Jordan Schildcrout Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Jordan Schildcrout By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF From 1969 to 1974, after the premiere of Mart Crowley’s landmark gay play The Boys in the Band (1968) and before the establishment of an organized gay theatre movement with companies such as Doric Wilson’s TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), there flourished a subgenre of plays that can best be described as gay erotic theatre. While stopping short of performing sex acts on stage, these plays featured copious nudity, erotic situations, and forthright depictions of gay desire. In the early years of gay liberation, such plays pushed at the boundaries between the “legitimate” theatre and pornography, and in the process created the most exuberant and affirming depictions of same-sex sexuality heretofore seen in the American theatre. Some of these works were extremely popular with gay audiences, but almost all were dismissed by mainstream critics, never published, and rarely revived. The most widely seen of these plays was Tubstrip (1973), written and directed by Jerry Douglas, whose career in the early 1970s was situated squarely at the intersection of legitimate theatre and pornography. An analysis of Tubstrip and its groundbreaking production history can illuminate an important but often overlooked chapter in the development of gay theatre in America. Tubstrip (which can be read “tub strip” or “tubs trip”) is a risqué farce set in a gay bathhouse, written by “A. J. Kronengold” and directed by “Doug Richards,” both pseudonyms for a single person: Jerry Douglas, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama who later became a popular and award-winning director of pornographic films. Infused with a post-Stonewall sense of gay identity and sexuality, the play ran for 140 performances off-Broadway in 1973, then toured to eight cities over nine months, and opened on Broadway for a five-week run in 1974. By the producer’s own estimate, Tubstrip played approximately 500 performances to an audience of 50,000. This article argues that this remarkably successful play is emblematic of a significant moment in gay culture, when the fall of stage censorship and the rise of the sexual revolution and gay liberation created an unprecedented surge of gay erotic theatre, beginning with Gus Weill’s Geese (1969) and David Gaard’s And Puppy Dog Tails (1969), and reaching its pinnacle with Jerry Douglas’s bathhouse comedy. [1] During the early years of gay liberation, other forms of queer theatre included elements of gay eroticism: Charles Ludlam’s Bluebeard (1970) and Andy Warhol’s Pork (1971) reveled in carnivalesque excess and carried the critical imprimatur of hip theatrical art, and British imports such as Butley (1972) and Find Your Way Home (1973) depicted gay relationships with the bleakness seemingly expected in “serious drama” of the era. In contrast, gay erotic theatre often appropriated light middlebrow genres, such as romantic comedy and farce, to create fantasies of same-sex romance and sexuality. To varying degrees, Tubstrip and its ilk imagined the possibility of a happy homosexual and a healthy sexuality based on mutual desire, liberated from the guilt and shame of the closet. Critics of these plays, however, often saw only lewdness and exploitative sensationalism, which, they argued, did not belong in the legitimate theatre. The plays of gay erotic theatre may have appealed primarily to gay men who aspired to see their identities and desires, long closeted, finally reflected and affirmed in the culture. Audiences, however, were not exclusively gay, and the battles fought over sexuality and legitimacy in the theatre had repercussions beyond this subculture of gay men who, while marginalized, had a degree of cultural and economic power denied to women and other minority groups. An examination of the “homosexploitation” plays of gay erotic theatre can further illuminate the ethos of the bourgeoning gay sexual culture, providing an opportunity not just to indulge in nostalgia for the liberation era, but to reflect on how our experiences and fantasies of sex and romance are constructed in our own cultural moment. Tubstrip and other “sex positive” plays of gay erotic theatre invite the audience to find pleasure in theatrical depictions of sexual liberation, which is itself an act of liberation. Frank Queerism: The Intersection of Gay Theatre and Pornography The 1960s witnessed the emergence of what we now call “gay theater,” with gay theatre artists—informed by a contemporary understanding of gay cultural identity—creating representations of gay lives, often (but not exclusively) for an audience presumed to be gay. Most historians trace the genre to the seminal work of off-off-Broadway playwrights like Robert Patrick, Doric Wilson, and Lanford Wilson at the Caffe Cino, and then recognize the crossover commercial success of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968) as a crucial turning point. While the plays of gay erotic theatre must be understood in relation to these previous gay plays, broader changes in gay sexual culture also influenced their production and reception. Gay erotic theatre thrived for many of the same reasons as the pornographic cinema of the era, as described by historian Whitney Strub: A confluence of forces, including gay activism and its push for increased visibility, the rapidly diminishing scope of obscenity laws (historically disproportionately aimed at queer expression), the market demands of a gay consumer base, and the broader spirit of sexual revolution, all worked in tandem to open a new space for gay erotic expression. [2] While many regarded pornography as both a cause and symptom of the urban decay of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Strub argues that the supposed “decline” of the city provided increased freedom for queer people, who were now less subject to such surveillance and control. . . . As the straight, white middle class fled for suburbs specifically designed for procreative heterosexual families, urban opportunities beckoned for gay communities. [3] The 1969 Stonewall Riots helped to create a more visible political movement for LGBT people at the same time that changes in censorship laws created opportunities for a more visible sexual culture, both gay and straight, on both stage and screen. However, as Elizabeth Wollman notes, “Many members of the commercial theatre industry worried” that sexually explicit theatre productions like Oh! Calcutta! (1969) and Che! (1969) “were not terribly distinct from the live sex shows and pornographic films that had begun to proliferate in New York City.” [4] Scholars such as Thomas Waugh have discussed the history of post-World War II gay pornographic films as a progression from beefcake models posing in pouches to softcore gay erotica with full nudity to hardcore narrative feature films with performers engaging in sex acts. [5] The emergence of hardcore cinema in the early 1970s precipitated the trend of “porno chic,” which Jennifer C. Nash describes as the “mainstreaming” of pornography, with “elaborately plotted, narrative-driven feature-length films that consciously effaced the boundary between the pornographic and the mainstream,” playing in “regular” movie theatres, reviewed by mainstream critics, and attended by millions of men and women. [6] One of the earliest entries in this phenomenon was the feature length hardcore gay film Boys in the Sand (1971), directed by Wakefield Poole, a former Broadway dancer. The film became an unprecedented commercial success and made a star out of blond and handsome Casey Donovan. [7] While occasionally intersecting with porno chic, the gay erotic theatre produced between 1969 and 1974 is most comparable to softcore erotica, which did not depict explicit sex acts. Richard Dyer, writing in 1985, endeavored to distinguish between pornography and erotica for gay men, although these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, and at other times have simply marked cultural privilege, with “erotica” being what Ellen Willis called a euphemism for “classy porn.” [8] Dyer creates a distinction by asserting that pornography “is supposed to have an effect that is registered in the spectator’s body,” and this goal dictates the structural form of the genre, since “the desire that drives the porn narrative forward is the desire to come, to have an orgasm.” Pornography, then, is characterized by the way in which its form follows its presumed function, to stimulate not just arousal but physical orgasm. Of course, it’s impossible to determine exactly how a work of art functions in different circumstances with different audiences, but Dyer’s point about narrative structure still holds: the dramatic narratives of gay erotic theatre, while they might arouse, are not structured to bring the audience to orgasm. Instead, erotic theatre places emphasis on the psychological, social, and aesthetic aspects of sex. Nevertheless, productions that offered gay eroticism for a paying audience were often accused of pornographic “gaysploitation.” [9] In a 1977 article titled “Theatre: Gays in the Marketplace vs. Gays for Themselves,” Don Shewey criticized plays, often by straight playwrights, that “exploit gay characters and gay themes for sensationalism or cheap comedy” like Norman Is That You? (1970) and Steambath (1970). [10] But he recognized that this sort of exploitation was different from what he called “semiporno gay celebrations like David Gaard’s And Puppy Dog Tails , A. J. Kronengold’s Tubstrip , and Gus Weill’s Geese ,” which he saw as emerging from “the nascent gay activist movement and an increasingly public gay populace.” [11] Jerry Douglas recalls that the first play he saw containing nudity and homosexuality was Geese by Gus Weill, produced at the Players Theatre in January 1969. [12] Consisting of two one-act plays—the first with a male couple, the second with a female couple— Geese broke new ground in the depiction of sexuality, with one outraged critic proclaiming the plays to be “shockers even by today’s permissive standards. The dialog is raw and unfettered, and there is emphasis on nudity, including homosexual and lesbian lovemaking.” [13] Both plays juxtapose the newfound pure love of a young same-sex couple with the bitter relationships and hypocritical sexual mores of their parents’ generation. [14] Critics accused Geese of engaging in “fast-buck-ism” and “frank queerism,” [15] risking “the reinstitution of stage censorship in New York,” [16] and performing “a faggot propaganda piece” [17] for an audience of “prurient peeping Toms” [18] and “flagrant pederasts.” [19] Gay erotic theatre aggravated the anxiety, always present in the professional theatre, over whether theatre aspires to the “higher values” of art or functions as a commercial product in a marketplace. Were plays such as Geese a) sincerely pursuing the cause of sexual liberation or b) offering cheap thrills in hopes of making a profit? The answer, of course, often seemed to be c) both. Wollman asserts that for every radical committed to using stage nudity toward social change, there were two or three entrepreneurs who were just as interested in the money that could be made by hiring young, good-looking people to show a little skin. . . . Most ended up with feet in both camps. [20] For example, the program bio of one of the actors in Geese states, with a combination of conviction and nonchalance, “Nudity or homosexuality, or whatever, is a product of life and it’s about time it got on the stage.” [21] Not all theatre artists shared this perspective, as evidenced by an actor’s departure from Robert M. Lane’s Foreplay (1970), which prompted the Variety front-page headline, “Won’t Depict A Nude Homo, Actor Quits.” [22] When industry papers featured banner headlines such as “NY LEGIT GOING SEX-HAPPY” and “NUDITY SELLS TIX?” in 1969, [23] the underlying consternation was the difficulty of objectively distinguishing between theatrical art and exploitative sensationalism in plays as varied as Marat/Sade , The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , Fortune and Men’s Eyes , Oh! Calcutta! , Paradise Now , Scuba Duba , and Geese . As British critic John Elsom argued in 1974, “One man’s decadence is another man’s sexual enlightenment.” [24] Despite negative reviews, Geese was commercially successful, playing off-Broadway for 336 performances through November 1969 (and thus during the Stonewall Riots in June), with subsequent productions in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Geese was inevitably mentioned as a point of comparison when David Gaard’s play And Puppy Dog Tails opened off-Broadway in September 1969. In this domestic comedy, John lives with his lover, a Southerner named Carey-Lee, but his head is turned by a visit from his straight friend Bud, a Navy man with whom he “fooled around” in his adolescence. [25] Forced to choose between the closeted sexuality of his macho buddy and a loving gay relationship with Carey-Lee, John chooses the latter. Most critics derided the play as nothing more than a poor excuse to get “a glimpse of male musculature and—briefly—male genitals” [26] and “a crudely devised apology for the right to be gay.” [27] Newsday worried that The Boys in the Band had created “an epidemic” of imitators, [28] while Variety registered homophobic horror over “a rising tide of limpwrist-oriented plays.” [29] Nevertheless, and despite not liking the play, Clive Barnes of the New York Times acknowledged that And Puppy Dog Tails was doing something new, which was reflected in the review’s slightly ironic subheader: “Homosexuals Depicted As Happy, A Novelty.” He wrote, “While we have had scenes before of homosexual sex and even declarations of homosexual love, this is the first play in my experience to show demonstrations of homosexual affection.” [30] He then parenthetically confesses that he found such displays of affection “embarrassing” because of his own “hang-ups.” But the necessity of such displays is precisely the point of And Puppy Dog Tails . Indeed, the play is not primarily concerned with the supposed battle between hetero and homo, as certain critics thought, but in the divide between a homosexual culture that eroticizes straightness as a masculine ideal and a gay culture that valorizes a romantic relationship based on mutual desire. Just as John does not need a straight lover, perhaps Gaard’s play did not need the approval of straight critics. And Puppy Dog Tails recouped its cost during previews and ran for 141 performances. Geese and And Puppy Dog Tails set the stage for Jerry Douglas’s entrance into the production of gay erotic theatre. Douglas studied playwriting and directing at the Yale School of Drama before moving to New York in 1960, and he spent the decade writing off-Broadway musicals, directing plays, and serving as the casting director for the Coconut Grove Playhouse. In 1970, he had his first experience directing a play containing nudity, Gerry Raad’s Circle in the Water , which dealt with repressed homosexuality and sadism amongst cadets in a military academy. Later that same year, he directed his own play Score , an example of “bisexual chic” avant la lettre , about a sophisticated married couple who compete with each other in seduction, battling for the greatest number of conquests—including those with partners of the same sex. [31] The production, which featured Sylvester Stallone in a supporting role, was dismissed as “one of the rash of sexploitation shows which have followed the easing of stage restrictions here” [32] and closed after 23 performances. [33] Jerry Douglas’s next endeavor was writing and directing the hardcore feature film The Back Row (1973), starring Casey Donovan as a New Yorker who attracts the attention of George Payne, a sexual neophyte from Wyoming who has just arrived at Port Authority. The film shows Payne learning “how to be gay,” including a meta-cinematic scene in which Payne, having followed Donovan into an adult movie theatre, watches the action on screen and imagines himself and Donovan taking the place of the actors. The scene encapsulates the ethos behind much of Douglas’s work: pornography has a pedagogical function, instructing gay men on how to fulfill their desires, not just as a technical matter of physical positions, but by diminishing the inhibitions created by a homophobic society and liberating their erotic imaginations. Douglas used the pseudonym “Doug Richards” for The Back Row , hoping to keep his career in porn separate from his legitimate theatre career, but the film became one of his most critically acclaimed and commercially successful creations. Jeffrey Escoffier lists The Back Row , which was filmed on location in New York City, as the first of the “homorealist” porn films, which “created a synthesis of a documentary-like view (in this case focusing on the gay sexual subculture) and the more psychopolitical themes of sexual liberation,” using “actual locations where public sex took place.” [34] Douglas’s next work continued his exploration of the gay subculture in one of the emblematic locales of sexual liberation: the bathhouse. The Boys in the Baths: Sexual Exuberance and Romantic Longing in Tubstrip Jerry Douglas recalls that producer Ken Gaston approached him with the initial idea for Tubstrip : “I want you to write a play about the baths, and I want it to be a love story.” Gay bathhouses like New York’s Continental and Everard Baths—colloquially knows as “the tubs”—occupied a unique position in urban gay life, which many remember as a sexual utopia. [35] In the documentary Gay Sex in the ’70s , activist and author Arnie Kantrowitz recalls: You could do everything. . . . You could eat in the restaurant, you could go swimming in the pool, you could have a massage—to orgasm if you preferred, you could dance on their dance floor, and you could have more sex than most people would consider having in a year. [36] But Kantrowitz also emphasizes that “Even during the days of the most advanced and reckless promiscuity, it was still a search for someone,” and he met his long-term romantic partner at the baths. This combination of sexual exuberance and romantic longing informs both the dramaturgy and ethos of Tubstrip . The play takes place in the central lounge of a popular New York City bathhouse, but the establishment is sparsely attended this particular Tuesday evening because “there isn’t a self-respecting faggot in this city who isn’t home watching the Academy Awards” (16). [37] Although it will eventually crescendo into the frenzy of farce, Tubstrip begins with a pensive silence, as the young attendant Brian, the play’s main character, sits alone in a suspended bamboo cage chair “in a fetal position. . . his thoughts a thousand miles away” (2)—an image used in much of the publicity for the show [Figure 1]. The opening tableau hints at the journey to come, with Brian leaving the nest of his egg-shaped chair and metaphorically taking flight—but toward what? Brian’s appearance is contrasted with the entrance of a patron named Darryl, emerging naked from the pool (installed below stage level, in the orchestra pit), splashing the audience in the front row. Before the first word is spoken, Douglas’s staging juxtaposes above and below, air and water, the mind and the body, the romantic and the erotic, and (as Darryl tries to gain Brian’s attention by arranging himself in sexually provocative poses) the desired and the desiring. Figure 1. Poster for 1973 off-Broadway production of Tubstrip at the Players Theatre, featuring Larry Gilman as Brian. Used with permission of Jerry Douglas, from his personal collection. Each of Tubstrip ’s nine characters comes to this bathhouse with his individual sexual and romantic desires, and the play culminates in the formation of different kinds of relationships. The denizens include Richie, a romantic and naïve young man who is searching for his lover Darryl, who has surreptitiously come to the baths in search of sexual variety; Andy, a witty black queen infatuated with Brian; Tony, a sadist, and his lover Kevin, a masochist; Dusty, a sweet-natured hustler; Wally, a middle-aged skin-flick mogul searching for new talent; and Bob, a Viet Nam veteran who knew Brian in high school. The stage is filled with young and attractive actors, almost all of whom, at one point or another, will be naked. Even 59-year-old Wally, although never naked, was actually played by a 26-year-old actor (Jake Everett) who shaved his hair and constructed a “fat suit” for the role. The play presents a fantasy version of a bathhouse; yet, even as it celebrates sexual liberation, Tubstrip dramatizes many of the tensions evident in the emerging gay sexual culture, between sex and romance, promiscuity and monogamy, sadomasochism and consent, competition and community. As Kevin Winkler has noted, the bathhouse was a theatrical space, not just for professional entertainers like Bette Midler, who famously got her start performing at the Continental Baths, but for the men cruising and engaging in sex. [I]t was always showtime. You just had to find your follow spot, be it in the steam room, the showers, the orgy room, or take your act on the road through the winding hallways. If your act flopped once, you could try it out again right down the hall, altering a bit of business, tightening up your dialogue (or maybe you preferred pantomime), and experimenting with a different characterization. [38] Much of the comedy of Tubstrip comes from an awareness of the theatricality involved both in the presentation of self and the pursuit of sexual fantasy at the baths. The bathhouse, like the playhouse, is a location in which people might wear masks and play roles, but it is also ultimately a place where truths are revealed, and by the end of Tubstrip , many of the characters see each other—and themselves—with greater honesty and clarity. Over the course of its twenty-one months of performances, advertisements for Tubstrip proclaimed that it was “Better Than a Trip to the Baths” (indicating erotic pleasure) and “Better Than The Boys in the Band ” (indicating theatrical legitimacy). The latter boast hints at the extent to which early gay liberation theatre artists were performing in the shadow of Mart Crowley’s hit play—and also reacting against it. [39] The Boys in the Band presented an ensemble of gay characters—including the bitter host Michael, the “fairy” Emory, the token African American Bernard, and the hustler known only as Cowboy—gathered for a birthday party that implodes in a swirl of alcohol, verbal attacks, and manipulative games. In Act II, characters play a game in which they phone their high school crushes and relive their rejection, while Alan, the play’s supposed straight man, denies his homosexuality and flees the party. As J. Todd Ormsbee observes, “The target of Michael’s party game is the failure of gay love, its pain and humiliation, perhaps its impossibility.” [40] The central plot of Douglas’s Tubstrip reverses this dynamic. We learn that Brian, as a gawky high school freshman, had a crush on the macho heterosexual athlete Bob. While he was at war, Bob received letters from Brian, which piqued his sexual interest in a kid he barely remembered. Now Bob, entering the bathhouse in full Green Beret uniform, has come searching for Brian, and he is impressed to find that the “short, skinny, uncoordinated” freshman (89) has grown into a desirable young man. The act one curtain falls on Bob passionately kissing Brian, which Douglas recalls was “daring” for the time. Tubstrip would seem to enact a homosexual wish fulfillment: the handsome straight prince desires the gay boy who was once an ugly duckling. Imagine how different Crowley’s play would be if “nelly” Emory’s high school crush confessed that he desired him in return. But Douglas goes a step further: once Brian learns that Bob is married, closeted, and won’t commit to more than a secret weekend fling with him, he rejects Bob—and also quits his job at the bathhouse. Instead, Brian leaves with the monogamously inclined Richie, who has just broken up with his lover. Throughout the play, the flirtation between Brian and Richie has been boyish and playful, as opposed to a “heavy cruise,” most evident in their second act water fight in the pool. Rather than consummating an affair with the “stud” of his adolescent fantasies, Brian chooses the naïve and sincere young man who perhaps reminds him of himself as that awkward, yearning freshman. The contrast between physical pleasures and emotional fulfillment was also evident in the casting of the roles of Bob and Richie, with Brian rejecting the character often played by porn stars (such as Jim Cassidy) in favor of the character played by actors (such as Tom Van Stitzel) who won critical praise for giving nuanced performances. Hinting at a life of domestic happiness, Brian and Richie discuss cooking breakfast for each other as they head out into the sunrise. The bathhouse functions in a manner similar to the Shakespearean forest where erotic desire is unleashed and lovers, liberated from social restraints, can meet their proper match. But in order to maintain that romance, the lovers must then leave the forest behind and return to the “civilized” world. (Wally, as the play’s most erudite character, makes this connection, ironically extoling the “midsummer madness” that exists at the baths all year round.) The central plot of Brian and Richie valorizes traditional notions of romantic fidelity, which necessitates leaving the bathhouse, but Tubstrip does not condemn characters who remain and seek what we might now call a “no strings attached” hook-up. Bob and Darryl, as the lovers rejected by Brian and Richie, respectively, are quite clear about their longing for purely sexual adventure and variety, and the play ends with them following each other into the steam room. They, too, can have their desires fulfilled at the bathhouse, and the play does not disparage them for doing so. The character most pulled by the tension between sexual exuberance and romantic longing is Andy, described by critics as “a chatty flirt” and “a black queen” who has some of the play’s best comic lines. Contemporaneous accounts of the baths illustrate the ethnic diversity of the patrons, but Andy is the sole person of color on stage, potentially putting him in the same tokenistic position as Bernard in The Boys in the Band . At the start of the play, Andy endures a couple of racist zingers from his friend Wally, but in contrast to The Boys in the Band , in which the racial disparagement of Bernard grows uglier as the play goes on, Tubstrip shows Andy and Wally moving toward deeper friendship and mutual support. While given to incisive “reads” and witty rejoinders, Andy is not a neutered commentator, but very much part of the sexual action of the bathhouse. His romantic pursuit of Brian and his flirtations with other patrons are often played for comedy, but they are also rooted in his genuine need for affirmation in a community that too often leaves gay black men out of its romantic and erotic fantasies. Most memorably, when Andy feels he is not getting enough attention, he emerges wearing an enormous Afro wig. According to Douglas, Walter Holiday, the actor who played Andy in every performance of Tubstrip , contributed a great deal to the creation of his character, including this visual assertion of Black Power and Angela Davis fabulousness. Andy is dejected when he does not end up with Brian at the end of the play, but his friend Wally assures him that someday he, too, will find love. In a final gesture of bold self-assertion, Andy removes his towel and nakedly strides into the steam room once again. The possibility of having both sexual variety and romantic fulfillment is realized in the sadomasochistic couple of Tony and Kevin, who also provide some of the play’s most sexually explicit sequences. Douglas recalls that one of the greatest laughs of the evening came when Tony, entering in conservative business attire, whips off his Brooks Brothers suit in one swift flourish to reveal the leather harness underneath. Tony then proceeds to unpack his attaché case, which contains a number of increasingly outrageous sex toys, from cock rings and handcuffs to chocolate syrup and bananas. His “pretty-boy” lover, Kevin, soon joins him, and the script shows them as an affectionate and caring couple who enjoy playing the roles of an abusive master and humiliated slave. In this, the play participates in the debate among early gay liberationists over the psychological and political ramifications of S&M, siding with Lyn Rosen’s defense of sadomasochism: Too may people confuse S&M with bad relationships in which one person dominates another or treats another badly. S&M is a sexual act in which both partners treat each other well. [41] Many of the play’s characters do not understand this distinction and show concern over the abuse Tony heaps on Kevin, including handcuffing him naked and face down on the pool table. Good-hearted Richie attempts to “rescue” him from this humiliation, but is taken aback when Kevin exclaims, “Look, prick, you do your thing, let me do mine. Now, fuck off ” (76). Later, when Kevin easily slips out of his predicament without a key, Richie is upset to learn that the cuffs weren’t actually locked. Kevin explains, as though it should be obvious, “Suppose there was a fire—” (82). [42] The joke points to Douglas’s metatheatrical understanding of S&M as a sexual act , complete with its own costumes, props, lines (“Yes, sir !”) and roles, enacted with the consent of all the performers. Yet Tubstrip also pushes at the limits of sadomasochism when the couple involves a non-consenting participant, the hustler Dusty. Unlike the sex worker known only as “Cowboy” in The Boys in the Band , Dusty has a name and his own desires, and the audience even learns a bit about his sexual journey. [43] When Wally, one of his clients, spots him in the bathhouse and snarkily berates him for previously passing himself off as straight, Dusty replies with simple sincerity, “I never lied to you. Things change” (45), indicating his growth into gay self-acceptance. [44] He initially agrees to a threesome with Tony and Kevin, but when Tony tries to pierce Dusty’s nipple without his consent, a violent fight and then a chase through the bathhouse ensues. While played for farce, this situation also involves a touch of Ortonesque menace, which only abates when Brian, in his authoritative role as bathhouse attendant, puts a stop to the fight and banishes Tony and Kevin from the premises. In a further show of ambivalence about Tony’s sadism, the play reveals him to be Wally’s psychoanalyst, a member of a profession that, in its role of arbiter of “sanity” and “normalcy,” had a history of causing great harm to homosexuals. Nevertheless, the play ultimately shows Dusty to be unharmed, and Tony and Kevin return to their affectionate and mutually supportive romantic relationship. At the age of 59, Wally is older than any character in The Boys in the Band , a play that paints a grim picture of gay men clinging to youth. Wally takes a more philosophical perspective on his status as “dirty old man,” since, as he explains, “there’s always someone a little older, a little dirtier” (79). Wally is comic because of his grand duchess affectations, and the play creates some farcical bits out of the other characters avoiding Wally sexually, such as when four men come running out of the steam room as soon as Wally goes in (51). One way that Wally deals with this rejection is by retreating into his profession as a pornographer, imagining the world as if it were a movie, commenting on the action around him by proclaiming, “It’ll make a gorgeous film” (28). When he learns that Brian’s high school crush has come to find him, Wally becomes effusive with purple prose: “Childhood Sweethearts—doing it with jock straps and football helmets! Separated by cruel fate—reunited by a twist of circumstance! Love conquers all!” (63). He’s excited by watching and creating fantasies, and his role as voyeur puts him in the same position as the audience. Wally is not “matched” with anyone at the end of the play, but he is not alone, in part because he is reunited with Veronica, his cat who happens to be in heat and has been lost in the bathhouse, adding to the farcical shenanigans. [45] Moreover, while his bitchy barbs might indicate his frustration with the sexual competition of the bathhouse, he ultimately achieves a sense of community, exchanging friendship with characters like Andy and Dusty, whom he previously disparaged. In Wally, we see that the bathhouse can facilitate not just sexual encounters, but also friendship and a larger experience of community. The play’s function as “community portrait” is reflected in the photograph featured in the center of the off-Broadway program, showing all nine men (and one cat) as an affectionate ensemble [Figure 2]. Figure 2. Centerfold photo from program for 1973 off-Broadway production of Tubstrip. Back Row: Jamey Gillis (Tony), Jake Everett (Wally) and Veronica, Larry Gilman (Brian), Tony Origlio (Richie), Richard Rheem (Kevin); Front Row: Bob Balhatchet (Darryl), Walter Holiday (Andy), Jim Tate / Dean Tait (Dusty), Richard Livert (Bob). Photo: Christopher Studios. Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. When Time Magazine reviewed The Boys in the Band , they highlighted its depiction of “rejection, humiliation, and loneliness,” [46] which were presumed to be the lot of all homosexuals, in part because Crowley’s characters assert such generalizations (e.g., “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse”). Tubstrip makes no such generalizations, in part because the greater amount of queer representation post- Boys relieves it of the burden of representing all homosexuals. Instead, Jerry Douglas’s play creates a fantasy in which characters connect—as sexual partners, as romantic lovers, as friends, and as a community. The play does not dwell on the trauma of the closet, no one agonizes over what “made them” gay, no one is forced to pretend to be straight, no one drowns himself in alcohol, and even the characters who do light drugs (pot and poppers) seem motivated by sexual enhancement rather than self-destruction. Like Geese and And Puppy Dog Tails , Tubstrip depicts gay love, sex, and affection (which can be intertwined or not, depending on your desire) as exciting, fulfilling, and achievable. While this might be a sentimental fantasy, it’s a fantasy that proved immensely popular with gay audiences—and affronted many mainstream critics. Tubstrip on Stage: Audiences, Critics, and the Road to Legitimacy Tubstrip began performances at the 199-seat Brecht Theatre in the Mercer Arts Center on 17 May 1973. Suggesting the play’s location at the intersection of legitimate theatre and gay sexual culture, the cover of the program featured a drawing of two nearly naked blond boys, smiling and lounging in relaxed poses. Inside were advertisements for the boutique sex shop the Pleasure Chest, “metal inhalers” (for amyl nitrite), nude male photography, and hardcore pornography. Posters and flyers for the show did not include the words “gay” or “homosexual,” instead borrowing a phrase from pornographic cinema and touting the play’s “all male cast.” In gay magazines, advertisements for the play appeared next to those for porn films and bathhouses. These marketing tactics drew an audience, allowing the production to recoup its investment within five weeks. It played for a total of 100 performances, before the 103-year old Broadway Central Hotel, which housed the Mercer Arts Center, collapsed, leaving Tubstrip temporarily homeless. [47] The production reopened less than two weeks later at the Players Theatre, running for 40 more performances, from 14 August to 16 September, but never officially opening to the mainstream press. Instead, the producers took advantage of the fact that gay culture had grown more self-sufficient since the days of Geese and And Puppy Dog Tails , with a marked increase in gay-owned publications, bars, shops, and restaurants. Most writers invited from gay publications like The Advocate , Gay Scene , Michael’s Thing , and Where It’s At enjoyed the nudity and eroticism of Tubstrip, yet even when photos of semi-naked actors accompanied their reviews, they tended to focus on the overall quality of the play, particularly its wit and comic structure, as well as what they saw as its liberationist ethos. Lee Barton of the Advocate saw it as a welcome departure from “what’s been passing for gay theatre” and plays that “exploit, degrade, insult, or distort what it’s like to be gay.” He praised Tubstrip as “funny, sexy, [and] important,” but wondered whether mainstream critics could “tolerate anything gay that is so open and healthy.” [48] In his diary, Donald Vining was effusive about the play and highlighted the sense of recognition experienced by a gay audience member, describing the set as “a wonderful evocation of the Continental Baths.” I was so glad I had recently been there so that the hanging basket chair, the pool table, the steam room doors, and the mattresses on the floor all had meaning. I said to Ken, “They’ve got everything but the swimming pool” and lo and behold two actors emerged naked and wet from some kind of tub at the front of the stage. . . . We had nine naked men, eight of them quite attractive, and lots of hilarious lines. The play would be of no interest to anyone not a homosexual but it is actually very well crafted, the several plots skillfully managed, the laughs beautifully built up to, the characters nicely differentiated, and everything highly professional. . . . I found the whole thing a hoot and my sentimental nature was pleased when the two romantics, disappointed in their lovers for different reasons, found each other at the end. [49] Vito Russo, however, wrote that he was “more furious” at plays like Tubstrip than at Boys in the Band “because they pretend to be a product of our liberated culture” but actually just “exploit the situation to make a buck” from members of the gay community who will “pay any price” to see nudity on stage. [50] But Vining’s response indicates that Russo misjudged the desire of the ticket-buying gay audience. The nudity is one element of the larger theatrical fantasy, which also includes the pleasure of seeing one’s world represented, of being an insider who understands the meaning of that world, and of seeing gay romance and eroticism validated in a manner still rare in mainstream culture. The marketing of Tubstrip may have exploited sexuality in order to sell tickets, but the play itself offered much more to audience members like Vining, who saw no conflict between the erotic and the legitimate theatre. Indeed, he found pleasure in seeing the erotic within the legitimate. In a rare move for a sexually explicit gay play, Tubstrip then hit the road, travelling to eight cities over nine months in 1974. Jerry Douglas was with the production for the entire tour, making revisions to the script and rehearsing new actors, since only two actors remained constant through the entire run: comic duo Walter Holiday (Andy) and Jake Everett (Wally). The stops for the first leg of the tour were Boston (4 weeks), Washington, DC (5 weeks), Philadelphia (2 weeks), Toronto (3 weeks), Detroit (1 week), and Chicago (5 weeks). The only hint of trouble came in Detroit, where residents of the hotel in which the theatre was located covered up the poster, and the Free Press sounded alarm bells about the possibility of obscenity. [51] In general, critics who liked the play tended to downplay the significance of the nudity, while negative reviews accused the play of “homosexploitation.” [52] A common theme was determining whether the play could appeal to “open-minded straights” or was strictly for “a specialized audience.” [53] In Washington and Philadelphia, critics highlighted the “newness” of Tubstrip and discussed it as a first. Washington’s NBC station announced, “This may be our first ‘X’ rated theater review. . . so if you’re under 17, please go to bed. Gay theatre has come to town,” [54] while a local magazine expressed the hope that Tubstrip would encourage more gay theatre, since “there is a large gay community and others in the Washington area who no doubt would support quality productions.” [55] The critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer regarded Tubstrip as a sex comedy, one of many that have been produced off-Broadway but the first of its kind to reach Philadelphia. . . the tour being something of an event in the history of gay liberation. . . asserting as it does not the sickness but the validity of homosexual affection and homoerotic appeal. [56] The show won praise as “a comic statement about love” [57] and “an outrageously witty farce,” [58] and even the critics who panned the play grudgingly acknowledged that it “seems to please its special audience” [59] who “responded with great relish” [60] and “seemed to love every minute of Tubstrip , which must mean something.” [61] When the production reached Los Angeles, Tubstrip transformed from a successful play into a cultural phenomenon. Casey Donovan, star of the porn films Boys in the Sand and The Back Row , as well as the recently released film version of Score (1974), joined the cast in the lead role of Brian—but he used his “legitimate” name, Calvin Culver. Like Jerry Douglas, Culver worked both in the legitimate theatre and in hardcore pornography, known by different names in each realm. But Tubstrip , existing at this particular moment of gay liberation and porno chic, blurred the lines between these realms. Advertisements for Tubstrip promoted their star as “Calvin (Casey Donovan) Culver,” literally inserting the pornographic into the legitimate. Douglas recalls that the goal was for Culver to achieve respectability as an actor while not neglecting Donovan’s porno fan base, and Culver told the San Francisco Examiner , “I’m not the least bit ashamed of those films I made, but I hope my career will take off now in a more serious and legitimate direction.” [62] Having a celebrity in the show created more publicity for Tubstrip than ever before. Culver appeared on front covers and in photo spreads in magazines, the show scheduled “meet the cast” parties with local bars and bathhouses, famous actors including Shelley Winters and Larry Kert ( West Side Story , Company ) came to the show, Reverend Troy Perry of the gay-affirming Metropolitan Community Church attended three times, and the company appeared in the 1974 Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade. Douglas remembers, “There were gaggles of fans at the stage door every night. And Cal signed every autograph that was asked of him.” The production was enormously successful over the 11-week run in Los Angeles, but the new casting seems to have altered the critical reception of the play. Unlike actors who previously played Brian, 30-year-old Culver was no moony-eyed youth gazing into the romantic distance; in promotional photos, Culver glares directly at the viewer in a sexual come-on [Figure 3]. His co-star Jim Cassidy, newly cast in the role of Bob, was also a porn performer but had little acting experience, which seemed to contribute to the perception among some critics that the show was merely an opportunity to see porn stars in the flesh, with one review noting that some audience members “literally oohed and aahed when [Cassidy] stripped.” [63] For the first time, some expressed disappointment that the actor playing Brian did not engage in full-frontal nudity, since that was now the expectation with Culver in the role. Figure 3. Advertisement for 1974 touring production of Tubstrip in Los Angeles, featuring Calvin (Casey Donovan) Culver as Brian. Used with permission of Jerry Douglas, from his personal collection. Tubstrip concluded its tour with a seven-week run in San Francisco, where the city’s two major newspapers savaged the play, but the local gay press celebrated it as an exemplar of gay liberation and a “positive statement” that successfully captured gay life. One headline announced “No Suicides in This Homosexual Play,” [64] and one writer quipped, “When is the last time you walked out of a play or film about gays and felt good?” [65] Jerry Douglas (still operating under the name Doug Richards) had a more public profile in San Francisco, giving a press conference with Culver. Perhaps with an eye toward the planned Broadway production, Douglas asserted that, though a “gay play,” Tubstrip was not “about homosexuality” and appealed to a broad audience: It’s interesting the same pattern in every city we’ve played; the first week we get the dirty old men with binoculars in the front row, the second week we get the younger gay set, and by the third week it’s 50-50 mixed straight and gay. [66] After successfully running for over 400 performances off-Broadway and around the country, Tubstrip would now test its ability to reach a diverse audience in the commercial center of the American theatre. Tubstrip opened on 31 October 1974 at Broadway’s Mayfair Theatre (previously known as Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe) under what was known as a “middle theatre contract.” [67] For the first time, Jerry Douglas used his own name as the director (but not as the playwright), and Calvin Culver no longer had Casey Donovan splitting his name in two. But Tubstrip ’s desire for success on Broadway was a bit like Brian’s desire for heterosexual Bob: the big guy might be open to a fling, but he wasn’t about to make a commitment. New York critics took pains to warn heterosexual audiences that this play was not for them, up to and including dialogue that “might be virtually a foreign language.” [68] Mel Gussow in the New York Times was especially dismissive, and the Associated Press critic acknowledged that while the play might have “a nationwide gay housekeeping seal of approval,” he felt like a “straight intruder.” [69] In a positive review that praised “a uniformly superb cast,” Debbi Wasserman of Show Business attempted to dismantle the homo-hetero divide imagined by her fellow critics by redrawing the lines: “ Tubstrip is not for everyone, but it comes pretty close. It’s not for the prejudiced puritan, but it is for the romantic.” [70] Tubstrip had found extraordinary success as a gay play for primarily gay audiences, a reciprocal relationship based on mutual desire, but the straight trade of Broadway refused to see it as legitimate, and the production closed after 37 performances. [71] Tubstrip had a return engagement in Washington, DC, in January 1975, and has not been produced since. [72] Two months after Tubstrip closed, another comedy set in a gay bathhouse found greater success on Broadway. The Ritz by Terrence McNally had started at the Yale Rep with the title The Tubs . On the way to Broadway, the play not only changed its name (to avoid confusion with Douglas’s play), but also changed the sexual desires of its main character. In New Haven, the play concerned a married sanitation engineer from Ohio who has come to the baths to have a gay affair. In New York, the play concerned a married sanitation engineer from Ohio who has come to the baths unwittingly, and the greatest source of comedy is this straight man’s confusion and embarrassment when faced with the gay goings-on of the kooky patrons. In a stage direction regarding the “men endlessly prowling the corridors” of the bathhouse as though they are “on a treadmill,” McNally indicates that “Even though they never speak, these various patrons must become specific.” [73] But the playwright does not bother to make them specific, and they function as little more than part of the scenery for a comedy about straight people. Reconstructed to cater to non-gay audiences, The Ritz ran for 400 performances and won a Tony Award for Rita Moreno. Interestingly, Larry Gilman, who had first played Brian the attendant in the off-Broadway production of Tubstrip , was hired as a replacement in the role of an attendant in The Ritz , and Culver, performing as Casey Donovan, starred opposite Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn in a short-lived 1983 revival. After making the bisexual porn film Both Ways , Jerry Douglas spent the next chapter of his career working as a writer and editor in pornographic publishing. He returned to pornographic cinema in 1989 and steadily produced a series of popular and highly regarded films—including More of a Man (1991), Flesh & Blood (1996), Dream Team (1998), and Buckleroos (2004)—that won numerous industry awards for best picture, best screenplay, and best direction. The sexual exuberance and romantic longing that inform Tubstrip are evident in many of Douglas’s films, which have maintained their popularity in a way that his theatrical works have not. In the midst of gay liberation and looking ahead to the future, the actor John Bruce Deaven, who played Dusty and served as Equity Deputy, kept a record of Tubstrip ’s production history. He completed the document in 1975 with a fantasy—clearly inspired by the Sondheim musical Follies (1971)—that on 4 July 2001: Tubstrip casts from all the years (thousands) reunite at broken down Mayfair Theater in New York prior to the day it is torn down. All wear “year” they were in Tubstrip and what part! [74] This “reunion,” of course, never occurred, and many of the men involved in Tubstrip did not live to see 2001. Although largely forgotten, plays like Geese , And Puppy Dog Tails , and Tubstrip are significant for their role in opening the theatre as a venue for the expression of gay romantic and sexual desire. What was once condemned as “homosexploitation” has persisted in one form or another for over 40 years, often at the intersection of legitimate theatre and pornography, from staples of the “purple circuit” like Robert Patrick’s T-Shirts (1979), with porn star Jack Wrangler in the original production, and the erotic plays of Cal Yeomans and Robert Chesley; through a resurgence in the mid-1990s with works like David Dillon’s ensemble comedy Party (1995), Ronnie Larsen’s Making Porn (1996), and Robert Coles’s Cute Boys in their Underpants… series; to the long-running musical revue Naked Boys Singing (1999), the meta-pornography of Thomas Bradshaw’s Intimacy (2014), and the ménage à trois soap opera Afterglow (2017). By engaging in cultural battles with the theatrical establishment and critical gate-keepers, the erotic theatre of the gay liberation era also helped to create a cultural landscape where later Broadway plays as esteemed as Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1982), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), and Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out (2002), all featuring nudity and/or depictions of gay sex, could be seen as legitimate. Gay sexuality in the 21 st century is quite different than it was in the era of sexual liberation. The AIDS crisis, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the use of apps like Grindr as a tool for meeting sexual partners have radically changed the ways that queer men experience their sexuality. The internet has facilitated renewed interest in “vintage” porn from the era of gay liberation, with films of 1970s restored, rereleased, and posted by aficionados on video sharing websites. These “classics,” along with contemporary documentaries about Gay Sex in the 70s and porn stars like Jack Wrangler and Peter Berlin, offer the viewer a nostalgic fantasy of an era of gay sexual abandon. It’s more difficult for “vintage” plays to maintain a place in the culture, particularly when critical disdain caused them to go unpublished. Yet revisiting erotic plays of the gay liberation era can do more than offer the pleasures of nostalgia. They illuminate how our experiences and fantasies of sex and romance are constructed by our changing social realities, allowing us to reflect more clearly on how we experience desire in our current moment—and to imagine ways in which we might experience it in the future. Acknowledgements: This scholarship would not have been possible without the generous friendship and well-preserved personal archive of Jerry Douglas. I’m indebted to David Román and Michael C. Oliveira at the University of Southern California, and grateful for the insights and contributions of Kevin Lustik, Stan Richardson, Richard Sacks, Paula Shaw, David Zellnik, and the peer reviewers and editors of JADT . References [1] Other plays in this subgenre, containing nudity and depicting gay relationships, often structured as romances and informed by the ethos of gay liberation, include: War Games (1969) by Neal Weaver, Foreplay (1970) by Robert Lane, Score (1970) by Jerry Douglas, Georgie Porgie (1968/1971) by George Birimisa, Minus One (1971) by Lawrence Parke, Brussels Sprouts (1972) by Larry Kardish, Mercy Drop (1973) by Robert Patrick, and Stand by Your Beds, Boys (1974) by John Allison and Ray Scantlin. Beginning in 1969 in Los Angeles, the SPREE (Society of Pat Rocco Enlightened Enthusiasts) Theatre Company staged performances of original gay plays, often comedies containing nudity, with titles like The Casting Couch and The Love Thief. While not necessarily featuring romantic relationships or liberationist ideologies, Sal Mineo’s 1969 revival of Fortune and Men’s Eyes by John Herbert and Jerry Douglas’s 1970 staging of Circle in the Water by Gerry Raad also featured nudity and homosexuality. [2] Whitney Strub, “Hey Look Me Over: The Films of Pat Rocco,” UCLA Film and Television Archive, https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/collections/inthelife/history/hey-look-me-over-films-pat-rocco . Accessed 8 September 2017. [3] Whitney Strub, “From Porno Chic to Porno Bleak: Representing the Urban Crisis in 1970s American Pornography,” Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 40. [4] Elizabeth Wollman, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. [5] Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 269-273. [6] Jennifer C. Nash, “Desiring Desiree,” Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s, eds. Carolyn Bronstein and Whitney Strub (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 86. Among the most famous (heterosexual) films associated with porno chic are Deep Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1972). [7] Along with Poole and Douglas, another theatre artist who created gay porn in the early liberation era is counter-culture playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, who wrote and directed the hardcore film American Cream (1972) under the name Rob Simple. [8] Richard Dyer, “Gay Male Porn: Coming To Terms,” Jump Cut 30 (March 1985), 27-29. [9] The term echoes the more prevalent phenomenon of “blaxploitation,” which functioned under a very different set of circumstances in regard to class, gender, cultural power, and, obviously, race. But both terms point to the concurrent burgeoning of previously underrepresented or disempowered voices in American culture. For more on instances of crossover between these cultural trends, see Joe Wlodarz, “Beyond the Black Macho: Queer Blaxploitation,” The Velvet Light Trap 53 (Spring 2004), 10-25. [10] Don Shewey, “Theatre: Gays in the Marketplace vs. Gays for Themselves,” in Lavender Culture, Revised Edition, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 236. [11] Shewey, 243. Shewey mentions these three erotic plays in the same context as Jonathan Ned Katz’s activist documentary play Coming Out (1972), as coming from and speaking to the gay community. [12] Personal interview with Jerry Douglas, 23 January 2017. All subsequent references to Douglas’s memories or assessments of the past come from this interview. [13] Richard Hummler, “Off Broadway Reviews,” Variety, 29 January 1969, 75. [14] My description of the play is based on contemporaneous reviews and articles, since an exhaustive search has yet to turn up a copy of the script. [15] “Off-B’way Geese Plugs Nudity, Frank Queerism,” Variety, 22 January 1969, 57. [16] Hummler. [17] “Sex Downtown: An Off-Broadway Review,” Screw, 7 March 1969, n.p. [18] William Glover, “Review,” AP Service, 12 January 1969, clipping. [19] John Simon, “Theatre Chronicle,” Hudson Review, Spring 1969, 102. [20] Wollman, 14. Wollman also notes the “relative tameness” with which adult musicals depicted gay sexuality compared to straight sexuality (52). The “straight plays” of gay erotic theatre were much bolder. [21] Dan Halleck, Geese Theatre Program, Players Theatre (New York, 1969), 2. [22] “Won’t Depict A Nude Homo, Actor Quits,” Variety, 25 November 1970, 1. Robert Jundelin’s departure caused a delay in the Broadway opening of the production, which received mixed-to-negative reviews and closed after 38 performances. [23] Richard Hummler, “NY Legit Going Sex-Happy: Off-B’way Porny May Reach B’way” Variety, 21 May 1969, 1, 70; Charlotte Harmon, “Nudity Sells Tix?: Bare Facts Still Not Totally Clear,” Backstage, 7 February 1969, 28. [24] John Elsom, Erotic Theatre (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1974), 2. [25] David Gaard, And Puppy Dog Tails, manuscript, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. [26] Walter Kerr, “For Homos and Heteros Alike, A Swindle,” New York Times, 26 October 1969, D3. [27] Daphne Kraft, “Off-Broadway: Puppy Dog Tails,” Newark Evening News, 20 October 1969, 16. [28] George Oppenheimer, “And Puppy Dog Tails, Or How to Make Boys,” Newsday, 20 October 1969, n.p. [29] Richard Hummler, “Off-Broadway Reviews: And Puppy Dog Tails,” Variety, 29 October 1969, 70. [30] Clive Barnes, “Theater: And Puppy Dog Tails Opens,” New York Times, 20 October 1969, 60. [31] It’s important to note that male playwrights, directors, and producers created the lesbian eroticism seen in both Geese and Score. Women generally have had less cultural power than men, so the history of lesbian eroticism created by lesbians in the theatre had a very different path, which was also informed by arguments in feminism throughout the 1970s and 1980s over sexual representation, with different camps described as “anti-pornography” and “pro-sex.” Lesbian theatre scholars like Jill Dolan, Sue-Ellen Case, and Kate Davy have celebrated the eroticism in the groundbreaking plays of Split Britches and Holly Hughes at the WOW Café in the 1980s, as well as the plays of the Five Lesbian Brothers produced off-Broadway in the 1990s. More recently, lesbian eroticism has been seen on Broadway in productions of Paula Vogel’s Indecent and the musical Fun Home, adapted for the stage by Lisa Kron from Alison Bechdel’s memoir. See Jill Dolan, “The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance,” Theatre Journal 39:2 (May 1987), 156-174; Sue-Ellen Case, Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance (New York: Routledge, 1996); Kate Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). [32] Dick Bruckenfeld, “Review,” Village Voice, 5 November 1970, 49. [33] Score was more successful in Radley Metzger’s 1974 film version, for which Douglas wrote the screenplay. The film, featuring Casey Donovan, was financially successful, leading the producers to take a full-page ad in Variety announcing “Score Scores at the Box Office,” 28 August 1974, 23. [34] Jeffrey Escoffier, “Sex in the Seventies: Gay Porn Cinema as an Archive for the History of American Sexuality,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26.1 (January 2017), 91-92. [35] Leo Bersani, however, does not. He describes the gay bathhouse as “one of the most ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive environments imaginable.” Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (Winter 1987), 206. [36] Gay Sex in the ’70s, directed by Joseph Lovett, Lovett Productions/Frameline, 2005. [37] Citations refer to the manuscript available in the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive at the University of Southern California, currently the only accessible version of the play. However, the archived version is an early draft, not reflecting changes made over the course of rehearsing and performing the play, which appear in the final version in Jerry Douglas’s possession. While all textual citations are for the archived earlier version, this essay will also reference plot details that exist only in the final version of the script. [38] Kevin Winkler, “The Divine Mr. K.: Reclaiming My ‘Unruly’ Past with Bette Midler and the Baths,” Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater, ed. Robin Bernstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 69. [39] Although Douglas’s play expresses a very different perspective on gay identity and sexuality, he remembers finding Crowley’s play “brilliant” when we saw the original production. For a production history of the play and analysis of its complicated cultural impact, see James Wilson, “‘Who Does She Hope to Be?’: Celluloid Ghosts, Queer Utopias, and The Boys on Stage,” Matt Bell, ed., The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016). [40] J. Todd Ormsbee, “The Tragedy and Hope of Love Between Gay Men: The Boys in the Band and the Emotionality of Gay Love in the 1960s and 70s,” The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, ed. Matt Bell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 282. [41] Lyn Rosen, “Forum on Sadomasochism,” Lavender Culture, Revised Edition, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 88. [42] Sadly, on 25 May 1977, the Everard Baths was destroyed in a fire that killed nine people. Laurie Johnston, “9 Killed in Bath Fire Identified by Friends,” New York Times, 27 May 1977, 17. [43] For more on the “object-ification” of the Cowboy, see Matthew Tinkcom, “‘A Credit to the Homosexual’: The Boys in the Band and the Appearances of Queer Debt,” The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, ed. Matt Bell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 261-263. [44] Dusty was initially played by Dean Tait, a professional body builder who was also in Circle in the Water. Tait was featured in beefcake photo spreads promoting Tubstrip, and he would later appear in Jerry Douglas’s film Both Ways (1975) and the popular erotic musical revue Let My People Come on Broadway in 1976. [45] The production used a live cat on stage. Douglas recalls that when the production toured, “In every city we went to we got a different one, a baby kitten, and left the old cat behind.” [46] “New Plays: The Boys in the Band,” Time, 26 April 1968, 97. [47] The collapse occurred on 3 August 1973, at 5:10pm, when the play was not in performance, and most people were able to evacuate the building, used primarily as a welfare hotel, before it fell. Because the performance complex was on the east side of the structure, the theatres were not severely damaged, and the production’s cast and crew, after obtaining a court order, were allowed to rescue the set and props from the space. Newspapers reported the deaths of four people and the injury of a dozen more in the collapse. Murray Schumach, “Broadway Central Hotel Collapses,” New York Times, 4 August 1973, 1; Fred Ferretti, “Two More Bodies Found in Rubble,” New York Times, 11 August 1973, 23. [48] Lee Barton, “Tubstrip’s a Grand Hotel with Steam,” The Advocate, 20 June 1973, n.p. [49] Donald Vining, A Gay Diary: Volume Four, 1967-1975 (New York: The Pepys Press, 1983), 324-325. [50] Vito Russo, “Tubshit: A Parade of Tight Asses,” Gay, 18 June 1973, 14. [51] Chuck Thurston, “Staid Hotel Preparing For Gay Play,” Detroit Free Press, 24 March 1974, 8-D. [52] Lawrence DeVine, “Tubstrip: A Play for Posterity?” Detroit Free Press, 28 March 1974, 9-C. [53] Louise Lague, “It’s a Steam Bath, and the Gays Have It,” Washington Star-News, 5 February 1974, C-3. [54] Lou Robinson, “Review: Tubstrip [Transcript]” WRC-TV 4 (NBC), n.d. [55] Teddy Vaughn, Memo Magazine [typed advance copy, no title/date], collection of Jerry Douglas. [56] William B. Collins, “Tubstrip Made For Gay Audience,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 February 1974, 15. [57] Lague. [58] Vaughn. [59] Richard Christiansen “Tubstrip is Soggy,” Chicago Daily News, 10 April 1974, n.p. [60] David McCaughna, “Tubstrip Cashes in on Gay Mannerisms,” Toronto Citizen, 15-28 March 1974, 13. [61] Gregory Glover, “Tubstrip Sequel to Boys in the Band,” Toronto Sun, 8 March 1974, 24. [62] Jeanne Miller, “Gay Theatre that Draws Straight Voyeurs,” San Francisco Examiner, 16 August 1974, 29. [63] “Rub a Dub Dub, All Men in a Tubstrip,” UCLA Summer Bruin, 5 July 1974, 7. [64] Anitra Earle, “No Suicides in This Homosexual Play: The Porno Film Star of Tubstrip,” San Francisco Chronicle, 20 August 1974, 43. [65] Pola Del Vecchio, “Stepping Out,” Kalendar, 30 August 1974, 5. [66] Donald McLean, “Meet Calvin Culver,” Bay Area Reporter 4:17, n.p. Clipping, Jerry Douglas personal collection. [67] The goal of this contract, offered by the League of Broadway Theaters, was to bring plays from off-Broadway to Broadway, allowing lower production costs but also restricting capacity to 300-800 seats—not the full Broadway house. Industry commentators seem to have made no distinction over this contract, with both Variety and Otis Guernsey categorizing Tubstrip as a Broadway play. See Stewart W. Little, “The Lively Arts: Upward Mobility in the Theatre,” New York Magazine, 11 May 1970, 47. [68] Madd. “Review: Tubstrip,” Variety, 6 November 1974, 62. [69] William Glover, “Theater,” Associated Press, 1 November 1974, clipping, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. [70] Debbi Wasserman, “Review: Tubstrip,” Show Business, 7 November 1974, 6. [71] Most sources (including Theatre World, Otis Guernsey’s Best Plays of 1974-1975, the Internet Broadway Database, and the Playbill Vault) incorrectly state that the play ran between 22 and 25 performances, listing October 29 as the date of the first preview. However, advertisements and “Theater Directory” listings in the New York Times show that Tubstrip had its first preview on October 18, opened on October 31, and closed on November 17. The timeline created by the actor John Bruce Deaven (who also served as Equity Deputy for the production) corroborates these dates. [72] In 1975, Ken Gaston produced and took credit for writing the script of Hustlers, another play by “A. J. Kronengold,” which performed in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. Jerry Douglas had nothing to do with this production. David Richards, “The Producer, And Playwright, Is Hustling, Too,” Washington Star-News, 22 January 1975, C1/C3. [73] Terrence McNally, The Ritz and Other Plays (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1976), 6. [74] John Bruce Deaven, "History of Tubstrip," unpublished personal document, 1975, collection of Jerry Douglas. Footnotes About The Author(s) Jordan Schildcrout is Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance at Purchase College, SUNY. He is the author of Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (University of Michigan Press), “Drama and the New Sexualities”(Oxford Handbook of American Drama), and “Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s boom” (JADT). His article “Envisioning Queer Liberation: The Performance of Communal Visibility in Doric Wilson’s Street Theater” will appear in Modern Drama (Spring 2018). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

The Theatre Project is home to more than 25,000 images from around the world and covering over 3,000 years of theatre history. You will find each image in the collection has a descriptive title, along with information about its period and country. Images can be browsed by collection as well with groupings including categories such as scenography, actors, etc. Theatre Image Collection Welcome to the CUNY Graduate Center Theatre Project. The Theatre Project is home to more than 25,000 images from around the world and covering over 3,000 years of theatre history. You will find each image in the collection has a descriptive title, along with information about its period and country. Images can be browsed by collection as well with groupings including categories such as scenography, actors, etc. For more than 30 years it has been maintained by Distinguished Professor Marvin Carlson and his students as an important resource for those looking for the visual materials that are a crucial part of theatrical research. Starting in December of 2012, the CUNY Graduate Center Theatre Project moved to the open source software Omeka to increase accessibility and searchability of the many images and to make uploading and cataloging of the images easier. This transition also brought the image database under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center's digital initiatives. The source is available for many images and a citation for each image is also provided on the item view page. Please note the collection is password protected and those interested need to get in touch to receive the login details. For queries related to database access, content and image collection, please write to Prof. Marvin Carlson at mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu or Frank Hentscher at fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu Visit Collection

Watch Radical Move by ANIELA GABRYEL at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. How much would you sacrifice to experience transcendence, to go beyond the body? Members of a legendary theatre group, in continuing the explorations of Jerzy Grotowski, give up everything for artistic research. Suspended between fascination and fear, they seek to transgress their own limits. The group resembles a miniature society with all its inherent faults, especially as it falls apart.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Radical Move At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by ANIELA GABRYEL Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 16th at 7:25pm. 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 Poland Language English Running Time 88 minutes Year of Release 2023 About The Film How much would you sacrifice to experience transcendence, to go beyond the body? Members of a legendary theatre group, in continuing the explorations of Jerzy Grotowski, give up everything for artistic research. Suspended between fascination and fear, they seek to transgress their own limits. The group resembles a miniature society with all its inherent faults, especially as it falls apart. About The Artist(s) Film director, writer, a graduate of Film Directing at Polish National Film School in Lodz and of Theatre studies at Jagiellonian University. Her short films have been screened and awarded at numerous festivals in Poland and around the world. Her full-length documentary debut When Will This Wind Stop was screened and recognized at many film festivals, including an award at IDFA in 2016. Currently Get in touch with the artist(s) aniela.astrid.gabryel@gmail.com and follow them on social media 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

Kelly I. Aliano Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. Kelly I. Aliano By Published on December 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF QUEERING DRAG: REDEFINING THE DISCOURSE OF GENDER BENDING. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. The cultural visibility and prevalence of drag performance has changed dramatically in the fifteen years since the premiere of the television program RuPaul’s Drag Race. Indeed, drag is more commonly presented in the popular culture sphere, as well as more commonly targeted by conservative attacks, than perhaps ever before. Because of this increased cultural significance, there is a renewed need to consider drag from a scholarly perspective. Meredith Heller’s Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending takes up this challenge, offering insight into “the scope of drag practice” (xi) and providing new strategies for discussing drag. Heller’s work is a useful resource for furthering the work of critically engaging drag as a performative and artistic medium that is distinctly queer. Heller reinforces the notion of queer as “not align[ing] with hegemonic structures and expectations” (6), so it can remain a valuable and expansive theoretical framework for discussing performance. Heller’s discussion here pushes beyond other definitions of drag, such as Steven P. Schacht and Lisa Underwood’s in The Drag Queen Anthology , that situate it merely as a performance that one undertakes to convince spectators that they are an individual of the opposing gender. Instead, Heller asks us to conceptualize drag as a discursive practice that includes those witnessing the practice as well as those performing it. Heller’s analysis offers us a new framework for thinking about drag by highlighting the limitations of current language to discuss the practice to use it to consider a more expansive range of performance modes while providing “new definitional guidelines for naming an act as gender-bending” (6). This new perspective centers what a body communicates as opposed to presumptions about said body itself. Queering Drag considers drag as being “what performers do rather than who they are” (17-18). Heller admirably contends with the extensive literature on drag, such as the work of J. Halberstam, Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, and Esther Newton. She then offers a meaningful critique of how language has heretofore been used to discuss the practice without merely dismissing some of the field’s key voices. The lens Heller provides allows for a more comprehensive array of performances to be claimed as queer. However, there is a possibility that such a widely encompassing perspective will undercut the legacy of specifically queer-identified performance modes. Heller intentionally chose examples that have “been linguistically coded or archived as done by women or as a women’s practice” (11) because of the ways in which this might challenge the previously established dominant narrative of drag. To implement this new theorizing of drag, Heller considers “four types of US-based gender-bending”: “male impersonation, sexless mythical characters, queer butchness, and contemporary drag kinging” (33). The examples take us through popular entertainment of the nineteenth century to El Teatro Campesino to the Jewel Box Revue to a variety of community spaces in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries incorporating drag king performance. The examples, taken together, offer an interesting discussion of drag that puts women performers–broadly defined–at the center of that practice. The strict framework for performance examples here also offers an opportunity for future scholarship to consider how Heller’s framework might apply to other forms of performance claimed or defined as drag. The studies within individual chapters historicize their subjects well. Chapter 2, which explores performers in vaudeville and variety shows, considers the impact of drag king acts explicitly done for financial gain, for example, as opposed to those covered in the subsequent chapters that were more concerned with “identity politics, civil rights, or community affiliation” (72). It provides meaningful insight into the lived experiences of these figures alongside their popularity on stage. In the next chapter, on El Teatro Campesino, Heller considers the women members of the company and the ways in which their choice to perform in gender-bending projects allowed them to find “empowerment… without wholly acquiescing to unwanted sexual and gender positions” (78). This analysis centers on so-called “sexless” roles, which were by their very nature separate from the gendered identities of the performers. The discussion considers the racialized experience of gender for these performers, a concept expanded in the next chapter on Black queer performers, particularly those active in the Jewel Box Revue. Heller sees the “butch” presentation of these women as being in direct defiance of cisgender norms and “a public signifier of… queer sexual desire” (116). Chapter 5 builds on this discussion, centering smaller-scale presentations of drag king performance, with an emphasis on defining the practice as “fundamentally marked by performers’ intents to express identity queerness or highlight oppressive identity norms” (164). This is a useful framework for considering how to apply Heller’s theories beyond the examples she includes in this volume: we must center the performer’s goal with the performance, not the nature of what we perceive as being performed. Each chapter, on its own, offers a worthwhile and well-analyzed case study, although the book would benefit from a stronger thread connecting the disparate examples across the chapters. Still, Queering Drag offers diverse examples of gender-bending performance and provides a valuable framework for analyzing other examples of drag performance. In highlighting the book’s potential limitations in her conclusion, Heller wisely notes “that it is the very quality of being undefined, unnamed, and unintelligible that makes queer performance queer” (194). Nonetheless, Queering Drag provides a useful theoretical framework and compelling examples from over a century and is thus a valuable entry into the discussion of queer performance. It brings concepts from gender and sexuality theorists like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault into conversation with the rich history of theorizations of drag performance. Then it updates those concepts for our contemporary moment. Heller’s scholarship allows us to contend with the complexities of gender-bent performance by dialoguing about gender in ways that successfully challenge discourses of binary oppositions and instead embrace “the many ways people do gender” (199). This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) KELLY I. ALIANO is the author of Theatre of the Ridiculous: A Critical History (McFarland, 2019); The Performance of Video Games (McFarland, 2022); and Immersive Storytelling and Spectatorship in Theatre, Museums, and Video Games (Routledge, 2025). She teaches in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College and is the Manager of Education Special Projects at The New York Historical. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE By Marina Johnson Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. By Jackie Lubeck and Theatre Day Productions. Edited by Samer Al-Saber. London, UK: Methuen Drama, 2022; pp. 282 +vii. By Marina Johnson The title of the anthology of Jackie Lubeck and Theatre Day Productions’ plays, To the Good People of Gaza , speaks back to a world that has seen the dehumanization of Palestinians in mainstream media for centuries and, in the past year, seen an escalation of this during the genocide on Gaza. The anthology, edited and with an introduction by Samer Al-Saber, allows readers a glimpse into theatrical productions in Gaza from 2010-2015. Theatre Day Productions in Gaza had an agreement with the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency (UNWRA) to give students a “theatre day” during the summer of 2010 as a summer camp. Summer camps at the time were filled with activities like sports, painting, and music, but did not have any theatre, arguably one of the more complicated summer camp programs because theatre necessarily requires rehearsal time, a performance venue, and additional storytelling elements like props, set, and lighting. Once it began, this camp continued in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The Israeli attacks on Gaza prevented a summer camp from happening in 2014, but Lubeck worked with the students during the academic year of 2015 instead. To the Good People of Gaza: Theatre for Young People contains the plays that were produced during those trying years. This anthology is more than a historical record of Gazan theatre—it is a testament to the vital role performance plays in shaping identity, resilience, and community under siege. In this review, I examine how Lubeck’s plays engage with daily life in Gaza, balancing humor and hardship, and consider the anthology’s significance as both a cultural document and a call to action. The creation, rehearsal, and performance of these plays in Gaza demonstrates the dedication of Lubeck and the team behind Theatre Day Productions. The education system in Gaza is complicated, with not enough buildings to accommodate all students simultaneously. For that reason, students would often attend school in shifts. Theatre Day Productions adopted this shift model, rehearsing in multiple locations across Gaza with two completely different groups of students per day. Over the course of the 10- to 16-week program, they reached tens of thousands of students each summer. In a four-play series, each play was performed by three separate teams, with two performances daily for audiences of 200 to 250 children, six days a week for several weeks. This anthology, for the first time, presents these plays, which capture dual forces shaping Gazan life—an urge for joy and freedom alongside the pervasive presence of destruction and death. To the Good People of Gaza provides theatremakers, educators, and those reading the collection with a privileged view into life in Gaza from 2010-2015. These plays reflect elements of daily life that the makers deemed important for the youth to participate in, grapple with, and process through live performance. Reading them now honors the creative and educational forces behind each play, as well as the youth performers who invested their time and energy into plays that speak directly to their life experiences. Jackie Lubeck wrote the plays herself and then made edits based on the actors’ contributions in the rehearsal room. In the anthology, the plays are divided into five sections by the year they were written, and several plays comprise each section. They were performed by and for Palestinian refugee youth. While they are each worth reading in their entirety, I want to note two stand-out pieces, The Electricians and The Shop . The play The Electricians begins with a King responding to emails he has received from his subjects. The Wazir is a comedic character whose first answer to any problem is to threaten arrest. The King calls for the Wazir as he wonders why his emails won’t send. After threatening to arrest the computer mouse, the Wazir reveals that there is a power outage. The King and the Wazir head to people’s homes directly to respond to their emails in person. The first man they visit, Man with the Event, is proposing an event in response to the King’s past request to keep the kingdom clean. His event will focus on education around sorting garbage and proper disposal of materials such as batteries and medicine. Next, they visit the Shopkeeper with Extra Candy who has ordered too much candy and wants to distribute it to children to make them happy. After all: “Life is not only bitter. Life is sweet. And candy makes it sweeter” (123). The King and the Wazir finally visit The Brothers Electric who are a site to behold. The first brother is holding potatoes connected by wire and the second brother has a garden hose wrapped around his body and holds a large watering can. Both of them have cables attached to their ears. They seek to find new sources of electricity to make life easier in the kingdom. They inspire the King and Wazir to keep trying to find ways that they can make the kingdom a better place to live, by using their hearts and minds. The play is an allegory that deals directly with issues that people face in Gaza. Power outages were not unusual in Gaza as Israel has limited electricity and water usage in Gaza for years, so this moment would have resonated with the audience. Lubeck wrote Man with the Event as a character who both entertained and educated the audience about keeping the country clean as the responsibility falls on them as citizens since the Israeli siege makes even supposedly simple matters like garbage disposal complicated. It is easy to imagine the play inspiring those who participated in it and saw it to think twice about alternative sources of energy and their own roles in keeping their cities clean. Other plays are more directly related to life under Israeli bombardment during that time and are set more literally in Gaza, like the play The Shop , which features three girls who are making a video for their father who is presumably hospitalized after his shop is bombed. Three of his daughters go about cleaning the damage and debris in order to be able to re-open the shop for customers, all the while reassuring their father, via the video they are recording, that life will go on and that Salwa, the oldest sister, will be able to get married once their father is well enough. As they search through the debris, they bring the reality of life in Gaza to the forefront, as many in the audience would have been intimately familiar with the circumstances shown in front of them. The Shop shows the destruction that has become normal in Gaza as an area besieged by Israel while also reflecting on the Palestinian resilience and hope that has long been a defining feature of the Palestinians in Gaza. The last series of plays in the anthology are grouped together under the collection “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Inspired by the Wallace Stevens poem of the same name, Lubeck picked thirteen images to explain Gaza that would resonate with residents: “siege, religion, family, sand, prison, birds, noise, sandwiches, depression, sea, heat, smiles, and phones” (viii). Lubeck adds in her preface, “to these qualities, I add a stubborn desire to hope, to go on, and to assume that something might one day change” (viii). The plays in this section are One Thousand Questions , The Snow Trip , The Boys in the Mirror , and The Boys Who Can’t Sit Still . Like the poem with whom they share a name, these plays engage with a multiplicity of perspectives, contradictions, and paradoxes to provide a minimalist and occasionally surreal view of Gaza. The texts in this section invite the reader to grapple with the literal and metaphorical reality of life in Gaza alongside the youth who performed the pieces. When the summer camp project with UNRWA began in 2010, Gaza had been under siege since 2007, leaving the two million plus people there virtually trapped, and the 2008-2009 Israeli bombardments of Gaza, which lasted for 22 days and killed approximately 1400 Palestinians, were still fresh in everyone’s minds. [1] In the preface, Lubeck writes that she felt herself and those around her become sick of complaining about their circumstances and the “dire political situation” in the Gaza Strip. Lubeck wanted to write plays that recognized the “good people” of Gaza with whom she lived and worked daily. Not originally from Palestine, Jackie Lubeck arrived in 1972 and worked there until her recent retirement. In 1995, she co-founded Theatre Day Productions with her husband and collaborator, Jan Willems. Lubeck’s nearly five-decade career in Palestinian theatre meant that she was deeply embedded in the community, writing Palestinian plays with and for Palestinians. Jackie Lubeck is a playwright who writes across genres in a witty, nuanced, and deeply heartfelt way; her plays show a deep engagement with the children of Gaza. Written between 2010 and 2015, these plays amplify the heart and soul of the Palestinian youth who performed them. These plays remind the reader of the realities that Palestinians in Gaza have known for years as they faced death and destruction and, simultaneously, these texts highlight the longing for laughter and freedom they felt, too. The collection serves not only as a testament to the strength of Gaza’s youth, but also as a powerful tool for humanizing a population too often reduced to headlines and statistics. Through these plays, the voices of young Palestinians emerge with clarity and force, inviting readers to engage with their personal stories, dreams, and struggles. To the Good People of Gaza ultimately calls on its audience to witness, reflect, and, perhaps most importantly, to act—to recognize the humanity that endures in the face of immense hardship, and to stand in solidarity with those striving for justice and dignity. To the Good People of Gaza is a necessary book for theatre makers who work with youth, advocates for the Palestinian cause, educators, Palestinians in the diaspora, and anyone who seeks to understand more about the people of Gaza. Engaging with this book is an act of bearing witness to Gaza as it was before, and taking in the stories that Lubeck and the performers felt were crucial to audiences in Gaza. Now, as we are confronted with a Gaza that has faced unspeakable horror through genocide, those of us outside of Gaza have this book to reflect on and use in our education, solidarity work, and continued advocacy for Palestine and the Palestinian people. Marina Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in TAPS at Stanford University (M.F.A in Directing, University of Iowa). Her dissertation research focuses on Palestinian performance from 2015 to the present. Johnson is the co-host of Kunafa and Shay, a MENA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, and they are also a member of Silk Road Rising’s Polycultural Institute. Johnson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Theatre/Practice , Arab Stages , Decolonizing Dramaturgy in a Global Context (Bloomsbury) , Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities (Routledge), Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I: Performers (Bloomsbury). Prior to her Ph.D., she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Beloit College for three years. Select recent directing credits include: The Wolves (Stanford) The Shroud Maker (International Voices Project), Shakespeare’s Sisters (Stanford), The Palestinian Youth Monologues (Stanford), Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche (Beloit College), and In the Next Room (Beloit College). www.marina-johnson.com [1] Al Jazeera. “Timeline: Israel’s Attacks on Gaza since 2005.” Al Jazeera, August 7, 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/7/timeline-israels-attacks-on-gaza-since-2005 . Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in TAPS at Stanford University (M.F.A in Directing, University of Iowa). Her dissertation research focuses on Palestinian performance from 2015 to the present. Johnson is the co-host of Kunafa and Shay, a MENA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, and they are also a member of Silk Road Rising’s Polycultural Institute. Johnson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Theatre/Practice , Arab Stages , Decolonizing Dramaturgy in a Global Context (Bloomsbury) , Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities (Routledge), Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I: Performers (Bloomsbury). Prior to her Ph.D., she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Beloit College for three years. Select recent directing credits include: The Wolves (Stanford) The Shroud Maker (International Voices Project), Shakespeare’s Sisters (Stanford), The Palestinian Youth Monologues (Stanford), Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche (Beloit College), and In the Next Room (Beloit College). www.marina-johnson.com TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. By Jackie Lubeck and Theatre Day Productions. Edited by Samer Al-Saber. London, UK: Methuen Drama, 2022; pp. 282 +vii. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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 Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia Published: July 15, 2026 Download Article as PDF By Gergana Traykova Image Credits: Article Featured Image: The Seagull by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, directed by Aleksandar Ivanovski, Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre (Veles). Cast: Slavica Manaskova, Simona Dimkovska, Sandra Tancheva, Janka Lefkova, Jordan Vitanov, Faik Mefailoski, Isidor Jovanovski, Blagojcho Stojanov, Filip Hristovski, and Kire Acevski. Photo: Krste Shupev At a time when theatre often seeks effect, publicity, and visual explosion, The Seagull , directed by Aleksandar Ivanovski, chooses silence as its most powerful instrument. His direction is at once quiet and resolute—it does not shout or demonstrate, but whispers, allowing pauses to speak. Ivanovski seeks neither literalism and naturalism, nor does he fully enter the realm of the conventional; his world exists in a peculiar in-between zone, where the inner, the lived experience, is more real than the external. From the very first moments, Ivanovski introduces the audience to the lives of the characters—the action unfolds quietly and unobtrusively, even before the spectators have taken their seats. One has the sense of joining a group of people who have already forged strong bonds among themselves, in the midst of an ongoing life entangled in the complex threads of fate, whose story will unfold regardless of our presence. This sense of a living, continuous action is reinforced by the stage environment created by Filip Korunovski. It underscores the central duality of the production—its concreteness and symbolism, materiality and poetry. The green hills across which the actors move reflect both a natural landscape and the inner world of the characters—soft, vulnerable, and unstable. A stream runs across the entire length of the stage, cutting through and dividing it, transforming the space into a living organism. Water becomes a place of encounters, a reflection of the inner world, and a mirror of the invisible movements of the soul. These choices highlight the delicate balance between naturalism and poetic sign—between the visible and the invisible, the concrete and the symbolic. It is here that Trigorin, getting into the river to catch fish, seeks solace in a simple act of everyday leasure. And in the last scene, the rain delivers its final line: it washes away and consumes human passions and drama, bringing both comfort and destruction. It is a kind of catharsis that does not liberate, but affirms the inevitability of the end—the end of Konstantin Treplev and of his attempt to save himself through art. Isidor Jovanovski as Trigorin in The Seagull by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, directed by Aleksandar Ivanovski, Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre (Veles). Photo: Krste Shupev. The multimedia projection subtly underlines the metaphorical line of the performance—from sunset to rain. At the beginning, the soft golden light of sunset illuminates the stage like a promise, a fragile hope that life and art might merge in harmony. Gradually, the colors deepen; blue and gray begin to dominate, and the landscape sinks into darkness—as if nature itself shares the human inability to hold on to the light. In this transition from warmth to cold, from day to night, the multimedia does not merely illustrate but experiences the fading—of the day, of dreams, of Konstantin Treplev. This transformation is echoed in the stage space itself. The platform, initially a veranda, gradually changes its function—from an element separating the natural landscape from the material world, it becomes Sorin’s house. This transformation is not only spatial but semantic: the platform becomes a point of observation from which the characters contemplate the world, the rain, and the intimate experiences of the couples by the water. In the final scenes, this space is no longer merely a site of action, but an image of contemplation—of theatre observing life without being able to change it. The space also functions as a boundary between “inside” and “outside.” Some characters are admitted into the warmth of the home and the community; others remain at the edge—physically and emotionally. In moments of rain and storm, this division becomes even more tangible: vulnerability is experienced differently depending on whether one has a place to retreat to. Medvedenko, Yevgeny Dorn, Konstantin, and Nina often find themselves at the periphery of the space, while other characters inhabit the interior world of the home. Slavica Manaskova, Jordan Vitanov, Kire Acevski and Blagojcho Stojanov in a scene from The Seagull by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, directed by Aleksandar Ivanovski, Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre (Veles). Photo: Krste Shupev. Ivanovski’s musical choice—the song Alone With My Thoughts by Norah Jones—is not merely a background element but part of the dramaturgy of the performance. Its subdued, airy melody resonates with the inner world of the characters and underscores the striving toward the poetry of silence. The music does not express a specific emotion, but rather a state—that intermediate space between thought and feeling in which Chekhov’s characters live. It carries both distance and tenderness—the same sensation that permeates the performance: love that never arrives, words that fail to find their way, closeness that remains only in thought. Jones’s voice sounds like an echo of the inner monologues—the ones the characters never utter. The song transforms their solitude into a soundscape—a quiet prayer toward the other whom they fail to truly encounter. The soft pulse of the music integrates organically into scenes where nature and the human merge—water, sunset, rain. It gives the performance a rhythm of breathing, not of action; a rhythm that emphasizes vulnerability. When it sounds, the spectator does not simply hear music, but becomes “alone with their thoughts”—in the same emotional isolation in which the characters exist. Ivanovski also uses it as a final touch to his idea of human alienation—not tragic, but fragile, almost beautiful in its doomed nature. Within this visual score, theatre unfolds not only through words—though at first glance it may seem so—but through images, sounds, movements, and silences. The performance does not tell a story of passions, but of unsharedness—of feelings, ideals, and the striving for art and understanding. Here, even the seagull killed by Konstantin Treplev does not appear literally on stage; it is presented as a gift, as a sign that provokes the imagination and the inner world of the characters. This symbolic approach to the material and immaterial manifests most clearly in the dynamics between the characters. Arkadina (Slavica Manaskova) dominates Trigorin (Isidor Jovanoski) with the confidence of a mature woman who knows the world and can manipulate its moods. At certain moments, however, Manaskova’s expressive nervousness—shouts and sharper emotional outbursts—slightly disrupts the balance of the stage partnership. In contrast, Nina Zarechnaya (Sandra Tancheva) approaches Trigorin with reverent tenderness—innocent, naive, deeply emotional, like someone just discovering the world. Between these two poles stands Treplev (Filip Hristovski), whose portrayal of the young artist is built on a struggle not with others, but with existence itself—with the need to be heard and understood. In the scenes following the time jump, Konstantin Treplev’s physical transformation is particularly striking. Having gained weight and enclosed within his body, he bears the marks of the years the action skips over. This external change becomes a sign of lived depression and the burden of unfulfilled aspirations. Particularly dense is the portrayal of Masha—a character constructed as a painfully precise portrait of unrequited love. Initially coarse and cynical, she gradually reveals her deep despair. Her constant drinking and smoking become attempts at solace—vices that temporarily dull the pain of her impossible love for Treplev. In her figure, one can easily recognize the universal image of a person whom love does not choose. Especially impressive is Faik Mefailoski as Semyon Medvedenko—a character who, in Ivanovski’s reading, becomes a key to the overall poetics of the production. Although, by the logic of Chekhov’s play, the center of the childlike and the poetic belongs to Nina Zarechnaya, Mefailoski’s performance unexpectedly places Medvedenko in that position, turning him into a bearer of these ideas. From openly in love and childishly naive, he gradually reaches the rage of a man who has realized his own invisibility. Through him, the director introduces the motif of the childlike and the poetic inevitably colliding with the weight of reality. Within the ensemble, Mefailoski manages to “play” in the precise tonality of the performance—without external effect, but with inner density. Faik Mefailoski as Medvedenko in The Seagull by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, directed by Aleksandar Ivanovski, Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre (Veles). Photo: Krste Shupev. The final scene between Medvedenko and Masha is particularly powerful. Here, the character steps out of the image of a quiet and good-natured man—the accumulated sense of rejection finally overflows. In this moment, the actor reveals the painful side of the character: a man who has lost faith in love. Gradually, the performance begins to develop one of Chekhov’s most painful themes—love as a force that does not save, but destroys. It transforms the characters in different ways: Medvedenko as a personality, Treplev internally, Nina psychologically. Love here is not solace, but a process of disintegration—quiet, prolonged, and inevitable. The Seagull by Aleksandar Ivanovski is neither a modern provocation nor a museum reconstruction, but a contemporary reading through the sensibility of silence. Chekhov does not sound outdated, because lack of closeness and shared emotions, common misunderstandings and loneliness have always been part of life. In the end, beneath the falling rain, Treplev lies dead in the water, the lights fade, and the final refrain of Norah Jones does not mark the end of the story, but the beginning of that silence which continues in life—a silence of unspoken feelings. References References About the author(s) Gergana Traykova is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Theatre Studies at NATFA “Krastyo Sarafov” in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her research focuses on contemporary developments in puppet theatre and its interrelations with drama theatre. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre Studies and Theatre Management, as well as a Master’s degree in Puppet Theatre Directing from the same institution. She is the author of reviews, critical essays, and interviews published in specialized journals, including KuklArt , Artizanin , ScenArt , Stranitsa , and Kino . Between 2024 and 2026, she has been actively involved in theatre festivals as a jury member, selector, and critic. She currently works as a dramaturg at the Drama and Puppet Theatre – Vratsa, Bulgaria. 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.

Watch Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera by Mark Obenhaus at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera is a documentary record of the landmark 1984 revival of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's groundbreaking opera Einstein on the Beach, staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was the first time since the original 1976 production — which premiered at the Avignon Festival and played the Metropolitan Opera — that the two principal creators had reunited to restage this tradition-breaking work. Director Mark Obenhaus provides intimate access to both artists: Glass discusses the opera's radical musical structure, its rejection of conventional narrative arc, and the challenge of hearing music that transforms continuously rather than repeating in recognizable patterns. Wilson reflects on his visual approach to the production, his use of light and geometric form, and the relationship between duration, stillness, and theatrical time. The film weaves these interviews with footage from rehearsals and the actual performances, giving viewers a rare window into the preparation of a work that had already reshaped the landscape of contemporary opera and performance. Considered an essential document for anyone interested in the evolution of the performing arts in the 20th century, the film makes the case — through the evidence of the work itself — for why Einstein on the Beach remains one of the defining achievements of American avant-garde culture. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera Mark Obenhaus At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 29 at 6:45 PM, and June 4 at 9:00 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Country United States Language English Running Time 58 minutes Year of Release 1984 About The Film Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera is a documentary record of the landmark 1984 revival of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's groundbreaking opera Einstein on the Beach, staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was the first time since the original 1976 production — which premiered at the Avignon Festival and played the Metropolitan Opera — that the two principal creators had reunited to restage this tradition-breaking work. Director Mark Obenhaus provides intimate access to both artists: Glass discusses the opera's radical musical structure, its rejection of conventional narrative arc, and the challenge of hearing music that transforms continuously rather than repeating in recognizable patterns. Wilson reflects on his visual approach to the production, his use of light and geometric form, and the relationship between duration, stillness, and theatrical time. The film weaves these interviews with footage from rehearsals and the actual performances, giving viewers a rare window into the preparation of a work that had already reshaped the landscape of contemporary opera and performance. Considered an essential document for anyone interested in the evolution of the performing arts in the 20th century, the film makes the case — through the evidence of the work itself — for why Einstein on the Beach remains one of the defining achievements of American avant-garde culture. Director: Mark Obenhaus Producer: Chris Ann Verges Original Music: Philip Glass About The Artist(s) Mark Obenhaus is a leading producer, director, and writer of documentary film and television. His work spans more than four decades and has been recognized with five national Emmy Awards, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, the Writers Guild of America Award, the British Press Guild Documentary Award, and numerous other honors. Obenhaus began his career producing cinema vérité documentaries and working with director Bob Fosse on commercial projects. He went on to produce six programs for the PBS series Frontline, two of which — Abortion Clinic and Living Below the Line — won Emmy Awards. For PBS Great Performances he produced and directed two celebrated music documentaries: Miles Ahead: The Music of Miles Davis and Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera. For The American Experience he produced and directed The World That Moses Built and Mr. Sears Catalog. From 1991 onward Obenhaus held a long association with ABC News, serving as senior producer of Day One and going on to produce major specials including Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years, The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy (a co-production with the BBC), and UFOs: Seeing Is Believing with Peter Jennings. He also served as senior producer of the landmark twelve-hour series The Century with Peter Jennings. His feature documentary Steep, about extreme mountain skiing, premiered at the Tribeca and Telluride Film Festivals and was released theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics. His most recent film, Cover-Up (2025), co-directed with Laura Poitras and examining investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, won the Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival and received a Directors Guild of America nomination. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Conference of the Absent by Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. There is a crisis! And in times of global crisis, it's all about global cooperation. Nevertheless, this time the crisis is being dealt with locally - on behalf of the world: at a conference that no one needs to book a flight or mount a train for. A performance to which the invited experts and speakers do not appear physically, but are represented by local people who only receive their script at the beginning of their presentation. In CONFERENCE OF THE ABSENT, the audience observes people from their own city as they take on the identity of an absent conference speaker. Completely without CO2-emissions and bad Skype or Zoom connections, but with all the performative means of the theater, the contributions and contradicting theses on the consequences of globalization will be delivered into the theater space - and settle them within it. The advantage of not being there - not having to be everywhere at all - becomes a joint play that can be experienced anew every evening. At the center of this game are people who become carriers of ideas and playfully acquire both biographies of experts as well as their thoughts. In this way, absence becomes an added value because it creates space for new enrollments and unexpected perspectives. Ghostwriters and speechwriters, co-authors and directors at the same time, Rimini Protokoll turns documentary co-authorship into remote directing. Concept / Text / Direction: Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel Video- and Light design: Marc Jungreithmeier Sound design: Daniel Dorsch Research / Dramaturgy: Imanuel Schipper, Lüder Pit Wilcke with the voice of: Nadja Stübiger and thee prompting voices of: Henriette Hölzel, David Kosel, Hans-Werner Leupelt und Karina Plachetka Cooperation political-cultural education: Dr. Werner Friedrichs Production Management: Epona Hamdan Production Management touring: Vera Nau, Monica Ferrari Dramaturgy Assistance: Sebastian Klauke Directing Assistance: Lisa Homburger and Maximilian Pellert Stage Assistance: Maksim Chernykh Production Assistance: Federico Schwindt Technical Director Touring: Joscha Eckert, Bodo Gottschalk, Marc Jungreithmeier Sound Operator Touring: Aaron Ghantus, Fabian Tombers A production of Rimini Apparat In co-production with Staatsschauspiel Dresden, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) and Goethe-Institut. The concept creation was funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Conference of the Absent At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) Performance Art This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Germany Language French, German, Portuguese and others, with English subtitles Running Time 107 minutes Year of Release 2021 There is a crisis! And in times of global crisis, it's all about global cooperation. Nevertheless, this time the crisis is being dealt with locally - on behalf of the world: at a conference that no one needs to book a flight or mount a train for. A performance to which the invited experts and speakers do not appear physically, but are represented by local people who only receive their script at the beginning of their presentation. In CONFERENCE OF THE ABSENT, the audience observes people from their own city as they take on the identity of an absent conference speaker. Completely without CO2-emissions and bad Skype or Zoom connections, but with all the performative means of the theater, the contributions and contradicting theses on the consequences of globalization will be delivered into the theater space - and settle them within it. The advantage of not being there - not having to be everywhere at all - becomes a joint play that can be experienced anew every evening. At the center of this game are people who become carriers of ideas and playfully acquire both biographies of experts as well as their thoughts. In this way, absence becomes an added value because it creates space for new enrollments and unexpected perspectives. Ghostwriters and speechwriters, co-authors and directors at the same time, Rimini Protokoll turns documentary co-authorship into remote directing. Concept / Text / Direction: Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel Video- and Light design: Marc Jungreithmeier Sound design: Daniel Dorsch Research / Dramaturgy: Imanuel Schipper, Lüder Pit Wilcke with the voice of: Nadja Stübiger and thee prompting voices of: Henriette Hölzel, David Kosel, Hans-Werner Leupelt und Karina Plachetka Cooperation political-cultural education: Dr. Werner Friedrichs Production Management: Epona Hamdan Production Management touring: Vera Nau, Monica Ferrari Dramaturgy Assistance: Sebastian Klauke Directing Assistance: Lisa Homburger and Maximilian Pellert Stage Assistance: Maksim Chernykh Production Assistance: Federico Schwindt Technical Director Touring: Joscha Eckert, Bodo Gottschalk, Marc Jungreithmeier Sound Operator Touring: Aaron Ghantus, Fabian Tombers A production of Rimini Apparat In co-production with Staatsschauspiel Dresden, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) and Goethe-Institut. The concept creation was funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education. Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) About The Artist(s) Rimini Protokoll: Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel founded the theatre-label Rimini Protokoll in 2000 and have since worked in different constellations under this name. Work by work they have expanded the means of the theatre to create new perspectives on reality. Rimini Protokoll often develop their stage-works, interventions, performative installations and audio plays together with experts who have gained their knowledge and skills beyond the theatre. Furthermore, they like to transpose rooms or social structures into theatrical formats. Many of their works feature interactivity and a playful use of technology. Expander Film Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky are co founder of the internationally operating Berlin based film label Expander Film. They aim is to produce documentaries and artistic projects which explore new paths in form and content. Besides their film and music video productions Expander works in close collaboration with various artists for video and film projects shown in exhibitions and museums around the world, accompanies projects for cultural institutions, contributes features for television, develops stage design and video in theatre plays. Get in touch with the artist(s) ferrari@rimini-protokoll.de and follow them on social media https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/de/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

KATIANA GONÇALES RANGEL + KATIE BROOK presents Nannies of New York City at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Nannies of New York City KATIANA GONÇALES RANGEL + KATIE BROOK 8-8:50 pm Wednesday, October 16, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP Nannies of New York City is a documentary theater work by and about the experiences of professional caregivers in Manhattan. Written and performed by Rocio Piamonte, Inde Ramsaran, Katiana Gonçales Rangel, Maryory Rodriguez, and Cristiele Santos Dramaturgy by Jasmine Pisapia This project is made possible in part with funds from a regrant program(s) supported by the funding agencies The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in partnership with the City Council and administered by LMCC. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Katie Brook is an experimental theater director focused on new plays and devised work. Recent directing credits include ISLANDER (New Georges, HERE), The Cherry Orchard (Quantum Theatre, Pittsburgh), and Liza Birkenmeier’s Dr. Ride’s American Beach House (Ars Nova). For many years, Katie worked for the oral history project, StoryCorps, and has developed audio dramas, including The MS Phoenix Rising (Trish Harnetiaux, Playwrights Horizons). She received her MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, and is currently a Lecturer in Directing at Tufts University’s School of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Katiana Gonçales Rangel is a performer, director, and educator from Brazil based in NYC. They have been creating independent theater work since 1998. Their most recent work Ama The Diver (2023/2024), in collaboration with Jim Fletcher and the cellist Lori Goldston, was performed in NYC, Portland, and Seattle. Katiana has been creating documentary theater work with immigrant New Yorkers since 2014 with Incoming Theater Division (ITD), a branch of the company New York City Players, and has been ITD director since 2020. In 2024, the group performed La Casa de Bernarda Alba in Spanish language directed by Richard Maxwell. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

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Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF The education and training of young scientists includes the acquisition of a large and technical vocabulary, understanding a variety of experimental approaches, and application of statistics and mathematical models to analyze experimental and observational results. [1] Small wonder then, that young scientists often miss the larger point that science is a process of imperfect model building. That is, students don’t understand that effective communication of scientific discoveries to all audiences must include colorful metaphor and models, and that these models aid understanding without doing harm to the scientific enterprise. We describe here our adaptation of theatric improvisation techniques to build students’ science communication skills in an undergraduate life science curriculum at Lawrence University. These techniques have been informed by, but significantly modified from, a program for graduate education at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. As the Argentinian author Jorge Louis Borges would have us understand, perfect scientific models are useless. He wrote, In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it.[2] Undergraduate students, who are just at the start of their scientific training, have instead a view that science is a process of learning about reality so that, eventually, we will understand perfectly the nuances of even the messiest biological systems. They often think that we are in the business of making perfect maps of the world and they are loath to relinquish this view. Though all our students read Borges in our required freshman course, science students usually maintain their view that the accuracy of science is so critical that their communication of a scientific understanding of the world must include a great deal of detail delivered with a high degree of accuracy. They try to communicate scientific vocabulary, the degree of imperfection of current scientific understanding, and the methods by which scientists arrived at their conclusions. While all this detail is needed for students to build their own understanding of scientific results, or for the communication of science to professional scientists, students hold fast to this method of communication in all cases, thus obscuring both the beauty and truth of science. Perhaps an example is in order. When a student wished to explain how genes get used differently in different parts of our bodies, she said, “Tissue-specific patterns of gene expression are created by cell-specific transcription factors binding to DNA sequence motifs upstream of the start site of transcription.” Did you roll your eyes? We did! While what she said was terrific if she were talking to a group of molecular geneticists, anyone else’s eyes would appropriately glaze over. Our goal is to have her ask: “Did you ever wonder why your pancreas makes insulin, but your eyeball doesn’t?” Then she could explain that both the pancreas and the eyeball contain the instructions (a gene) to make insulin, but only in the pancreas does the on/off switch for insulin production get flipped to the ‘on’ position. Do we really need to know that only certain cells of the pancreas do this? Do we need to know what genes are made of? No! If she really wanted to explain the on/off switches, she could describe the DNA sequences as musical notes and their particular order as musical motifs, and she could demonstrate how these switches can vary, much as the opening theme to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony varies throughout the piece. Is it ‘dumbing it down’ to use these metaphors? Also, no! We have learned to be explicit in saying to our students that we are not ‘dumbing down’ the science – we are making it accessible and understandable by linking scientific concepts to concepts the audience already knows. Goals This then, is our goal for graduating life science majors: yes, they learn a technical vocabulary, experimental design, data analysis, and scientific writing, but they also learn that scientific models are already imperfect, so using a metaphor or an evocative description is a wonderful way to distill and communicate scientific information to a lay audience. We want our graduates to be cognizant of their audience, to be able to react in real time to the cues that audience members send concerning their understanding of oral and visual communication, and we want our students to channel their creative energy and enthusiasm for their work to communicate scientific information effectively and engagingly. To accomplish our goal of facilitating effective and clear science communication, we designed a capstone course in our undergraduate life science curriculum in which we use theatrical improvisation as the main tool to improve oral communication of science. The capstone course enrolls 40-50 biology, biochemistry, and neuroscience majors in their senior year at Lawrence University. Lawrence University, located in Appleton, Wisconsin, is a private liberal arts college enrolling 1500 undergraduates. The college has a strong tradition of individualized learning [3] that has shown great success in stimulating student interest in, and mastery of, disciplinary research. Small group research projects are an integral part of the biology curriculum from the very first introductory course through the upper level, and many students individually elect to undertake research with a faculty mentor. We have consciously constructed our curricula to build students’ creative and technical science skills, including hypothesis development, experimental design and execution, data analysis, and oral and written dissemination of results. We couple hands-on research with course content so that students receive integrated, practical instruction in the application of scientific methodology and concepts. In 2011, the faculty of the college voted to include a required ‘Senior Experience’ with every major and allowed each department or program to design their own experience for senior students. Life science faculty designed a capstone course that would directly address students’ needs to communicate science beyond a specialized scientific community and that would allow students to dive deeply into a biological topic of their choosing, whether as lab or field research or as literature review or distillation of a biological topic for a lay audience. Our biology capstone course facilitates the transition from the life of a student to the life of a professional. Our explicit goals for the students are the following: (1) direct a project and produce a substantial paper written for a scientific audience, (2) understand ethics in the life sciences, (3) acquire skills to reach and teach non-scientific audiences about one’s project. Students begin their capstone course with their topic chosen and, in many cases, research or off-campus activity completed. The course is therefore reserved for the production of several papers on the student’s topic and multiple types of oral communication about their project. Students are primed with a deep understanding of some small area of biology and, since they chose their own topics, hopefully a great deal of enthusiasm for disseminating their understanding of this topic. Oral Communication in Science It is important to state here that even professional oral communication in the sciences is much more free form than it is in the arts and humanities. Thus, the link between theatrical improvisation and scientific communication is not as distinct as one might initially think. Scientific conference presentations, for example, always include visual aids and are never read. Speakers are expected to deliver either memorized or extemporaneous prose while using visual aids as an organizational guide. Such professional presentations are jargon-heavy and detailed. Our undergraduates learn professional presentation skills throughout their life science curriculum and are acculturated into a biological way of understanding and describing the world. Our goal in the capstone course is to expand those skills to include distillation of complex material to create engaging presentations for broader audiences. We, as a society and as individuals, need a clear understanding of biological concepts in order to make wise and safe decisions about our healthcare and our environment. For example, individuals and political entities need to decide about whether to eat farmed or wild seafood, comprehend the effects of our exercise regimens on our descendants, or accommodate an endangered thistle on the beach. The efficacy of a doctor explaining treatment or a researcher testifying in a Congressional hearing depends on clear, accessible communication. Thus, we work on student distillation of science for audiences that range from the students in the room (whose expertise ranges from ecology to neuroscience), to the college’s (non-scientist) President, to one’s grandparents, or to people in an elevator with them. Well-known American actor Alan Alda and the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University inaugurated a program in 2009 using improvisation exercises to teach graduate students in the sciences to respond to, and interact with, their audiences when speaking about their scientific work. Their initial students volunteered from many of Stony Brook University’s graduate and professional programs for a semester-long program. The changes in the graduate students’ ability to relate more naturally to their audiences brought to life subjects ranging from optics to molecular biology. In an interview published in The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine , author Kelly Walsh wrote: “To facilitate objectivity, Alda explain[ed], ‘you have emotion trained out of you when you’re writing science for other scientists in your field.’ But communicating science to broader audiences requires the opposite approach because, as Mr. Alda [said], ‘people like me, ordinary people, rely on story and emotion.’” [4] Early publicity from the Stony Brook program began to circulate in science communication circles just as we at Lawrence University began our pilot life science capstone course for a few undergraduate students. Encouraged by Stony Brook’s success, we tried using theatrical improvisation to improve the communication skills of undergraduates. Our early goals for our students included breaking down communication barriers and giving students permission to drop the jargon when describing their work. As summarized by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, “Mild to moderate short-term stressors enhance memory. This makes sense, in that this is the sort of optimal stress that we would call ‘stimulation’ – alert and focused.” [5] He later states that “the sympathetic nervous system pulls this off by indirectly arousing the hippocampus into a more alert, activated state, facilitating memory consolidation.” [6] If the neuroscience is right, our students should internalize better the lessons of science communication in the heightened alert state induced by improvisation games. Early Attempts at Improvisation with Undergraduate Scientists Lawrence theater faculty member Kathy Privatt introduced us to Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theater , teaching us to use a few exercises, including Play Ball and Mirror . Undertaking these exercises, let alone the idea of leading students through them, was uncomfortable and awkward for us. Professional scientists do not typically engage in physical improvisation, though we do have experience with mental versions. We swallowed our fears and jumped into using the exercises as a way to loosen rigid, nervous, and stultifying student presentation styles. We initially presented the exercises as our American theater-based colleagues had indicated was appropriate for theater students, with minimal preliminary instructions plus a bit of Spolin’s side-coaching. In the first two years of our undergraduate course, the students only half-heartedly took part in improvisation exercises. We estimate that the leaders’ energy exceeded the total of that put forth by our students. Some students responded with outright hostility and derision. Their body language and grumblings said, “This is stupid. I shouldn’t have to do this!” We wondered whether we were on the right track or whether undergraduate students lacked the necessary motivation to use these exercises as they were intended. We also struggled to fit all our goals in the allotted 36 hours of instruction. Improvisation was therefore tucked into odd 10-minute corners of class time. Students delighted in moving about but not in learning to interact with their audience. Although instructors participated alongside the students to persuade them that the activities were not below our dignity and were valuable, students still did not relate the exercises to communication skills we addressed in other lessons. We did note, however, that most students responded very favorably to a discussion of body language and its impact on oral communication. We mentioned research that had shown measurable results of changing one’s body posture while speaking, but we did not cite any particular study. The least expressive student of our initial class departed immediately after this discussion for an Ivy League graduate school tour and interview, and returned amazed that open limbs, leaning forward, and smiling had made the process easier and the response of the school warmer. We had our first student-provided clue as to how to make improvisation palatable. Science students are further motivated when we connect the need for body language and facial expression to the fact that their audience imitates emotional behaviors (e.g., excitement) unconsciously in response to the emotional body language of a speaker. [7] In the summer of 2011, the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University began a summer institute for theater instructors, university administrators, and science faculty to learn more about science communication. Among the colleges represented, only Lawrence University was planning a program solely for undergraduates. We returned from the summer institute even more convinced of the value of Spolin’s improvisation games as a tool to help our students speak with their audiences, rather than at them and we vowed to increase the amount of time in our class devoted to these exercises. What We’ve Learned about using Improvisation with Young Scientists We have learned that one cannot just jump into improvisation with a scientific audience and expect the desired results. The barrier to doing improvisation is just too high and the students are trying to be too analytic to allow the necessary playful mindset. While theater students expect that they must transmit both information and emotion to their audience, science students feel emotion doesn’t belong in science. We therefore use science-specific modifications to open students’ minds to the benefits of improvisatory sessions. We begin with a video from Stony Brook that demonstrates how improvisation can improve science communication by graduate students. [8] Students immediately recognize the problems with the graduate students’ presentations done prior to improvisation, and they recognize themselves in this position! They are then a bit better primed to accept improvisation as a tool. We bookend improvisation sessions with explicit exposition of the goals of the exercises and a frank discussion of how students felt during and after the improvisation exercise. In particular, we find that it helps to connect the improvisational activity to human physiology. For example, use of Amy Cuddy’s excellent TED talk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are” [9] is well received because Dr. Cuddy explains the effect of body posture on physiology as well as on the reception of the content of one’s communication. Early in our next course iterations, we implemented several small exercises that involve minimal speaking. The first exercise is a silent improvisation called Exposure . [10] We modified this initial improvisational game from one half of the group standing in front as the other half sits as the audience, to both halves of the class facing one another across the room, first just staring at each other, and then coached to count the blue shirts. As the two halves of the class face one another, inevitably someone begins to fold in on himself, or another person tries to turn away, or yet another starts to laugh. Left alone, as instructed by Spolin, the behavior will devolve into a group giggle. These signature attitudes of discomfort and lack of confidence, of being undignified, have been a plague in past years. Our perfectionist students fear being judged, in no small part because their presentations involve a grade, and being found inadequate will not (they think) get them into medical school or a research program. So as each behavior manifests itself, we address it. Their reflection on and discussion of Exposure have proved more meaningful than the activity itself and set a pattern of reflecting on why we undertake each specific activity. Exposure has proved to be the first time many students recognize the roots of stage fright, but as science students, they need to name and analyze aspects verbally. We ask the students what makes these reactions surface. We then describe each as a normal psychological reaction to stress. When we can talk about cortisol and other stress hormone levels, we are on comfortable, biological ground, and students become more receptive to physical improvisation as a way to reduce stress in oral communication. Instructors also emphasize that we need to know why we are speaking in front of an audience, what our role and purposes are, and what we mean to do. We emphasize that the point of our improvisations is not to become actors or entertainers, but to grow to become more responsive communicators, for no communication occurs unless two or more people share a common idea. We want students to use the exercises to gain valuable insights to communicating with more clarity and to be more responsive to audiences’ non-verbal feedback. The discussions with our students helped us better realize the purpose of our improvisational work and, in turn, better articulate its goals to future students. We also realized that we needed to start our biology students at an earlier stage of the theatrical process. We begin each year now with an activity we call Audience . Improvisation Exercises that Work with Scientists Audience The students are seated in a lecture room. They are instructed to close their eyes. This is done to reduce self-consciousness while imagining, and to simultaneously accentuate the emotional and physical states. Closed eyes also reduce that urge to giggle or feel foolish. Next we say: “Imagine yourself in an overly warm and stuffy room listening to a very boring lecture. How are you positioned in the seat? Where are your legs and feet? The presenter is talking about a subject you don’t quite understand, using words you cannot quite catch. How do you hold your arms and hands? The voice is a monotone, droning on, buzzing along with no variation in pitch or rate or intensity. What positions are your head and neck in? What expression is your mouth showing? Stay in this position, open your eyes, and without moving, slowly look around the room.” At this point, the entire class is usually slumped back in their seats, legs extended, many heads are lolling, a great many have their arms crossed, some may even have put their heads down on their desks. We then ask: “Why are so many of you in the same positions? How do you feel? What are you, the audience, communicating to the speaker?” We begin to discuss defensive and distancing body language that demonstrates where the audience members are emotionally and perhaps intellectually. Next: “Please rise, stretch, and reseat yourself, for another day comes. Today’s speaker is animated, clearly one of the most knowledgeable experts in the world. How are you positioned in the seat? Where are your legs and feet? The presenter is talking about a subject you never realized mattered so significantly. New terminology is introduced gradually and only as needed. The words are connected to concepts you already know. How do you hold your arms and hands? The speaker’s voice conveys meaning with variation in pitch and rate and intensity. What positions are your head and neck in? What expression is your mouth showing? Stay in this position, open your eyes, and without moving, slowly look around the room.” This time postures are erect, many students are leaning forward, their faces are relaxed, and some are even smiling! “Why are so many of you in the same positions? How do you feel? What are you, the audience, communicating to the speaker?” We also ask: “Which audience do you want to speak to? Why?” Students need to hear very explicitly that any talk or presentation is two-way communication. Although only one person may be speaking, everyone is involved in sharing a common idea. An audience contributes to the success of a speaker when it collectively shows interest or enthusiasm, or can, through disinterest or antagonism, make the speaker’s job more difficult. This activity sets up the importance of watching one’s audience while speaking and communicating as an audience member. Each student is only a presenter for five percent of the class time, but part of the audience for all the rest. Some realize for the first time that they can gauge the success of their talks by postures of their audiences, watching for confusion or comprehension and changing their own delivery to meet the needs of that audience. The class changed attitudes about the usefulness of the remainder of the improvisation activities! Mirror Following implementation of Audience and Exposure , with students ready for something more active, it is a natural progression to move on to Mirror [11] . In this exercise, pairs of students face each other, and all the students facing west, for example, are designated the first leader. Each leader is coached to move one limb slowly, and the other student is told to mirror all movements and facial expressions. When the inevitable giggling begins, the instructor stops the exercise and then asks, “Why are we doing this exercise? How does it connect to the previous exercises?” We hope that students will see that public speaking is a two-way communication between the audience and the speaker, and we hope they will concentrate on providing and receiving feedback when it is their turn at public speaking. We then continue the exercise, asking for complete silence, and adding another limb to the movement, speeding things up, changing leaders, and eventually leading and following simultaneously (Figure 1). Figure 1. Leaderless mirroring as students explore two-way communication. (Image courtesy of C.L.Duckert.) Mirror is a great place to introduce some of the key neuroscience behind communication that convinces our students. Mirror neurons were discovered in the late 1980s by a team from the University of Parma. [12] These neurons are active in our brains and the brains of animals as we engage our attention, watch, act, or imagine another being performing some action. [13] We activate mirror neurons when we smile and make faces at babies and delight in their response. We continue to use them throughout our lives, not only to learn new things but also to interpret the emotions of others. Cuddy remarks, “In everyday life, this mimicry is so subtle and quick (it takes one-third of a second) that … it allows us to feel and understand other people’s emotions.” [14] When people use Botox to reduce facial wrinkles, they also impair their ability to smile or frown or mimic others, and as a result, fare less well when interpreting the emotional states of those others. [15] Our students’ mimicry of each other’s postures and gestures is crucial “in the collaborative process of creating a mutually shared understanding.” [16] They then realize that their enthusiasm while speaking will be mirrored by their audience, thereby increasing audience receptivity. Play Ball Our most successful active improvisation is Play Ball , which students easily understand as relevant to public speaking . [17] Instead of plunging into this game immediately, we ask two student athletes to be the first participants, and the first ball throw announced is from their sport. After a toss or two, we ask for a defensive or a scoring move. We then ask them about the changes in their bodies and postures and why they made those changes. We ask how the recipient of the throw altered her stance or hand position. It quickly becomes clear to the audience that the goal of this exercise is to respond appropriately to the actions of one’s partner. Next, half of the class is lined up on each side of the room, and students make eye contact with their partners. Now, as our class enters into ball play (with the instructor calling out ‘throw a baseball,’ ‘throw a bowling ball’), they use their entire bodies and change stances, throwing with different arm movements and strength for various ball types. After instructors chastise the group if balls change size between catch and throw, soon the students’ bodies make meaning evident and they prepare the recipient for whatever is coming next. Faces look up as both their eyes and their understanding widen once the ball toss changes from lobbing water balloons or ping-pong balls, to “throw an insult” or “deliver a compliment.” Recipients flinch or throw their arms wide. Student discussion has emphasized the teamwork aspect of communication, where success depends on reading each other’s physical and emotional states. We add how every speaker must watch their audience reaction for confusion or comprehension so as to adjust the pace, depth, and detail of explanations. The deliverer and recipient influence one another, whether in the improvisation or in public speaking or teaching. Students realize that communication involves anticipation, intent, reception, and reaction to concrete actions and metaphoric ideas. They begin to notice how their most effective science communication requires continual non-verbal monitoring of their audience to ensure comprehension. Transformation of Objects [18] If our students have a favorite, it is Transformation of Objects. Participants conjure objects from empty space. In our version, the objects must be pieces of equipment they would use doing their work or research in the life sciences, including equipment whose purpose or function may be unknown to them. Students are placed in a large circle, facing inward silently. An object is created and used by the first person and passed to the next person who repeats the use. The receiver then morphs the piece of equipment into another, uses it and passes it on. Students usually start with the very familiar — microscopes, binoculars, pipetters — but soon they are trying to stump one another. Less familiar equipment such as a mist net for trapping bats or a fraction collector for protein purification is handed off to the consternation of the next person. Surely we have all had to use something by rote that we did not really comprehend. Students have acted out explosions and failures, eureka moments, and malfunctioning equipment. This entirely silent exercise forces students to focus on describing things without words, a risky undertaking for students who have spent four years honing verbal and written descriptions of science. Taking risks visually, in front of a group of people, gives students permission to take what seems to them like oral risks when presenting their science. They are more willing to be informal, to use descriptive language, and even to use their bodies to describe how they did an experiment, to indicate the behavior of an animal, or to illustrate how two molecules interact. They get the idea that communication is much more than words. In short, they become more comfortable, even playful, in front of their peers! Bumper Sticker, a Written Improvisation After these initial improvisations, some barriers have been broken down, and students feel that the next important exercise is so much easier than it would have been without improvisation. We call this exercise Bumper Sticker . Students are asked to create a two to four word ‘bumper sticker,’ or a tweet that describes their project in 140 characters. Students are given time to think for a bit on their own and then they write their slogan on the board to be examined by the class. The subjects of their projects are precise and detailed. To communicate, we must first answer why should anyone else care? “ABT-737 resistant and BIM-SAHB sensitive cells ” becomes “I kill cancer.” “Hereditary pancreatitis…so rare it is painful” is easier for anyone to understand than “the p16v mutation of human cationic trypsinogen (PRSSI) gene and hereditary pancreatitis.” We could be intrigued by “Let Buddha change your brain” to consider “the underlying anatomical correlates of long-term meditation on the hippocampus and frontal gray matter.” “Got Guts?” and “Polly want a forest” can move us to action more than “surgical protocols and patient selection in intestinal transplantation,” and “behavioral changes in psittacines in modern Neotropical contexts.” Now we are beginning to communicate our science! What Do I Do for a Living? [19] + How Old Am I? [20] + Where? [21] = What’s Going On? Lastly, we use activities that cast students as performers and audience. The object is to have the audience identify what is going on. A scientist’s activities and collaboration with co-workers often requires coordinating actions in time or sequence. Spolin’s three games focus attention on behaviors that identify character as well as action. We use the three in combination, not to understand any specific aspect of life science directly, but to motivate students to learn how to assist audiences in understanding by using timing, pace, and the more nuanced aspects of body language. The students easily become self-conscious and stiff, with some even refusing to participate, but group activities ease the awkward feelings by reducing the attention focused on any single person. Simultaneously, injection of humor keeps student interest up and tensions down. We found it useful to break up close associates in the class by dividing the students randomly into groups, each assigned one of the defined activities performed in the order below. 1. Watching a tennis match – simultaneous identical individual actions 2. Getting on a passenger jet – sequential individual actions with different roles 3. Launching a canoe – coordinated actions in unison 4. Doing laundry at the laundromat – distinct individual actions in parallel 5. Carrying a 3m x 3m pane of glass – unfamiliar coordinated action in parallel Unbeknown to the groups, each small activity becomes more difficult to portray, from the tennis match to carrying the pane of glass. After three to five minutes, each group presents their short, wordless play. The rest of the class guesses the activity, but we also describe how we knew what was happening in each scene. The students do not react to this as criticism or evaluation, but recognize that they are unraveling a puzzle as the performers struggle to communicate their intentions clearly. Although there is some concern initially, students rise to each challenge as they learn from the performances of the earlier groups even as each scene becomes more challenging. By the end, students are relaxed and feeling successful, recognizing that they often attune their actions to those of lab mates and partners as well as to less participatory audiences. Science Café, an Oral Science Improvisation To this point, all improvisational activities are performed silently, but we and our students also need to speak. Biologists are often asked to explain concepts to family, friends, even strangers met while running errands. Agriculture, the environment, and medicine are in the news and in our lives. Biological terms such as DNA, evolution, and genetics surround us. We want our students to be willing and ready to engage in public dialogue about science; thus we have invented an exercise we named Science Café in which students must explain biological terms to non-biologists without using jargon. Alan Alda speaks of the “curse of knowledge, the cognitive bias that makes it difficult to think or talk about a familiar subject as if from a position of unfamiliarity.” [22] In Science Café , we work extemporaneously to explain basic biological terms to intelligent strangers. Students have either the role of explainer or questioner, both drawn from a collection of possibilities in a jar (examples in Figure 2). The term to be defined and the role of the questioner are announced to the audience. The explainer must describe the term to the questioner, who then asks a clarifying question that a person in that role would want to know. The explainer must respond using terminology or metaphors appropriate to the questioner. Initially, our students prefer to act as the questioner rather than the explainer. But soon they realize that thinking inside the mind of a non-biologist is also hard work. Also, we found that student explainers felt that they were “dumbing down” material when speaking with those outside the field. We countered this tendency by ensuring that questioners were identified as highly educated in other fields or in positions of power. Students are not graded on their content or performance, but we use the definitions the students develop to help assess our departmental efficacy in teaching key biological concepts. Terms to Explain Roles of Questioners Autotroph The president of the college DNA Your grandmother Endergonic reaction An orchestra conductor Gene An investment banker Transcription A human resources manager Trophic level cascade An electronics engineer Figure 2. A sampling of Science Café Components Results Over the six years we have been running the capstone course, we have become more comfortable with the inclusion of improvisation, better able to articulate its goals and utility, and student presentations have improved remarkably. If we have learned anything in our experiments with improvisation in a science course, it is that our students are more willing to participate when the scientific rationale behind arts techniques is considered. The more frequently we can identify and name, discuss, and analyze phenomena, the more willing they are to embrace these methods. The neurological, physiological, and behavioral aspects of improvisation belong in a biology class. The improvisational exercises we adopted remind us that we live among many intelligent and curious non-scientists. Sharing why we care, accessing the emotion behind our inquiry, can connect us with others. Current student Terese Swords writes that she “noticed [her] explanatory and communication skills considerably strengthen” as she “can more easily improvise responses to questions and tailor explanations to a wide array of audiences.” [23] Curiosity, awe, and wonder draw scientists into our fields. Our search can never prove anything absolutely true, so we employ precisely developed tools to answer narrowly defined questions about detailed phenomena. Recent graduate Konstantinos Vlachos provided this explanation of the importance of improvisation in our course: Many scientists today are afraid of talking to people about their work. It’s not that we don’t want to share our work, it’s that we are afraid to do it because our subjects are oftentimes so elaborate and sometimes so overwhelming to others. Instead, we choose to keep a distance from many people. The improv sessions helped me not to be afraid of my own knowledge and skills. [24] We have found that discussion of the goals and utility of improvisation is key to its acceptance by undergraduate science students. Interrupting an activity to discuss, re-focus, or analyze our physiological and behavioral responses places it in a familiar context. Importantly, improvisation has become a more featured component of the course; it is started on the first day and is continued throughout the term with increasing expectations of student participation. An unintended consequence of students’ rising comfort with science communication is that student projects have become increasingly multi-media and less traditional. We have had student projects culminate in videos, art projects, games, music, and even one play script and public reading! The culminating event of our Senior Experience course is BioFest – a mix of posters, videos, and demonstrations of each student’s senior project. In 30-minute increments, one-quarter of the class presents their work to anyone who walks by. Younger students are encouraged to attend as the room buzzes energetically with friends and colleagues from all disciplines visiting the students’ presentations. Family members fly in from across the country; mentors from the campus and the community come to see the results. Posters, as seen at any conference, predominate, but some students bring along research tools or organisms they have investigated (Figure 3). Figure 3. Poster presenters display confidence and approachability while presenting the science adapted to their audiences. (Image courtesy of Tracy Van Zeeland.) Some students even stage their projects. A book on what happens after death is displayed against a crime scene tape outlining a body, staging the project’s scientific title, “The breakdown of decomposition: the processes involved as influenced by environmental processes”). Audience participation is encouraged. A website, part of the project “Therapeutic efficacy of spp in treating cancers,” displays the pharmaceutical benefits of Navajo tea, a traditional medicine, as visitors sip tea samples. An amateur winemaker tastes the results of a student’s vintages made from wild yeasts growing on grapes (“Identification and characterization of wild yeasts”). In the afore-mentioned project, “Surgical protocols and patient selection in intestinal transplantation,” there is action in the real world: a Wikipedia page describing intestinal transplants already has 1500+ hits, and visitors are able to sign up to be organ donors. Lawrence University’s Vice-President of Development speaks with the student who analyzed current and projected climate change on species growing on university property (“Bjorklunden bioclimate envelope models — their practice and utility”). Athletes watch a video about biofeedback effects on hockey performance (“The role of biofeedback in autogenic training on physiological indices and athletic performance”). We watch with pride as our students talk with whoever comes by, answering questions and sharing their enthusiasm (Figure 4). In our first years, this was a staid and serious event. In the past three years, the room has erupted in chatter, laughter, and questions. Students and faculty are disappointed that they can’t possibly visit each student’s presentation in the time allowed. Parents and administrators attend and are impressed with our students’ enthusiastic and accessible presentations of their work. We are convinced that improvisation has improved our students’ ability and willingness to communicate their scientific know-how immeasurably. The Senior Experience course in biology has capped students’ undergraduate science training with projects of their own design, and helped them become better science communicators, obtain jobs, and find their professional passions. Figure 4. Students must be prepared to speak with any audience as they come by. (Image courtesy of Tracy Van Zeeland.) Appendix What Our Students Say We have solicited reactions to capstone improvisation from a sample of recent Lawrence University graduates. “You will not always know the knowledge level of your audience and have to be ready to either simplify or elaborate. Additionally, it is hard to know what kinds of questions will be asked after you have finished and because of this you have to be ready to improvise in order to communicate the information to your audience.” Nick Randall, Class of 2013 “When a student or colleague asks a question, and you give a response that does not follow the context of the question, they are not going to understand the answer. Much like improv, you need to stay within the context given.” David Cordie, Class of 2013 “I had such an extreme fear of public speaking that I struggled to raise my hand to answer a professor’s simple question in a small class of people I knew well. When I found out we were doing improv in my science class I was very surprised. The improv techniques and speaking skills I learned in this class pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone. Fast forward a few months after graduation to my first presentation in a temporary job. Using the skills I learned in class, I wowed the upper management. Before I knew it, I was well known as a great speaker, solicited by people I barely knew for communication advice, and invited to present at several workshops. It was at one of these talks that my boss and our partners realized they needed to keep me longer than originally planned because of the work I was showcasing and my ability to excite our partners into action. I strongly believe that without the communication skills I learned in class, I would not have gotten the job I have now, and I would have been less successful and had far fewer opportunities to promote my work and engage others. I think this was the most important class I ever took.” Maria De Laundreau, Class of 2013 “Many scientists today are afraid of talking to people about their work. It’s not that we don’t want to share our work, it’s that we are afraid to do it because our subjects are oftentimes so elaborate and sometimes so overwhelming to others that we don’t want to make them uncomfortable. Instead, we choose to keep a distance from many people. The improv sessions helped me not to be afraid of my own knowledge and skills. It helped me to be ready to respond more effectively to the variety of reactions that an audience may have during public speeches. But most importantly it taught me not to be afraid of failure and criticism. After all as a young scientist, I have a lot room for improvement, which makes occasional failure and criticism an inevitable part of my career. Bio 650 showed me how to respond thoughtfully in this criticism, thus reaching my ultimate goal, which is to learn and share effectively how life works!” Konstantinos Vlacho, Class of 2015 “Initially I was horrified to participate in improv, but even after doing it for only a couple weeks, I have noticed my explanatory and communication skills considerably strengthen. I am much more confident in job interviews and feel that I can more easily improvise responses to questions and tailor my explanations to a wide array of audiences. I can now say that I am completely comfortable [with] public speaking (even about topics I am unsure of) and it is all thanks to my biology major.” Terese Swords, Class of 2016 Summary of Oral Communication Activities Audience (our own invention) Teaching Improvisation to Scientists with Alan Alda Exposure Amy Cuddy’s TEDTalk Self-Introductions (name & project title) Mirror Play Ball Bumper Sticker production 12-minute oral scientific presentation of student project & relevant background Transformation of Objects What’s Going On? Science Café BioFest References [1] We thank Alan Alda first and foremost for his vision of improving science communication. We thank the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University for providing evidence that improvisation works wonderfully to free the stories and remind us why science intrigued us in the first place and for the concept of distillation that enables students to see that accuracy, brevity, and clarity are not the same as dumbing down science. We thank Kathy Privatt of the Lawrence University theater faculty for the choice of activities winnowed from another realm. And we thank our co-teachers of the capstone course for their patience and wisdom; without you the course wouldn’t have evolved as it has: Bart De Stasio, Kimberly Dickson, Alyssa Hakes, Brian Piasecki, Jodi Sedlock, and Nancy Wall. We thank our students both for their trust in us and for their willingness to grow and add a playful enthusiasm to imbue their science. [2] Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 325. [3] E. A. De Stasio, M. Ansfield, P. Cohen, and T. Spurgin, “Curricular responses to ‘electronically tethered’ students: Individualized learning across the curriculum,” Liberal Education 95, no. 4 (2009): 46-52. [4] Kelly M. Walsh, “Discovering a Common Language,“ The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine , October 6, 2015. http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Detail.aspx?cid=d77626ca-e830-47da-a546-7fbeab1846f1 . [5] Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers 3rd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 2011. [6] Ibid, 2011. [7] Beatrice de Gelder, “Towards the Neurobiology of Emotional Body Language.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7 (March 2006): 242-49. [8] School of Journalism, Stony Brook University, Teaching Improvisation to Scientists with Alan Alda (2010) http://www.youtube.comwatch?v=JtdyA7SibG8 . (5:24-8:38 in particular). [9] Amy Cuddy, Your Body Shapes Who You Are , TEDGlobal, (June 2012) http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are . [10] Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater , 3rd ed. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 53. [11] Ibid., 61-63. [12] G. Di Pellegrino, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, “Understanding motor events: a neurophysiological study.” Experimental Brain Research , 91 (1992): 176-80. [13] Marco Del Giudice, Valeria Manera and Christian Keysers, “Programmed to learn? The ontogeny of mirror neurons,” Developmental Science 12, no. 2 (March 2009): 350-63. [14] Amy Cuddy, Presence (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 179. [15] Eddie North-Hager, “Botox Impairs Ability to Understand Emotions” (6 June 2011) https://news.usc.edu/28407/Botox-Impairs-Ability-to-Understand-Emotions/ [16] Judith Holler and Katie Wilkin. “Co-Speech Gesture Mimicry in the Process of Collaborative Referring During Face-to-Face Dialogue.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 35, no. 2 (June 2011): 133-53. [17] Viola Spolin, Improvisation for Theater , 64. [18] Ibid., 82. [19] Ibid., 74. [20] Ibid., 69. [21] Ibid., 88. [22] Kelly Walsh, “Discovering a Common Language.” [23] Personal communication with the authors. [24] Personal communication with the authors. Footnotes About The Author(s) Elizabeth A. De Stasio is the Raymond H. Herzog Professor of Science and Professor of Biology at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She earned her PhD in Biology and Medicine at Brown University working in the area of molecular biology and did post-doctoral training in the Department of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is currently collaborating with researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and at Rutgers University to understand which genes are used to make functioning nerve cells. She is devoted to making science accessible to all students through her courses in introductory biology and genetics, and a course for non-majors she calls Biotechnology and Society. Cindy L. Duckert is a Lecturer in Biology and Senior Experience Facilitator at Lawrence University and the Senior Museum Educator at the Weis Earth Science Museum in Menasha, Wisconsin. Her career began as an engineer (California Institute of Technology) building airplanes at Lockheed and making toothpaste tube material more efficiently at American Can Company when she realized that explaining technical things to non-technical people is her forté. The discovery that interpreting one field of study to another is an unusual skill came as mid-career surprise. She taught K-12 teachers how to do real science in their classrooms with the JASON Project’s online courses and thousands of visitors to the Experimental Aircraft Association Museum what keeps airplanes in the air. 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: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

The annual PRELUDE festival is dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary and mediatized performance PRELUDE Festival Since 2003, The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center has presented the PRELUDE Festival. The annual PRELUDE festival is dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary and mediatized performance. PRELUDE offers an array of short performances, readings, and screenings — a completely free survey of the current New York moment and the work being prepared for the next season and beyond—as well as new commissions and panel discussions with artists, scholars, and performers. PRELUDE is a place to discover what voices are shaping the future of theatre and performance in NYC, to observe, engage, commune, and critique. Prelude 2024 Between the scenes View Festival Lineup Prelude 2020 Sites of revolution! View Festival Archive Prelude 2016 welcome failure! View Festival Archive Prelude 2013 forward View Festival Archive Prelude 2023 20th anniversary edition! View Festival Archive Prelude 2019 Riotous excursions! View Festival Archive Prelude 2015 . View Festival Archive Prelude 2012 . View Festival Archive Prelude 2021 Start making sense! View Festival Archive Prelude 2017 theater/maker View Festival Archive Prelude 2014 . View Festival Archive The PR ELUDE Archive Read 10 Y EARS PRELUDE Edited by Frank Hentschker and designed by Yu Chien Liu

By Florian Malzacher | A survey of contemporary theatre to demonstrate its political potential in both form and content. < 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 The Art of Assembly Florian Malzacher Download PDF The Art of Assembly surveys theatre today to demonstrate its political potential in both form and content. Drawing on numerous examples from around the world in performance, visual art, and activist art, curator and author Florian Malzacher examines works that draw on the particular possibilities of theatre to navigate the space between representation and participation, at once playfully and with sincerity. In a time of wide-ranging crisis, The Art of Assembly is a plea for a strong definition of the political and for a theatre that is not content merely to reflect the world’s ills, but instead acts to change them. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Watch Palestine Comedy Club by Alaa Aliabdallah / Charlotte Knowles at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. Six Palestinian stand-up comedians write and tour a stand-up comedy show exploring the unlikely, often dark humour that surrounds the complexity of Palestinian identity. What starts as a blending of comic traditions to encourage honest and open reflections through the shared enjoyment of laughter becomes an existential imperative to survival and sharing common humanity. In Palestine, there are no comedy clubs or traditions of stand-up comedy. The country is divided by walls, fences, and checkpoints, creating cultural and quality-of-life disparities between towns. Consequently, developing a comedy show that can resonate with vastly different audiences across these divides poses a significant challenge. Nonetheless, comedians Alaa, Hanna, Diana, Khalil, Ebaa, from Occupied Haifa, Ramallah, Jenin, Hebron, and the Golan Heights along with their British director, Sam, manage to navigate checkpoints and borders to perform in theatres across Palestine and Israel. Word of their performances spreads internationally, leading to an invitation to London for a series of gigs, tragically scheduled to commence in October 2023, just as the Genocide on Gaza breaks out. ‘Palestine Comedy Club’ serves as an exploration of comedy and the power of laughter to unite, liberate, challenge and heal. Initially, we witness how the comedians blend comic traditions from the Western world with those rooted in Arab cultures to employ new tools for expression and create a fresh audience experience. This includes highlighting differences between 'Westbankers' and '48ers', encouraging open and honest reflections, and bridging differing generational viewpoints through the shared enjoyment of laughter. However, as Gaza faces relentless attacks, the mission to connect audiences through laughter and humanity becomes an existential imperative. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Palestine Comedy Club Alaa Aliabdallah / Charlotte Knowles At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30, at 2:15 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center 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. Country Palestine, United Kingdom Language Arabic, English Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Six Palestinian stand-up comedians write and tour a stand-up comedy show exploring the unlikely, often dark humour that surrounds the complexity of Palestinian identity. What starts as a blending of comic traditions to encourage honest and open reflections through the shared enjoyment of laughter becomes an existential imperative to survival and sharing common humanity. In Palestine, there are no comedy clubs or traditions of stand-up comedy. The country is divided by walls, fences, and checkpoints, creating cultural and quality-of-life disparities between towns. Consequently, developing a comedy show that can resonate with vastly different audiences across these divides poses a significant challenge. Nonetheless, comedians Alaa, Hanna, Diana, Khalil, Ebaa, from Occupied Haifa, Ramallah, Jenin, Hebron, and the Golan Heights along with their British director, Sam, manage to navigate checkpoints and borders to perform in theatres across Palestine and Israel. Word of their performances spreads internationally, leading to an invitation to London for a series of gigs, tragically scheduled to commence in October 2023, just as the Genocide on Gaza breaks out. ‘Palestine Comedy Club’ serves as an exploration of comedy and the power of laughter to unite, liberate, challenge and heal. Initially, we witness how the comedians blend comic traditions from the Western world with those rooted in Arab cultures to employ new tools for expression and create a fresh audience experience. This includes highlighting differences between 'Westbankers' and '48ers', encouraging open and honest reflections, and bridging differing generational viewpoints through the shared enjoyment of laughter. However, as Gaza faces relentless attacks, the mission to connect audiences through laughter and humanity becomes an existential imperative. Director: Alaa Aliabdallah Producer: Charlotte Knowles Executive Producer: Carri Twigg, Esther Van Messel, Mikail Chowdhury, Farzana Rahman, Maryam Pasha Cinematographer: Alaa Aliabdallah Editor: Libby Knowles Composer: Khalil Al Batran, Faris Amin About The Artist(s) Director’s profile: Regash (Alaa Aliabdallah) has worked as a photographer and filmmaker with many artists and organisations such as the Palestinian Circus School, Freedom Theatre, Stereo48 Dance Company, and Sarreyet Ramallah. Regash is an internationally recognised portrait and street photographer, with an online audience of over 20,000 people. He produces photography for international fashion brands and magazines. Palestine Comedy Club is Regash’s debut feature documentary. He personally shot the comedy tour, all six comedy performances and five interviews. Regash is also including his beautiful street photography in the Palestine Comedy Club film, creating collage stories of each of the cities visited on the tour to provide audiences with a deeper dive into the diverse cultures found across Palestine. Producer’s profile: Charlotte Knowles is an award-winning TV and film producer. Her work has been featured on BBC, ITN, and Arte. Notable achievements include her term as CEO of the Independent Film Trust, where she oversaw the development and production of various critically acclaimed projects, including the award-winning, Scottish BAFTA and BIFA nominated documentary “Rebel Dykes.” In 2022, Charlotte founded Tough Crowd Limited, a production company exploring narratives at the intersection of politics and pop-culture. Palestine Comedy Club is the first feature documentary to appear from Tough Crowd. Under the Tough Crowd banner, Charlotte also created the CreativeHQ App, a mobile app providing professional development and business coaching for creative media producers. Palestine Comedy Club نادي الكوميديا في فلسطين Palestine Comedy Club is a comedy production company established in the UK and Palestine by Palestinian stand-up comedian, Alaa Shehada, with assistance from comedy director, writer and researcher Dr. Sam Beale, and film producer, Charlotte Knowles. Under the leadership of Alaa Shehada, Palestine Comedy Club is working to establish a stand-up comedy circuit across the West Bank providing space and funds for emerging stand-up comedy talent in the region to hone their craft and develop a culture of live comedy performance that is unique to the Palestinian experience. Palestine Comedy Club’s first show, ‘Balad’ (بلد ) toured to venues in Ramallah, Nablus, Haifa, Nazareth, Jerusalem and Jenin in 2021. Performed by Alaa Shehada, Hanna Shammas, Raed Sheukhi, Diana Swity, Ebaa Monther and Khalil Al-Batran, ‘Balad’ explores the complexity of Palestinian identity as it is experienced across the entire region, from Hebron to the Golan Heights. The show received excellent reviews and was described as “ laughter in extreme pain, and a turning point towards a different comedy in Palestine.” (full review shared below). The group is currently in the process of developing a show that will travel to the UK, before returning to Palestine to work with a wider range of stand-up comedians including more established talent such as Adi Khalefa. Palestine Comedy Club will also be delivering workshops throughout the year to encourage more performers to take up stand-up comedy and become part of the growing comedy ecosystem. Get in touch with the artist(s) https://www.instagram.com/palestinecomedy/ and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

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 Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Published: July 15, 2026 Download Article as PDF By David Barlow with Cindy Sibilsky Image Credits: Article Featured Image: Photo by Albert Dobrin of King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Compagnia de’ Colombari’s King Lear, directed and adapted by renowned experimental theatre director Karin Coonrod, has a habit of scrambling to extend the performances in other places due to popular demand. It premiered at the Yale University Theatre for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut, in June 2024. Because of interest from New York City for the raw, radical interpretation of the oft-produced show and the powerful cast (who all happened to be available, a rare thing with actors), the company rallied to transfer the show within a month. Colombari’s King Lear enjoyed a sold-out, limited four-show run in July 2024 at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre. That was more of a preview run, for King Lear returned to take over the ever-flexible Ellen Stewart Theatre January 23 through February 8, 2026 for the official Off-Broadway engagement. Opening weekend was during the first street-closing snowstorm of one of the most frigid winters the city has seen in years. Despite that, the show received critical raves (including a New York Times Critic's Pick by Helen Shaw, who crowned it: “A Stunning ‘King Lear’ That Reveals, Finally, a King in Full"), repeat attendees and sold-out performances. Word of the success spread around the world, and shortly after the La MaMa run ended, Romania came calling. Colombari’s King Lear was invited to perform at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival for two performances, on May 27 and 28, 2026, in Craiova, Romania. As a biennial festival, this would be the next chance until 2028. The show was hot and ready; the actors (seven out of ten who were available), the creative team and the Colombari company were committed to making this rare opportunity work. Photo by Albert Dobrin of King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival The production employs Coonrod’s signature multiplicity, in which multiple actors of varying ages, genders and cultural backgrounds share an iconic role, with surprising and impactful results. That was witnessed with her Merchant of Venice in the historic Jewish Ghetto of Venice in 2016 on the 500th anniversary of its founding, where five actors split the part of Shylock, then came together for a “howl that rends the night” (according to Ben Brantley’s review in The New York Times ). In King Lear, ten actors play Lear in the opening scene, stripping off their paper crowns to transform into other characters, then reuniting at times as a regal legion. But absolute power and royalty are as fragile as a paper crown, and finally, only one Lear remains. That “Last Lear” originated with veteran actor Tom Nelis, whose obligation to return to the role of Grandfather in Ragtime on Broadway prevented him from joining his fellow Lears in Romania. So the Last Lear was replaced by another Colombari veteran actor (and friend to Nelis as well), David Barlow. Barlow generously offered to share his insights and observations behind the scenes of his process as the new Last Lear, and his experiences at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival, with European Stages. Here are edited excerpts from his Lear Diary: May 24 When director Karin Coonrod reached out to me about joining the Compagnia de’ Colombari production of King Lear in Romania, I was both happily surprised and warily daunted. I would be taking on the acting track of Tom Nelis, a superb actor whose Broadway engagement in Ragtime prevented him from traveling to Europe. Normally, one expects Lear to be played by an elder statesman—Sir Ian McKellen comes immediately to mind, along with countless actors who have earned the role over the course of long careers. I mean, at 54, I’m no spring chicken, but I never dreamed I’d be rubbing elbows with the role this soon—if ever. But Karin’s compelling adaptation of the play initially allows for the king to be represented by a diverse cast of ten actors. She offers multiple windows into Lear’s prismatic psyche as he plummets from self-satisfied bombast to bare-forked animal. With great care, she has charted his wild descent into the dark night of the soul and subsequent inner awakening. That said, Tom’s track does do much of the role’s heavy lifting. One by one, all the other Lears drop away until there is only one Lear left standing—raving mad in the wilderness, commiserating with the blinded Gloucester, and reuniting with his youngest daughter Cordelia. It is not an assignment to take lightly—indeed, to embody that text is one of the great privileges any actor may be granted. A few years ago, a friend asked me: if you could only have one Shakespeare play with you on a desert island, which would it be? My answer: King Lear . The play is existentialism before existentialism, Beckett before Beckett. And now—gulp—here was an opportunity to seriously delve into a text I’d always held in the highest regard. So, back home in New York, I threw myself into preparation, which, of course, included letting my white beard grow unchecked. Luckily, it has come in so bushy it might give ample sanctuary to a nest of hornets—or at least one mid-sized marmot. I now marvel at how Appalachian mountain men or orthodox priests can tolerate chewing on their own mustache at every meal, or continually dousing it in their morning brew. Alas, one must suffer for one’s art. There are two other newcomers to this iteration of the production: KenYatta Rogers (playing Gloucester) and Nomè SiDone (playing Edgar). The three of us had a week of rehearsals in Brooklyn to wedge ourselves into a production that, following its heralded run at La MaMa in New York, was already a well-oiled machine. I had seen the show there, and knew I’d be teaming up with terrific actors. Compagnia de’ Colombari is a big-hearted group of artists, all of whom have embraced us with the same warmth and goodwill that Karin herself engenders. So, how does one approach the task of portraying this character’s titanic journey, and in such a compressed process? Well, aside from studying a video of the show shot in January, my plan was simply to get the words into my brain as quickly as possible. There is nothing worse than fretting about what the hell is your next line! Each actor has their own process, of course, but for me, coming to work with the language memorized is what will best secure any chance of having an organic exploration in the room. And what language it is! What a curious joy it is to map out this man’s confrontation with his own self-deceit—to enter the raging current that sweeps away every illusion of status and significance on which he has built his sense of self. For him to wake up, all of it must come tumbling down. May 25 Over the years, I’ve come to prefer an approach to acting Shakespeare that, above all, honors the poetry and meter of the text. By that, I don’t mean to suggest that playing Shakespeare well merely requires the recitations of a gifted technician (nothing could be more deadly!). Rather, it is to stress the importance of trusting that this playwright always has your back. Shakespeare—especially with such a masterpiece as King Lear —always provides exactly what is needed in every instant to activate the human imagination—no more and no less. The text consistently supports the actor in simply “say what they mean and mean what they say,” and, in doing so, is on the line. I suppose it’s similar to playing Bach or Chopin—the music is already impeccably notated, now all one must do is practice to the point of allowing it to flow through one’s instrument unobstructed. Open the spigot of your heart, follow the rhythm, and Shakespeare’s iambic beats will usher you into the deepest wells of the human collective unconscious. So no, I’ve never felt drawn to method-based approaches to Shakespeare. Emotional recall, backstory, sense memory—that all seems unnecessary, distracting even. But…but but but… This particular role has, in fact, stirred many personal reverberations. Lear’s archetypal journey into the shadows has felt eerily reminiscent of the inner disintegration I underwent in my mid-forties. It was a harrowing time—textbook mid-life crisis stuff. I guess I was somewhat the poster boy of a man staring into the proverbial abyss. And I’d be embarrassed to admit how much I struggled during that period of my life had it not been such a necessary part of my own growth. Sure, I have never divided a patrimony amongst my three daughters (I don’t have children), and my most kingly estate in life so far has been a one-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I have never been cast out by my own kin or dispossessed of all earthly rights. But while considering the play’s cathartic themes of loss, I can easily remember how not so long ago I’d been utterly consumed by questions of identity and self-worth. Desperately, I tried to fend off the crippling dread of losing a core sense of purpose and belonging. This uncontrollable sense of failure is perfectly depicted in the theologian Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward , in which he describes the “two halves” of life: The first half is marked by the establishment of ego strength, which one attains through achievement and external signs of success—both necessary and healthy. The second half begins when that first structure—so assiduously built over time—eventually collapses under its own weight. According to Rohr, many people—regardless of age—never leave the first phase. And while one might consider that a blessing, it can ultimately lead to calamity. As we see with Lear, who even in his twilight years has stayed trapped in the pursuit of control, status, and certainty, he is blind to the catastrophe he will so carelessly set into motion. In one of my favorite quips that the Fool employs to skewer his master, he says: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” Genuine maturity requires surrender, humility, and a much deeper participation in reality. That is most often precipitated by profound feelings of loss, failure, mortality, grief, disillusionment, and unexpected change. Rohr calls these moments “falling upward” because what initially feels like a crisis or disaster can ultimately become a doorway to deeper wisdom. Instead of asking: “How do I succeed, acquire, and control?” One may begin to ask: “What is essential?” “Who am I beneath these roles?” “How do I love?” And it is love—and true love’s compassion—that becomes the very engine of Lear’s transformational journey. At the height of the storm that rages both in and outside his mind, he awakens to the suffering of all those who are less fortunate: “Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just.” Lear suddenly let’s go of his victimhood and petulant cry for retribution to consider the plight of others. He is willing to feel what they feel and thus close the gap of separation between himself and his fellow man. Later, in the light of Cordelia’s unconditional love and incredible sacrifice, he has finally surrendered all pretensions of importance to simply delight in the communion they share, even in the face of impending doom: “Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too — Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out — And take upon the mystery of things As if we were God’s spies.” As is the case in so many—if not all—of Shakespeare’s plays, wisdom (or the lack thereof) is best demonstrated in how we love. Photo by Albert Dobrin of King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival May 26 A couple of nights before our departure for Europe, we did a “share out”—three scenes performed for a small audience in the basement rehearsal space of St. Paul’s Church in Brooklyn. It was helpful to have a crack at a portion of the play in front of people before leaving the States, to get it more in the body and feel some synergy with those who had come to cheer us on. For some, it was their first encounter with the play. And now, here I am sitting in a crisply appointed apartment in the Romanian city of Craiova. I have a panoramic view of distant forested hills beyond the foreground’s post-Soviet industrial sprawl, and the Kaufland Mall five stories below. The city’s old center is a half-hour walk away, or a quick trip by tram. That is where we have skirted off to take in the local charm and enjoy the friendly pulse of beer gardens, old churches, and a myriad of theater spaces presenting productions from all over the world. Oh, and a balloon ride a few stories above the Shakespeare Village. This “village” is set on the grounds of the city’s hippodrome in Nicolae Romanescu Park. The balloon was tied down, so we didn’t float that far up, but high enough to have a great view of the stage where the Romanian blues band The Southern Cockroaches were letting it rip with a grand set of Nashville standards. There seem to be few Americans here, and yesterday my Uber driver was eager to practice his English. The conversation quickly turned to politics, at which point I offered my requisite apologies for the US’s latest batch of geopolitical blunders, while he denounced the rampant corruption that has long infected his country’s government. And suddenly it occurred to me I was again discussing the universal themes of King Lear . In Lear’s addled tirade to Gloucester, there is a moment of shrewd clarity when he advises his blinded friend to: “Get thee glass eyes, And like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not.” May 27 Wow! We teched and ran through the entire show all on the same day we had our first performance. And in withering heat. Our space, Teatrul Colibri, is a large children’s theater without air conditioning. And Craiova has been unseasonably warm. So, if there were ever a time and place to summon one’s inner actor warrior, it was today. With more bodies in the space, and in full costume under the lights, our first show may as well have taken place in one of the inner rings of Dante’s Inferno, which I suppose is strangely appropriate. But we pushed on and, from all accounts, gave a damn good show. Could the Romanian audience understand us? Was the temperature as tough going for them as it was for us? I’m not sure. But there’s one thing I’m clear about: this country loves theater. The audiences are present, tuned in, and willing. May 28 Today, a number of us saw Declan Donnellan’s Two Gentlemen of Verona performed by an outstanding troupe of Spaniards. My god, they were good! I never thought I’d have such a blast watching a production of that play. Not one of my favorites, to be sure, but now my earlier judgments are under review. It was also fun to listen to the play in rapid-fire Spanish. As I’m fluent, I’d say I caught a solid 50 percent of what was said. Otherwise, I was taken by the fantastic comic timing and physical alacrity of every single performer. Then several of us scarfed down a traditional Romanian meal at Restaurant Casa Ghincea (think cabbage stew, sausage, polenta, etc.) before hopping in an Uber to get back to our hot box of a theater. With last night’s show under our belt, everyone was poised to release into this final performance of King Lear fully. And we did. For me, I was continually coaching myself not to turn this evening’s effort into some great apotheosis of all my hard work. It would be what it would be. Stay present, be in the moment, exactly as it is. Just tell the story. And then, at the play’s dénouement, turning to Cordelia (played by the wonderful Celeste Sena), I saw the tears in her eyes. Lear says to his daughter: “Be your tears wet? Yes, faith.” Yes… faith indeed. References References About the author(s) David Barlow is a native New Yorker. A graduate of the NYU Grad Acting Program, he has performed in works ranging from the classical and kitchen sink to the avant-garde and off-the-wall. His original theatre piece LA Party (directed by Phil Soltanoff) has toured the US and Canada. He has performed in Europe at numerous national theaters in France with director Arthur Nauzyciel (Splendids and Julius Caesar), a rocky potato field in East Germany (Bauerntheater directed by David Levine), and Norway’s National Opera House in Oslo (The Hamlet Complex directed by Alan Øyen). Back home he has performed at New York Theatre Workshop, Theater For A New Audience, Primary Stages, and The Play Company for whom he performed in This Is My Office and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Best Solo Performance. He was a member of the off-Broadway theatre company Potomac Theatre Project for over 25 years, and regionally he has performed in many theaters across the country, including Berkeley Rep, Arena Stage, Hartford Stage, Actors Theater of Louisville, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Portland Center Stage, Kansas City Rep, Berkshire Theater Group, and Philadelphia Theater Company. Recently, as part of Sketchbook Theatre’s outreach, David has helped lead community projects with London theatre artist David Glass, creating new works in Buffalo, NY and Macao, China. David is also a director, and leads workshops in the Viewpoints movement training. A lifelong theatermaker and arts worker, Cindy Sibilsky (she/her) is the founder/CEO and producer of inJOY Entertainment LLC (established in 2011), a multimedia, multi-genre and multi-purpose arts & entertainment company focusing on meaningful cultural exchange worldwide. She is a Broadway, Off-Broadway & international independent producer, marketing/PR director, and writer/journalist. In 2019, she was guest editor, curator, and lead writer for American Theatre Magazine’s special edition on Japanese Contemporary Theatre . Through inJOY Entertainment, Cindy represents a diverse and constantly growing roster of New York and global clients, companies and shows, including festivals, theatre, musicals, dance, cirque, plays, cabaret, drag, concerts, curated art shows, public art, and immersive performances. 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.

Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF Introduction While an abundance of data clearly shows a gender imbalance in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, it is less clear how to motivate change regarding both overt and subtle barriers that hold women back. [1] This is particularly the case in the STEM field of information technology (IT). Since subtle gender barriers are transmitted through the cultural norms, values and gender roles of a society, creating a gender-balanced IT profession requires a way of addressing these emotional and implicit factors. The problem is that the scientific professions, on their own, are unable to do so. Information about structural barriers to social inclusion reported in scholarly publications is generally inaccessible to the lay person. Further, the scientific model of research dissemination leaves little room for the expression of subtlety, nuance, emotion, and holistic representation. Hence, artistic practice – specifically theatre for social change through relational aesthetics of transformative learning – can be employed to stimulate awareness, understanding, and activism about barriers to women in technological fields. It can also enable dissemination of research findings beyond the STEM academic community. In response to this opportunity, an original play, iDream , was written to communicate, in dramatic fashion, research results from an investigation of factors contributing to the under representation of women in the IT field. It did so by tackling the issues of experiencing, internalizing, and overcoming barriers to inclusion. The characters, plot, and dialogue of the play come from prior research that both developed theory and empirically applied it in over one hundred life history interviews with women working in the IT field. The characters in the resulting play embody the struggles of those who are marginalized in the IT field by virtue of gender but who seek inclusion and equality in the information society. Following staged readings of the play, audience feedback, and audience learning assessment, the play script was revised. The final version is now available to the public on the project website. This essay considers the challenges and opportunities of using theatre to address the important societal issue of exclusion in STEM disciplines. Backstory In 2007 Eileen Trauth sat at her computer having just sent her final report to the National Science Foundation (NSF) about a multiyear investigation into the gender imbalance in the STEM field of IT. She had developed and empirically tested a theory in the course of conducting life history interviews with women IT workers in the USA. During interviews that sometimes went on for three hours, these women willingly poured out their life stories – about their families, their communities, their schools, their hopes, and their dreams. They spoke about their interests and their passions, and about the people who helped or hindered their progression along a path that brought them to be participating in the interviews. She had already started publishing academic papers that added to cumulative scholarly knowledge about the problem of gender in the IT profession. But something was nagging at her. “How can I communicate what I have learned in this research in such a way that I can reach beyond my fellow academics? I want the results of my research to change the hearts and minds of parents, policy makers, educators, students and, ultimately, society,” she mused. Yet she recognized that scientific writing isn’t set up for such advocacy. This reflection and a fortuitous conversation the following year launched her on a journey through uncharted interdisciplinary waters. The conversation was with Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, who had just finished co-creating and presenting a play about Hurricane Katrina. The play was based upon interviews with residents of New Orleans and written in the genre of theatre for social change. Being aware of the interviews Eileen had conducted, Suzanne suggested a collaborative venture. Eileen’s research had revealed that the barriers to women entering and remaining in the IT field were not limited to those that are explicitly imposed on women, such as parents overtly discouraging their daughters from enrolling in computer science degree programs, or guidance counselors explicitly steering women students away from careers in computing. She had also found evidence of barriers that are implicitly internalized by young women themselves, when they receive messages from adults, peers, and the media about where they do and do not belong. As a result, they are sometimes unconsciously holding themselves back, which is being mistakenly diagnosed in the popular discourse as women “losing interest” in technology. Eileen was searching for a way to give voice to the powerful emotions expressed by the women she interviewed. There were times when she listened helplessly to the women express their feelings about isolation, exclusion from workplace socializing, being subjected to negative gender stereotypes, self-doubt, and being passed over for promotion. She wanted to communicate not just the facts she learned about the gender imbalance; she also wanted to communicate what it feels like to be on the margins. However, nuanced writing about subtle and unconsciously internalized barriers, writing that conveys what it feels like to be excluded, is the antithesis of scientific writing. Empirical research results that are published in scientific journals are expected to be presented in a straightforward manner, emphasizing objectivity and, typically, quantitative data. The emotion, nuance and subtlety that were an integral part of Eileen’s story of barriers did not fit with mainstream scientific research reporting. Consequently, she believed that her scholarly papers were telling only part of the story. She was also becoming increasingly dissatisfied with limiting the dissemination of her research results to fellow academics. Over the course of the project she had developed a growing desire to communicate to the broader public what she had learned about the nature of these gender barriers. She wanted to make a difference with this research and contribute to societal transformation. In recognizing that her research had taken her down the path toward advocacy, she was confronted with the limits of her discipline to effectively advocate for change. She acknowledged that art could pick up where science left off. Thus, this collaborative, cross-disciplinary project was born. This essay, about employing theatre to make a difference in STEM fields, recounts the process of enacting an NSF grant to develop and produce a play as an intervention to address the gender imbalance in science and technology. It also investigates some of the challenges associated with an effort to bring three different disciplines to bear on the enactment of societal change. That is, the play needed to satisfy the demands of playwriting in the relational aesthetics of theatre for social change. Performance arts can call people into relationship with each other and to objects, ideas, and places: a relational aesthetic , a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1988. [2] While doing so it needed to incorporate the results of scientific research and theorizing about gender barriers in the IT field into the characters and story line of the play. Finally, the play needed to evidence audience learning in the forms of awareness, attitude change, and intended behavior. Eileen Trauth is a professor of information science and technology, and gender studies, who conducts research on gender exclusion in the IT field. [3] She was principal investigator on this grant and co-wrote the play. She wanted to transform the findings from research interviews about gender barriers in the IT field into a medium that allowed for greater expression of emotion and subtlety than what is afforded by scientific journal articles. Karen Keifer-Boyd is a feminist arts educator and scholar of art pedagogy who served as the project evaluator; she wanted to assess the transformative learning that resulted as the playwrights, cast, and audience members experienced the performance of the play. Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, was a project consultant and co-creator of the play script. Her goal was to write a play script that would further societal transformation about barriers to achieving one’s dreams. Transformation: From Transcript to Play Script Theatre has frequently provided a venue for reaching audiences in order to achieve social goals beyond the purely aesthetic by healing, promoting action, encouraging community, and supporting transformation. [4] One articulation is called theatre for social change, which is enacted in times and places of crisis. [5] While theatre for social change has various understandings, our use of the term to describe our project is consistent with Thornton’s [6] depiction of theatre for social change as a set of five defining characteristics. The first characteristic is intentionality. Theatre is being used to alter the actual world, not just reflect it. In our project the intention is to create awareness, educate, and inspire action related to gender barriers in the IT field. The second characteristic is community, based on either geographical location or identity. The community shapes and informs the theatrical work. In our project the community consists of women IT workers whose voices are projected through the work to a potential community of IT workers in the audience. The third characteristic is hyphenation, the intersection of performing arts and sociocultural intervention. In our project the sociocultural intervention is awareness and education about gender barriers to IT careers. The fourth characteristic is conscientization: awareness leading to action. In our project awareness of gender barriers is intended to motivate behavior to resist them. The final characteristic is aesthetics. In theatre for social change multiple perspectives are often in evidence with the aim of giving voice to the voiceless. In our project two perspectives were employed (that of the playwright and that of a scientist) to give voice to an underrepresented group in the IT field: women. There are a number of current examples of theatre for social change. Katrina on Stage: Five Plays, [7] is a collection of works that employ theatre to promote awareness and activism about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking (2004) was written to promote activism about abolishing the death penalty. William Mastrosimone’s Bang, Bang, You’re Dead (1999) was written to increase public awareness about violence in high schools. Insofar as the intention of our work is to create awareness and understanding, it also shares a goal of applied theatre, which is to focus on the use of theatre to educate and engage with social issues. Applied theatre is also sometimes referred to as Applied Theatre for Social Change. [8] The project discussed here employs relational aesthetics in which actors, readers, and audience members experience qualitative research findings as theatre for social change, which highlights the issues associated with oppressive societal institutions. [9] One approach in theatre for social change is to transform research findings into an original play script. This approach has several labels, including: performed ethnography, research-informed theatre, and performed research. According to Tara Goldstein et al., Performed ethnography and research-informed theater are research methodologies that involve turning ethnographic data and texts into scripts and dramas that are either read aloud by a group of participants or performed before audiences.[10] They developed a framework of research-informed theatre to analyze the melding of research, theatre, and education to produce transformative learning. Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon employed performed research techniques in her performance piece SHOT! (2009) in order to reframe the discourse about an impoverished North Philadelphia community. [11] Intended as theatre for social change, the play script—when read, performed, or experienced as audience—brings awareness about gender barriers in the IT field and teaches how to challenge, change, and overcome inequities in IT fields. It shares with other forms of arts activism the goal of using “theatre in the service of social change.” [12] Other forms of activist theatre are: community theatre, popular theatre, grassroots theatre, agit-prop (from agitation and propaganda) or protest political theatre, participatory theatre, Freirean “Theatre for Development,” [13] or Boalian “Theatre of the Oppressed”—also referred to as forum or playback theatre. [14] While the staged readings of iDream were performed with professional actors in professional theatre venues, we expect that it might also be performed by schools or community groups and be followed by audience talkback sessions. Our study of attitudinal change for the actors and the audience members at staged readings suggests that the pedagogy of this play project works through embodied learning when performing the play script as a staged reading, or experiencing the staged reading as an audience member. While our learning assessment occurred for staged readings of the play script we believe it is reasonable to expect that a full production would also result in embodied learning. As theatre for social change it aims to remove social and institutional barriers that women experience in the IT field. Theatre, dance, films, and animations in STEM fields is typically used only for explanatory purposes; the arts help non-scientists visualize abstract science concepts as well as bio-physical processes invisible without specialized apparatus. For example, Vince LiCata wrote the play DNA Story (2009) [15] to teach non-scientists about DNA structure and X-ray crystallography. In contrast, our goal was not to explain scientific concepts but rather to raise awareness and critique hegemonic social narratives regarding who could participate in the STEM field of IT. As theatre for social change, iDream performs research about women’s experiences in the IT fields in order to heighten awareness and to advocate for change. The NSF grant scheme that funded this project to transform research findings into an original play script, and to assess it as transformative pedagogy, was directed at innovative ways to communicate research results to a public audience. [16] The original research upon which the play project was built was a qualitative field study of women working in the IT profession. [17] Eileen Trauth interviewed 123 women working in the IT field in the USA. The themes explored in the interviews were: the extent to which the IT field in is socially constructed as a man’s world; pressures on women in the IT field, and how these pressures affect their professional development and working lives; the relationship between working in the IT profession and a woman’s gender self-image; and, finally, how women in the IT profession cope with the challenges presented to them. During open-ended interviews that ranged from one to three hours in duration, women discussed their life stories that led them to their current position in the IT field. They discussed their demographics, the type of work they did, personal characteristics, significant others in their lives, and influences from the larger society regarding gender roles and working in a technical field. At the outset of each interview Eileen explained her interest in understanding variation among women in the ways that they were exposed to, experienced, and responded to gender barriers throughout their careers. [18] While this research was being conducted, Eileen had not envisioned developing a play script as a way to enact societal transformation regarding gender barriers. But she was conscious at the time of the evocative and emotionally compelling nature of the narratives. Hence, in 2008, when Suzanne Trauth proposed writing a play based on the research findings, Eileen was quite receptive to the idea. Two intended audiences were envisioned as the play was being developed. Teenagers constitute the primary audience for the play—those who are experiencing and internalizing barriers to participation in the IT field. While the research that informed iDream is primarily about factors influencing the underrepresentation of women in the IT field, it is also recognized that underrepresentation is an issue for men in certain racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and sexual groups, and that gender stereotypes are enacted by members of all genders. However, while the learning objectives of awareness and understanding, attitude change, and intended behavior about gender, race, ethnicity, and class stereotypes that are embedded in a culture could apply to men as well as women students, the focus of this particular project was on the factors affecting the underrepresentation of women in the IT field. The secondary audience for the play consists of significant adults in teenagers’ lives—parents, teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, and others who are in a position to influence them. Hence, while performances of this play are intended for younger audiences, in order to make the play appealing to adults as well some themes that were intended primarily for this secondary audience were also embedded in the play script. An example is an adult’s effort to hold a young person back from pursuing a dream out of a desire to protect her or him from the same trauma s/he experienced. A concern raised during review of the grant proposal was the need to demonstrate how the play would be compelling to the target audience. In response, at the initiation of the project Eileen Trauth conducted a focus group with undergraduate women currently enrolled in an IT degree program. As relatively recent high school students they were in a position to provide feedback on the story line and advice on techniques to engage the audience. For example, participants said that when they were in high school they lacked exposure to the range of IT educational options that were available in college; they believed that creating greater awareness and understanding about this would be valuable to high school students. As a result, the three main characters in the play and their respective stories relate to a range of IT careers. With respect to awareness and understanding about imposed and internalized barriers to women, participants recommended that the message be conveyed with subtlety. Consequently, promotional materials about the staged readings of iDream emphasized its focus on current issues facing today’s high school students: how to follow one’s dreams while coping with real world issues such as obtaining tuition money for college, and dealing with the expectations and advice of significant people in their lives (parents, boy/girlfriends, guidance counselors, and teachers). Making a decision about careers in the IT field was positioned as the setting for the exploration of these larger themes of concern to high school students. The focus group participants also recommended the use of humor and audience engagement to make the play appealing to high school students. To that end, the script incorporates the vernacular of 18-year-olds, their music and language, their relationships, concerns, and sense of humor. It also includes references to popular video games, and references to contemporary social media and texting. Further, some characters only appear in a technology-mediated way, such as through text messages: MOTHER: Have you done your homework? AMANDA: Duh. It’s Friday night. I have a date with Jimmy. ( She texts and laughs. Mother grabs the cell phone. ) MOTHER ( reads, confused ): What is this? OMG. MOS. 5. CTN. BBL8R. ILU. WYWH. It sounds like a foreign language. Like a…a code or something. Are you hiding something from me? ( Amanda takes the phone back. ) AMANDA: OMG you are so boring. MOTHER: I want to know what you’re talking about. AMANDA: I’m making plans with Jimmy. Though Amanda’s mother reads the text messages, she doesn’t understand their meaning. The scene operates on two levels: it is a humorous exchange that underscores the generational differences between mother and child while, simultaneously, emphasizing Amanda’s obsession with the coded language of texts. Later, Amanda’s teacher Ms. D uses her student’s preoccupation with texting as a means of engaging her interest in a technology career in cryptography. The goal of this project, as theatre for social change, was to create transformation on the part of audience members who experience the play—about intentional and unintentional barriers that can be imposed upon and internalized by young people in the pursuit of their dreams about careers in the IT field. Eileen Trauth was focused on ensuring that the characters and the story arc in the play communicated research findings about gender barriers in the IT field and embodied the theoretical constructs of a gender theory that she developed and that was used in the research that inspired the play. According to this theory, The Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT, the underrepresentation of women and gender minorities in the IT field can be explained by the interaction of three sets of factors (theoretical constructs). The first is individual identity: demographic characteristics (such as age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socio-economic class) and type of IT work (such as computer hardware development, software design, or user support). The second factor is individual influences: personal characteristics (such as personality traits and abilities) and personal influences (such as role models and mentors). The third factor is environmental influences (such as cultural norms about gender roles). [19] Even though this project was undertaken to communicate the results of scientific research about gender barriers, the play had to satisfy aesthetic requirements as well. Suzanne Trauth had primary responsibility for writing the play script. She focused on ensuring that its aesthetic design created forward momentum with believable characters who live through a discernible story arc shaped by strong conflicts that force the characters to act to achieve objectives. The higher the dramatic stakes, the greater would be the audience engagement during a performance. Hence, a script was needed that would generate a high level of engagement during its performance in order to achieve the goal of societal transformation through awareness, attitude change, and intended behavior regarding gender barriers in the IT field. In the play, three girls—Khadi, Theresa, and Amanda—are high school students confronting an uncertain future: whether or not to go to college and, if they decide to, what they would study and how to make that happen. They are encouraged by Ms. D., the dynamic teacher of their Digital Design course, to explore the male-dominated fields of information and computer technology—computer science, computer engineering, and information science. In doing so, they begin to discover their places in the world while they struggle with the obstacles—personal, family, and academic—that might prevent them from following their dreams. The play focuses on the conflicts faced by all three protagonists: Theresa’s desire to attend college versus her father’s demand that she work in a hair salon with her cousin; Amanda’s blossoming interest in higher education versus her mother’s low expectations—and her boyfriend’s priorities—for Amanda’s future; and Khadi’s confusion about her choice of college versus the instability of her home life and lack of appropriate mentorship. iDream has a single plot with three threads that are woven together as the three friends face life decisions. By graduation day, Theresa has asserted her independence, Amanda has traded an early marriage for college, and Khadi has found her mentor in an empathetic boyfriend. In view of our goal, the interacting arcs of the three primary characters drove the narrative and textual foundations that held the production together. The integration of their three stories and the personal, academic, and familial barriers they confront as they face the challenges of planning for life after high school become the scaffolding upon which the moment-to-moment actions of the play unfold. Their objectives drive the narrative. The conflicts raised in the play reflect the range of obstacles discovered as a result of the research on barriers to careers in STEM for women and underrepresented groups. Theresa struggles with cultural and parental expectations. Her father is focused on the short term economic benefits of Theresa’s employment immediately after graduating high school. He does not see the long term economic benefits from Theresa remaining out of the labor force for four years while in college. Khadi confronts a lack of consistent mentoring about her future. And Amanda must tackle low parental expectations that affect her self-esteem. THERESA: Papi tells me to get my nose out of the books and learn to do something practical so I can earn money for the family. KHADI: Dad would say “yeah” but Mom is worried about money. I would need a scholarship or something. AMANDA ( mimics her mother ): Mom says, “I’m not wasting good money on college when I’m not sure you’ll even graduate high school.” All performance elements play a crucial role in the dissemination of the research findings. The story arcs of the characters express the results of the research: as the three girls confront personal and social barriers to achieving their goals, they embody the questions and concerns raised in the course of the interviews undertaken by Eileen Trauth. This storytelling, in turn, triggers audience engagement, via personal empathy during the performance and the public discussion afterward. Art and science converge in an exploration of career opportunities in the twenty-first century, and barriers that might hold people back. The focus is not so much on overt barriers that are imposed on individuals; rather the play dramatizes the process by which a young woman might unconsciously internalize limits on her dreams. Research-Informed Theatre Two forms of research were involved in this project. One form of research was the field study of women working with IT that produced the theoretical constructs and findings about the gender imbalance. These findings were, in turn, embodied in the characters and story line of iDream . The characters are a composite of the stories told by the adults about barriers they experienced and observed over the course of their lives, and the constructs of the theory used in the research. The other form of research was the process of obtaining and incorporating feedback into the writing and revising of the play script. Hence, the relationship of the audience to the performance was an integral part of this project. It was through audience engagement that this second kind of research was accomplished. The transformation of a scientific product into a theatrical process was intended to enact transformative learning through relational aesthetics in the experience of reading, performing, or viewing the play: to build awareness, change attitudes, and motivate behaviors and actions. The goal was to shift perspectives about individual, environmental, and social forces at work in creating barriers for women in technology fields. According to Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies, and a professor in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at The University of Georgia, societal transformation is a movement to change oppressive forces and begins with investigating the ways the forces form and operate. [20] Jack Mezirow notes: Transformative learning refers to the process by which we transform our taken-for-granted frames of reference . . . to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action.[21] The need for societal transformation is evident in the data about both the significant underrepresentation of women and gender minorities (e.g., black men and LGBTQ individuals) in STEM fields such as IT and in the hegemonic masculine culture that pervades the high tech world. [22] Two groups of individuals are the focus of the societal transformation: those who are experiencing and internalizing the barriers and those who are in a position to tear them down. The development of the play script involved the creation of an initial draft based on the results of Eileen Trauth’s fieldwork and her interactions Suzanne Trauth. This was followed by two workshopping sessions and a series of public staged readings of iDream . Following each of these, the play script was subsequently revised. The script was first workshopped with actors at a table reading with Suzanne Trauth, Eileen Trauth, the director, and the dramaturg in attendance. The goal of this session was for Suzanne, the director, and Eileen to hear the play being read for the first time. The second script workshop occurred a month later on a stage in front of a small audience comprised of teachers, college students, and high school students. The project team observed the script being presented in a staged reading format and gained initial audience feedback on the script. Six staged readings of the play with professional (i.e., Equity) actors in front of public audiences were then held in 2012. The first staged reading was in June 2012 for an audience of several hundred NSF-funded STEM researchers. In October 2012 the remaining five staged readings in front of public audiences were held, three in New Jersey and two in Pennsylvania. Each performance was followed by audience talkback sessions held immediately afterward. Following each event, the script was revised. The final version of the play was completed in 2013. The New Jersey performances were held at Premiere Stages in Union, New Jersey. The audiences for the two daytime performances were recruited from high schools in Jersey City, Elizabeth, and in and near Union. The students came from urban schools that have significant ethnic and socio-economic diversity in the student bodies. Suzanne Trauth and John Wooten, Producing Artistic Director of Premiere Stages (who was also a consultant on this project) invited theatre teachers in these high schools to bring their students. The third performance took place on a Saturday evening as part of a new playwrights series with an audience consisting of adults who came to see the staged reading of a new play; the subject matter of iDream was not the main motivator for attendance. The two Pennsylvania performances were held on a Saturday night and a Sunday afternoon at the State Theatre in State College, Pennsylvania. The audiences for these performances were recruited from newspaper announcements, posts to email listservs, and an interview by a local television station with Eileen Trauth, Suzanne Trauth, and the director. The performances were also listed among the upcoming events on the theatre’s website. Audience members at all five performances were presented with a pretest and an informed consent form to sign, both of which provided background information about the project. In addition, immediately preceding each performance, the director came onto the stage and gave a brief introduction to the project and the play. We achieved engagement with the target audience by writing the script in such a way as to build empathy with the characters, by relating the storyline to the audience members’ own experiences, and enabling them to “see themselves” in the unfolding drama. In this way, audience members were drawn into the circumstances in iDream . Audience members’ connection, in a visceral way, to the play provided the emotional energy moving the story along to the climactic moment. THERESA ( proudly ): My trigonometry exam. I got 99 out of 100. ( Father reluctantly takes the paper and studies it. ) FERNANDO: 99 out of 100. ( teases ) Why not 100 out of 100? But what will you do with 99 out of 100 in your cousin Maria’s beauty shop? This trigonometry will help you cut hair? ( He hands the paper back to Theresa. ) THERESA: I was thinking about college— FERNANDO: No, Theresita. You will go to beauty school. You will have a trade that you can be proud of. You will be able to help your family. In America we have a better life. It has been hard and I work many long hours. But I do it for you and Mami and Imelda and Juan. Theresita, I know you are smart. But you must do this for the family. THERESA: But things change and it is different here now. FERNANDO: Your family never changes. THERESA: I could get a scholarship. FERNANDO: No Theresa! You cannot give any information to the school about our family. You must NEVER talk about us to [outsiders.] Do not betray your family. THERESA: But Papi, this is our country now. They are not outsiders— FERNANDO: No. Come and set the table. No more talk of [outsiders]. And no more talk of numbers. ( He leaves. Theresa presses the exam to her heart. ) During the talkback sessions, audience members, who had experienced being devalued as a woman or person of color, were emotional in their responses; they related the characters to their own lives. Two sub goals were embedded in the overall goal of stimulating awareness, understanding, attitude change, and activism. One sub goal was to generate awareness about types of careers in a field that has been stereotyped as being the exclusive domain of men. The second sub goal was to create awareness about both overt and subtle barriers to participation in the IT field, which are experienced by members of underrepresented gender groups. Karen Keifer-Boyd was responsible for designing and implementing the learning assessment. Research-informed theater can be transformative learning if the relational aesthetic experience of a performance “exposes a discrepancy between what a person has always assumed to be true and what has just been experienced, heard, or read.” [23] Consequently, Karen designed an assessment to gauge changed assumptions and attitudes about women in the IT field by audience members who attended the staged readings of iDream . Three forms of data constituted the audience learning gains assessment. First, audience members were asked to complete a pre-survey form consisting of open-ended questions. Second, at the end of each staged reading, Eileen Trauth, Suzanne Trauth, the director, and actors responded to questions and comments from the audience members during a talkback session. Karen Keifer-Boyd and a graduate student attended the staged readings and took handwritten notes regarding audience responses during these sessions. A third form of data came from a follow-up online survey that was sent to audience members who had completed the pre-survey. Responses during the talkback sessions and follow-up survey consistently showed that iDream “speaks” to the audience. One mother revealed, “I didn’t know the computer field was so broad.” A Latino actor commented that one of the characters “behaved just as my mother did.” An adult Latina audience member said: “The play was telling my life.” Some women audience members related the play to their own experiences of gender stereotyping and being dissuaded from IT careers, or not being given the same opportunities as their male counterparts. One woman audience member “strongly identified with Theresa because it brought back memories of being the oldest in an Italian family and being expected to help the family [rather than undertake a career].” Audience members revealed that after experiencing the staged reading iDream they were now aware that the IT field is available to women and underrepresented minorities and showed some evidence of change in their perceptions of who can pursue IT careers. For example, an audience member stated, “The careers were presented as really accessible in the play.” One student stated, “Students play games but they don’t think about how they’re made. The play did a good job of presenting careers.” A 41 year-old woman responded on the post-survey, “After the play I know they [IT professionals] do more than just ‘develop software,’ which was my original answer.” The audience members also revealed awareness of implicit and explicit barriers that can be both imposed and internalized. They identified with the characters, or knew people and experiences reflected in the play. A mother in the audience stated, “My daughter is nine and when she was five she told me that other kids told her math is not for girls. This play showed the options in the computer field.” Another area of awareness was about resources, particularly the role of teachers in helping underrepresented groups overcome restrictive stereotypes. Nearly all of the respondents in the post-survey mentioned the significance of the teacher in the play as encouraging the three female characters to pursue college and careers in IT. A male audience member stated, “I am pleasantly amazed with the presentation of representing a message in art. … This play spoke to … a dream deferred because the barriers are there, but the story also presented opportunities.” We are aware that identifying the arts as a venue to articulate women’s experience of barriers in STEM might perpetuate a stereotype of the arts as a feminized discipline in contrast to the masculine STEM fields. Throughout the life of this project, which included talkback sessions following the six staged readings and seven presentations at a diverse set of conference venues, there were numerous opportunities for this issue to be raised. Yet it never was. But this doesn’t invalidate the concern. Indeed, Eileen Trauth, in her capacity as a scholarly journal reviewer, has encountered this arts-feminine/science-masculine stereotyping in manuscripts she reviews. For this reason, we believe that it is best to anticipate the potential for this issue being raised and to be prepared to address it in discussions and workshops that accompany future performances of the play. Enacting transformative learning through relational aesthetics in theatre for social change is not to prescribe or expect specific behavior changes. Rather, it is a pedagogical design of this play project that awareness and attitude change set in motion behavior changes specific to each individual’s life and circumstances. For example, one female high school student related the character of Theresa in the play to her brother, who has an interest in gaming and graphic design. She intends to tell her brother he could make a career out of developing video games. A high school teacher “appreciated seeing the struggles of students at home and the different cultures represented, so I can understand and help get students through graduation.” Several audience members recommended that all high school students should see the play. For example, a college professor recommended to all in attendance at one of the staged readings that all first-year college students should see the play because “there’s confusion about STEM—everyone thinks it’s too hard.” A student asked that the script be made available to schools “so they could perform it. Another asked about courses for her daughter to take that would help her “attack gender bias in the IT community.” Transformative learning, a goal of this project as theatre for social change, is “behaving, talking, and thinking in a way that is congruent with transformed assumptions or perspectives.” [24] Assessment of the impact of experiencing staged readings of iDream indicates pedagogical potential for transformative learning. The accessibility of the play script, not only literally by downloading from the play website, but also in the familiar dramatic aesthetics of its construction, lends it the potential for societal transformation through widespread education of high school students, parents, teachers, and counselors about the overt as well as the subtle barriers to participation in the IT field that confront women and other underrepresented groups. Postscript At the conclusion of the project a website was created to make the iDream play script available to those interested in reading and/or performing the play ( www.iDreamThePlay.com ). The final version of the play script became available to the public in 2014. The website also provides resource materials related to overcoming gender barriers in the IT field, such as a short video about the project and interviews with cast and production personnel. These materials offer an opportunity for both documenting and disseminating the performance, and for analyzing the performance process. Three questions accompanying the video convey the learning objectives of the play. How do we help people become aware of the subtle barriers that exist in our society, ones that are often unconsciously internalized, that hold young people back? How do we engage students in thinking about college and careers in science and technology? How do we awaken them to the possibility of creating their own individual dreams—and acting on them? As high schools, community groups, and universities perform the play or do in-class readings, these three questions can guide group discussion, providing a pedagogical design to be adapted to particular groups and places. The goal for the artist working toward relational aesthetics is to create an event or set in motion a social experience, which is the actors’ and audience’s experience of the art. In this project, the play script is the vehicle for creating art as experience. Groups can read and perform the script together and then work with the prompts and resources on the play’s website to reflect on their attitudes, perceptions, and positionality in relation to the IT field. The “Resources” section on the play website was created in response to audience members’ requests for a place to learn more about IT careers. Resources include information about information technology careers, organizations of underrepresented groups in information technology, and articles about theatre and STEM. The website is an important way for high school teachers to learn about the play and to produce a staged reading or full production in their schools. It provides a way to advance knowledge and practice, and enable others to build upon the results of the project. Through dialogue and research motivated by the play, further awareness, attitude change, and transformative learning with intended and actualized behaviors toward addressing gender barriers in STEM fields are the ultimate goals of the generative pedagogical design. From Karen Keifer-Boyd’s perspective as an arts educator who teaches students how to teach new media art, the benefit of working cross disciplinarily lies in the potential of the play script as education and art, to be used to challenge gender inequities in the IT field. Within her discipline she sees the potential for girls to be motivated to creatively play with technology as a mechanism for opening their minds to possible careers with technology. She believes society and institutions need to encourage such play. For Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, framing the issues of gender equality in the context of theatre reminds all involved in the process that these issues are not unique to the STEM fields. The American theatre has long struggled to establish gender parity with regard to the production of plays by female playwrights. That struggle is in the process of being addressed in recent years with the Dramatists Guild’s initiation of The Count, an ongoing study that explores the question of who is being produced in American theatres. In the November/December 2015 issue of The Dramatist , the organization presented for the first time three years of data from regional theatres across the country: only 22% of the plays produced from the regional sample were written by women. Meaningfully, playwright Marsha Norman, the author of the article, suggested that “if life worked like the theatre, four out of five things you had ever heard would have been said by men.” [25] Clearly, the American theatre has a distance to travel in achieving gender equality on its stages. In confronting the STEM issues, the artistic side of the collaboration is reminded that the goal of gender parity crosses disciplines. By the end of the project we came to see that it was really just the beginning. We had embarked upon this project with the goal of producing a play script as a way to disseminate Eileen Trauth’s research findings. The National Science Foundation funding supported development of a play script, and the production of a series of staged readings in order to obtain developmental audience feedback that would inform a subsequent revision of the script. That project is completed and the play script is currently available at the iDream website for those interested in reading or presenting a full production of the play. But we now view our original project as the inaugural steps of a longer-term mission. Eileen Trauth and Suzanne Trauth are currently exploring an expansion of this venture to broaden access to the story begun in iDream by using video story-telling and interactivity as options for greater engagement with the subject matter for a wider variety of audiences. References [1] This work was supported by three grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF #1039546 , NSF #0204246 , NSF # 0733747). We would like to thank, in particular, Dr. Jolene Jesse at the National Science Foundation for her encouragement to pursue this project. [2] N. Bourriaud, Esthétique Relationnelle/Relational Aesthetics , trans. by S. Pleasance and F. Woods (Dijon, France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002). [3] See, for example: Eileen M. Trauth, “The Role of Theory in Gender and Information Systems Research,” Information & Organization 23, no. 4 (2013): 277-93. Eileen M. Trauth, “Are There Enough Seats for Women at the IT Table?” ACM Inroads 3, no. 4 (2012): 49-54. Eileen M. Trauth, and Debra Howcroft, “Critical Empirical Research in IS: An Example of Gender and IT,” Information Technology and People 19, no. 3 (2006): 272-92. [4] See: Diane Conrad, “Exploring Risky Youth Experiences: Popular Theatre as a Participatory, Performative Research Method,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 3, no. 1 (2004): Article 2. Retrieved from http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/3_1/pdf/conrad.pdf . Susan Denman, James Pearson, Deborah Moody, Pauline Davis, and Richard Madeley, “Theatre in Education on HIV and AIDS: A Controlled Study of Schoolchildren’s Knowledge and Attitudes,” Health Education Journal 54, no. 3 (1995): 3-17. Jeff Nisker, Douglas. K. Martin, Robyn Bluhm, and Abdallah S. Daar, “Theatre as a Public Engagement Tool for Health-Policy Development,” Health Policy 78, no. 2 (2006): 258-71 . [5] James Thompson, and Richard Schechner, “Why Social Theatre?” The Drama Review 48, no. 3 (2004): 11-16. [6] Sarah Thornton, “What is Theatre for Social Change?” in From the Personal to the Political: Theatre for Social Change in the 21 st Century with Particular Reference to the Work of Collective Encounters: A Review of Relevant Literature (Liverpool: Collective Encounters’ Research Lab). [7] S. M. Trauth, and L.S. Brenner, eds. Katrina on Stage: Five plays ( Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). [8] Applied Theatre Action Institute. 2015. Retrieved from http://appliedtheater.org/ . [9] Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York, NY: TCG Books, 1993). [10] Tara Goldstein, Julia Gray, Jennifer Salisbury, and Pamela Snell, “When Qualitative Research Meets Theater: The Complexities of Performed Ethnography and Research-Informed Theater Project Design,” Qualitative Inquiry 20, no. 5 (2014): 674-685, 674. [11] Kimmika L.H. Williams-Witherspoon, “On SHOT!: A Rationale for Resesarch and Dramas Depicting Violence in the ‘Hood’,” Theatre Topics 23, no. 2 (2013): 169-83. [12] Tim Prentki, and Sheila Preston, eds. The Applied Theatre Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009), 12. [13] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2007). [14] Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed. [15] Personal copy from the author. [16] National Science Foundation, Informal Science Education (#1039546). [17] National Science Foundation, “A Field Study of Individual Differences in the Social Shaping of Gender and IT” (#0204246). [18] For further explanation see: Eileen M. Trauth, “Odd Girl Out: An Individual Differences Perspective on Women in the IT Profession,” Information Technology and People 1, no. 2 (2002): 98-118. [19] See: Eileen M. Trauth, Jeria L. Quesenberry, and Haiyan Huang, “Retaining Women in the U.S. IT Workforce: Theorizing the Influence of Organizational Factors,” European Journal of Information Systems 18 (2009): 476-97. [20] Juanita Johnson-Bailey, “Positionality and Transformative Learning: A Tale of Inclusion and Exclusion,” in The Handbook of Transformative Learning: Theory, Research and Practice , edited by Edward W. Taylor, and Patricia Cranton (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2012), 260-73. [21] Jack Mezirow, “Learning to Think Like an Adult,” in Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress , edited by Jack Mezirow & Associates (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 7-8. [22] Claire Cain Miller, “Technology’s Man Problem” The New York Times , April 2014. [23] Patricia Cranton, “Teaching for Transformation,” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 93 (2002): 63-71, 66. [24] Ibid, 66. [25] Marsha Norman, “Why the Count Matters,” The Dramatist , Nov/Dec, 2015. Footnotes About The Author(s) Eileen Trauth is professor of information sciences & technology, and women’s gender & sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She conducts research on societal, cultural and organizational influences on the information technology profession with a special focus on gender and social inclusion. She held the 2008 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, and served on the scientific advisory board for Female Empowerment in Science & Technology Academia (FESTA) , a European Union project to increase female academic participation in science and technology. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Australian Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland. She is editor of the Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology and editor-in-chief of Information Systems Journal. ( www.eileentrauth.com ) Karen Keifer-Boyd is professor of art education and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She was the 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, and received a Fulbright in 2006 for research in Finland on intersections of art and technology. Her writings on feminist pedagogy, visual culture, inclusion, cyberart activism, transcultural dialogues, action research, social justice arts-based research, and identity are in more than 50 peer-reviewed research publications, and translated into several languages. She co-authored Including Difference: A Communitarian Approach to Art Education in the Least Restrictive Environment (NAEA, 2013); InCITE, InSIGHT, InSITE [ amazon.com ] (NAEA, 2008); Engaging Visual Culture [ davisart.com ] (Davis, 2007); and co-edited Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professors Never Told You [ amazon.com ] (Falmer, 2000). ( www.personal.psu.edu/ktk2/ ) Suzanne Trauth is a playwright, novelist and screenwriter. Her plays include Françoise , which received staged readings at Luna Stage and Nora’s Playhouse and was nominated for the Kilroy List; Midwives developed at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey; Rehearsing Desire ; iDream , supported by the National Science Foundation’s STEM initiative; and Katrina: the K Word . She is a member of Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey Emerging Women Playwrights program and the Dramatists Guild. She wrote and directed the short film Jigsaw , nominated for best film in the shorts category at the PF3 Film Festival and screened at New Filmmakers, NY. Ms. Trauth has co-authored Sonia Moore and American Acting Training and co-edited Katrina on Stage: Five Plays. Her novels include Show Time and Time Out . ( www.suzannetrauth.com .) 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: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Clay Sanderson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Clay Sanderson By Published on April 15, 2023 Download Article as PDF The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto’s collection of historical essays from a wide array of scholars may at first seem to retread familiar territory, but the editors are determined to make this volume original and relevant. In their Introduction’s first paragraph, the co-editors emphasize “an urgency to disrupt traditional historiography that perpetuates hierarchies of power and privileges overwhelmingly white male voices” (1), and for the most part, their disruption is successful. While American theatre in the second half of the twentieth century has been extensively recorded, the editors provide some new resources, deliberately highlighting the contributions of BIPOC and female artists; they also avoid the usual trap of forgetting that professional American theatre goes far beyond the island of Manhattan. Critical essays discuss relevant cultural history of each period, which frames what was happening on stage in the context of what was then happening in the United States at the time. This absorbing volume is broken into three parts: Commercial and Mainstream Theatre, The Regional Theatre Movement, and Experimental Theatre and Other Forms of Entertainment. Each section includes three to four essays, written predominantly by leading scholars of theatre studies. For instance, the first section includes Susan C.W. Abbotson’s chapter, “Broadway Post-1945 to 1960: Shifting Perspectives.” This exemplary essay outlines how after War World II, America adopted a new identity as a leading world superpower and boasted “a growing middle class determined to grasp a bright new American future” that was “modeled around the perfect nuclear family, while holding at bay the demons of communism, the atom bomb, and juvenile delinquency” (21). Simultaneously, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and subsequent Sexual Behavior in the Human Female book-length studies shocked people across the country with his revelation of a stark contrast between what conservative Americans believed their society to be and the reality of what their neighbors were actually doing behind closed doors. These contrasting ideologies, Abbotson argues, are partly responsible for the popularity of the work of such playwrights as Tennessee Williams, who titillated Broadway audiences with his frank portrayal of the sexuality of both those on the outskirts of society and those making up its family-based middle class. Abbotson references influential plays by Eugene O’Neill, Thorton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and William Inge, as well as musicals by the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe, which featured the work of innovative producers, directors, and choreographers such as Hal Prince, George Abbott, and Jerome Robbins. Yet the editors’ mandate for a more inclusive theater history is modeled by this same chapter’s focus on female contributors to the Golden Age of Broadway. Abbotson includes artists such as Federal Theatre head Hallie Flanagan, acclaimed Shakespearean director Margaret Webster, musical theatre director Mary Hunter, and Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford, among others. She also considers some of the African-American theatre that was happening Off-Broadway–including works by such playwrights as William Branch, Loften Mitchell, and Alice Childress who are frequently left out of New York theatre history. Thus, the Cambridge Companion reflects on how disparate theater-makers, communities in America and perspectives intersect. In Part II, the section on regional theatre, Elizabeth A. Osborne uses her chapter “Money Matters: Dismantling the Narrative of the Rise of Regional Theatre” to correct the accounts ofearly historians of the regional theatre movement such as Martin Gottfried and Joseph Zeigler, arguing that “(h)istoriographically…the existing narrative has gone largely uninterrogated for too long” (136). Traditional narratives chronicle regional theatre as an attempt in the 1940’s and 50’s to decentralize New York City within the professional theatre world, striving to give audiences amore avant-garde alternative to Broadway and its tours, only for many organizations to eventually succumb to the economic need to model commercial theatre’s values despite their non-profit status. Osborne argues that this narrative “oversimplifies a complex web of artistic goals, economic and administrative structures, and relationships with local communities” (138). Osborne centers women as the true forgers of the regional theatre movement, detailing the founding of Theatre ’47 in Dallas by Margo Jones, the Alley Theatre in Houston by Nina Vance, and the Arena Stage in Washington D.C. by Zelda Fichandler. Part II also includes an important essay by Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “When and Where They Enter: Black and Brown Voices in American Theatre.” This wide-ranging chapter chronicles the Black Arts movement as propelled by Larry Neal, the Chicano Theatre movement as led by Luis Valdez, and the seminal work of BIPOC playwrights such as Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, and María Irene Fornés. Carpenter nicely balances the importance of these artists’ contributions to the transformation of American theatre, noting that some of these writers (particularly Valdez and Baraka) were “products of their time” who “were not always inclusive in terms of intracultural representation”(161) such that their own biases upheld a male, heteronormative worldview. Part III’s focus on “experimental” theatre and beyond also finds meaningful ways to refocus history away from male-centered institutions. Although in Timothy Youker’s essay “Experimental Collectives of the 1960’s and The Legacies” we are treated to the requisite exploration of how the likes of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud deeply influenced non-commercial and regional theatre collectives from the San Francisco Mime Troupe to the Living Theatre in New York City, eventually leading to such modern groups as Moisés Kaufman’s Tectonic Theatre Project, Youker also chronicles the contributions of female-centric troupes suchas Anne Bogart’s SITI company and The Five Lesbian Brothers. This well-researched, more inclusive vision of the experimental theatre movement demonstrates the wide-range of non-traditional performances practices that have drawn in diverse audiences outside commercial theatre. The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945 will benefit established scholars and theatre history students. It incisively summarizes the contributions of the most well-known theatre artists of the past seven decades, as well as many who history has overlooked. Framing diversity of representation as critical to scholarship, this volume considers previously underrepresented perspectives and players in theatre history scholarship. Equally, this volume practices theater historiography: questioning what we think we know, and reinvestigating it with an eye towards the future. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CLAY SANDERSON Arizona State University 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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage 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 By Areeg Ibrahim 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:

Watch Transindigenous Assembly by Joulia Strauss at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. This documentary concerns queer aboriginal and indigenous artists and their inventions of the “good life”. Many indigenous peoples have in common that they embrace trees, drink the sun, talk to the plants, worship their ancestors, and, in order to daydream, forge their own bridges to the sky – just as we will be during the film. Transindigenous Assembly takes us on a journey from knowledge-rich island to knowledge-rich island, guided by Joulia Strauss who plays an Ancient Greek lyre along the way while narrating this “Odyssey” from the perspective of an ecofeminist Siren. In this film you will meet artists who have remained in their indigenous communities or have variously returned to them and the forms of knowledge they offer. You will meet master teachers whose outstanding teachings on light are as precise as any mathematics. You will meet Aboriginal cultural workers who have emancipated themselves solely through the power of their art, and Amazonian curanderas who work miracles despite the shaman business. Living on the receiving end of the Empire, they have invented lives worth living. The idea of bringing all these protagonists together in one film is intended to inspire an alternative planetary politics. The film also proposes an epistemic and pedagogical shift to help education adapt to these times of failed systems of governances and life on a privatized planet. The people featured in the film include: filmmaker and activist Sonal Jain, co-founder of the Desire Machine Collective, Assam; Dharmendra Prasad, founder of the Harvest School; Surendar Kshatriya, founder of the Barefoot Nature movement; Syriademmah, who with his shamanic drum from Iran synchronizes the rhythm of our hearts with Gaia; the queer Aboriginal Sista Girls Buffy Warlapinni and Nicole Miller, who have emancipated themselves from the conservative structure of their tribe and made their life in the settlement more bearable by printing ancestral patterns with natural colours on fabric and opening the Tiwi Design Centre, Tiwi Islands, Australia; Khien Phuc, founder of the Cambodian Lotus Center, who has rescued land from the clutches of real estate speculators and built a free school for the Takmao village; Albenis Tique Poleska, an indigenous leader from the Pijao tribe in Columbia who is part of a long tradition of midwifery and, being raised in Cauca, helps navigates peace processes; Maestra Justina Serrano Alvares, who has been at home doing jungle diets all her life, deliberately not giving in to the educational system; and Maestro Wiler, who shares with us important warnings and bits of advice about the globalization of jungle knowledge. The author of the film, Joulia Strauss, was herself born and raised as Mari, one of Europe’s last remaining indigenous cultures with a shamanic tradition, located at the very edge of Eastern Europe. The Mari people have successfully resisted the Czar, Stalin, and now Putin. The intention of the film was to use the privilege of being able to travel and to meet other indigenous peoples around the planet to tell them about the existence of “Indigenous Russia” (no other member of the Mari tribe has ever travelled to any other indigenous community), to exchange songs, cosmovisions, techniques of survival, notions of good life, and to ask whether they also feel that the time has come to unite; and last but not least, to invite them to be professors at the Avtonomi Akadimia, a university for transformation in Athens. During the editing process, which took place during the Covid19 lockdown, the second phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, inducing many indigenous cultures living inside of the Russian “Federation” to unite for the first time in history. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Transindigenous Assembly At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Joulia Strauss Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th, at 5:15pm. 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 Germany Language English Running Time 85 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film This documentary concerns queer aboriginal and indigenous artists and their inventions of the “good life”. Many indigenous peoples have in common that they embrace trees, drink the sun, talk to the plants, worship their ancestors, and, in order to daydream, forge their own bridges to the sky – just as we will be during the film. Transindigenous Assembly takes us on a journey from knowledge-rich island to knowledge-rich island, guided by Joulia Strauss who plays an Ancient Greek lyre along the way while narrating this “Odyssey” from the perspective of an ecofeminist Siren. In this film you will meet artists who have remained in their indigenous communities or have variously returned to them and the forms of knowledge they offer. You will meet master teachers whose outstanding teachings on light are as precise as any mathematics. You will meet Aboriginal cultural workers who have emancipated themselves solely through the power of their art, and Amazonian curanderas who work miracles despite the shaman business. Living on the receiving end of the Empire, they have invented lives worth living. The idea of bringing all these protagonists together in one film is intended to inspire an alternative planetary politics. The film also proposes an epistemic and pedagogical shift to help education adapt to these times of failed systems of governances and life on a privatized planet. The people featured in the film include: filmmaker and activist Sonal Jain, co-founder of the Desire Machine Collective, Assam; Dharmendra Prasad, founder of the Harvest School; Surendar Kshatriya, founder of the Barefoot Nature movement; Syriademmah, who with his shamanic drum from Iran synchronizes the rhythm of our hearts with Gaia; the queer Aboriginal Sista Girls Buffy Warlapinni and Nicole Miller, who have emancipated themselves from the conservative structure of their tribe and made their life in the settlement more bearable by printing ancestral patterns with natural colours on fabric and opening the Tiwi Design Centre, Tiwi Islands, Australia; Khien Phuc, founder of the Cambodian Lotus Center, who has rescued land from the clutches of real estate speculators and built a free school for the Takmao village; Albenis Tique Poleska, an indigenous leader from the Pijao tribe in Columbia who is part of a long tradition of midwifery and, being raised in Cauca, helps navigates peace processes; Maestra Justina Serrano Alvares, who has been at home doing jungle diets all her life, deliberately not giving in to the educational system; and Maestro Wiler, who shares with us important warnings and bits of advice about the globalization of jungle knowledge. The author of the film, Joulia Strauss, was herself born and raised as Mari, one of Europe’s last remaining indigenous cultures with a shamanic tradition, located at the very edge of Eastern Europe. The Mari people have successfully resisted the Czar, Stalin, and now Putin. The intention of the film was to use the privilege of being able to travel and to meet other indigenous peoples around the planet to tell them about the existence of “Indigenous Russia” (no other member of the Mari tribe has ever travelled to any other indigenous community), to exchange songs, cosmovisions, techniques of survival, notions of good life, and to ask whether they also feel that the time has come to unite; and last but not least, to invite them to be professors at the Avtonomi Akadimia, a university for transformation in Athens. During the editing process, which took place during the Covid19 lockdown, the second phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, inducing many indigenous cultures living inside of the Russian “Federation” to unite for the first time in history. About The Artist(s) Joulia Strauss, artist and activist, lives and works in Athens and Berlin. Her sculptures, paintings, performances, drawings, and video works have been displayed in solo and group exhibitions at the Pergamon Museum and the Martin-Gropius-Bau, in Berlin, and at the Tate Modern, in London, as well as at the Tirana Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Athens Biennale, the Kyiv Biennial, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and documenta14, among others. She plays a reconstruction of an Ancient Greek lyre and sings healing songs in Ancient Greek, Mari, and many other languages. Strauss practices Việt Võ Đạo Kung Fu and is training for her fourth stripe. In 2024 she founded Avtonomi Akadimia, a durational artwork and grassroots university that she organizes in the Akadimia Platonos, Athens Get in touch with the artist(s) jouliastrauss@gmx.de and follow them on social media www-joulia-strauss.net http://joulia-strauss.net/2024-transindigenous-assembly/ 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

Nic Barilar Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 Nic Barilar By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF In September of 1960, St. Vincent Troubridge, the Assistant Examiner of Plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office—the United Kingdom’s theatre censor—submitted his report recommending a license for a production of Irish writer Seán O’Casey’s comedy The Drums of Father Ned . Troubridge details how he arrived at his recommendation, explaining he “approached this play with circumspection,” because “I remembered that its banning by the Archbishop of Dublin caused the collapse of last year’s [ sic ] Dublin Festival of Drama.”(1) Indeed, not the prior year but two years earlier, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid refused permission for a mass to open the 1958 spring cultural festival, An Tóstal , after learning that the Dublin International Theatre Festival (part of An Tóstal ) would include a new O’Casey play and an adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses . Media soon reported McQuaid’s decision. O’Casey took the news with only mild irritation since, as far as he knew, the festival still planned to produce his work. When O’Casey received a letter from producers at the theatre where his comedy was to perform requesting he give the director authority to alter the play, O’Casey revoked his permission and claimed he was the victim of a church ban. This, together with the festival’s own ejection of Ulysses , led Samuel Beckett to pull his contributions to the festival in solidarity. Without headliners, the organizers cancelled the 1958 theatre festival.(2) Troubridge’s report reveals a key insight on censorship that has gone under-theorized: reading a text with the memory that it was banned can change or even shape its reception. Troubridge explains that the play’s censorship made him “read the play with extreme care” in order to “steer a course between accepting too readily the opinion of a possibly reactionary Irish cleric and giving offence to” UK Catholics. What he found was criticism of Irish clergymen as bigoted and out of touch with their flocks. Troubridge argues, “though it is understandable that the Archbishop of Dublin may not like it, it should cause no more offence to the Catholic Church than if one remarked that Alexander Borgia was not a perfect Pope.”(3) Troubridge specifically read with imagined differences between Ireland and the UK in mind, interpreted the play through Irish censorship, and judged its suitability within British legality and sensibilities. This comparison of national values raises pressing questions about the role that the memory of censorship performs when it adheres to cultural objects: How do such memories contribute to the interpretation of the object’s representations? How do acts of censorship continue to impact cultural objects and their reception long after and far away from the initiating act of censorship? What is the political effect of engaging with censorship history as an interpretive tool? These questions become thornier when considered through not just a textual reading of O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned , but also its world premiere performance by the amateur Lafayette Little Theatre in Indiana in 1959. Unlike Troubridge, the Hoosiers in attendance had no “natural” memory of the play’s censorship. Rather, the artists constructed their own. Through advertising, publicity, and program notes, the Lafayette Little Theatre (LLT) built what Alison Landsberg calls “prosthetic memory”: cultural memory acquired through media engagement rather than lived experiences or familial/national descent.(4) This prosthetic memory of censorship took the form of a narrative about O’Casey’s play, Ireland, and America, too. Ireland became an imagined space of oppression against which the Americans were invited to interpret and contrast themselves. After all, it was in America where O’Casey’s play was performed. In this way, the LLT’s narrative around the production participated in Cold War-era discourses of American exceptionalism. Although the artificial memory of censorship gave the audience a way to interpret O’Casey’s play, the Ireland performed onstage sometimes clashed with the narratives that the memory projected, challenging the LLT’s underlying assumptions about Ireland and America. While reviews are limited, memory and performance studies methodologies can help theorize the cultural work the production undertook. Not only is The Drums of Father Ned deeply Irish, it’s also deeply leftist. Ironically, by inviting the Cold War Hoosiers to interpret the play through the lens provided by the memory of censorship, the LLT’s performance of Father Ned ’s communist sympathies held the potential to reflexively highlight Lafayette’s memories of anticommunism. These competing memories convoluted O’Casey’s play, yielding ambivalence. While Landsberg studies the way prosthetic memory can bridge identity differences to progressive ends, the case of the LLT’s Father Ned demonstrates the political limits of prosthetic memories of censorship. In addition to shedding new light on a neglected performance in Irish and O’Casey studies as well as a neglected geography in U.S. theatre history, the LLT’s Father Ned offers scholars, artists, political commentators, and activists ways of thinking about, contending with, or even appropriating or adopting censorship history.(5) In particular, the LLT’s use of censorship memories suggests that censorship’s effects are not bound to the time/place of their enactment: censorship moves, and as it moves it continues to exert censorial effects. According to Judith Butler, censorship is “a productive form of power” that creates as it attempts to negate. For Butler, censorship never completely erases its target. If a state seeks to ban a word, it must state the word to ban it, recirculating language it sought to destroy. Censorship paradoxically makes its subjects “[take] on new life as a part of the very discourse produced by the mechanism of censorship.”(6) This “performative contradiction” disrupts the limitations censors try to impose, transforming them into sites of contestation—into something “banned.”(7) As sites of contestation, censored objects and subjects invite people to performatively renegotiate or “produce” interpretations of the ideas under contestation. This slippage, the recirculation inherent in censorship’s performative contradiction, entails mobility—across geographies, discourses, media, and time—and as censorship moves it continues to “produce” via people’s engagement with it. Today, when censorship can take place through online policing, cancel culture, and self-censorship, when the mantle of “silenced” and “censored” can be adopted and projected via social media’s megaphone (among other means), it is imperative that scholars and artists reckon with both its movement and its effect as an interpretive framework. Father Ned 's Journey to Indiana How did an amateur theatre in Indiana come to be the first to produce a play by a world-renowned playwright? The answer lies with Dr. Robert Hogan, remembered today as one of Irish theatre’s most “indefatigable annalists.”(8) Having previously contacted O’Casey for his doctoral thesis, he wrote to the playwright after learning about the festival scandal, asking if O’Casey would send him a copy of the play so that he could write on it.(9) It was not until January 1959 that Hogan broached the subject of producing Father Ned in Lafayette, where he was working in the English department at Purdue University. Following the collapse of the Dublin festival, O’Casey entertained several offers to produce The Drums of Father Ned on professional stages, but none had come to fruition.(10) Without other options, the group’s amateurism probably didn’t deter O’Casey. Indeed, Hogan suggested the production upon recalling O’Casey’s youthful participation in amateur dramatics.(11) What’s more, several O’Casey plays premiered with amateur groups.(12) While James Moran suggests O’Casey turned to amateurs out of economic necessity, Susan Canon Harris argues Britain’s Unity Theatre, which premiered The Star Turns Red in 1940, better suited O’Casey’s politics as a workers’ theatre.(13) The LLT hardly shared O’Casey’s revolutionary aspirations, though. It’s likely that the LLT’s biggest incentive to stage O’Casey’s play was the financial opportunity that would come with producing a famous playwright’s world premiere. The Drums of Father Ned did not fit their practical or aesthetic profile. They mostly produced conventional New York hits like Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden and stage versions of popular films like Frederick Knott’s Dial “M” for Murder . Of the 117 plays the LLT produced from their 1931 founding to Father Ned in 1959, eighty-nine were by American or English playwrights. Only seven had been by Irish writers, and it had been a decade since their last Irish play.(14) Father Ned also has a cast of twenty-nine, significantly larger than most LLT shows (compare with Chalk Garden ’s six and Dial “M” ’s nine). The large cast posed an opportunity to recruit LLT members, however. Their budget depended on company membership and program advertising. Only those who purchased a membership could see or participate in LLT shows, and the company was losing members to television by the late 1950s.(15) They also made tickets available to the public for the first time.(16) The play’s controversial past was itself a selling point: the show was a box office hit. Over two thousand attended its 4-night run at Sunnyside Junior High.(17) This success was despite the play’s Irish focus, which also made it an outlier for LLT shows. The Drums of Father Ned is an ensemble piece with a thin narrative, allowing O’Casey to focus on ideas in vignette-like episodes that critique Irish life. The play begins with a satire of the Irish War for Independence (1919–21), a foundational moment in Ireland’s and the characters’ national consciousness. Titled the “Prerumble,” the scene shows the Black and Tans—British royal police—capturing two young men, Binnington and McGilligan. The pair hate each other so much that the Black and Tans eventually release them saying, “these two rats will do more harm to Ireland living than they’ll ever do to Ireland dead.”(18) O’Casey depicts Irishmen of the period as in conflict with each other as much as with the British. Time then jumps to 1950s Ireland, and the rest of the play revolves around the imaginary town of Doonavale as its inhabitants prepare for An Tóstal (the same festival in which the play, itself, was to perform). Now the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, Binnington and McGilligan still hate each other (and even fought on opposite sides of the Irish Civil War [1922–23]), but overlook their grudge when it comes to money. Their adult children and local laborers rehearse a pageant about the 1798 Irish Rebellion. The Mayor and his Deputy await a shipment of lumber that turns out to be “red” lumber from Russia. Meanwhile, a North Irish businessman, Alec Skerighan, attempts to woo Binnington’s servant, Bernadette, but ultimately assaults her. Murray, a local organist, rehearses choral numbers under the controlling eye of the parish priest, Father Fillifogue. The eponymous Father Ned is Fillifogue’s foil. Although he never appears onstage, Father Ned is the spirit of the Tóstal : his passion, openness, and investment in the community’s future inspire the younger characters. By the end of the play, the older characters lose their power and the town joins Father Ned in a march to change. While not realist, the style helps O’Casey manifest cultural and political changes he believed were necessary. O’Casey uses the play to critique the cultural and economic atrophy of 1950s Ireland and posits An Tóstal as something of a cure for Ireland’s ills. There were too few jobs and an over-emphasis on agriculture, protectionism, and self-sufficiency that failed to reckon with postwar realities.(19) Lack of economic opportunity contributed to emigration. From 1951 to 1961, nearly a sixth of the population left the Republic.(20) Women, especially, fled in pursuit of change, bodily autonomy, marital opportunities, and escape from ostracism and the national marriage bar.(21) An Tóstal attempted to stimulate the economy by extending the tourist season with historical and religious pageantry, sports, concerts, and theatre.(22) O’Casey felt An Tóstal ’s activities, influx of foreigners, and opportunities for young people could stir Ireland’s renewal.(23) Unlike Ireland, Lafayette was a prosperous place in 1959, buoyed by post-war prosperity, Purdue University, and major manufacturers like Alcoa and a Coca-Cola bottling plant (which purchased space in the production program).(24) There were few ways for The Drums of Father Ned to resonate with the Hoosiers. According to Irish theatre historian Patrick Lonergan, when Irish plays that center Irish histories/issues perform abroad, they “must be framed or mediated in a way that will provide an interpretive framework for a[n]…audience lacking specialized knowledge of Ireland.”(25) Lafayette’s audience needed a way to engage with the play. So Hogan and the LLT built a memory of Irish censorship for them. “Dublin’s loss is Lafayette’s gain”: Learning to Remember Ireland in Indiana Hogan and the LLT constructed this memory through production publicity—what Hogan called his “propaganda” in a letter to O’Casey.(26) In addition to advertising the event, these materials constituted a discursive field through which audiences could recall the memory of Irish censorship during the performance to help interpret the play. Hogan constructed this memory through a narrative of American exceptionalism that explained the staging of O’Casey’s play in Lafayette, positioning the locals in relationship to the play and its history. For Landsberg, prosthetic memory forms through an embodied interaction with media that allows audiences to take on histories other than their own.(27) This interactive dynamic appears in these performance-adjacent texts and positions the play’s history, O’Casey’s biography, and the LLT production in relation to Lafayette. From the start, the LLT framed Father Ned through its scandalous past. Their first press announcement stated, “the play has already become something of an international ‘cause-celebre’ because of its dramatic withdrawal from the Dublin International Theatre Festival last summer and from the subsequent cancelling of the festival.” This announcement gives no description of the play’s content, emphasizing its history and O’Casey as “the greatest living dramatist of the English-speaking world” instead—a telling choice for an article that also served as an audition notice.(28) After casting, an editorial pitched the show as a vote of confidence from O’Casey and an honor for the city: “it will be interesting and stimulating to be among the first in the world to hear what so famous an Irish literary figure who ranks with Shaw, Joyce and Yeats has to say.”(29) Hogan’s marketing went farther, calling on Lafayette to participate in an unfolding history that would repudiate Irish censorship. Hogan embedded that invitation in essays defining O’Casey’s life by injustice. The first of these articles glossed the theatre festival scandal. Hogan ends this article with the Manchester Guardian ’s report: “One may contemplate [the festival’s] ruins as a monument to the subservient orthodoxy which so often passes for piety in Ireland.” Eliciting a comparison between oppressed Ireland and a tolerant U.S., Hogan concludes, “But in this case, Dublin’s loss is Greater Lafayette’s gain.”(30) Hogan penned publicity in the form of a history-in-progress that interpolates its readers, encouraging them to participate in the story’s triumphant conclusion. The logic and rhetoric of Hogan’s writing absorbed the LLT’s performance into America’s culture of containment. In the first decades of the Cold War, the global spread of communism and the U.S.’s foreign containment policy pushed anticommunist sentiment to paranoiac heights.(31) If communism couldn’t be contained abroad, it could penetrate and threaten the U.S. from within. In this way, the foreign policy of containment came home. Containment culture simultaneously constructed and policed American norms through discursive and cultural production, negotiating American ideals according to specific needs rather than a stable set of principles.(32) For example, although domestic commentators labeled abstract art un-American, the State Department deployed American abstract art abroad to promote American expressive freedom.(33) Simultaneously, containment culture sanctioned the expulsion of perceived subversiveness in its aim to cultivate idealized Americans, such as in 1951 when Lafayette schools ejected a government textbook that teachers and officials argued supported communism. Indiana followed suit one year later. Lafayette commentators argued that it wasn’t that America’s youth shouldn’t know about communism but that they shouldn’t be taught there’s anything redeemable in it.(34) The LLT’s narrative that framed their production of Father Ned projected local pride in righting an international wrong, of being an exceptionally tolerant and progressive space for artistic expression. In his publicity work, Hogan depicts Ireland as an oppressed and oppressive other in contrast to America, clarifying the national character of the memory of censorship he staged the play against. Hogan continues his history of Ireland via O’Casey, casting the playwright as an outcast genius and decrying Ireland. Hogan’s next article summarized O’Casey’s adolescence in colonial Ireland, emphasizing his poverty.(35) Next, he described O’Casey’s early adulthood, painting a picture of an artist who became keenly aware of social injustice as he entered the workforce and struggled to survive against the backdrop of the bloody revolutionary era.(36) In his subsequent article, Hogan reshapes Ireland from oppressed to oppressor through a description of the 1926 riots over O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and O’Casey’s later self-exile to Britain.(37) Hogan’s final article conjured an embattled O’Casey whose artistic home at the Abbey Theatre pushed him out of Ireland by rejecting his misunderstood WWI drama The Silver Tassie .(38) Hogan connects this to Father Ned ’s history: O’Casey continually searches for an outlet, and Lafayette, Hogan implies, can give him vent. This publicity rhetorically established Lafayette’s place in the play’s history. The advertisements always touted that it was a world premiere, simultaneously promoting the event, framing it for the community, and providing a proxy-rehearsal for attending the play, priming the audience for how to think about it.(39) These advertisements expect its audience to have some familiarity with how the play arrived in Lafayette and ask Hoosiers to imagine themselves in that history. As the opening approached, the Lafayette and West Lafayette mayors proclaimed a “World Premiere Week” in honor of the LLT’s historic achievement, and the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce urged the community support this “event of world-wide theatrical importance.”(40) Both implicitly understand the production via its censorship: Ireland refused it, allowing Lafayette to make history. Although it’s unlikely everyone in the LLT audience read all of Hogan’s articles, the production program reproduced much of their content and rhetoric, grounding spectators in their curated history. It introduces O’Casey as “a stormy figure in the British Theatre,” tracing O’Casey’s earlier controversies through the theatre festival scandal. “Well,” the note proclaims, “Dublin’s loss is Lafayette’s gain,” echoing the earlier article.(41) Again, the production positioned the Hoosier community as the solution to Irish censorship. Hogan and the LLT brought the memory of Irish censorship to Indiana through the production’s paratexts, establishing a framework for audiences to interpret the show. Othering Ireland on the Hoosier Stage Onstage, the LLT worked to differentiate Ireland from Lafayette. The prosthetic memory of Irish censorship further distanced the audience from identifying with the Ireland onstage by allowing the spectators to position themselves and their world as different. According to the narrative Hogan and the LLT created, it was by virtue of their unique place in the world that the play could appear in Lafayette at all. Indeed, O’Casey draws a particularly harsh sketch of historical and contemporary Ireland—but he does so to imagine Ireland’s movement from oppression to utopia via O’Casey’s communism. This complicates the memory’s neat Indiana/Ireland division and, by extension, the performance’s politics. For O’Casey, Ireland’s stagnancy was due to its political and cultural conservatism. According to The Drums of Father Ned , a new politics grounded in a communal sociality of care rather than competition is necessary to move Ireland forward. The prosthetic memory of Irish censorship made it difficult for the LLT’s production to resonate in this way because it situated Lafayette in a position of progressive superiority compared to Ireland. Lafayette was more progressive than Ireland by dint of the banned play’s mere presence and communism was a wholly negative force to be expelled, not adopted. Because amateur theatre is an especially “situated practice… rooted in its local environment,” the LLT artists needed to perform Irishness to contrast with Lafayette.(42) The minimal set, historically and culturally inaccurate costumes, auditorium, and performers were constant reminders of the local circumstances of production. Performing with Irish dialects was one of the major ways the company used to create difference, even though O’Casey twice told Hogan not to bother, saying that he preferred the actors’ natural voices over contrivance.(43) To perform without an Irish brogue in a production that so reflexively pointed out its localness would risk limiting its capacity to depict Ireland as other. Take, for instance, Robert Corbin, who played Father Fillifogue. According to Richard “Dick” Jaeger, who played the church organist Mr. Murray (see Figure 1), the LLT frequently cast Corbin in older roles because he was a person with albinism, and directors felt his light skin and hair aged his appearance while his relative youth allowed for physical dexterity and endurance unavailable to many seniors.(44) Corbin’s past performances as older men would have haunted his Father Fillifogue for LLT regulars, highlighting the show’s localness.(45) Performing with Irish dialects helped to distinguish the Irish characters from the Hoosier actors who played them, even as many in the audience surely delighted in seeing friends, family, and colleagues onstage. Figure 1: The LLT’s staging of “The Prerumble.” IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/1. Nevertheless, Jaeger distinctly recalled Hogan and co-director Jeanne Orr telling everyone to speak with “a broad theatre accent.” According to Jaeger, Hogan taught the cast the dialect to varying degrees of success.(46) Corroborating the importance of dialects, news coverage sold the authentic Irish speech of one cast member, Geraldine Gray, an Irish immigrant who “hasn’t lost her Irish brogue,” as a selling point that lent authenticity to the production.(47) Gray was joined by fellow immigrant Nicholas Bielenberg, a graduate student at Purdue, who played the Man of the Pike in the play’s 1798 pageant. Both noted their Irish origins in their program bios. Bielenberg confirmed in a 2020 interview that the cast used Irish dialects, adding that he and Gray helped the others, and that it wasn’t exaggerated but “soft.”(48) The sound of the play, together with Gray and Bielenberg’s presence, confirmed the legitimacy of the production’s representations of Ireland while constantly marking it as different from Lafayette. In its movement from oppression to utopic progress, The Drums of Father Ned begins with a bleak picture of colonial Ireland, creating sharp contrasts with Lafayette in the LLT’s production. The production began with the silhouette of a town in flames behind a scrim, with a cross-topped spire especially visible and a white Celtic cross standing before the scrim. A group of Hoosiers clad in black sweaters, khaki pants, and berets played the Black and Tans, firearms in hand (see Figure 2). The officers force the hateful Binnington and McGilligan to talk to each other and run side-by-side while the officers shoot just to the left and right of each—coercing the hateful pair together, mixing social and martial torture to humorous effect. This staging of the Irish War for Independence, with its hellish backdrop and violence, is a darker depiction of Ireland than that contained in the memory of censorship. After the Black and Tans march away, gunshots sound and Binnington exclaims, “Aha, our boys are givin’ it to them! God direct their aim.” Here, O’Casey marshals the name of God in service of dehumanizing violence induced by the colonial relationship. At the scene’s conclusion, the audience heard a war chant accompanied by a drumroll.(49) As the program’s glossary notes, the drums signify a Protestant ritual, pointing to the sectarianism that informs Ireland’s history and foreshadows the continued sectarian divide in independent Ireland. Figure 2: Mr. Murray (Richard “Dick” Jaeger) rehearses for An Tóstal under the watchful eye of Father Fillifogue (Robert Corbin, right). IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/4. The sardonic violence, Irish dialects, war-torn setting, and dark humor solidified Ireland as an other and likely inspired in spectators an endearing thankfulness to not be in Ireland. The scene was intense enough to frighten Hogan’s child.(50) The “Prerumble” evoked for the Hoosiers a far-off place not their own. The prosthetic memory of Irish censorship reinforced this critical distance by providing a narrative framework about the play that positioned Lafayette both as Ireland’s tolerant counterpart and the banned play’s home. Rather than offer pathways to empathy and progressive politics, prosthetic memory denied them by further cementing and implicitly vilifying cultural difference through the comparison of Hoosiers and Irish, Indiana and Ireland. The Specter of Anticommunism and Hoosier Intolerance From the prologue through the play’s end, O’Casey works to supplant one Irish nationalism with another. O’Casey draws connections between the revolutionary era and the contemporary one, arguing that Ireland’s stagnancy is due to the conservatism, capitalism, and parochialism that calcified after independence. O’Casey proposes Ireland can overcome its economic failures and socio-cultural malaise through an alternative nationalism that embraced a broadly socialist worldview of communal care over competition and profit. As the play progresses, these two nationalisms come into increasing conflict until O’Casey’s politics win out, paving the way for a utopian future. The memory of Irish censorship, though, likely muddled this critique, continuously reinscribing its viewers in a binary where America out-progresses Ireland. American containment culture resisted O’Casey’s dramaturgy even as the play unfolded, contributing to an ambivalent reception. The first major source of revolutionary energy in The Drums of Father Ned emerges from the 1798 Rebellion An Tóstal pageant rehearsed by the younger characters. This failed uprising against British imperialism provided O’Casey with a historical model for his alternative Irish nationalism precisely because it was led by an interfaith group that hoped its call for equality would transcend Ireland’s divisions. O’Casey specifically saw in its leader, Wolfe Tone, a proto-Marxist willingness to fight structural inequalities and advocate for universal equality.(51) He thus renders the 1798 pageant in Father Ned as a nostalgic, patriotic melodrama.(52) Further, he plants this idealism in the younger generation of characters who are inspired to work toward their vision of a renewed Ireland where anything short of an equal and united Ireland “is but quiet decay.”(53) For the younger characters (and O’Casey), there’s hope in the rehearsal of a nationalism that forgoes the historical divisions of the revolutionary period. O’Casey minimizes the youths’ “radicalism” through the ridiculously conservative Father Fillifogue: “So your play babbles about the rights of man. [ He chuckles mockingly .] What with your rights of women, rights of children, rights of trades unions, rights of th’ laity, an’ civil rights—[ shouting angrily ] youse are paralysin’ life!”(54) The peaceful “quiet decay” is Fillifogue’s ideal, which a more caring and equal democracy can undo. The players are earnest in their efforts, too. The players express genuine connection with the pageant, saying ahead of their rehearsal that “We have to get on with th’ work of resuscitatin’ Ireland.” Binnington and McGilligan admonish their efforts as a waste of time and money. But the younger characters see in their labor not a chance to “widen the walls of a bank” but to care for the good of their community, drawing on the communist imagery of hammer and sickle to make their case.(55) Such imagery would likely have set off alarms in the minds of the Cold War Hoosiers in attendance. Indiana and Lafayette, in particular, were centers of anticommunist fervor. Indiana was one of only four states to pass legislation banning the Communist Party from the ballot, and the state also required people in certain professions take loyalty oaths to qualify for employment.(56) In 1957, worried about communism in Indiana University’s faculty and the relocation of the Communist Party USA headquarters to Chicago, Indiana legislators established a state-level House Un-American Activities Committee, which, at the federal level, famously investigated suspected communist activity in public and private sectors.(57) Lafayette also participated in this project at the local level. In 1949, Purdue University employees took loyalty oaths. Ten years later—the same year as the LLT production—Purdue complied with a federal mandate requiring loyalty oaths from students seeking federal student loans, and commentators approved.(58) In fact, Lafayette beat the drums for anticommunism, outlawing outright communism’s promotion, support, advertisement, dissemination, or advancement, punishable by fine and imprisonment.(59) While it is unclear if the city charged or convicted anyone for violating the ban, the law projected a unified front in the “total cold war,” as President Eisenhower put it, against communism. Hogan, at least, participated in that war. Hogan’s scholarship makes clear his anticommunism, even when it came to O’Casey. He scathingly describes The Star Turns Red as the O’Casey play that is “closest to straight propaganda…and it is his poorest play.…There is no real dramatic clash here because there are no characters. There is only disembodied opinion.” Hogan goes on to quote critic George Jean Nathan: “the two worst influences on present-day playwrights are, very often, Strindberg and Communism.” To Hogan, O’Casey’s primary contribution was his formal experimentation, and he reads Father Ned as a parable of a universal cycle of death and renewal, represented in its generational transition.(60) It is harder to suggest what Jeanne Orr, who co-directed with Hogan, thought or knew of O’Casey’s politics or its presence in Father Ned . In a newspaper article, Orr said that O’Casey “is attacking intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and confining attitudes” in the play.(61) Her granddaughter, Jessica Jeanne Orr Urley, stated in a 2020 interview that her grandmother was progressive.(62) Holding a degree in speech from Ohio State University as well as a master’s from Purdue, Orr was highly educated. In an article in the local daily, the Journal and Courier , about her work, Orr listed amateur theatre actor and director, puppeteer, radio and theatre dramatist, and seamstress among her work in addition to her labor as a mother and wife.(63) She later won an award for a children’s book she authored and illustrated that celebrates individualism and difference.(64) She also greatly admired the play, expressing in a post-show letter to O’Casey her “deep gratitude…for what became my most interesting, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding experience in the theatre.”(65) None of this means she was procommunist, of course. It is unlikely that the LLT embraced O’Casey’s communistic utopianism. Like Orr, Hogan also recognized that the play’s Ireland moves from puritanism to tolerance.(66) At the time, though, he also consistently ignored or disparaged the playwright’s leftism. It is probable that the directors’ varying perspectives and especially Hogan’s anticommunism informed staging choices and obfuscated the play’s politics, at least. The 1798 pageant is one instance where dramaturgical confusion is evident. In a post-show report Hogan wrote to O’Casey, he explained that they kept to the letter of the script to the best of their abilities, but that they may have tonally missed the mark with the 1798 pageant. Hogan explained that they played the dueling scene “in a purposely awkward grand manner with broad stage gestures and amateurish bumbling. I think it was one of the best scenes, though one woman stalked out during it, saying, ‘My God, I’m leaving if the acting is this bad.’”(67) Following O’Casey’s stage directions, the scene should show a lack of preparation, not inability. To stage the pageant in such a broad manner that it turns spectators out of the theatre is to potentially ridicule the ideas and characters in which O’Casey lodged hope. Showing their inspiration as an absurd or naïve game of poorly acted make-believe instead of an enactment of earnestly held beliefs that rehearse utopia undermines O’Casey’s politics. For an audience already inclined toward anticommunism, deprecating the play’s communism could have reinforced preconceived prejudices. If Ireland was an other against which to compare the U.S., rather than help to propel Ireland toward progressivism, the LLT’s staging of the pageant kept Ireland in a place of naivety at best and repression at worst. Even if the production staged the scene in congruence with O’Casey’s politics, the performance still would have othered Ireland—but it would have been an other that exceeded the imagined tolerance that the prosthetic memory of Irish censorship established. Again, the memory of censorship positioned the audience in a comparative relationship with the banned art that allows the audience to work through their own subjectivity and understanding of history. Audiences make meaning from perceived contrasts between the histories laden with the memory of censorship, the banned art itself, and their own time and place. Instead of imagining Ireland as more progressive than the U.S. or entirely repressed, it’s quite probable that the production’s staging of 1798 left spectators with multiple Irelands of varying character. At this point in the show, read through the cultural memory of Irish censorship, the performance maintained U.S. exceptionalism by limiting the challenge O’Casey’s dramaturgy posed to that constructed memory and the American identities the memory safeguarded. Rather than encourage audiences to embrace difference and understand themselves anew, the prosthetic memory of censorship permitted audiences to reinscribe their exceptionalism vis-à-vis the politically muddled staging. Each instance the play addresses communism is a moment of negotiation, where The Drums of Father Ned summons the Hoosier history of anticommunism and asks the audience to contend with their assumptions. Hogan and the LLT did not create their prosthetic memory of Irish censorship to reckon with any interpolative dynamic other than the “tolerant here”/“oppressive there” dichotomy, yet the performance asked its audience to consider O’Casey’s communism as a way to better the world. The cultural memory of Irish censorship conflicted with the positive, progressive Ireland in Father Ned because the memory allowed the Hoosier audience to place themselves in a dominant hierarchical position to the Irish on the basis of their supposed tolerance. Read through an interpretive framework that privileged American identities and histories, O’Casey’s fantastical “progressive Ireland” pointed out Lafayette’s own history of political intolerance. The performance conjured the specter of Hoosier anticommunist intolerance and censorship, scrambling the memory of censorship’s predetermined relationship to Ireland and the politics of Cold War containment culture. Irish censorship moved to highlight and critique histories of censorship that Lafayette took for granted, challenging what it meant to be Hoosier. The play’s references to communism are never only about communism, but are in conversation with ideas like religion, sexuality, and gender. The production interrogated these categories’ function as regulators of the domestic communist containment project, questioning the supposedly binary nature of communist/U.S. culture. For instance, late in the play the northern Protestant Skerighan debates religion with the southern Catholics. He asks Michael Binnington whether God is a Catholic or a Protestant and Michael shares, He’s neither; but He is all…He may be but a shout of th’ people in th’ street.…It might be a shout for freedom, like th’ shout of men on Bunker Hill; shout of th’ people for bread in th’ streets, as in th’ French Revolution; or for th’ world’s ownership by th’ people, as in the Soviet Union.(68) Michael frames God in revolutionary terms, in justice and communal, humanitarian care. As Moran argues, “O’Casey co-opts such theological language in order to justify the communist cause.”(69) O’Casey’s advocacy of communism comes out of a very Christian place, but it nevertheless is still an advocacy of communism and would have resonated against Lafayette’s history and jarred with the memory of censorship. Lafayette saw its share of religiously-motivated anticommunism, enacting their ban on communism in part because communism “denies God and the God given rights which our government is designed to respect.”(70) The conservative columnist Fulton Lewis Jr. argued in an article that appeared in the Journal and Courier in 1958 that the U.S.’s “superior heritage of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” would be key to defeating communism.(71) For O’Casey, the brotherhood of man is precisely where God is located and communism is its logical political expression. When Father Fillifogue discovers Binnington and McGilligan’s plot to import lumber from Soviet Russia to save money, he furiously exclaims, “You rascals, how can I let my people live under roofs of atheistical timber?” and demands they burn it. The youths, including several dressed in their eighteenth-century pageant costumes and wielding pike and musket props, refuse, condemning Fillifogue’s command as the burning of homes.(72) O’Casey thus makes the priest’s anticommunism immoral and impractical. This is a small revolution, but one that O’Casey emphasizes, too, with the 1798 pageanters: the alternative, communal nationalism that they earlier rehearsed, they now enact. O’Casey turns Christianity’s “inherent anticommunism” on its head. In Lafayette’s estimation, Christianity expelled communism and worked to guarantee Americanism. In O’Casey’s logic, Christianity that manages to get over its own piety easily promulgates communism—a total reversal of containment principles. O’Casey’s Ireland is the more tolerant imaginary and, arguably, the more Christian state, a representation that upsets the memory of Irish censorship. On this point, the play may have upset some religious Hoosiers, too. According to Bielenberg, some Catholics in the audience “frowned upon” the play because they thought it antireligious. Bielenberg insisted that these objections were not based on O’Casey’s communism, arguing that they weren’t aware of it.(73) This contradicts what Hogan told O’Casey about the Catholic response: “Indeed, there were a couple priests chortling in the audience one night. About 20percent [ sic ] of the people in the town or [ sic ] Catholics, but there have been no rumbles.”(74) It is entirely possible that Hogan simply did not hear the rumbles that Bielenberg heard or that the response was inconsistent. It is entirely possible that some in the audience thought the play was antireligious because of the connections O’Casey makes between communism and Christianity. To challenge the cultural politics of conservative religiosity was to stand against the faith. Rejecting O’Casey’s religious message also meant rejecting his communism and thus maintaining containment culture. This logic clashes with the cultural memory of Irish censorship by suggesting that perhaps Dublin’s archbishop was right to protest the play. Ireland and the U.S. are more closely aligned than the memory’s narrative suggests because both refuse communism and antireligion, which, according to this logic, is in the best interests of both nations. Containment culture also policed sexuality and gender as signs of healthy American values, but these categories were more fraught. In some respects, norms were ideals: heterosexuality, monogamous marriage, the wife-as-homemaker and husband-as-breadwinner. Early Cold War America agonized over perceived threats to hegemonic expressions of masculinity. More women were in the workforce, blurring gender roles and yielding a more egalitarian domesticity. Many believed that women’s evolving social roles impacted sexual mores, decentering male sexual pleasure. WWII gave men greater purchase to carry out supposedly natural aggressions, yet men were also expected to be gentle providers and role models. Further, husbands were expected to be sexually experienced enough to pleasure their wives but not so much as to detract from their marriage. Monogamy and premarital abstinence could thus hinder masculinity even as it was also an ideal. This “crisis of masculinity” exposed political anxieties: sexual and gender “deviance” equaled political subversion.(75) The publication of Indiana University professor Alfred C. Kinsey’s studies on sexuality created a firestorm, revealing the great extent to which Americans “deviated.” As Indianapolis minister Dr. Jean S. Milner sermonized, “there is a fundamental kinship between this thing [Kinsey’s report on female sexuality] and Communism and…though it may seem to be a thousand miles from Communism, [it] will contribute invariably towards Communism, for both are based on the same naturalistic philosophy."(76) Given communists’ supposed proclivity for “abnormal” sexuality and gender expression, recentering masculinity could guard America. But this generally meant accepting men would need to practice aggression and sexual prowess to gain the experience necessary to manage their homes.(77) Two scenes in The Drums of Father Ned bring American assumptions about communism and sex and gender into dialogue. With the revelation of the “red” timber, chaos descends. Fillifogue blames Michael and Nora: “We have had peace here till youse came back from Dublin [where they attend university] with your design to use the Tosthal for your own ends; but I won’t allow your idle impudence to molest our pure peace.”(78) His language is terribly ironic, for their “peace” is one of patriarchal abuse, as evidenced by the Ulsterman Skerighan’s assault on Bernadette the maid on the pretense that she enticed him by “twutterin’ [her] luddle bum” at him. Skerighan forces himself onto her and kisses her against her will. Though at first, she “coyly” tries to dissuade his advances, she finally screams and pushes him off. Panicking, Skerighan tries to bribe Bernadette into silence and although she first refuses she ultimately takes his money—gesturing to her powerlessness. Fillifogue then tells Skerighan that he saw Bernadette running from the house. Fillifogue interprets Bernadette’s retreat as a sign of her sinfulness, but it’s more likely that she is fleeing after the assault.(79) Bernadette represents the condition in which many Irish women found themselves and that led many to emigrate. Fillifogue’s culture of peace thus comes at the expense of women’s mistreatment. Like the pageant sequence, the LLT production apparently played Bernadette’s assault primarily for laughs. While Moran is right that the scene points out one of the reasons so many Irish women emigrated, Hogan called the scene “delightful” in his scholarship and failed to contend with its violence.(80) Rather, the sequence is one of several representations of misogyny in Ireland that O’Casey depicted in his later plays, as Moran demonstrates. Between the archival photograph of the scene (see Figure 3) and his comment that they pushed the play’s comedy, it’s likely Hogan and Orr staged it in a slapstick style. Figure 3: The North Irish Protestant businessman Alec Skerighan (Stuart Main) approaches a shocked maid, Bernadette (Patricia Hensley), after whirling her to the sofa. IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/2. The LLT’s staging reflects the Cold War’s masculinity crisis. Skerighan’s sexual aggression is acceptable and even desirable under this logic. In this interpretation, Bernadette still resists his aggression but then feigns distress in an overly dramatic fashion in order to extort Skerighan, making light of the assault to comedic effect, complete with dramatic irony that cues the audience to Bernadette’s ruse instead of grappling with her trauma. This benefits Skerighan’s masculinity at the risk of Bernadette’s safety. Read through the memory of Irish censorship, instead of cultural difference, here the LLT production perversely performed the gendered oppression O’Casey meant to critique as normal, closely aligning the conservative Irish patriarchy with American masculinity. The movement of censorship as memory likely had the effect of confirming already entrenched attitudes rather than critique either Ireland or the U.S. The Drums of Father Ned concludes with a positive link between communism and sexuality. As Binnington and McGilligan try to support Fillifogue at the end of the play in his suppression of the young people’s enthusiasm, Nora attacks their support of capitalism and patriarchy. Fillifogue’s ridiculous response blames her thinking on “th’ College lettin’ th’ students wear jeans. I warned th’ Chancellor that allowing the students to dress like manual labourers would have a communistic tendency and influence.”(81) Michael then reveals that he and Nora have been living together and sharing a bed while at College. Their parents collapse into chairs in shocked paralysis, as the despairing priest proclaims, “Youse see, youse hear! The jeans, jeans, jeans!”(82) In this satire of Red-Scare hysteria, Fillifogue connects their sexual behavior with communism via jeans. Nora’s openness about their relationship is what finally topples the older generation. The Romeo and Juliet –esque couple from opposing “houses” live and sleep together without any mention of marriage, violating normative expectations. Once revealed, this “revolutionary” sexuality that ignores old enmities shatters Irish conservatism and ushers in the dawn of O’Casey’s Irish utopia. A culture that accepts a kind of communism, Christian principles, sexual liberty, and social equality without contradiction, the Ireland that concludes the play far exceeds the limits of what counted as Hoosier tolerance and exceptionalism. The end of the play sees Ireland shift politically, with Nora and Michael contesting their parents’ elected positions. The young leave the old, deciding to follow Father Ned’s march into the future. As Binnington and McGilligan struggle to rise from their stupefaction, they beckon their wives to bring them their mayoral regalia, but the robes, hats, and chains are too big for them.(83) This bit of fantasy illustrates they are inadequate for the needs of governance. Fillifogue similarly collapses as his parish abandons him for Father Ned, who has encouraged progressivism, and the three slump over and admit defeat: “Ireland has gone to the fair!” – meaning both the young as well as the Tóstal fair. Skerighan, whose business also depends upon his dealings with Binnington and McGilligan, tries to rouse the three Catholics to stop Father Ned by singing a mocking Protestant song. Father Ned’s march interrupts and drowns out Skerighan’s divisive tune, and Murray urges them to join the united front. Father Ned’s drums roll, and the play ends (see Figure 4).(84) Faith in competition loses to faith in community. Figure 4: The Drums of Father Ned ’s final tableaux at the LLT. IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/3 The play asks its audience where it stands. Will they march to Father Ned’s beat or stay behind? The LLT performance asked Lafayette to take on what it means to live under censorship, to affectively feel and think through the contradictions in their thinking and history, and to maybe even entertain a politics that may never have had a place in the community had it not been for their willingness to indulge in the fantasy of American exceptionalism. But the show also skirted the drama’s progressive potential. The play’s procommunist outlook, at turns muted or ridiculed but ultimately fulfilled, was not wholly subsumed. Audiences voiced their confusion. As Hogan told O’Casey, “but even tho [ sic ] they were entertained and chortled and guffawed through more than two hours, I’ve got to ruefully admit that a lot went away wondering what the play was about;” and in his book, “there were a lot of people who left shrugging.”(85) Henry Hewes, drama critic for the Saturday Review , traveled from New York to see the production. In his review, he, too, commented on a sense of bewilderment.(86) In its movement from Ireland to the U.S., the world premiere of The Drums of Father Ned repudiated Lafayette, Indiana, and the U.S.’s contradictory intolerance and exceptionalism. By making the case that communistic politics and culture can achieve a more equal, tolerant world and presenting an Ireland that accepts ideas and practices which U.S. containment culture rejected, the LLT production rebutted its own narrative about Lafayette’s exceptionalism. Yet because the company built its framework around the notion that the Hoosiers already occupied the ultimate possible political position, even a utopian play that reminded them not only of what they had refused to tolerate, but that those very ideas and practices could make the world better failed to offer much beyond the challenge itself. Ireland might have played a small role in shaping how Lafayette’s theatregoers understood themselves, but taking on the prosthetic memory of Irish censorship very likely produced more ambivalence than serious reflection, let alone a renegotiation of their own biases. And despite the pretensions to progress that making banned cultural objects accessible can entail, the Lafayette production of O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned demonstrates how the cultural memory of censorship can limit progress and inspire political complacency. All photographs were scanned by the National Library of Ireland and are shared with the permission of Shivaun O’Casey. References St. Vincent Troubridge, Report on The Drums of Father Ned , September 26, 1960, The Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence, LCP CORR 1960/1074/1, The British Library, London. Christopher Murray, Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work: A Biography (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 386–404. Troubridge. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004), 2. Previous studies considering O’Casey’s play have focused on the archbishop’s intervention and/or the text itself. See Joan FitzPatrick Dean, Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 160–65; Joseph Greenwood, ‘Hear My Song’: Irish Theatre and Popular Song in the 1950s and 1960s (Peter Lang, 2017), 133– 57; James Moran, The Theatre of Seán O’Casey (Bloomsbury, 2013), 30–31, 117–46; Christopher Murray, “O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned in Context,” in A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage , ed. Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa, 117–29 (Indiana University Press, 2000); Paul O’Brien, Seán O’Casey: Political Activist and Writer (Cork University Press, 2023), 256–64. Judith Butler, “Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor,” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation , ed. Robert C. Post (Getty Research Institute, 1998), 249, 248. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge, 1997), 130. Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 309. Sean O’Casey, The Letters of Sean O’Casey , ed. David Krause, vol. 3, 1955–1958 (Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 254, 306 n. 1, 551–2; Hogan to O’Casey, received March 4, 1958, Seán O’Casey Papers (hereafter cited as O’Casey Papers), IE/NLI/MS/37,846/2, National Library of Ireland, Dublin. John Moody to O’Casey, February 18, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,074; J.E.C. Lewis-Crosby to O’Casey, March 10, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; Paul Shyre to O’Casey, March 14, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; Paul Shyre to O’Casey, March 29, 1958, April 18, 1958, May 19, 1958, June 5, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,079/3; Harold Goldblatt to O’Casey, October 7, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; O’Casey to Harold Goldblatt, October 12, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; O’Casey, Letters , 3: 536, 568, 575, 580–82, 954–55, 612, 627–28. Robert Hogan, The Experiments of Sean O’Casey (St. Martin’s Press, 1960), 140–41. These included The Star Turns Red in 1940 at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre and both Purple Dust and Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy at Newcastle’s People’s Theatre in 1942 and 1949, respectively. Moran, 27, 29–31, 248 n. 100. Moran, 27; Susan Canon Harris, Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892–1964 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017),192–94. Jim Hanks, Stage Memories and Curtains (On Stage/Back Stage) (Copymat Services, 1998), 62–66. The other plays by Irish playwrights were George Bernard Shaw’s The Great Catherine and Candida , Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest , Lennox Robinson’s The Far-Off Hills , and St. John Ervine’s Friends and Relations , The Ship , and The First Mrs. Frasier. Ibid., 12, 16. “World Premiere of Play by Irish Author,” Journal and Courier , April 25, 1959. “A Few Tickets Are Left for O’Casey Play,” Journal and Courier , April 25, 1959. Sean O’Casey, The Drums of Father Ned (St. Martin’s, 1960), 10. John Bradley, “Changing the Rules: Why the Failures of the 1950s Forced a Transition in Economic Policy-making,” in The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , ed. Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan (Mercier, 2004), 105–17; Mary E. Daly, Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957–1973 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 6–7, 19–24; Eleanor O’Leary, Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2018), 11–12, 38–43. Edna Delaney, “The Vanishing Irish? The Exodus from Ireland in the 1950s,” in Keogh et al., 81. Caitríona Clear, “‘Too Fond of Going’: Female Emigration and Change for Women in Ireland, 1946–1961.,” in Keogh et al., 135–46; Sandra McAvoy, “Before Cadden: Abortion in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland,” in Keogh et al., 147–63. The marriage bar was a national policy in Ireland that women resign from their posts in certain jobs upon marriage and prohibited married women from joining the civil service. The policy lasted until 1973. See Daly, 128, 151–55. Eric G. E. Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War (Syracuse University Press, 2009), 67–69, 124–35. O’Casey, Letters , 3: 414, 416, 423–24, 433. O’Casey was also critical, however, of the materialism he saw at the heart of An Tóstal . See ibid., 266. Alcoa, “Lafayette Families Live Better Because of Alcoa,” Journal and Courier , July 23, 1959; Program for the Lafayette Little Theatre Association production of The Drums of Father Ned , 4–5, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,161/4. Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 92. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. Landsberg, 108. “Little Theatre May Do World Premiere,” Journal and Courier , February 26, 1959. “World Premiere,” Journal and Courier , March 4, 1959. Robert Hogan, “O’Casey Play Already Has Stormy History,” Journal and Courier , March 7, 1959. Larry Ceplair, Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History (Praeger, 2011), 91–190; M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 122–90. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (Basic Books, 2008); Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Duke University Press, 1995). Michael L. Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 1–6. “Text Rejected As Socialistic,” Journal and Courier , December 14, 1951; “Textbook Action Vindicated,” Journal and Courier , December 13, 1952. Robert Hogan, “O’Casey Started with Little, Learned Much,” Journal and Courier , March 21, 1959. Robert Hogan, “O’Casey Saved Money for Reading Material,” Journal and Courier , April 4, 1959. Robert Hogan, “Like Most, O’Casey Left Native Land,” Journal and Courier , April 9, 1959. On the Plough and the Star riots, see Morash, 163–71. Robert Hogan, “Play Rejection Called Crucial O’Casey Event,” Journal and Courier , April 16, 1959. On the Abbey’s rejection of The Silver Tassie , see Moran, 20–23, 66–80. Hogan also appeared on local television and radio to promote the play. Bill Brooks, “Around Here,” Journal and Courier , April 18, 1959. Lafayette Little Theatre Association, Advertisements for The Drums of Father Ned , Journal and Courier , April 8 and 9, 1959 . “Proclaim Week for Premiere,” Journal and Courier , April 16, 1959; Resolution of the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. “About the Play,” Program for the Lafayette Little Theatre Association Production of The Drums of Father Ned , O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,161/4. Helene Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling, The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 12. Sean O’Casey, The Letters of Sean O’Casey , ed. David Krause, vol. 4, 1959–1964 (Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 14, 20. Richard Jaeger, phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, April 16, 2016. My deepest thanks to Richard “Dick” Jaeger and Nicholas Bielenberg for sharing their thoughts and memories of the production. On the ways past roles “haunt” actors’ present performances, see Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (University of Michigan Press, 2001), 1–15, 52–95. Jaeger interview. UPI, “Premiere Of Irish Playwright’s Drama Slated For Lafayette,” Anderson Daily Bulletin , April 22, 1959. Nicholas Bielenberg, phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, July 3, 2020. O’Casey, Father Ned , 7–12. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. O’Casey, Letters , 3: 464. O’Casey quotes a play from Shaw to explain his views of Tone and communism. See George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (Penguin, 1984), 163. See also, Moran, 36. O’Casey saw melodramas of 1798 as a young man. See Stephen Watt, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre (Syracuse University Press, 1991), 31, 51, 59, 143–87. O’Casey, Father Ned , 36. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 32. Ceplair, 238 n. 24; Heale, 29. Dale R. Sorenson, “The Anticommunist Consensus in Indiana” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1980), 94, 127, 194–7. “Loyalty at Purdue Covered by Oath,” Journal and Courier , June 4, 1949; “Loyalty Oaths and Defense,” Journal and Courier , December 2, 1959; Mary Schlott, “Loan Loyalty Oath OK with Purdue,” Journal and Courier , November 19, 1959; George E. Sokolsky, “Loyalty Oaths and Such,” Journal and Courier , February 22, 1960. “Council Will Act On City Communism Ban,” Journal and Courier , September 29, 1950; “City Acts to Prohibit Communist Activities,” Journal and Courier , August 5, 1950. Hogan, Experiments , 85–86, 98, 139. “World Premiere.” Jessica Jeanne Orr Urley, phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, March 22, 2020. My thanks to Jessica for helping me gain a better sense of her grandmother as a human and artist. Mary Kemmer, “Seven Plays, Two Sons A Degree in Six Years,” Journal and Courier , August 29, 1959. Urley interview. Jeanne Orr to O’Casey, June 8, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. Hogan, Experiments , 135–42. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. O’Casey, Father Ned , 92. Moran, 127. Qtd. in “Council Will Act.” Fulton Lewis Jr., “The Answer to Communism,” Journal and Courier , August 28, 1958. O’Casey, Father Ned , 95–96. Bielenberg interview. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. Hogan does say, though, that Geraldine Gray, the Irish immigrant who played Nora, “gave us a bit of trouble about the crucifix in Act I, and a couple of actors took the play to a priest who sai[d] nothing wrong in it.” Clearly, there was some trepidation in the cast as well. K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (Routledge, 2005), xxi–ii, 9–17, 124–25; Miriam G. Ruemann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (University of California Press, 2005), 9, 55, 59, 68, 76–85. Qtd. in Wardell B. Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research (Harper and Row, 1972), 366. Cuordileone, Manhood , 78, 84. O’Casey, Father Ned , 97. Ibid., 58–61. Moran, 142; Hogan, Experiments , 137. O’Casey, Father Ned , 98–99. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 104–05. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3; Hogan, Experiments , 143. Henry Hewes, “Broadway Postscript: The Green Crow Flies Again,” Saturday Review , May 9, 1959. Bibliography Alcoa. “Lafayette Families Live Better Because of Alcoa.” Advertisement. Journal and Courier , July 23, 1959. Bielenberg, Nicholas. Phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, July 3, 2020. Bradley, John. “Changing the Rules: Why the Failures of the 1950s Forced a Transition in Economic Policy-making.” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Brooks, Bill. “Around Here.” Journal and Courier , April 18, 1959. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, 1997. ---. “Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor.” In Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation , edited by Robert C. Post. Getty Research Institute, 1998. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine . University of Michigan Press, 2001. Ceplair, Larry. Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History . Praeger, 2011. Clear, Caitríona. “‘Too Fond of Going’: Female Emigration and Change for Women in Ireland, 1946–1961..” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Cuordileone, K. A. Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. Routledge, 2005. Daly, Mary E. Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957–1973 . Cambridge University Press, 2016. Dean, Joan FitzPatrick. Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Delaney, Edna. “The Vanishing Irish? The Exodus from Ireland in the 1950s.” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Greenwood, Joseph. ‘Hear My Song’: Irish Theatre and Popular Song in the 1950s and 1960s. Peter Lang, 2017. Hanks, Jim. Stage Memories and Curtains (On Stage/Back Stage) . Copymat Services, 1998. Harris, Susan Canon. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892–1964. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Heale, M. J. American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 . Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Hewes, Henry. “Broadway Postscript: The Green Crow Flies Again.” Saturday Review , May 9, 1959. Hogan, Robert. The Experiments of Sean O’Casey . St. Martin’s Press, 1960. ---. “Like Most, O’Casey Left Native Land,” Journal and Courier , April 9, 1959. ---. “O’Casey Play Already Has Stormy History.” Journal and Courier , March 7, 1959. ---. “O’Casey Saved Money for Reading Material.” Journal and Courier , April 4, 1959. ---. “O’Casey Started with Little, Learned Much.” Journal and Courier , March 21, 1959. ---. “Play Rejection Called Crucial O’Casey Event.” Journal and Courier , April 16, 1959 Jaeger, Richard. Phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, April 16, 2016. Journal and Courier . “City Acts to Prohibit Communist Activities.” August 5, 1950. ---. “Council Will Act On City Communism Ban.” September 29, 1950. ---. “A Few Tickets Are Left for O’Casey Play.” April 25, 1959. ---. “Little Theatre May Do World Premiere.” February 26, 1959. ---. “Loyalty at Purdue Covered by Oath.” June 4, 1949. ---. “Loyalty Oaths and Defense.” December 2, 1959. ---. “Proclaim Week for Premiere.” April 16, 1959. ---. “Text Rejected As Socialistic.” December 14, 1951. ---. “Textbook Action Vindicated.” December 13, 1952. ---. “World Premiere.” March 4, 1959. ---. “World Premiere of Play by Irish Author.” April 25, 1959. Kemmer, Mary. “Seven Plays, Two Sons A Degree in Six Years.” Journal and Courier , August 29, 1959. Krenn, Michael L. Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War. University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Lafayette Little Theatre Association, Advertisements for The Drums of Father Ned . Journal and Courier , April 8 and 9, 1959. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture . Columbia University Press, 2004. Lewis Jr., Fulton. “The Answer to Communism.” Journal and Courier , August 28, 1958. Lonergan, Patrick. Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era . Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era . Basic Books, 2008. McAvoy, Sandra. “Before Cadden: Abortion in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland.” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Moran, James. The Theatre of Seán O’Casey . Bloomsbury: 2013. Morash, Christopher. A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 . Cambridge University Press, 2002. Murray, Christopher. “O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned in Context.” In A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage , edited by Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa. Indiana University Press, 2000. ---. Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work: A Biography . McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age . Duke University Press, 1995. Nicholson, Helene, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling. The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre . Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. O’Brien, Paul. Seán O’Casey: Political Activist and Writer . Cork University Press, 2023. O’Casey, Eileen. Eileen O’Casey Papers. National Library of Ireland, Dublin. O’Casey, Seán/Sean. The Drums of Father Ned . St. Martin’s, 1960. ---. The Letters of Sean O’Casey . Edited by David Krause. Vol. 3: 1955–1958. Catholic University Press, 1989. ---. The Letters of Sean O’Casey . Edited by David Krause. Vol. 4: 1959–1964. Catholic University of America Press, 1992. ---. Seán O’Casey Papers. National Library of Ireland, Dublin. O’Leary, Eleanor. Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland. Bloomsbury, 2018. Pomeroy, Wardell B. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research . Harper and Row, 1972. Ruemann, Miriam G. American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports . University of California Press, 2005. Schlott, Mary. “Loan Loyalty Oath OK with Purdue.” Journal and Courier , November 19, 1959. Shaw, George Bernard. John Bull’s Other Island . Penguin, 1984. Sokolsky, George E. “Loyalty Oaths and Such.” Journal and Courier , February 22, 1960. Sorenson, Dale R. “The Anticommunist Consensus in Indiana.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1980. Troubridge, St. Vincent. Report on The Drums of Father Ned , September 26, 1960. British Library, London, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Correspondence, 1960/1074/1. UPI. “Premiere Of Irish Playwright’s Drama Slated For Lafayette.” Anderson Daily Bulletin , April 22, 1959. Urley, Jessica Jeanne Orr. Phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, March 22, 2020. Watt, Stephen. Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre. Syracuse University Press, 1991. Zuelow, Eric G. E. Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War. Syracuse University Press, 2009. Footnotes About The Author(s) NIC BARILAR is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Nic earned his PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Pittsburgh in 2021. Nic’s research has appeared in the edited collections Beckett Beyond the Normal (Edinburgh University Press, 2020; pb 2022), The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature (Routledge, 2024), and The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Nic is also an actor, proud member of Actors’ Equity Association, and director. Among his creative credits, he produced and directed the North American premiere of Irish playwright Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s classic 1965 drama On Trial ( An Triail , 1964). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Somber Tides by Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Somber Tides is a cry from the species, startled into survival against the elements. One last breath before being trampled by the Earth or maybe conversely a battle to wage against winds and tides clutching on before extinction.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Somber Tides At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse 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 Canada Language No Dialogue Running Time 12 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Somber Tides is a cry from the species, startled into survival against the elements. One last breath before being trampled by the Earth or maybe conversely a battle to wage against winds and tides clutching on before extinction. About The Artist(s) Choreographer and filmmaker Chantal Caron's visual signature has always been inspired by the St. Lawrence River and the natural elements that make up its ecosystem. Her works are inspired by the living and embodied in contemporary dance. A member of the Order of Canada and recipient of CALQ's "Artist of the Year" award in 2023, her short films have been selected and awarded around the world since 2015 for their unique aesthetics. Get in touch with the artist(s) distribution@bandesonimage.org and follow them on social media Official Site : https://bandesonimage.org/distribution/catalogue-de-films?view=article&id=10 FILM FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61564890205177 PROD FB : https://www.facebook.com/fleuveespacedanse PROD INSTA : https://www.instagram.com/fleuve_espacedanse/ DISTRIB FB : https://www.facebook.com/BandeSonimage DISTRIB INSTA : https://www.instagram.com/bandesonimage/ 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