot Trilogy exposes the hamartia of the characters and conveys their struggle to find a new sense of normalcy after their loss of innocence. Tragedy and the Staging of the Sensible Defining tragedy as the drama of alienation means to implicitly link its characters to the absolute absence of companionship. The tragic fate is cast as unique. It is the lonely path of a singular individual caught, according to Steiner, in “the logic of estrangement from life, of man’s ontological fall from grace.” [7] In this vein, a hero’s isolation is the minimum requirement for the unfolding of tragedy. In Aristotelian terms, the hero’s alienation resides in a fatal action, the hamartia , and as soon as it is performed “fallen man is made an unwelcome guest of life or, at best, a threatened stranger on this hostile or indifferent earth (Sophocles’ damning word, dwelt on by Heidegger, is apolis ).” [8] The estrangement thus sets the acting subject apart. Even if it remains unsaid in Steiner’s definition of the term, tragedy therefore implies a world populated by human beings, a polis or a community that differs from and eventually interacts with the tragic hero. To conceive of the hero’s homelessness means to relate the uniqueness of tragic fate to discursive practices about citizenship, community, and belonging. To be alienated means that there are processes at play that shatter the hopes for meaningful, intersubjective interactions. Hence, the tragic hero stands in relation to a community (on stage as well as off stage during the performance in front of an audience) and from the dialectical engagement with these relations emerges the political potential of tragedy. Tragedy is a dramatic threshold that renders the blind spots of a community visible by negotiating social practices from the perspective of the tragic lone hero at its margins. If, as Rancière writes in The Politics of Aesthetics , “artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility,” the theatrical experimentation with tragedy’s tropes and characteristics engages simultaneously with the politics of alienation and belonging. [9] When Rancière writes about the politics of the arts, he locates the political in the everyday communal dynamics that influence human perception and in the different possibilities of participation that the division of labor, common space, and time entail. He argues that “the distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed.” [10] Such a division has influence on what is palpable, whose voices and actions can be heard, who can be seen and recognized as a member of the community, and who is granted (political) agency. Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts.[11] In other words, the system of in/visibility that governs a community functions through delineations of inclusion and exclusion. Theater is particularly apt to make the distribution of common ground and difference palpable because the theatrical performance simultaneously represents and embodies fictional characters and events. The shared space with living bodies on stage allows the spectators to tap into the various registers of sensory perception available to them and to connect them to a communal experience. When Plato and Aristotle seek to deal with “the split reality of the theatre” by either ascribing to it the function of enacting or practicing the ideal form of community as Plato does or through catharsis representing the world with the purpose to purge the social body from unwanted emotions as in Aristotle’s view, they set the conditions for theater to serve contradictory political purposes. [12] In his discussion of these differing artistic regimes, Rancière observes that the tragic stage: simultaneously carries with it, according to Plato, the syndrome of democracy and the power of illusion. By isolating mimesis in its own proper space and by enclosing tragedy within a logic of genres, Aristotle . . . redefined its politicity. Furthermore, in the classical system of representation, the tragic stage would become the stage of visibility for an orderly world governed by a hierarchy of subject matter and the adaptation of situations and manners of speaking to this hierarchy. The democratic paradigm would become a monarchical paradigm.[13] This malleable political potential of the stage can be understood as the precondition both for the states of community that it makes palpable and for the subversions of the boundaries that the distribution of the sensible establishes. Hudes challenges the distribution of the sensible in national discourses of collective drama as well as in the private institution of the family through the lens of tragedy. In the Elliot Trilogy , the protagonist’s function as a soldier in wars fought overseas by the US emplaces his actions in a space and time that the civilian community that he rejoins after each tour does not share with him. As such, the very function that determines the protagonist as a national subject instead of a ruler—as someone who serves his country—irrevocably alienates him from the everyday lives of the society he lives in. Consequently, Hudes’s plays are a departure from the monarchical paradigm of the Aristotelian tragedy. They complicate the subject matter of the nation and the interpellation of the individual as national subject with the personal experience of alienation and the precarious state of belonging. Her reconceptualization of tragedy acknowledges the complexity of social and political dynamics in the twenty-first century that is exceedingly high because the global directly ties in with the local. Globalized interconnections expose that there are no simple truths and that the individual needs to navigate their actions as a human being, citizen, and inhabitant of the world simultaneously. Musical Echoes: Tragedy, Dissonance, and Alienation Music is the major acoustic experimental dimension that connects Hudes’s work to tragedy. In his early treatise The Birth of Tragedy , Friedrich Nietzsche emphatically posits that music engenders tragedy in classical Greek drama. He writes “ that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus , and was originally only chorus and nothing else” and he thus elevates it to “the true primal drama.” [14] Consequently, he locates the chorus as the site were tragedy takes place while rejecting A. W. Schlegel’s understanding of the chorus as the “ideal spectator,” or as Nietzsche describes it, “the epitome and concentration of the mass of spectators.” [15] For Nietzsche, this idealized definition of the chorus does not take into account the diegetic function of the chorus: “the true spectator, whoever he might be, must always remain aware that he is watching a work of art and not an empirical reality, while the tragic chorus of the Greeks is required to grant the figures on the stage a physical existence.” [16] However, the chorus also does not merely react to the dramatic actions on stage, [17] but serves as a threshold between both “a living wall that tragedy pulls around itself to close itself off entirely from the world and maintain its ideal ground and its poetic freedom.” [18] Along these lines, the embodied music of the chorus connects the actuality of the performance with the fictional action. It is the invisible fabric that separates the tragic hero from the world and simultaneously has an effect on the audience because it translates her or his actions and, hence, promotes processes of understanding and making sense that allow the spectators to relate the drama on stage to their own lives. Poised at the interstices of human alienation and intersubjective connection, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue lends itself to entering into a dialogue with Nietzsche’s position on the classics from a contemporary perspective – thinking its musical and formal experimentation as the resonant location from which tragedy materializes. The structure of Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue mirrors the structure of the musical genre by the same name. It is divided into preludes and fugue scenes in which four characters take turns in speaking lyrical dialogue sentences. One voice sets the melody and the others join in to create the counterpoints and interweaving parts of the musical whole. The voices of Elliot, his father, adopted mother, and grandfather join forces to relate the experience of three generations of a Puerto Rican family as members of the US military. When the chorus introduces a scene with the grandfather as a soldier in 1950 Korea, they complement each other to provide a description of the fictional space that remains invisible due to the minimalistic stage design: GINNY : A tent. No windows, no door. Walls made of canvas. A floor made of dirt. The soil of Inchon, Korea is frozen. GRANDPOP : Sixteen cots they built by hand. Underwear, towels, unmade beds. Dirty photos. GINNY : That is, snapshots of moms and daughters and wives. . . . GRANDPOP : A boy enters.[19] Only when these last words are spoken, the enactment of the scene begins while the oratory mode continues with two more voices eventually joining in. Hence, the chorus of four voices initiates the action. Without them, the drama could not play out as it does. They introduce each of the three male family members and, together, they bring them to life with their speech. At the same time, their communal effort counterpoints the isolation experienced by the soldiers in the field and the silence regarding their war experiences that they keep to themselves when they come back home. The tragedy, one could argue, happens between these voices – in their musical entanglement as well as in the temporal asynchronicity that keeps them from coming together in perfect harmony. In one of the preludes, Elliot’s grandfather, who owns a flute on which he plays Bach for his comrades during the war, explains the tensions that govern the fugue: Of everything Bach wrote, it is the fugues. The fugue is like an argument. It starts in one voice. The voice is the melody, the single solitary melodic line. The statement. Another voice creeps up on the first one. Voice two responds to voice one. They tangle together. They argue, they become messy. They create dissonance. Two, three, four lines clashing. You think, Good god, they’ll never untie themselves. How did this mess get started in the first place? Major keys, minor keys, all at once on top of each other. ( Leans in ) It’s about untying the knot (35). The dissonance of the voices pitches the harmonic unity of a shared experience against the isolation of the individual in a situation where lives are lost and nobody wins. When Elliot is injured in Tikrit, the multiplicity of voices recounting the incident clashes with his isolated and solitary position: POP : Seventy-four barbs chew into his bone. GRANDPOP : It is not a sensation of rawness. GINNY : It is not excruciating pain. POP : It is a penetrating weakness. GRANDPOP : Energy pours out of his leg. GINNY : Like water from a garden hose. ELLIOT : Sarge! POP : The boy knows he is trapped (41). Throughout the trilogy, Elliot’s injured leg will serve as a reminder that he has left his physical—and also psychological—integrity behind in an event that cannot be genuinely shared with family or civil society. In the passage above, the fugue resonates with the distance and the sense of alienation that separates and simultaneously unites the four characters. Overall, the temporal layering of the respective wars in which the family members served emphasizes that the war experience remains invariably the same in the 1950s, 1960s, and in 2003. García-Romero argues that by “utilizing the fugue structure, Hudes sets up the expectation of a multi-vocal landscape which surrounds one main theme or idea” underlining “that the impact of the subject of military service is all pervasive and that regardless of generation or military conflict, the devastation of war is universal”. [20] In Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue , the grandfather’s commentary that the fugue is all “about untying the knot” can also be considered as a self-reflexive commentary on the joint experimentation with musical and theatrical aesthetics. The tragic tone is supported by the minor key of the grandfather’s flute when he plays a Bach tune several times throughout the entire play: “Minor key, it’s melancholy,” says the grandfather when he assumes the function of the narrator for a moment (36). However, scenes serving as preludes fragment the fugue and thus disrupt the process of melancholic resolution, reflecting that all members of the family choir have their individual stories that they do not necessarily share. The sense of alienation that results from any war experience inhibits the potential for perfect harmony. Supernatural Frictions and Musical Improvisation In Water by the Spoonful , the potential for dissonance to resolve into harmony vanishes even further as tragedy takes over the everyday. Early in the play, Elliot’s cousin Yazmin, a music professor, introduces free jazz as the governing aesthetic principle: Coltrane’s A Love Supreme , 1964. Dissonance is still a gateway to resolution. . .. Diminished chords, tritones, still didn’t have the right to be their own independent thought. In 1965 something changed. The ugliness bore no promise of a happy ending. . . . Coltrane democratized the notes. He said, they’re all equal. Freedom. It was called Free Jazz but freedom is a hard thing to express musically without spinning into noise. This is from Ascension , 1965.[21] The play’s experimentation with jazz aesthetics echoes its concern with the impossibility of both personal and collective traumata to be reconciled into a single and simple narrative of good versus evil that promises but ultimately is incapable of providing solace. The repercussions of violence and death permeate all actual and virtual spaces that the characters inhabit and force them to navigate the complex and intricate affective networks caused by tragic flaws. Water by the Spoonful exposes the uncanny layers of human suffering by tying them to the sonification of noise and freedom in free jazz. The repercussions of Elliot’s past actions become a haunting personification that continues to exist in the now of the world on stage, a spectral tear in the split coexistence of Yazmin’s lecture hall and the sandwich shop Elliot works at after his return. The ghosts from his past are literally trapped in-between worlds and the musical tunes reconceptualize the tragic device of the specter as they render the complexity and democratic dissonance of trauma narratives audible. While Yazmin plays Coltrane for the audience, a ghost appears on stage. The man goes to Elliot and addresses him in Arabic, disrupting his everyday activities. The apparition takes on the form of a civilian Elliot killed during the war, and his appearance in the second part of the trilogy can be understood as an element of dramatic escalation or theatrical noise. In Rancière’s words, the specter and Elliot are interlinked through their respective “bodily positions and movements” that visualize “the parceling out of the visible and the invisible” on stage. [22] The collision of the supernatural with the actual world acts out the distribution of inclusion and exclusion in the communal perception. In the first play, Elliot merely has nightmares about him, but in Water by the Spoonful , the remnant echo from the war becomes an anthropomorphic, supernatural manifestation that only Elliot perceives and renders it difficult for him to perform his task. GHOST : Momken men-fadluck ted-dini gawaz saffari? ELLIOT : That’s three teriyaki onion with chicken. First with hots and onions. Second with everything. Third with extra bacon. Two spicy Italian with American cheese on whole grain. One BMT on flatbread. Good so far? GHOST : Momken men-fadluck ted-dini gawaz saffari? (18). Without looking the ghost in the eye, Elliot is perturbed when the specter appears but tries to remain professional as he continues his conversation with a customer while the ghost insists on asking Elliot the same question over and over again. It translates into a concern of legal status: “Can I please have my passport back?” (11). The passport—Elliot always carries it in his pocket—acquires a symbolic value on stage for the freedom that Elliot took from a man, i.e. the freedom to live, but also the freedom to pass borders, and, ultimately, to pass peacefully over the threshold to the afterlife. The clashing of languages and the asymmetrical communication situation with an inaudible third party on the phone emphasize their entanglement in the conflict between two nations that holds them captive. The discrepancy between the food order and the struggle for life and freedom could be read as an instance of dramatic irony that underlines the urgency which pervades the situation. In The Happiest Song Plays Last , we finally learn that the passport represents a constant reminder to Elliot’s hamartia or, in other words, the fatal misjudgment that he confesses when he acknowledges that he “knew he was a civilian” in front of his family: “At first I thought it was an AK in his hands. Split second before I shoot, I’m like, that’s a cricket bat. And then I pulled the trigger and took his face off. How am I supposed to tell anyone that?” [23] As long as the passport is not returned to its owner, the suffering continues for all parties involved. Since the passport cannot be returned despite the attempts Elliot makes to send it to the civilian’s family, the suffering continues indefinitely without any prospect of forgiveness or absolution. “Man makes ghost, man keeps ghost,” says one character near the end of The Happiest Song Plays Last (83) and in a pivotal moment when Elliot meets Ali, an ex-Iraqi Armed Forces soldier, the only possibility for resolution is that they can acknowledge each other: “No forgive. I cannot forgive. But you know real who I am. I know real who you are. Witness for each other” (36). The mutual recognition evoked in the scene rejects the possibility of a happy ending while still offering an avenue for reconciliation. It suggests that Elliot’s confession can be considered as the impetus for transforming the haunting memories of the past, the noise, into a jarring, yet encompassing narrative that consists of multiple, dissonant layers told collectively. As García-Romero observes, Hudes adopts the four principles of “cultural multiplicity, supernatural intervention, Latina identity, and theatrical experimentation” [24] established by the teacher and playwright María Irene Fornés in her dramatic productions. The ghost highlights how closely connected these aspects are in Hudes’s work. [25] On the one hand, the specter is a manifestation of the multiple invisible convergences between hybrid cultural identities and the complex histories emerging from conflict that are potentially silenced. On the other hand, the specter itself is a theatrical experiment. The impossible presence of the dead materializes on stage as a reminder of the potential for fatal misjudgments that haunts every violent confrontation, thus opening up a space for the collective negotiation of the invisible repercussions of war and its silencing effects on the human subject such as trauma or death. Human Connections and Haunting Specters of Alienation Alienation thwarts the successful pursuit of belonging for the characters in the Elliot Trilogy . Any form of human connection that they establish is frail and precarious, but they persist in their search for an allegiance to family and community. In Water by the Spoonful , the additional staging of the virtual dimension of the internet as a potential space for human connections furthers the dominant theme of belonging. The chat room complements the other spatial layers of the lecture hall, the realm of the dead, and Elliot’s living environment. Staged at the same time, these spheres resonate with the formal commitment of Hudes to the delineated free jazz aesthetics since their simultaneity shows how Elliot and other characters seek to overcome their sense of isolation. All spaces are equal and prone to intersect at any time throughout the play. Thus, the theatrical stage is fraught with spatial overlaps and the various actions in different places and spheres often intersect in dissonance, threatening to “spin . . . into noise” (18). The experimental engagement with digital space or, more precisely, the virtual promise of second chances in life upheld by an online community takes center stage in Water by the Spoonful . Scenes in the experiential world alternate with staged conversations in an online chat room and a virtual self-help group hosted by Elliot’s birth mother, a recovered drug addict. Her motivation is only revealed when the separation of her online and offline identities collapses and the virtual clashes with the real world. This happens when Elliot walks in on her in a café where she is meeting an online community member who needs advice. ELLIOT : I looked at that chat room once. The woman I saw there? She’s literally not the same person I know. ( To John ) Did she tell you how she became such a saint? JOHN : We all have skeletons. ELLIOT : Yeah well she’s an archeological dig. Did she tell you about her daughter? (51). During this encounter, two conceptions of community meet: the online communities that emerged in the digital age and the traditional institution of family that Christopher Perricone considers as a classical tragic theme: “It is essential to Aristotle’s idea of tragedy . . . that it be a family affair.” [26] Perricone argues that the principle of cooperation and support in the family is routinely violated in Greek drama. He writes: “In tragic families, mothers . . . kill their children. Fathers . . . kill their children. Sons routinely kill their fathers. Brothers and sisters . . . kill each other . . . . Tragedy, insofar as it is implicitly a family affair, should not happen. Family members should cooperate.” [27] In Water by the Spoonful , Elliot’s mother did not offer support because she left her small children to their own devices when they fell sick with the stomach flu, an error in judgement that ends in the death of Elliot’s younger sister. Instead of following the doctor’s orders to “give . . . [the] kids a spoonful of water every five minutes,” she leaves them alone to take drugs (52). Neglecting the easiest task leads to tragedy, as Elliot points out: “But you couldn’t stick to something simple like that. You couldn’t sit still like that. You had to have your thing. That’s where I stop remembering” (52). During the confrontation in the café, the mother’s attempt to reinvent herself online fails. In the end, both mother and son are trapped in a cycle of suffering and trauma caused by their respective share in another person’s loss of life. The hamartia becomes a flaw that is passed on from one generation to another. For Perricone, “the ultimate cause of tragedy—is that tragedy hits a Darwinian ‘nerve.’ That ‘nerve’ is the power of the family and the place of the family in the human condition . . . . Think of tragedy as the Darwinian cautionary tale, par excellence.” [28] Along these lines, Water by the Spoonful taps into the classic material of Greek tragedy and reconfigures it for contemporary purposes. In The Happiest Song Plays Last , tragedy becomes a universal matter for several families because of Elliot’s involvement in the war and his hamartia . “Our son is marked. He is going to inherit this,” says Elliot’s pregnant girlfriend Shar, when she learns about the killing of Taarek Taleb (84). The mark of tragedy that she fears her child will inherit echoes the devastation of the remaining family in Iraq. According to a letter that Elliot shares with her, the son who witnesses the violent death of his father does not talk anymore. In the letter, Ali, whom he asked to find the man’s family and to give them the passport that has been in his possession over the years, describes the wife’s account of the situation: “American soldier shoots him in face. He is pretending surprise. American soldier spits on body, she says. American soldier takes wallet and runs away” (83). The roles of father and husband in her account personalize the previously unnamed Iraqi civilian and turn the haunting ghost into a fully fleshed out human being. At the same time, the main protagonist, Elliot, becomes an anonymous American soldier whose actions in this role expose the demise of human ethics in times of war. “I can’t get rid of this,” Elliot says, referring to both the passport and the act itself, after reading the letter (84). The hamartia cannot be redeemed and the resulting human connection between the families is irrevocably marked by tragedy. Conclusion: Tragic Resonances in Contemporary Drama The reconceptualization of tragedy lies at the heart of Hudes’s dramatic conception of an experimental exploration of the sensible. The Elliot Trilogy serves as a resounding echo chamber between classical drama and a reconfiguration that recognizes the contemporary specificities of the human condition in the twenty-first century. The multiplication and overlap of voices, spaces, and their conjunction with supernatural or spiritual forces invoke haunting echoes that resonate back and forth from one play to another, between each character and the stories they share with their family, and between classical tragic material and contemporary theater. As Robert Andreach concludes in his book Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theater: “If Aristotelian form is dead, a new order of forms can restore the genre to life.”[29] In the Elliot Trilogy, the echoes of a tragic past reverberate in the present and spheres that seem incompatible at first sight reveal their permeability and expose the frailty of the human existence. Overall, Hudes’s playwriting is proof for the ongoing relevance of the tragic in the twenty-first century and for the genre’s extensive capacity to change. References [1] George Steiner, “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (2004): 2–3. [2] Anne García-Romero, The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 161. [3] Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, Outstanding Broadway Dramas and Comedies: Pulitzer Prize Winning Theater Productions (Zürich: LIT, 2013), 194. [4] Oregon Shakespeare Festival, “Playwright Notes: Leaving a Legacy,” 7:25, posted on 27 October 2014, YouTube , www.youtube.com/watch?v=YphF3Qe6M54. [5] Ibid . [6] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2011), 12–13. [7] Steiner, “‘Tragedy’: Reconsidered,” 4. [8] Ibid. , 2–3. In this sense, apolis characterizes the hero as a subject devoid of a place in the world. [9] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics , 13. [10] Ibid., 12. [11] Ibid. [12] Ibid., 14. [13] Ibid., 17–18. [14] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 36. (emphasis original) [15] Ibid. [16] Ibid., 37. [17] Paul Raimond Daniels, Nietzsche and “The Birth of Tragedy ” (London: Routledge, 2013), 76. [18] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy , 37. [19] Quiara Alegría Hudes, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2012), 12. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [20] García-Romero, “Fugue, Hip Hop and Soap Opera: Transcultural Connections and Theatrical Experimentation in Twenty-First Century US Latina Playwriting,” Latin American Theatre Review 43, no. 1 (2009): 88. [21] Quiara Alegría Hudes, Water by the Spoonful (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2012), 18. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [22] Rancière, The Birth of Tragedy , 19. [23] Quiara Alegría Hudes, The Happiest Song Plays Last (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014), 85. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [24] García-Romero, The Fornes Frame , 6. [26] Christopher Perricone, “Tragedy: A Lesson in Survival,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 44, no. 1 (2010): 76. [27] Ibid. , 81. [28] Ibid. , 82. [29] Robert J Andreach, Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre (Lanham: University Press of America, 2014), 174. Footnotes About The Author(s) NATHALIE AGHORO is Assistant Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt. She earned her doctorate with a PhD thesis on conceptions of voice and sound in contemporary American novels by Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jennifer Egan, and Jonathan Safran Foer. She is the co-editor of the JCDE special issue on Theatre and Mobility (with Kerstin Schmidt) and her publications include essays on postmodern novels, contemporary literature, and Afrofuturism in music. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf 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 Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.