Watch This is Ballroom by Juru and Vitã at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. In Rio de Janeiro City and its outskirts, LGBTQ+ youth of color recreates Ballroom culture on their own terms. A portrait of the dramas, the voguing performances, and the art of shade, 50 years after its inception in New York. Rio is burning!. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents This is Ballroom At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Juru and Vitã Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th, at 4pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language Portuguese, English Running Time 92 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film In Rio de Janeiro City and its outskirts, LGBTQ+ youth of color recreates Ballroom culture on their own terms. A portrait of the dramas, the voguing performances, and the art of shade, 50 years after its inception in New York. Rio is burning! About The Artist(s) Vitã is a filmmaker and screenwriter. Director of the short film "The day I remembered the trip to Bicuda" (2015), producer of the feature documentary "It's Not the First Time We Fight For Our Love" (2022). Curator of Brazilian Comedy FF and of showcases on Hong Sangsoo films in four cities in Brazil. Master's degree in Audiovisual at UFF (Brazil). In the ballroom scene, they participate as an independent photographer and are a member of the Legendary House of Lauren Intl. Juru is a researcher, dramaturgist and performing arts critic. Casting coach for the feature film "Com O Terceiro Olho na Terra da Profanação", by Catu Rizo (2017) and the short film "Sunset", by Bruno Roger (2014). Dramaturgist in the performance "Repertory n. 1", by Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira. Master in Contemporary Arts Studies at UFF and PhD student in Arts at UERJ. Get in touch with the artist(s) festival@utopiadocs.net and follow them on social media https://www.utopiadocs.net/ renato@utopiadocs.net 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

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour By Suzi Elnaggar Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) . Adapted by Fouad Teymour from Women Resisting Sexual Violence and the Egyptian Revolution: Arab Feminist Testimonies (2020) by Manal Hamzeh . Directed by Tina El Gamal . Silk Road Cultural Center in partnership with the International Voices Project and New Mexico State University, Chicago . 4 November 2024 . A (Re)view From The Inside: Silk Road’s Shahadat Shahadat (The Testimonies) was adapted by Egyptian playwright Fouad Teymour from Resisting Sexual Violence and the Egyptian Revolution: Arab Feminist Testimonies (2020) by Manal Hamzeh. Hamzeh’s scholarship aims to “provides unique insight into women’s experiences during the Egyptian Revolution, and into the methods of resistance these women developed in response to sexual violence.” [1] Her book centers the verbatim accounts of three Egyptian women—the shaaheda [2] (“women who give testimonios”) Ola S., Samira I., and Yasmine E., who experienced sexual violence during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution ( suwret yanayer ) and shared their stories publicly, from social media posts to television interviews, seeking justice on their own terms. Through her ongoing work, Hamzeh aims to preserve and represent the shahadat (testimonies) while documenting her conversations and relationship with the three women over the past decade. Egyptian playwright Teymour’s adaptation marks the first time Hamzeh’s work on the shahadat has been adapted for the stage. Previously, she collaborated on a graphic art representation of the testimonies, which, like the play, was developed with the women’s knowledge and consent. [3] Teymour’s script highlights the women’s voices, amplifying their strength, resilience, and unwavering demand for justice. Co-produced by Silk Road Cultural Center and New Mexico State University, Shahadat was presented as a work-in-progress reading at the International Voices Project (IVP) in Chicago at the Instituto Cervantes. [4] Shahadat found its home with Silk Road as part of a long-time friendship and collaboration between Hamzeh and its founders, Jamil Khoury and Malik Gillani. In addition to Teymour’s involvement, this first developmental reading was shaped by Egyptian and Egyptian-American perspectives, with direction by Egyptian-American theatre artist Tina El Gamal and script dramaturgy by myself, Egyptian-American dramaturg Suzi Elnaggar. To bring Hamzeh’s work to the stage, Silk Road prioritized assembling a team of primarily SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) and Egyptian artists, ensuring the adaptation honored the power of these testimonies while exploring how the reading could evolve into a fully realized production. Shahadat . Adapted by Fouad Teymour . Directed by Tina El Gamal . Left to Right: Samira played by Tina El Gamal, Yasmine played by Anelga Hajjar, Ola played by Marielle Issa, Manal/Hewar played by Annalise Raziq . Photo: IVP and Scott Dray , provided by Silk Road Cultural Center . From Book to Stage: The Text of Shahadat Teymour and Hamzeh worked through multiple drafts of the script, refining the adaptation to balance textual authenticity with theatrical cohesion. From the outset, Teymour aimed to maintain the fidelity of the women’s words while shaping a structured narrative that could sustain dramatic momentum onstage, a goal that director El Gamal supported in rehearsal through her actor-led process. Another notable aspect that reinforced the authenticity of the shahadat and honored the specificity of the women’s experiences in their own words was the extensive use of colloquially transliterated Arabic throughout the script. No elements were added to the testimonies, though some small translation adjustments were made for flow (Hamzeh originally translated the testimonies for her book from colloquial Egyptian Arabic into English). Additionally, Teymour’s script introduces two framing characters, where in the book Hamzeh’s scholarship frames the testimonies. These framing characters help add narrative cohesion and dramatic subtext: Hewar (Arabic for dialogue or conversation), a narrator and context-giver, and Rajul (Arabic for man), a composite character representing all the male voices. In this first reading, both were voiced by actors seated at the periphery—Rajul and the oud player stage right, and Hewar and the stage directions reader (separately) stage left—though they initially were written as off-stage voices. Hewar is doubled with the character of Manal (the dramatic representation of Hamzeh, played by an actor), creating an element of metanarrative when the ‘narrator’ comes on stage as Manal. Teymour has expressed interest in further developing these characters and their narrative and structural function in a future workshop, particularly by bringing Rajul onstage as a physical presence and exploring Hamzeh’s role as the character Manal. Apart from translation and framing the verbatim text, a key challenge for Teymour was weaving the three testimonies together—each woman’s experience was independent of the others, yet the script had to find a way to bring them into a shared space. With that challenge in mind, the first act unfolds as individual yet interwoven testimonies, capturing the fragmentation of their experiences, before transitioning to the second act that focuses on their collective relationship with Hamzeh, as an on-stage character Manal. This shift in structure mirrors the real-life process that led to the creation of Hamzeh’s book, the disparate testimonies of women drawn into conversation through Hamzeh’s work and scholarship, creating lasting relationships. Using Hewar as a narrator, Teymour provides necessary context for audience members who may not be familiar with the 2011 Egyptian Revolution while also moving back and forth through time to have the characters meet at the pivotal moment of the protests, the “day of rage” Friday, January 28th, 2011 (Teymour 1). Teymour continues to use this technique of hewar (conversation), so the narrative slips between the characters conversing with each other, the audience, and Hewar, who weaves throughout. The method of storytelling that Teymour uses builds on the methodological ideas in Hamzeh’s book, shahadat (public testimonies) , and haki , (the building of strong relationships and having conversations over time) (Hamzeh 13-18). Haki is rooted in the Arabic verb haka, meaning to weave or to tell, calling to a tradition of oral storytelling [5] . Teymour begins the narrative on Qasr al-Nil bridge, during January 28th, 2011, “the Friday of Indignation”(1). The ‘narrator,’ Hewar, sets the scene, situating the audience in a revolution in progress: The revolution was afoot. Three young women converged independently onto this historical event, seeking, alongside others, “freedom, bread, and Social Justice!” Unaware that their lives would be permanently upended in the process, and that they would end up teaching the world a lesson in courage, resistance, dignity, and [sic]self-respect. These are their stories told through their own Testimonies... Shahaddat! ( Shahadat , Teymour 1) Shahadat. Adapted by Fouad Teymour. Directed by Tina El Gamal. Yasmine played by Anelga Hajjar (foreground,) Ola played by Marielle Issa. Photo: IVP and Scott Dray, provided by Silk Road Cultural Center. Ola steps forward, recalling the protest in midan etahrir (Tahrir Square): “I was on the frontlines” (1). Hewar notes, at that same moment, Samira had been released from detention the day before and was amid the protesting crowds. Time shifts, and Samira recounts her decision to join the protests on January 24th: “I took the train from Sohag to Cairo knowing something was building up” (2). Hewar remarks that she is unsure of the location of the third protestor, Yasmine; Yasmine clarifies that she made the decision to join the protests, having only begun to be politically active: “I was living in the heart of Cairo when the revolution started. I began my political activism during the 18 days of essuwra ” (3). The three women continue their introductions, explaining what drew them to Tahrir Square, moving together to become the crowd of protestors chanting “3eish, Horreya, 3adalah egtema3eyeh!” [6] which Teymour translates as “Freedom, Bread, and Social Justice!” ending the first scene (4). This narrative interweaving of the testimonies, which exemplifies the idea of haki is a key part of the dramatization of the verbatim text. Hamzeh played a vital role in the development and reading, commenting on the process as it related to her methodology and sharing her first-hand knowledge of the three women. Because director El Gamal’s rehearsal process was collaborative, Hamzeh often shared her thoughts while also enjoying learning more about a developmental process as a non-theatre maker and academic. While Hamzeh provided insights, the creative team consciously decided not to attempt direct reconstruction of the women but to approach the script through an interpretive lens. The actors engaged with the text as it appeared on the page, informed by the contextual details in Hamzeh’s book, which were mediated through dramaturgical presentations, handouts, and exercises. El Gamal led the actors in crafting the characters through discussion and some devised work in the room. This process allowed the actors to discover the characters organically, balancing fidelity to the testimonies with the needs of the stage and the material’s emotional weight. Shahadat. Adapted by Fouad Teymour. Directed by Tina El Gamal. Left to Right: Rajul played by Faiz Siddique, Yasmine played by Anelga Hajjar, Samira played by Tina El Gamal, Ola played by Marielle Issa, Manal/Hewar played by Annalise Raziq. Photo: Gordon Chow, provided by Silk Road Cultural Center. Staging and Theatricality A staged reading has inherent limitations—minimal set, little movement, and a focus on the text—but El Gamal’s direction found ways to use these constraints to the production’s advantage. The actors began offstage before moving into a staggered formation at their music stands. Throughout the reading, the actors alternated positions, with different actors stepping forward to emphasize key moments, echoing the dynamic movement of a protest as it becomes a revolution. The fluidity reflected the activity of Tahrir Square on those January days, immersing the audience in the tumult and hope of a revolution as it unfolded. A particularly striking use of movement came during the testimony of Ola, an active political organizer during Mubarak’s presidency; she opens the play clashing with police over tear gas canisters. Recalling the clash, Ola moved forward downstage as if tossing a canister back, then fell in line again, embodying the rhythm of protest. On the other hand, Yasmine, recounting being surrounded and assaulted by a mob, retreated upstage, mirroring her sense of entrapment. Of the three women, her staged testimony was the most physically dynamic, emphasizing the fear and disorientation of her experience. Stillness, too, played a crucial role. At the end of act one, all three women raised their voices as they declared, “STOP!” (24). The shift from motion to stillness punctuated the act’s conclusion, reinforcing the strength of their testimonies. In act two, when Manal transitions from Hewar, the staging shifted from a triangular formation to a living room-like arrangement, which created an intimate and conversational setting that complemented the act’s reflective tone. For the play’s epilogue, the actors repositioned themselves into a straight line behind music stands, visually echoing the format of a Zoom call, reinforcing the theme of remote yet connected testimony. These staging shifts marked the passage of time, guiding the audience through the play’s evolving emotional landscape. Another element that added to the theatricality of the reading was live oud music. On the oud, Lucia Thomas underscored the reading by performing compositions by Yasmine. This addition, requested by Teymour, added emotional depth and texture to the piece. Throughout the staging, the music did not simply accompany the performance; it actively shaped the atmosphere. Swelling at moments of intensity and retreating to allow spoken words to resonate, the oud wove through the testimonies like an extension of their voices. In all, El Gamal’s use of clever yet minimal staging used the constraints of a staged reading to their best effect; at the end of the performance, multiple audience members commented on the effectiveness of those choices. Following the reading, Khoury led a talkback featuring Teymour, Hamzeh, El Gamal, myself, and most of the cast and creative team. The audience reported that the strength of the women’s testimonies deeply resonated with them and that they found connections to their own experiences. A significant Egyptian audience was present, and many expressed how the play captured the trauma and resilience of those who lived through the Revolution. However, the events of the shahadat themselves were difficult to hear, as some audience members expressed, though they relayed strong support for a full production to come to fruition. The script, which Teymour, Hamzeh, and Silk Road seek to develop further, hopefully with a local partner, was extremely well-received. Shahadat. Adapted by Fouad Teymour. Directed by Tina El Gamal. Stage Directions/ Samira stand-in played by Jamila Tyler, Yasmine played by Anelga Hajjar, Ola played by Marielle Issa. Photo: Gordon Chow, provided by Silk Road Cultural Cente Next Steps The developmental reading of Shahadat at IVP marked a critical step in developing this powerful piece, highlighting the resilience of women in the region through their testimonies and the importance in the contemporary American theatre of their being able to represent themselves and their experiences. Moving forward, the creative team is committed to refining the production, deepening its theatrical elements, and expanding its reach to broader audiences. As a work-in-progress reading, Shahadat demonstrated the power of these testimonies and the potential for a full production. With a more extensive workshop, there would be an opportunity to explore richer staging, sound design, and immersive projections to realize the play’s impact more fully. The ultimate goal is to transition Shahadat from a staged reading into a fully realized production that continues to amplify these voices and spark critical conversations, furthering the representation of SWANA, Arab, and Egyptian stories in the American theatre while honoring the voices of the shaaheda and their goal of promoting justice for women in Egypt and the region. Shahadat is not just a recounting of past events—it is an active engagement with memory, justice, and resistance. [1] Hamzeh, a scholar of gender and ethnicity and co-founder of the Department of Borderlands and Ethnic Studies, describes her research as “rooted in Arab feminist research methodologies.” Manal Hamzeh, “Manal Hamzeh Bio,” n.d., https://best.nmsu.edu/manal-hamzeh.html . Her book can be found here: “Women Resisting Sexual Violence and the Egyptian Revolution,” Bloomsbury, n.d., https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/women-resisting-sexual-violence-and-the-egyptian-revolution-9781350333321/ . [2] The translations and transliteration styles used in this review are pulled from Hamzeh’s text, except where drawn from the workshop playscript. She describes her approach as “Arabic terms and names transcribed into Latin alphabets with lay and popular spelling”; here, her use of shaaheda , a noun which does not usually have a feminine plural form in Arabic dictionaries, is an intervention through translation (145). [3] Hamzeh organized an initial reading of act one of Teymour’s script at NMSU, which myself and other creative team members attended virtually, called “Shahadat Theatrical Readings”; the page for the reading contains more of Hamzeh’s perspective on the work, as well as links to the graphic representations created with Ola and Yasmine: “Shahadat Theatrical Readings,” n.d., https://best.nmsu.edu/shahadat-theatrical-readings.html . [4] The International Voices Project serves as an incubator for international work, featuring commissions, translations, and new productions from playwrights representing countries from across the globe. This year, five playwrights were produced in partnership with local Chicago theatres and organizations, with each project championed by a group of artists who deemed the plays to be relevant to their communities; this method has led the International Voices Project to have an exceptional track record of their selected readings which go on to have full productions afterward. Over its 14 years, the International Voices Project has produced readings of multiple Arabic and Egyptian plays. To learn more about the project and past seasons visit the website: https://www.ivpchicago.org/ [5] For Hamzeh, haki , which has not been previously used as a research methodology, has been used by Palestinians “for decades” and is grounded in an “Arab methodology of oral storytelling.” Drawing on Palestinian scholar, Faiha Abdulhadi, who wrote, as quoted in Hamzeh’s book, “When we have our own narratives, with all details, then we can face the world with it. ” Manal Hamzeh, Women Resisting Sexual Violence and the Egyptian Revolution: Arab Feminist Testimonies (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020), 13,14, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350224087 . [6] This transliteration reflects a colloquial Egyptian style and is pulled from a workshop version of Teymour’s text. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Suzi Elnaggar Northwestern University; Freelance Dramaturg Suzi Elnaggar is an Egyptian American performance scholar, freelance dramaturg, and theatremaker. Her work has been published in Asian Theatre Journal, Arab Stages, and Theatre Times. Her interests include recontextualizing tragedy, myths, and folklore, postcolonial theatre contexts, decoloniality in performance, theatre of social change, the intersection of trauma and performance, transnational and migrant stories, and work that centers SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) experiences. Suzi’s scholarship and practice center community, collaboration, and context. As a dramaturg, she is experienced in both production and developmental work. She is the artistic director of Backstitch Story Project, and the founder and creative director of the Digital Development Project. She has read scripts for PlayPenn, Playwright’s Center, Rattlestick’s Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, SHELA, and Sparkfest, among many others. Selected dramaturgy credits (Production & Developmental Workshops): Silk Road’s Shahadat ; Backstitch Story Arts Off-White: The Arab House Party Play ; Clamour Theatre’s Lived Experience ; TACTICS Ottawa’s ANANSI V. GOD(S) ; Jubilee Theatre Waco’s Fairview (Texas Premiere); Wild Imaginings’ Jesus and Valium (World Premiere), The Way He Looks at You , Cardboard Castles Hung on Walls (World Premiere); Northwestern University Theatre’s The Great Sea Serpent . 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.

Watch Grand Theft Hamlet by Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. With theaters shut during the COVID-19 pandemic, two jobless actors, Sam and Mark, are uncertain about their futures—finding solace in the virtual chaos of Grand Theft Auto Online. Desperate for purpose, they decide to stage Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the unpredictable world of their favorite game.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Grand Theft Hamlet At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 1:25pm. 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 USA Language English Running Time 89 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film With theaters shut during the COVID-19 pandemic, two jobless actors, Sam and Mark, are uncertain about their futures—finding solace in the virtual chaos of Grand Theft Auto Online. Desperate for purpose, they decide to stage Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the unpredictable world of their favorite game. About The Artist(s) PINNY GRYLLS CO-DIRECTOR After founding Birds Eye View Film Festival, Grylls became an award-winning documentary and commercials director. Her first short documentary, Peter And Ben, won awards at Aspen, London Short Film Festival, and SXSW. Since then she has specialized in making documentaries about theatre, opera and dance. Films include The Hour (National Theatre/BBC), Becoming Zerlina (The Royal Opera House), Who Do You Think You Were (Channel 4), Voytek The Soldier Bear (BBC), Thankyou Women (The Guardian), and Skin Hunger (Arts Council/ Dante or Die). She was a contributing filmmaker to Grierson-nominated The Street bought by Amazon and is currently developing her first fiction feature Hear My Voice with BFI funding. Commercials include Dove, Aldi ‘Like series’ and British Gas. Grand Theft Hamlet will be her debut documentary feature. Pinny studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Oxford University and has worked for over a decade as a senior ethnographic researcher for Ipsos Mori and the UK government through Policy Lab. She was also an Associate Lecturer in ethnographic filmmaking in the Anthropology department at University College London. Other teaching work includes the Poplar Film School, Central Film School, University of the Creative Arts London, Creative Futures, and Here On Earth – an International collaborative environmental documentary project made online in lock down by teenagers in Taiwan, London and New York. She is a proud member of the hard of hearing/deaf community and is learning British Sign Language. SAM CRANE CO-DIRECTOR Crane is an award-winning machinima video artist and actor. He is currently playing Harry Potter in the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and can soon be seen as Jacques-Louis David in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Napoleon for Sony Pictures and Apple TV. In a theatre career spanning 20 years, he has been critically acclaimed for his performances at the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, in the West End and on Broadway. He starred as Farinelli in Farinelli And The King alongside Mark Rylance, and Winston Smith in Robert Icke’s multi-award-winning 1984. His machinima film We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On won the Critics’ Choice award at Milan Machinima Festival, First Prize for Video Art at The Athens Digital Arts Festival, was shortlisted for the Lumen Prize and long-listed for the Aesthetica Art Prize. He is a PhD candidate at York University's School of Arts and Creative Technologies and a member of the PEERS programme of artistic researchers at Zurich University of the Arts. He read Classics as an Undergraduate at Oxford University and trained as an actor at LAMDA where he won the Nicholas Hytner scholarship. Get in touch with the artist(s) cwells@mubi.com and follow them on social media N/A 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

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 16 Fall 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. By Areeg Ibrahim Published: November 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967. By Tiran Manucharyan. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2024; pp. 270. Tiran Manucharyan’s Of Kings and Clowns: Leadership in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre Since 1967 is an important addition to the literature on theatre and leadership. Manucharyan who is a Lecturer of Arabic as well as Comparative Literature at the University of St. Andrews, Scottland is a budding scholar of Egyptian theatre. Composed of 270 pages, this monograph is a rewriting of the author’s PhD dissertation and is comprised of a preface, an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion. The book deals with the transformations of Egyptian theatre since 1967 until the 2011 revolution through theoretical discourses, essays and plays of Yusuf Idris, as well as the analysis of the plays of Abul-‘Ela El-Salamouny, Lenin El-Ramly, and Fathia El-‘Assal, along with some theatre makers of the younger generation such as Sondos Shabayek, Mahmoud Gamal Hedeny, and Magdy El-Hamzawy. In the preface, Manucharyan explains that the book explores the development of Egyptian theatre since the period following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, shedding light on political and cultural leadership. The author maintains, “The book observes the ways Egyptian theatre has negotiated its place within the socio-political environment in which it operates, not only transforming itself but also inciting transformation” (xi). The author also proposes that this book is innovative as a monograph in English that provides an examination of the progress of theatre as well as a detailed analysis of plays, focusing on leadership and taking gender into consideration, especially in the dramatic and theatrical works of women playwrights and theatre makers. In the introduction, the author begins by exploring the way in which events on stage can integrate with real-life events, and recalls the essays of iconic Egyptian playwright Yusuf Idris who proposed removing the boundaries between stage and audience, in order to emphasize theatre’s role in society. After going through the relationship between leadership and theatre, Manucharyan refers to the works of some of the major Egyptian playwrights of the period, referring to Idris, El-Salamouny, El-Ramly and El-‘Assal. In chapter one, “ Tamasruh : Between Theatricalisation and Carnivalesque,” the author link’s Yusuf Idris’ tamasruh , a coined term which refers to dissolving the boundary between audience and spectator, with Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. The chapter links these concepts to the overarching theme: the relation of clowns and jesters to the carnivalesque. By extension, intellectuals/playwrights represent such archetypes, especially when they assume their role as leaders in the society. Idris’ vision of theatre, which is informed by indigenous popular forms of Egyptian theatre, such as the shadow theatre ( khayal al-zill ) and open-air rural performances ( samir ), calls for the stage as a space for public and collective participation (21). The chapter explores such concepts in relation to the plays of El-Salamouny, El-Ramly, and El-‘Assal. Each of the next four chapters takes up individual playwrights. Chapter two continues to explore Yusuf Idris’ ideas about establishing a uniquely Egyptian theatre, and then brings the discussion back to the clown and the role of women, with some references to plays of the aforementioned playwrights. (Since both this chapter and the previous engage in Idris’ thought, one wonders why they were not integrated into one chapter.) Chapter three focuses on the role of theatre and explores representations of leadership in the plays of Abul-‘Ela El-Salamouny. Similar to Idris’ ideas, El-Salamouny integrates indigenous forms of performance and theatricalization in his plays in order to have an open dialogue with the audience (63). The plays are discussed in relation to what they present about leaders, kings, clowns and women. Chapter four explores Lenin El-Ramly’s use of comedy as “the art of cunning” to satirize the socio-political milieu. Despite El-Ramly’s slightly different stance on the use of indigenous popular forms in theatre, his use of meta-dramatic techniques also offers a space for theatricalization. As in many of his plays, El-Ramly makes use of foolishness and madness to explore authoritarianism and institutionalization versus leadership and social change. Chapter five links silence and carnivalization while discussing the plays of Fathia El-‘Assal, as representative of Egyptian women playwrights. Manucharyan opines, “She makes female characters central to the action, yet still silent and muted to start with, making them seen and heard within the silence” (158). El-‘Assal’s plays thus portray leadership, women rights and societal inequalities. The final two chapters take up the 2011 revolution and the theatre it inspired. In chapter six, “Of Times and Spaces,” the author begins by referring to the 2011 revolution and then sheds light on the realities of the revolutionary change. The chapter discusses the time and space of the discussed plays (a part that could have been integrated into the previous chapters) before moving to explore how public spaces played a role during revolutionary times. The chapter then relates the revolution to the carnivalesque and the emergence of verbatim theatre, or public spectacles that are based on lived testimonies of the revolution. Some women theatre makers also had a paramount role in producing such kind of theatre. Chapter seven, “Theatre and the Revolution,” focuses on the post-2011 plays. It explores the relationship between theatre and the 2011 revolution in relation to the plays of the younger generation of theatre makers as well as some post-revolution plays by the previously-discussed dramatists. The chapter suggests that the 2011 revolution had its impact on theatre in allowing for the emergence of new forms and new voices (213). For instance, Sondos Shabayek and team’s Tahrir Monologues presented verbatim documentary theatre that narrated testimonies of the revolution’s participants. Mahmoud Gamal Hedeny and Mohamed Gabr’s 1980 Onwards dramatized the uncertainty of Egyptian youth after the revolution. As for Magdy El-Hamzawy’s Report on Revolutionary Circumstances , it was a staged play about the role of an underprivileged Kid in supporting the revolution. To sum up, Tiran Manucharyan’s Of Kings and Clowns: Leadership in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre Since 1967 provided an encyclopedic study of Egyptian theatre from the last third of the twentieth century onto the 2011 revolution. The book is a good read both for an average reader as well as scholars and students of theatre and Arabic studies. The strength of the book lies in its survey and analysis of leadership, carnivalization, and the search for a theatrical national identity in the plays of three established playwrights, as well as three theatre makers of the younger generation. The book uses these phenomena as lenses to look at the plays El-Salamouny, El-Ramly, and El-‘Assal both individually and in relationship to one another. The book also clearly uses the ideas of Egyptian playwright Yusuf Idris as part of the theoretical literature about the discussion. It is unclear as to whether the analysis of Idris’ plays is central to the book’s arguments about these phenomena or simply helps clarify the playwright’s theoretical concepts. The book also could have benefited from using some of the topical literature in leadership studies. Overall, t he book engages both the specialized and average reader in a journey with bits and pieces of enjoyable information and analyses about Egyptian theatre and representative plays. The book closes with a profound analysis of the 2011 revolution and highlights the role Egyptian theatre performances narrated, documented, and came to terms with that event. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Areeg Ibrahim is Professor and Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Arts in Helwan University, Cairo and was the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Effat University, KSA. She has published widely in both Arabic and English on Arabic and international Drama. She is the co-editor of a Routledge volume, Rewriting Narratives in Egyptian Theatre . She has also translated a number of Theatre books for the National Center for Translation. 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 An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Performance Review: The Tutor Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' By Deniz Başar Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages ISSN: 2376-1148 Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 27-51 Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays Helezoni and Orange Deniz Başar Abstract : This article traces the changes to the alternative theatre field in Turkey since the 2013 Gezi Park Resistance until today, documenting the reasons for and outcomes of the erosion of that field due to growing authoritarian neoliberalism. Through auto-ethnography, among other methods, the writer tries to meditate rhizomatically on the relationship between alternative theatre in Turkey and repertoires of resistance embodied in 2013, and re-embodied in protests triggered by the illegal imprisonment of elected İstanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on 19th of March 2025. Tracing the lineage of the 19th of March protests, a Gen Z-led movement, back to the millennial-led movement of Gezi, the article investigates the living heritages of the alternative theatre field in Gen Z theatre, which persist despite the strategic damage to the field which took place through the past decade. Arguing that these re-embodied, ever-growing repertoires of resistance are best archived in their sensibility by young people’s theatre works, the writer shares her insights into two short plays from 2025: Helezoni and Orange . Both plays were made by ensembles of emerging theatre practitioners, who were pushed into working in 2020s neoliberal spaces, due to the strategic and authoritarian erosion of the 2010s’ alternative theatre field, and both plays challenge the neoliberal authoritarianism policing their lives and censoring their work, in ways legible to people who have embodied knowledge of the local repertoires of resistance . Keywords : repertoires of resistance, Gezi Park Resistance, 19th of March 2025 protests in Turkey, alternative theatre, Gen Z theatre, queer theatre A Personal Introspection, in the Form of a Literature Review I have been teaching in various theatre conservatories in İstanbul, such as Bahçeşehir University and Maltepe University, as contract faculty, and as part of independent theatre workshops, such as Performance Ecologies , since 2022. Since 19 March 2025, I have encountered most of my students, and some of my own university professors from my BA degree in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University’s (MSFAU) Urban and Regional Planning Department, through the on-going protests. I feel unnamable things in my chest when I think about the fact that I was my students’ age when the Gezi Park Protests [1] happened in 2013, as I was writing my MA thesis on the alternative theatre field of İstanbul (Başar, 2014), and how that whole experience changed who I am today. A fellow theatre scholar working on the performance field of contemporary Turkey, Zeynep Uğur, notes the ways in which the alternative theatre field that emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s provided sociological foreshadowings of the Gezi Park Protests. Uğur then traces the aftereffects of Gezi on the alternative theatre field: [T]he Gezi movement can be traced back to the alternative theatre practice in Istanbul which was already in existence prior to the protests claiming autonomous spaces in the city for artistic creation and sociability. In other words, it provides an alternative history to analyse the sociopolitical transformation of citizens claiming their ownership in the city. Furthermore, alternative theatres become spaces of political resistance in the aftermath of Gezi (Uğur, 2022, 122). The logic of cause and effect is unapologetically ouroboros in contemporary Turkey. Gezi transformed my personal relationship to the city and independent theatres too, as a sense of urgency sneaked into all of my daily practices. The “here and now” of a revolutionary moment redefined the “here and now” of performance for me within my body as a “performing remains” (Schneider, 2011). It was the end of my first year in my master’s degree when Gezi happened, and I remember many things about June 2013 along with how I—miraculously—managed to write my graduate papers in between regularly being tear gassed in Taksim. Starting from late 2011 I was captivated by the alternative theatre scene which was introduced to me by a crush who was working as a volunteer dramaturg in this habitat. As life goes, this crush led to the other—the much, much bigger one—which redefined my life. I took it onto myself to make sure the world knew about it. I agree with Uğur’s reading above: alternative theatre—as a field—was a foreshadowing of Gezi (it was indeed one of the many [2] ). I underestimated the impacts of taking part in this kind of resistance, as many young people in their 20s do, but it caught up to me gradually: with immense waves of migraine and body pain (see Başar, 2022 for an academic reflection; [3] see Başar, 2025 for an artistic reflection), and in forms of chronic workaholism as I attempted to document, academically and artistically, what was happening (see Meerzon, 2024; and Ülgen, 2024 for semi-academic meditations on my artistic outputs). I wrote my MA thesis in Boğaziçi University (BU) between 2012 and 2014, a personal turning point in my career that made me the social scientist that I am today, if not the artist (for that, the real nod goes to MSFAU). BU, a historical, prestigious, landmark university, has been under heavy attack by the AKP government since 2021 (see Tekay, 2022; and, Altuğ et al., 2025), the year that I returned to Turkey to do my postdoc in BU through an FRQSC scholarship. My postdoctoral supervisor Emine Fişek was forced into quitting her tenure job after a long fight with AKP-enforced rectorate around the time my funding ended in 2023.[4] I produce most of my academic work in English, about the political performances and performativities of Turkey in the AKP era. I give into the colonial hegemony of Anglophone academia as strategic choice: I need other ESL scholars like me to learn about what has been happening here. [5] Yet I struggle about where to begin. How can I make the connections that are obvious for us—insiders—visible to outsiders? Here is my attempt. What Came Before and After 19 March 2025 On 19 March 2025, the elected mayor of İstanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was taken from his home for multiple alleged crimes, including “threatening and targeting persons involved in anti-terrorism activities” (Tecimer, 2025). A wave of nationwide protests started in the subsequent months, as more and more elected mayors were taken from their homes across Turkey for belonging to opposition parties against the 23-year rule of the AKP and Prime-Minister-turned-into-President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The preview of this authoritarianism was particularly tested in the 2019 elections, when İmamoğlu became mayor for the first time (see Felix, 2019; and Demiralp & Balta, 2021). Surely this episode of the history of Turkey will be written in detail in the near future, and after less than a year, the first academic articles are already circulating. Here is a quote from one: When he was detained on March 19 (he would be formally arrested a few days later), İmamoğlu was the presidential frontrunner of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which leads the political opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. While the next presidential election is not for another three years, İmamoğlu had been leading Erdoğan in opinion surveys. Now the 55-year-old mayor sits behind bars, facing the possibility of a long prison term (Esen and Gümüşçü, 2025, 106). As I revised this article at the end of 2025, citizens of Turkey were updated on this infamous case by learning through various media outlets that the “prosecutor seeks 2,352-year jail term for Istanbul's mayor” (Tuncer and Blackburn, 11 November 2025). Just as the timing gap between journalism and academic response has rapidly decreased in contemporary Turkey, the timing between journalism and artistic response has shortened too. Perhaps this is because many intellectuals of the country, artists, journalists, and academics, collectively feel the responsibility (and burden) of documenting what has happened, increasingly and overwhelmingly, over the past two decades. We don’t have the time to digest, and we almost always have to respond urgently. Perhaps this should be kept in mind as one reads this piece too, that Zeitgeist in contemporary Turkey is of urgency and urgency only. Then how does this Zeitgeist inform our lives? It means that hundreds of thousands of people live in a constant state of being ready for mobilization. As generative modes of activism have been directly attacked by the government since the early 2010s, and as they have been eroded through the daily reality of social and economic crisis of the early 2020s, our mode of action today is becoming more reactive. Like a fraudulent chess game, when the government makes a move, the people counter-move, en masse in at least the hundreds of thousands, and face the consequences. As Amnesty International reported on the 19 March protests: Following the CHP rallies, law enforcement officials used unnecessary and excessive force to disperse the crowds and according to the authorities, detained 1879 people, either at the location of the protests or from their homes, between 19-26 March across the country. By the end of March, over 300 people—mainly university students from different provinces including Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir—were remanded in pre-trial detention while hundreds of others were subjected to judicial control measures, including house arrest, foreign travel bans and reporting requirements. In Istanbul, seven journalists covering the protests in Saraçhane Square were detained in raids of their homes on 24 March (Amnesty International, 2025, 1). In the days that followed 19 March, many lecturers and professors in the university where I now work were left helpless as their students were detained without any legal procedure. We reorganized, pushed the authorities to start the legal process, tried to stay in solidarity, of course. Yet the burnout remained. Amnesty International documented several instances of unlawful use of force by law enforcement officials against peaceful demonstrators between 19 and 26 March, including beating, kicking and dragging protesters on the ground and the unlawful use of water cannon, pepper spray, tear gas, kinetic impact projectiles, often at close range directly targeting individuals at the head and upper body that led to numerous injuries and hospitalizations. All the information collected was assessed in accordance with international standards and the pertinent legal obligations the Turkish state has under the treaties it is a party to (Amnesty International, 2025, 2). Perhaps it was the morning of 21 March when a friend, who is an expert Ottoman historian, came to our shared office and cried her heart out as some of her students were detained and the legal support hadn’t caught up yet. What does this do to you, really? To people who are dissidents but also mothers, fathers, friends, teachers, Ottoman historians, and theatre artists. What does it actually do to your nervous system, to your dreams, to your understanding of what it means to be alive? My focus is very rhizomatic these days, and it is not out of choice. I regularly google how long Salazar ruled Portugal (36 years), Franco ruled Spain (36 years), Mussolini ruled Italy (22 years), Pinochet ruled Chile (17 years). I google how many years have passed since the so-called Islamic Revolution in Iran (47 years). I do statistics. I want to find a logical future projection as an academic. We call fortune telling “statistics” in academia. Fast Forward to June 2025 I get two invitations from my former students, current colleagues, to attend two different short play festivals. One is DasDas Theatre’s, which took place between 12-15 June (Image 1); and the other is Zorlu PSM Studio Shorts Festival, 14-15 June (Image 2), which is the final result of a seven-month long residency for young playwrights and directors. DasDas is a multi-functional venue with multiple black box performance spaces created by a group of well-established stage artists (actors and musicians), running since 2017 in the Metropol İstanbul shopping mall, aiming to cultivate new audiences within a particular upper-middle class. Zorlu PSM, designed as the first “performance center” of Turkey, is located in a luxury shopping mall, Zorlu Center, which was designed by starchitect Emre Arolat and opened in 2013. It was built through well-documented labor abuse [6] and the direct support of the government, which allowed the illegal building of the colossal shopping mall in the center of one of the busiest districts of İstanbul. Image 1: Memory ticket, DasDas Shorts Festival. 12-15 June 2025. Image 2: Instagram post , PSM Studio Shorts End-of-Year Performances. 14-15 June 2025. The structures of the two festivals are quite different: DasDas invites theatre students and new graduates living in İstanbul to showcase their new experimental and devised works, whereas Zorlu PSM Studio selects artistic interns in the beginning of an academic year and works separately with directors and writers to make meaningful artistic pairs who create a series of short plays at the end of the year. On 14 June 2025, at 9:15pm, I am at DasDas to watch Helezoni (Image 3) , a short play by new graduates and current students of Bahçeşehir Conservatory, having been invited by my former student Seray Üstündağ; and on 15 June 2025, at 8:30 pm, I am at Zorlu PSM to watch Orange (Image 4) , invited by the playwright, Baroj Nejdet Babat, whom I met through the Performance Ecologies project. I want to talk about these two pieces together because they are both created by theatre artists in their early 20s living and working in Turkey, and struggling to form their artistic voice in an atmosphere that is becoming more and more dreadfully oppressive and monopolized with each passing day. Image 3: Helezoni (poster) Project Design and Performance: Buse İlker, Seray Üstündağ, Yağmur Başak Text: Collective Text Supervision: Doruk Öztürk, Diyar Çiler Assistant Director: Diyar Çiler Sound Design: Buğra Nayir Lights: Alp Özer Video Design: Eray Devrenk Poster Design: Doğa Erdağ Date & Time: 14 June 2025, 9:15 pm Place: DasDas Stage Image 4: Orange (poster) Playwright: Baroj Nejdet Babat Director: Yasemin Kır Producer: Riyana Tufanova & Ekinsu Köse Assistant Director: Teo Chapdelaine Assistant Producer: Orçun Ertaman Performers: İpek Sobutay, Mizgîn Özel, Tuğba Sorgun, Aylin Çelikçi, Begüm Önerler, Merve Bayus, Nezahat Arkun Stage Design (SD): Cem Yılmazer, Yasemin Kır SD Realization: Zekeriya Ece, Riyana Tufanova Costume Supervisor: Hilal Polat Costume Design & Realization: Riyana Tufanova Light Design & Application: Güray Doğru Sound Design: Aylin Çelikçi, Begüm Önerler, Merve Bayus, Nezahat Arkun Poster Design: Can Akşit Date & Time: 15 June, 2025, 8:30 pm Place: Zorlu PSM These shows took place almost back to back, in two completely different parts of İstanbul, yet both inside luxurious shopping malls. I remember how in early 2010s my generation was proud of the bohemian nature of found spaces being turned into little black box stages in Beyoğlu [7] . In a palimpsest, I quote my (earlier) self: A significant episode in the contemporary theatre scene of Turkey began around 2008 (Başar 2014), when a generation of emerging young artists started renting small flats around the Beyoğlu district of İstanbul, which is known to be one of the most cosmopolitan, historical, and, possibly, the liveliest part of the city. These artists were locked out of institutional theatre settings because of the lack of formal theatre education (most of them were trained in universities’ theatre clubs while studying other things) or because of their ideological differences with the theatre institutions (Başar 2014, 152). In Beyoğlu, they began to create ensembles and write in the small black-box stages that they collectively made together. Only on these alternative stages and through their new plays, a variety of characters from contemporary Turkey (such as Kurds, LGBTI characters, and urban women wearing headcloths) started to appear on stage. This was a breath of fresh air in the theatre field of Turkey, circumventing the Leviathan-like bureaucracy of state theatres and municipality theatres, and the cheap populism of commercial comedy theatres and other private establishment theatres (Başar, 2021, 196). I remember both the vibe and the hype: Many of us were in our 20s or early 30s, some of us were emerging theatre professionals, some were either bachelors or graduate students in the diverse academic ecosystem of İstanbul (before the brutal attacks on academia after 2016, which aimed and partially succeeded in creating a monoculture [8] ), and there was a smell in the air that blended theatre and activism, and in return redefined both of these categories as immediate life itself. Yet I don’t mean to romanticize this era; it was a precarious heterotopia, just as Gezi was. But heterotopias, “[a]s a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation[s] of the space[s] in which we live” (Foucault, 1986, 24), die hard. In parallel to my above reading of the era, Zeynep Uğur comments on the same phenomenon as follows: In the early 2000s, the alternative theatre scene gained a new momentum with the increasing number of theatres spreading around Taksim. The founders of these theatres are commonly inspired by the avant-garde of the 1990s; however, their own personal trajectories are different. Almost all of them take their roots from university theatre clubs instead of conservatoires or theatre departments. Thus, socialisation emerges as a mobilising motor. To ‘create their own space to be able to make theatre as they want’ is an often-repeated phrase in the interviews that I conducted in Istanbul. A young audience profile, mostly college students, adhered to this emerging theatre (Uğur, 2022, 137). We used to look down upon the idea of moving into shopping malls (also see Aydoğan and Ayhan, 2026, to trace the sentiment). In a little more than ten years so much has changed, with so much trauma. [9] The bohemian and underground theatre infrastructure—built outside of state-governed institutional theatres and profit-oriented commercial theatres [10] —to which many people contributed with sweat, blood and tears has (mostly) collapsed under a regime that has become increasingly authoritarian. This regime has been very strategically targeting Beyoğlu, particularly since 2011, but the scale and insidiousness of the attacks has multiplied exponentially every year, as Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robbins, among others, point out: At first glance, the Beyoğlu Cultural Route (Beyoğlu Kültür Yolu Projesi) [a large-scale re-development project launched in 2020 by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism] may appear to be a good investment of resources, with the potential to enhance the cultural life of the city. […] What it represents is, in fact, an intervention on the part of the central state, intended to impose its own ideological priorities, both economic and political, on the cultural life of the city (Aksoy and Robbins 2023, 40). Meanwhile, hand-in-hand with the current regime, large corporations such as Zorlu Holding have started to invest in the performing arts in İstanbul, and as a miniscule compensation for this exploitative capitalist shift, these new organizations started creating spaces (extremely limited ones) for up-and-coming theatre artists. Yet, quite obviously, these spaces fail to make up for loss of the grassroots independent theatre scene of 2010s. That’s why I am burdened by history at age 36, when I come to see the shows of my former students in their early 20s; yet I also feel a complicated brew of emotions, knowing what they might be feeling since 19 March 2025. My internal compass oscillates between the joy of solidarity and mourning of the loss of innocence. But being in one’s early 20s means having hope, because that age group does not yet have the luxury of the 30s and 40s for being comfortably hopeless. A Brief Cross-Tracing of Repertoires of Dissident Performance and Protest Culture The two works that I watched back-to-back are stylistically and dramaturgically very different from each other. Helezoni , which is a made-up word based on the Turkish appropriation (‘helezon’) of the Latin word helix , is a devised work, fragmented in a 1990s-postmodern fashion, comfortable with being misunderstood. Orange , on the other hand, is much more structured: there is a text, there is a story, and there is even an invented folk tradition and ritual embedded into the performance. I go through my private mind-library of rhizomatic references, to see where I attach these performances in the global network of everything I know about theatre. Helezoni —interestingly, despite having an American gloss to it (à la Wooster Group and Tim Burton)—strictly lands in the German, especially Berlin-based, realm of theatre making: I reach and grab Robert Wilson’s Berliner Ensemble productions, Rimini Protokoll’s fragmented dramaturgies, and of course Bertolt Brecht’s pre-Second World War take on cabaret. In the realm of Turkish theatre, the only distant relative I can think of for Helezoni is Şahika Tekand’s body of works, which are also rooted in 1990s İstanbul (see Dinçel, 2023). A day later, Orange takes me to references from across Europe, and strictly avoids any feel of Americanness. I grab Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2009 movie Dogtooth , the 2023 book She That Lay Silent-Like Upon Our Shore by Brendan Casey, and–of course–García Lorca's last play before his assassination in 1936 during Spanish Civil War, The House of Bernarda Alba . The world that playwright Baroj Nejdet Babat and director Yasemin Kır created also reminds me of the aura of early 2010s in İstanbul; I am reminded of Şamil Yılmaz and Pelin Temur’s plays from Mek’an Sahne (see Onat, 2025) and M î rza Met î n and Berfin Zenderlioğlu’s works, performed in Kurdish with Turkish surtitles, from Şermola Performans. [11] Both pieces want to speak to the world they live in, and to the state of contemporary Turkey, but where Helezoni uses metatheatricality through 1990s-postmodern fragmentation to do that, Orange goes back to ritual to seek metatheatricality as a form of the sublime. These are both strategic dramaturgical choices to tap into the repertoires of resistance of Gezi, which was actually both a palimpsest and a transcendence of all previous left-wing resistance movements in Turkey (see Verstraete, 2019 & Başar, 2022); which is why the main title of this piece is “Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance.” Helezoni Helezoni has four parts to it, strictly separated by a male voiceover that introduces the numbered sections, which are loosely connected. All sections are devised by the woman-majority team, which includes many queer collaborators, and the only prior information the audiences have about the show is that it is devised from the premise “fascism everywhere”. The first section is a Grimm-style tale, written mostly by Diyar Çiler, within the parameters the group decided on, a tale about a group of animals living happily in a forest, accompanied by AI-generated images which straightforwardly aim to tickle the cognitive response of the uncanny valley (reminding me of Rimini Protocol). The wording of the tale is tethered to the taboo themes of the repertoires of resistance of Gezi, which was partially reenacted in the 19 March protests. [12] For instance, the tale uses ‘pepper’ to stand in for ‘tear gas’, and the phrase ‘factory of emotions that produce hope,’ which can mean both ‘state propaganda’ or ‘revolution’, almost-alluding to many things, almost gesturing towards a creeping danger, but all in a purposefully ambiguous manner. As the tale goes on, stage creatures in the form of acting bodies start to occupy the stage, filling it with mundane acts of prepping for the performance, such as putting tape down to mark the exact boundaries of where the performance will take place. Their physicalities range from fairies to witches. Defining the boundaries is important, to be able to cross over them later. The second section starts with three Tim Burton-esque (or Robert Wilson’s take on the Faustian theme) stage creatures taking over the stage fully (Image 5), after listening to the same tale with us, while working and commenting on the tale, their sudden and explosive laughter echoing around us. These stage creatures move in a stylized manner and have choreographed movements and fragments of speech that they throw at us. In the darkness we hear a witchy voice yelling “catastrophe! nein!” which marks the beginning of this second part while introducing the linguistic heteroglossia of the piece. Adding German into the mix perhaps alludes to both the Brechtian aesthetic and the horrors of fascist propaganda’s aesthetic (such as Triumph des Willens [1935]). The vocabulary they break apart is embedded in our own political moment, and their gestures showcase a repertoire of the streets, of the military training that we all received as part of our compulsory physical education classes in Turkey, and of the acting education they all received, creating counterpoints. Then they locate us in an urban square through their scattered descriptions. Is it Taksim Square where the 2013 protests happened, located next to Gezi Park? Or is it Saraçhane Square where 29 March 2025 protests took place [13] ? Is it Tiananmen Square in 1989? Is it Tahrir Square in 2011? Is it Vali Asr Square in 2022? Where is this square? Why are they there? And more importantly, why are we here, with them? But we don’t stay in the square: a video is projected alluding to the now aged practice of zapping amongst TV channels, which always censor what happens in squares.[14] The TV glitches, and a quote from early 2010s leftist band Bandista intervenes with the commercials. After this oscillation between the lived reality of urban squares and censored TV, the third section reaches towards the internet as a public sphere, immediately interconnected to urban squares, which speak a different tune than the commercials on TV (because “the revolution will not be televised,” as Gil Scott-Heron once said). Image 5: Helezoni. Photo credit: Volkan Aykaç. The third section opens with video which showcases this realm of the internet, which is completely different from the AI-generated video in the first section. This video was made by Film and TV undergraduate student Eray Devrenk, with clear care and passion. It was interesting for me because this video, less than four minutes long, pulled out so much of my personal history—the burden of history I tried to unpack in the beginning of this article—along with other things that I didn’t know yet, but immediately recognized their meaning through the overlap of images. Banned LGBTQ pride walks in İstanbul, highlighted with police clashes; conservative Islamic ‘family’ protests, backed by the government, against LGBTQ pride walks; the suicide videos from 2014 and 2015 of kind individuals (like Mehmet Pişkin—see Başar, 2022, 181, n.10) and trans activists like Mehtap Zengin, who just said that they could not take it any longer; the 2016 military coup attempt which paved the way for the three-year-long state of emergency and legitimi-zation of human rights abuses; wild-fires; wars; more wars; the 6 February 2023 earthquake that turned into a massacre, due to corrupt planning decisions; world leaders lecturing cameras on their borders, their wars, their hierarchy of people, and all the things that I can’t, and perhaps don’t want to, remember, to be able to stay functional. The video ends with a pop culture twist, a short scene from The Hunger Games , where Jennifer Lawrence yells at us “if we burn, you burn with us.” The actors don and doff a variety of accessories—ropes, hair pins, etc.—at the front of the stage as this video rolls behind them (Image 6). We don’t hear most of the sounds of these videos, à la Thomas Ostermeier; a solo drummer playing from a recording keeps the beat of the performance going. The final section makes yet another metatheatrical move. The actors change their acting style completely: they are actors now in a rehearsal room, they play, and then they wash their makeup in front of the audience (Image 7), and conclude with movement choreography. Image 6: Helezoni. Photo credit: Volkan Aykaç. The stylistic break comes when Seray Üstündağ comments on the fact that her taping work in section 1 of the performance was indeed not a good job, as the tape is laid in a wavey nature. People laugh here; the gesture of this stylistic shift is a powerful one. Seray Üstündağ untapes the stage. Now the entire stage, even perhaps the back stage, even perhaps the foyer, and beyond the shopping mall, the streets and the squares, belongs to the actors. They perform a series of trust falls, an act of catching each other at the exact moment of falling, which is an acting practice, and a very necessary skill in a revolutionary moment. (We have learned very well in Turkey exactly what happens when no one catches you in a trust fall.) When they wash their makeup together, almost in a ritualistic manner, it is a moment of catharsis. Yet it is also an uncanny catharsis in this postmodern show with no conclusion, no predefined faith hovering over the characters, and/or the actors. The final choreography is of exhausted bodies, going through choreographed stage actions as they fall apart, and fall down in a lump on the ground, to—maybe—rest a little. In the talkback session after the performance of Helezoni , the group talks about what made them devise this play. I am humbled by the experiences they have survived in their young age, and especially shaken by learning that assistant director Diyar Çiler is a survivor of the 6 February 2023 earthquake. What they choose to tell, I am here to listen. I also think about how the name of the play gestures towards the psychedelic nature of living in this global Zeitgeist, how violence is so close, but how much we are alienated from the impact of it unless it hits us directly and immediately. Orange The day after Helezoni , Orange tells another story of our times. Playwright Baroj Nejdet Babat is a very young queer and Kurdish artist from Şırnak [15] , who received their BA in Munzur University, and was introduced to the Performance Ecologies team by our colleague Asst. Prof. Duygu Çelik. [16] They have a soft voice and gentle manner always accompanied with a kind smile, which might at first sight hide their deep theoretical knowledge on gender and queer studies, exceeding many of the theatre scholars I encounter regularly. Director Yasemin Kır does justice to this nuanced gem of a text, with all the performative areas she explores with the design team and performers. Image 7: Orange. Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Orange takes place in an imaginary village that only grows oranges and nothing else (Image 8). No other fruits are allowed to grow in the village, and villagers (especially women and children, who are not allowed to leave) can only eat oranges. Only adult men are allowed to leave the village, and when they are gone, the village is ruled by a deep-cutting matriarchy that leans on a much deeper-cutting patriarchy. Mothers are the gatekeepers of the community; they indoctrinate their children about the importance and singularity of oranges, and tell fearful stories of wild boars that roam around the village [17] to make sure the children won’t go out, seeking a different fruit—or a different life (Image 9). The ecologically problematic idea of monocultures—i.e. growing a single crop in a large piece of land—as represented through the intense singularity of oranges in the play, also serves as a metaphor for fascism. Image 8: Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Babat’s text is unapologetic when it comes to using ancient tools of theatre, such as the chorus. In Orange , the chorus is composed of the village women, who give life to land, who protect, who harvest oranges, but who also oppress through their gazes and exert intense control through shaming, gossip, and their collective power to break the will of young people. In this village of oranges lives a young girl whose name is Cennet (a real name in Turkish which means both Paradise and Heaven ). Cennet wants to break free from both the monoculture of oranges and from her oppressive mother, who forbids her from ever being curious about the outside world. This mother figure seems to have walked in from the world of Gabriel Garcia Lorca. She casts heavy curses upon women who dare to disobey the monoculture, and tells gruesome stories about what has happened to them outside the village. Supposedly, the wild boars that roam right outside the limits of the village do not necessarily kill young women; rather, the violence described by the mother sounds much more like kidnapping, rape, and forced marriage. The choice of animal is loaded too: pigs are haram /sinful in Islam. The mother acts like the head of the chorus in Greek tragedies, and the chorus sings with her, collectively cursing the unnamed and mythologized women who disobeyed once upon a time, and were doomed to unspeakable fates. All the while, their songs cherish the monoculture of oranges. Image 9: Merve offers Cennet an apple. Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Just when Cennet is toying in her loneliness with the idea of escaping, an outsider comes, another young girl, from a neighboring village which only grows apples. This new friend, Merve, secretly sneaked out to take a long walk in the forest and discovered Cennet’s village of oranges, and she is curious to taste this new fruit. Merve starts visiting Cennet secretly and regularly after that first contact, and their friendship knowingly hints to the audience that a homoerotic romance develops between them. (I wonder how much more openly queer this performance could have been if we had been in an independent space, outside of this shopping mall, deep into Beyoğlu, surrounded by the dirty walls of found spaces turned into black box theatres, surrounded with will power and solidarity, maybe a decade earlier. Sure, the performance might have been less clean, less polished, but it would have not pulled back from naming things, as they should be named in honesty.) Merve also tells Cennet that the boars in the forest are not dangerous—it is the humans that are dangerous, and that she is particularly scared of orange-trading men. (Isn’t it always one of the most difficult confrontations to realize your community can be the big bad wolf in someone else’s story, and that they might be right to see you that way?) When Merve offers Cennet an apple (Image 10), she finally eats it—which is a direct allusion to the apple of Adam and Eve, which according to the three major monotheistic religions leads to the famous couple’s exile from heaven. Image 10: Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. From here on, there is a dramatic twist, one that is welcomed by the foreshadowing of the allusion of Adam and Eve’s apple—a twist that only early twentysomething artists can do, who are not beaten down by the dramatic structure, the dramatic canon and the conventional beauties of tragedy. After eating the apple Cennet goes back to her mother and village women and confronts them about their oppression, about their chosen and insistent ignorance, about their own evil (Image 11). She sings the prayer of the apple that she learned from Merve as she does this, and the chorus along with the mother try to silence her with the prayer of the orange village. Cennet sings longer and louder than them, and eventually leaves the monoculture of oranges with Merve, hand in hand, to find other fruits, together. Conclusion: An Interdisciplinary Introspection What does it mean to be in your early twenties in Turkey today? How does it differ from my early twenties? What is lost, what is gained in time? Below I quote my younger self, from a point in time when I was doing a first round of calculations for answering this question. I agree with Uruguayan political scientist Paulo Ravecca who claims that ‘situating disciplinary introspection through personal introspection may open fruitful paths to interrogate and unravel knots of experience made of knowledge, power, and politics’ (2019: 166). My own history is entangled in the history of contemporary Turkey: I was one of the protestors in the Gezi Park during June 2013 like many people I know, and the experience influenced—and perhaps shaped—me in multiple ways (Başar, 2022, 192). 19 March 2025 and its aftermath has shaped this generation of theatre makers. Many gestures of dissidence remained little-changed, yet meanings of these gestures shifted considerably over a dozen years: while we covered our faces in Gezi primarily to protect ourselves from the tear gas, this generation went to Saraçhane covering their faces primarily to protect themselves from government profiling. GenZ’s experience is different from ours as they try to fit their artistic and political perspective into a corporate institutional system that we managed to escape to some extent fifteen years ago, but that ecosystem is gone (for now). Today, answers escape me. Yet I stay with the questions as they grow and multiply like rhizomes, and wait for the right time, alongside my young colleagues. Because who knows? Formulating the right question could be the right answer to our times, by triggering the tsunami wave of a paradigm shift. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Endnotes [1] For an overview of and commentary on the 2013 Gezi Park protests, see Özkırımlı, 2014; David & Toktamış, 2015; Gürcan & Peker, 2015; Koç & Aksu, 2015; Yücesan-Özdemir, 2016; Hemer & Persson, 2017; Tüfekçi, 2017; Ağartan, 2024 . [2] See Yücesan-Özdemir, 2016, for a survey of other events that foreshadowed the Gezi Park protests. [3] Also see Christina Banalopoulou's discussion of the government's "suffocation policies" and "politics of asphyxiation" (2024). [4] Emine Fişek has been the Research Associate and Project Leader of ERC Project: THEAGENT - Theatre and Gentrification in the European City in Austria since 2023. See Fişek, 2026. [5] The limitedness of translations of Turkish plays into English makes it a challenge to start a larger scale discussion in Anglophone academia about the theatre field in Turkey; this has directly impacted my career trajectory, developing me as a translator and a translation editor. For a survey of Turkish play anthologies available in English, see Ergil and Yanıkkaya, 2026. [6] Curiously, these Zorlu Center cases, well known to the Turkish-speaking public, are not translated into English. Let me offer a translation of a short news clipping from 2012: “At the Zorlu Center construction site, which has turned the Beşiktaş district into a massive construction zone, a tragic worker death occurred. According to eyewitness accounts, the worker fell from the 22nd floor of the building and was killed. The Zorlu Center, which was sealed off when the construction reached the 4th floor, and then obtained a permit in one day without the approval of the Beşiktaş Municipal Council and the Chamber of Architects, continues to be the scene of tragic events. […] It is unknown whether Zorlu Center officials obtained a work permit for working on Sunday [the day that worker’s death happened]. The Beşiktaş Municipality is also maintaining silence on the matter. According to claims by local shopkeepers and eyewitnesses, this tragic death is not the first at Zorlu Center. Local residents claim that there have been fatal work accidents at Zorlu Center before, but all of them were kept from the press.” Translated from the source: "Zorlu Center'da işçi ölümü!" [Worker death in Zorlu Center], Beşiktaş Postası, last modified May 14, 2012. For readers who know Turkish, see İş Cinayetleri Almanağı 2012 [Almanac of Worker Murders], BirUmut Yayıncılık, 2013. This book and its serials from the same activist publication house will allow readers to see what a large-scale issue this is in the construction-dependent economic development model of the AKP, where workers are seen as disposable, work safety measurements are consistently lacking, and the construction companies where work accidents repeatedly happen face no disincentivizing punishments. [7] See Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Section III: Decentralized Theatres”) for a good discussion of the relationship between authoritarian urban transformation and alternative theatres. Also see Fişek 2018 on the representation of gentrification and capitalist investment on the stages of alternative theatres during the 2010s. Ironically, the venue discussed in this 2018 article, GalataPerform, was closed during the pandemic, though the ensemble continues to work. Additionally, see Fişek et al., 2026. [8] See Akıncı, 2018 to follow the reasoning of this claim. [9] For more on this claim, see Ejder, 2019. [10] See Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Section II: Subsidized Theatres” ) to understand the impact of AKP on institutional theatres of Turkey. Also see Adak and Altınay, 2018, to have a sense of the historical cultivation of the current day theatre ecosystem of Turkey. [11] See Baş, 2015; Akar, 2018; Metîn, 2019; and Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Chapter 6: Battle on Many Fronts: The Case of Şermola Performans ”) for an analysis of the Kurdish theatre scene in İstanbul during the 2010s. Beyond these works, to understand the general state of Kurdish theatre in Turkey, see the body of publications of Duygu Çelik, which are listed below. [12] It is telling that many of the banners in 19 March protests referred to Gezi. Here are some examples: “Biz Çapulcular Yeni Gelmedik Geri Geldik” [“Us Chapullers Didn’t Arrive Just Now, We Only Came Back”], “Gezi_2.0”, “Çapulcuların Çocukları Büyüdü” [“The Children of Chapullers Grew Up”] (Peker, 2025). “Chapullers” ( Çapulcular ) means “looters” in Turkish. Initially a pejorative that the government applied to the Gezi protesters, it was later adopted by protesters as a badge of honor. [13] See Akgöz, 2026 for a history of protests at Saraçhane Square. [14] Such as the infamous penguin documentary, broadcast on CNN Turk during the first days of the Gezi Protests, while people were being brutalized by the police almost immediately outside CNN Turk’s own corporate building (David & Toktamış, 2015, 19). [15] Another point of introspection: The main character (Toprak) of my first award winning play in Turkey, The Itch , was also from Şırnak. See Başar, 2024 for more on this play; and see Onat and Başar, 2025 for more insight on the nature the contest. [16] See works cited for a list of Duygu Çelik’s works on Kurdish theatre in English and Turkish. [17] The imagery here is reminiscent of the 2019 Turkish movie, Sibel, and its use of the wolf mythologies of the Black Sea region. ___________________ Works Cited Adak, Hülya, and Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay. "Introduction: Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas." In "Performing Turkishness," special issue, Comparative Drama 52, no. 3/4 (2018): 185-214. Ağartan, Kaan. Gezi: The Making of a New Political Community in Turkey . Edinburgh University Press, 2024. Akar, Bilal. "Transformation of the Kurdish Theater Field in Turkey between 1991 and 2017." Master's thesis, Koç University, 2018. Akgöz, Görkem. "LMT #142 : Saraçhane Square, Istanbul, Turkey." Laboratório de Estudos de História dos Mundos do Trabalho. Last modified March 5, 2026. Accessed March 7, 2026. https://lehmt.org/lmt-142-praca-sarachane-istambul-turquia-gorkem-akgoz/ . For the English version of the article: https://www.academia.edu/164967991/Saraçhane_Square_Istanbul_Turkey Akıncı, Özgül. "Performing Academia in Public Space in Turkey." Performance Research 23, no. 2 (2018): 44-48. Accessed 13 November, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1464753 . Aksoy, Asu, and Kevin Robbins. "Beyoğlu in Istanbul: Whose Story is It?" In Culture in the Cities - Present and Future , edited by Franco Bianchini and Guy Saez, 40-53. İletişim Yayınları, 2023. Altuğ, Seda, Mert Arslanalp, Volkan Çidam, and Saygun Gökarıksel. "Repression and Resistance at Boğaziçi University: The Making of Counterpublic under Authoritarian Offensive." In Fragments of Repression and Resistance: A.K.P. Rule in Turkey , edited by Kumru F. Toktamış and Isabel David, 119-42. Peter Lang, 2025. Aydoğan, Kemal, and Emine Ayhan. "'Büyük PSM'lerin Önünde Garipsiyorduk'" ["We were finding ourselves weird in front of big PACs (Performance Arts Centers)"]. In "Bugün, Sahne Nedir? [What is the stage today?]," special issue, Cogito , no. 119 (2026): 139-57. Banalopoulou, Christina. "'Doesn't Every Dying Person's Last Breath Touch the Living?'" Performance Research 29, nos. 4-5 (2024): 49-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2024.2510855 . Baş, Elif. "The Rise of Kurdish Theatre in Istanbul." Theatre Survey 56, no. 3 (2015): 314-35. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0040557415000289 . Başar, Deniz. "Constructing A Fictional Skin Disease Pandemic as Political Allegory Based on First-Hand Experience: An Auto-Ethnography Trial on How I Wrote The Itch ." In The Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine , edited by Gianna Bouchard and Alex Mermikides. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2024. Başar, Deniz. "Faces of a Long Unspoken Collective Trauma: Theatrical Representations of Friendship, Love, Betrayal, and Pain in the Landscape of War in Contemporary Turkey." In The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race , edited by Osita Okagbue and Tiziana Morosetti, 195-217. Palgrave, 2021. Başar, Deniz. "From Repertoires of Resistance to Monuments of Absence." European Journal of Theatre and Performance 4 (June 2022): 160-97. https://doi.org/10.21827/ejtp.4.41720 . Başar, Deniz. "Kaşıntı [The Itch]." In Mitos-Boyut 6. Oyun Yazma Yarışması, 2014 . Mitos Boyut, 2015. Başar, Deniz. "Performative Publicness: Alternative Theater in Turkey After 2000s." Master's thesis, Boğaziçi University, 2014. Başar, Deniz. Tsunami . Edited by Mina Çakmak. Istanbul: Onagöre, 2025. Poetry. Çelik, Duygu. "Dengbejlik geleneği ve Türkiye'deki Kürt tiyatrosuna etkileri [Dengbêjî tradition and its effects on Kurdish theatre in Turkey]." PhD diss., İstanbul University, 2017. Çelik, Duygu. "The Impact of the Dengbêjî Tradition on Kurdish Theater in Turkey." In Kurdish Art and Identity: Verbal Art, Self-definition and Recent History , edited by Alireza Korangy and Philip G. Kreyenbroek. Walter De Gruyter, 2020. Çelik, Duygu. "Kilam as Theatre Music in Kurdish Theatre in Turkey." In Music and Sound in European Theatre: Practices, Performances, Perspectives , edited by David Roesner and Tamara Yasmin Quick. Routledge, 2025. Çelik, Duygu. "The 'Other' Karagöz: The Kurdish Qeregoz." In Race, Gender and Disability in Puppetry and Material Performance , by Laura Purcell-Gates, edited by Paulette Richards, Hazel Briar, and Alissa Mello. Routledge, 2026. Çelik, Duygu. "Otherness and Censorship in the Theatre of Turkey (1960s–70s)." In The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship , edited by Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. David, Isabel, and Kumru F. Toktamış, eds. 'Everywhere Taksim' : Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi . Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Demiralp, Seda, and Evren Balta. "Defeating Populists: The Case of 2019 Istanbul Elections." South European Society and Politics 26, no. 1 (2021): 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2021.1923639 . Dinçel, Burç İdem. "Biomechanical Resonances in Turkey: The Working Method of Studio Oyuncuları." In The Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold , edited by Jonathan Pitches and Stefan Aquilina. Routledge, 2023. Ejder, Eylem. "Reports from the Field: Contemporary Performance Criticism in Turkey— Critical Endeavours: Experimental Searches in Contemporary Performance Criticism in Turkey." Platform 13, no. 1 (2019): 103-15. Accessed 13 November 2025. https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/11708/09_eylemejder.pdf.pdf . Ergil, Başak, and Zerrin Yanıkkaya. "Towards New Perspectives on Anthologizing and Representing Turkish Theater in the Anglosphere." Middle Eastern Literatures , March 13, 2026, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262x.2026.2629937 . Esen, Berk, and Şebnem Gümüşçü. "How to Fight Turkey's Authoritarian Turn." Journal of Democracy 36, no. 3 (2025): 106-20. Fişek, Emine, Aurélien Bellucci, Regina Lissowska-Postaremczak, Joseph Prestwich, and Clio Unger. "Stages of Gentrification: An International Roundtable." Theatre Research International, March 4, 2026, 1-13. Accessed March 7, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/03078833.2026.2634146 . Fişek, Emine. "Palimpsests of Violence: Urban Dispossession and Political Theatre in Istanbul." In "Performing Turkishness," special issue, Comparative Drama 52, nos. 3-4 (2018): 349-71. https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2018.0015 . Fişek, Emine. "THEAGENT ÖAW." Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften [Austrian Academy of Sciences]. Accessed April 14, 2026. https://www.oeaw.ac.at/projects/theagent . Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648 . Gürcan, Efe Can, and Efe Peker. Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey's Gezi Park: from Private Discontent to Collective Class Action . Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hemer, Oscar, and Hans-Åke Persson, eds. In the Aftermath of Gezi: From Social Movement to Social Change? Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. İş Cinayetleri Almanağı. 2012 [Almanac of Worker Murders] . 2013 ed. BirUmut Yayıncılık, 2013. Koç, Güneş, and Harun Aksu, eds. Another Brick in the Barricade: the Gezi Resistance and Its Aftermath . Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung, 2015. Meerzon, Yana, Art Babayants, and Deniz Başar. "Ethos of New Stockholm: A City Invented to be Staged." Critical Stages . Last modified December 2024. Accessed February 4, 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/30/ethos-of-new-stockholm-a-city-invented-to-be-staged/ . Metîn, Mîrza. "Kurdish Resistance and the Dramaturgy of Fire." Theatre Research International 44, no. 3 (2019): 314-17. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883319000397 . Onat, Fatma. "Traces of a Lost Archive: Four Selected Theatre Criticisms by Fatma Onat from 2010s' İstanbul." Edited by Deniz Başar. Critical Stages . Last modified December 2025. Accessed February 4, 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/32/traces-of-a-lost-archive-four-selected-theatre-criticisms-by-fatma-onat-from-2010s-istanbul/ . Onat, Fatma, and Deniz Başar. "In A State of Constant Migration: Conversation with Fatma Onat." Critical Stages . Last modified December 2025. Accessed 4 February 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/32/in-a-state-of-constant-migration-conversation-with-fatma-onat/ . Onat, Fatma, Deniz Başar, and Ayşe Bayramoğlu. New Stockholm'de Sonbahar = Payîza New Stockholmê = Autumn in New Stockholm . Mitos-Boyut, 2023. Özkırımlı, Umut, ed. The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi . Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Peker, Dilara Bağcı. "Gözaltına Alınan Ekrem İmamoğlu'na Destek İçin Saraçhane'ye Akın Eden Halkın Açtığı Pankartlar" [Banners Unfurled by People Flocking to Saraçhane in Support of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Who Was Taken into Custody]. Onedio. Last modified March 19, 2025. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://onedio.com/haber/gozaltina-alinan-ekrem-imamoglu-na-destek-icin-sarachane-ye-akin-eden-halkin-actigi-pankartlar-1280979 . Ravecca, Paulo. The Politics of Political Science: Re-writing Latin American Experiences . Routledge, 2019. Schmidt, Felix. "'The aura of invincibility is gone.'" IPS. Last modified 25 June 2019. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://www.ips-journal.eu/interviews/the-aura-of-invincibility-is-gone-3562/ . Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment . Routledge, 2011. Şeyben, Burcu Yasemin. Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey: Theatre under Threat . Lexington Books, 2021. Tecimer, Cem. "The Arrest of Istanbul's Mayor is Textbook Lawfare." Verfassungsblog - On Matters Constitutional. Last modified March 28, 2025. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://verfassungsblog.de/the-arrest-of-istanbuls-mayor-is-textbook-lawfare/ . Tekay, Cihan. "#AşağıBakmayacağız ('We Will Not Look Down')." South Atlantic Quarterly 121, no. 1 (2022): 210-19. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9561671 . Tuncer, Anıl Can, and Gavin Blackburn. "Prosecutor seeks 2,352-year jail term for Istanbul's mayor over alleged corruption." Euronews. Last modified 11 November 2025. Accessed 12 November 2025. https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/11/prosecutor-seeks-2352-year-jail-term-for-istanbuls-mayor-over-alleged-corruption . "Turkey: 'I Cannot Breathe' Allegations of torture and other ill-treatment in the context of mass protests between 19—26 March must be investigated" [Index Number: EUR 44/9471/2025]. Amnesty International. Last modified 19 June 2025. Accessed 12 November 2025. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur44/9471/2025/en/ . Tüfekçi, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest . Yale University Press, 2017. Uğur, Zeynep. "Reappropriation of Public Space Autonomous Space Making from Istanbul's Alternative Theatre Scene to the Gezi Movement." In "Activism and Spectatorship," ed. Pieter Verstraete and Agata Łuksza, special issue, European Journal of Theatre and Performance , no. 4 (May 2022): 114-59. Ülgen, Övgü. "'Wine & Halva:' Post-Migration and The Limits of Western Liberalism." The Theatre Times. Last modified July 26, 2024. Accessed 4 February 2026. https://thetheatretimes.com/wine-halva-post-migration-and-the-limits-of-western-liberalism/ . Verstraete, Pieter. "In Search of a New Performativity after Gezi: On Symbolic Politics and New Dramaturgies in Turkey." Theatre Research International 44, no. 3 (2019): 273-90. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883319000312 . Yücesan-Özdemir, Gamze, ed. The Road to Gezi: Resistance and Counter-publics in 21st Century Turkey . Red Quill Books, 2016. "Zorlu Center'da işçi ölümü!" [Worker death in Zorlu Center]. Beşiktaş Postası. Last modified 14 May 2012. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://www.besiktaspostasi.com/zorlu-centerda-isci-olumu-29556/ . References About The Author(s) Deniz Başar (PhD Concordia University ‘21) is a theatre researcher and playwright from Turkey, and a 2021-2023 FRQSC post-doctoral fellow in Boğaziçi University. She has published multiple articles on puppetry and political performativity. Her play Wine and Halva was staged in Montreal (2024) and remounted by Teesri Duniya Theatre (2026-27). Autumn in New Stockholm (2023), a play she co-wrote with Fatma Onat and Ayşe Bayramoğlu, was published in a trilingual edition (Turkish, Kurdish, and English), and a French translation was staged in Montreal in 2026. She currently works at the Foundations Development Directorate of Sabancı University. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch In-I In Motion by Juliette Binoche at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. In 2007, French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan stepped away from their established careers to embark on a bold artistic experiment. Over six months, they co-created In-I, an intense, boundary-pushing performance they would go on to stage 100 times around the world. Today, Juliette Binoche returns to that intimate journey. From the first spark of inspiration to the final applause, she retraces the emotional and creative arc of a singular collaboration. Drawing on dozens of hours of previously unseen footage, she reflects, as a filmmaker, on the nature of artistic creation, the vulnerability and exhilaration of taking risks, and the personal transformation they demand. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents In-I In Motion Juliette Binoche At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30, at 5:45 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 France Language French, English Running Time 125 minutes Year of Release 2026 About The Film In 2007, French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan stepped away from their established careers to embark on a bold artistic experiment. Over six months, they co-created In-I, an intense, boundary-pushing performance they would go on to stage 100 times around the world. Today, Juliette Binoche returns to that intimate journey. From the first spark of inspiration to the final applause, she retraces the emotional and creative arc of a singular collaboration. Drawing on dozens of hours of previously unseen footage, she reflects, as a filmmaker, on the nature of artistic creation, the vulnerability and exhilaration of taking risks, and the personal transformation they demand. CAST Juliette Binoche Actress Akram Kahn Dancer CREW A film by Juliette Binoche Cinematography Marion Stalens Production Sébastien de Fonseca Music Philip Sheppard Editing Sophie Brunet, Sophie Mandonnet Sound Mix Éric Tisserand Sound Editor Arnaud Rolland, Emmanuel Angrand Colour-grading Yov Moor, Elie Akoka Post Production Eugénie Deplus, Thomas Jaubert Production MIAO PRODUCTIONS In coproduction with YGGDRASIL Ola Strøm LÉGER PRODUCTION Solène Léger In collaboration with BABEL LABEL Co., Ltd. MEGUMI With the support of KERING TEMPIO FONDATION BNP PARIBAS International Sales mk2 Films © 2025 MIAO PRODUCTIONS About The Artist(s) Juliette Binoche was born in Paris. She loves travelling like someone who might have come from the four corners of the earth. In her blood run Polish, Brazilian and Flemish platelets. As a child, she loved making things, crafting, tinkering even. She brought her hands together, believed in the happiness of living, in saving snails, in warming up cold dolls. And then, to play was to escape. Escape from the loneliness of boarding schools, from recurring nightmares, creating moments of joy in playgrounds, in the pitch-black night of dormitories. At the age of four, she preferred whispering games to sleep. Her fragmented family brought her closer to angels. High up in the sky, like Dumbo, she no doubt chose her father and mother, who bathed in the world of the arts. With them, she lived at the heart of creative love. Her father’s theatrical tours awakened in her the desire for itinerant sharing. As a teenager, her cheeks aflame, Juliette had a band of friends with whom she performed theatre in the countryside with her mother: Jean-Philippe, Francine, Florence and Isabelle. But life meant she had to leave behind the valleys of Loir-et-Cher, the fruit trees, and the long evenings under immense sunsets. The nostalgia of that countryside, with its nourishing quality, became a touchstone throughout her life. Moving to Paris, baccalauréat in hand, she began theatre classes with Jean-Pierre Martino at 17 and Véra Gregh at 18. They helped her break down her will, to make room for silence, for another kind of openness. Casting after casting, hoping to fulfil her dream of becoming an actress, she was chosen to play her first major role in Rendez-vous by André Téchiné — a provocative, solitary film. The Cannes Festival became the palace of her public consecration, where the spiral of her life took flight. Her instinctive path through global creation has given Juliette Binoche a singular aura among filmmakers of a borderless constellation: Michael Haneke (Austria), David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara (United States), Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax and Claire Denis (France), Amos Gitaï (Israel), Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Trân Anh Hùng (Vietnam), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran)… Crowned with the most prestigious awards (Academy Awards, BAFTA, César, Best Actress prizes at Cannes, Berlin and Venice…), Juliette Binoche does not, however, seek virtuosity. She prefers a mysterious link between her inner world and the desire to give of herself, perhaps encouraged, as Louis Malle noted after Damage, by “the love affair between her and the camera, a presence and an intensity that are staggering.” The great range of her performances in Bruno Dumont’s films — from austerity (Camille Claudel, 1915) to burlesque (Slack Bay) — illustrates her taste for freedom and her courage in constantly questioning herself in the fire of her performances. She seemed destined for an uncompromising auteur cinema when Jean-Luc Godard spotted her in 1984 for Hail Mary, but Juliette Binoche was unafraid to venture elsewhere: Godzilla by Gareth Edwards or Ghost in the Shell by Rupert Sanders, which she says she chose as a wink to her children. The success of Anthony Minghella’s nine-Oscar-winning The English Patient, along with Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat, established Juliette Binoche as a truly international actress, recognised worldwide. Yet her need for renewal in her creations always drives her further towards freedom. Her shifts and turns make her elusive. She takes her destiny into her own hands in cinema as well as theatre (Andrei Konchalovsky, Ivo Van Hove, Wajdi Mouawad), devotes herself to music (It’s Worth Living with Alexandre Tharaud), to poetry as to painting (Portraits In-Eyes, published by Place des Victoires), to dance (In-I with Akram Khan) and, most recently, to directing her first documentary film In-I In Motion (2025). Get in touch with the artist(s) tiphaine@miaoproductions.fr 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

Get In Touch For inquiries, feedback, or any other information, please don't hesitate to contact us: Telephone: 212-817-1860 Email: mestc@gc.cuny.edu Address: The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5303New York, NY 10016-4309 Send Thank You for Contacting Us!

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 37 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 2 Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams EDITORIAL Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 Nic Barilar ARTICLE The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Donia Mounsef ARTICLE Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Pria Ruth Williams, Claire Syler, Amy Hughes, Karen Jean Martinson, David Bisaha ARTICLE Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship Rowan Jalso ARTICLE How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini ARTICLE The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Megan Stahl BOOK REVIEW Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Samantha Briggs BOOK REVIEW 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. Erika Guay BOOK REVIEW Fauci and Kramer Janet Werther PERFORMANCE REVIEW Our Town I. B. Hopkins PERFORMANCE REVIEW Frankenstein Melissa Sturges PERFORMANCE REVIEW Issue 1 Editorial Introduction Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie EDITORIAL A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Catherine Heiner ARTICLE Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov Alisa Zhulina ARTICLE “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Thomas Keith ARTICLE Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” Allan Johnson ARTICLE “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein James F. Wilson QUEER VOICES Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames Bess Rowen QUEER VOICES The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Jane Barnette BOOK REVIEW Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Nicholas Orvis BOOK REVIEW Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Zach Dailey BOOK REVIEW Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas BOOK REVIEW Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. Kelly I. Aliano BOOK REVIEW New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 Stuart J. Hecht, (former) Editor in Chief, New England Theatre Journal NEW ENGLAND THEATRE JOURNAL New England Theatre in Review Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review NEW ENGLAND THEATRE REVIEW American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Stephen Kuehler Harvard University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Otfinoski Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady. Bristol Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Paul E. Fallon. Cambridge, Massachusetts SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Megan Grumbling University of New England, Southern Maine Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Ofinoski Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady Bristol Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Angela Sweigart-Gallagher St. Lawrence University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat By Sami Ismat 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:

Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF The night before Independence Day in 1933, something unprecedented occurred. [1] As part of Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition, “Jewish Day” was celebrated, culminating in a record-breaking performance that garnered an audience of between 125,000 and 150,000 spectators crammed into Chicago’s Soldier Field, causing massive traffic jams before and after. [2] While some of Chicago’s other immigrant ethnicities were represented as part of the Expo, Jewish Day and its show-stopping finale were the most notable ethnically-oriented events of the entire fair. So impactful was the performance, The Romance of a People , that not only did it receive twelve columns of coverage in the Chicago Tribune the following day, but an encore performance was sponsored by the Tribune three nights after the initial performance. Ultimately a bold Zionist affair, raising money for creating the would-be Jewish refuge of Palestine, The Romance of a People combined spectacle and politics in a remarkably successful performance as Hitler was coming into power. A decade later, in the midst of World War II, another Jewish pageant of massive scale graced the city, but after ten years of atrocities, the motives and emotions were much different. Well into wartime, 1943 brought the New York-originated pageant, We Will Never Die , to Chicago as part of a nationwide tour. While still promoting the increasingly insistent need for a government-sanctioned nationhood (the demand which transformed Palestine into Israel five years after the Chicago performance), the pageant, as evidenced by its title, spoke to the threat to Jewish life and identity by the Nazis. Even more than in The Romance of a People, We Will Never Die carried the fear of genocide. A somber tone and a tocsin of impending death replaced the patriotic and inclusive hunger for recognition evident in The Romance of a People . Another decade later, as series of smaller individual performances were organized as part of a nationwide Jewish-American celebration: the American Jewish Tercentenary. Commemorating three hundred years of Jewish presence in America, the year-long event was held from 1954 through 1955, and boasted “forums, exhibitions, pageants, musical festivals, and public dinners organized by local committees in at least four hundred cities and towns.” [3] While these three decades of pageants bore similarities in theme and in production elements, their execution and tone differ drastically, speaking to the radically different times in American history for Jews and America’s relationship to the Jews. In our examination of these pageants, we understand them to be historically contingent, site-specific, and temporally-bounded events. Each of these Jewish-American pageants relied on its historical specificity and locale, while these elements also contributed to their lack of performance longevity. But it is in their nuanced, culturally-reflective status that we find these pageants compelling—they are historical artifacts that didactically perform their own contextually-contingent ideologies. Furthermore, as we focus on each of the three decades of pageants in the paper that follows, we contend with the ways in which their varying degrees of site-specificity are also intricately bound within a broader American network, reflective of both Jewish American microcosms and the macro-national level. Pageants and Politics We use twentieth-century Jewish pageants to argue that the pageant form of theatre is an ideal forum by which to make claims about citizenship and political engagement. While these pageants differ from traditional theatre in terms of their fluid scripting, grand scale, and limited potential for extended performance runs, they nonetheless resemble normative theatre in that they are specific, performed events with beginnings and endpoints, they feature performers enacting a narrative upon a stage, and they rely heavily on the audience-performance dynamic that is live theatre’s hallmark. That said, however, by virtue of the extent of its stagecraft, audience, and ambition within the public sphere, the pageant form, as distinct from the routinely-performed play, expresses the perspective of a segment of the population. This was particularly important from the end of the Civil War to the 1960s, a period of extensive immigration, during which the issue of accepting and integrating ethnic immigrants was salient and “patriotic pageants became a popular form for promoting the assimilation of the immigrant into American society.” [4] Pageants reached their apogee in the first half of the twentieth century, playing off the desire to solidify an American tradition, but this was necessary precisely because of the migrants who had to demonstrate that, despite diverse customs, religions, and beliefs, they belonged to—and were fervently patriotic towards—the American nation. Explicating this sentiment, albeit baldly, Esther Willard Bates describes this integration in her pageantry how-to guide, The Art of Producing Pageants from 1925: “pageantry is more than an end; it is also a means. . . . It teaches our late-comers the story of the nation in an imaginative manner, and when they act [as] our fore-fathers and speak their very words, they become part-owners in our traditions.” [5] The ethnic pageant, and in this case the Jewish-American pageant, was designed to meet this need but was also situated in light of the political needs of the community, as defined by organizations with the resources and authority to create extensive performances, requiring personnel, locations, and the activation of audiences. Pageants are not merely a means of displaying nationalism and tradition but also an occasion on which community resources are expended to set a political agenda. America’s longstanding tradition of using spectacle and pageantry for the formation and assertion of “Americanness” can be traced back to the earliest years of the American republic. Colorful, boisterous, and clear in message, pageants of early American history fostered community among America’s ethnic, religious, and social groups, simultaneously unifying them under a single banner of American identity and mobilizing as a vehicle for hybrid American-ethnic identity formation. S. E. Wilmer traces this long history of America’s theatricalized nationalism in Theatre, Society and the Nation . “Particularly in times of national crisis,” he states, “the theatre has served as a political and ideological tool to help reconfigure the [American] nation,” defining or challenging “national values and the notion of the nation,” and “reformulating concepts of national identity” that even predate Germany’s nationalistic theatrical Romanticism. [6] While the American-Jewish relationship to pageantry reflects these community—and nation-building—protocols, by the twentieth century pageants changed in their focus. Pageants became strategic attempts at persuasion, both within the community and beyond. American perceptions of Jews, both American and international, have also altered greatly over the course of the twentieth century, and the changing approaches to Jewish-American pageantry are as much a reflection of this shift in perception as of the changing relationship of American Jews to both America and assimilation. In American Historical Pageantry , David Glassberg describes the legacy of early American pageantry, its heyday in the first decades of the twentieth century, and its ultimate decline after the late-1920s. In its prime, historical pageantry played a major role in American celebrations and festivals, showcasing “the belief that history could be made into a dramatic public ritual through which the residents of a town, by acting out the right version of their past, could bring about some kind of future social and political transformation.” [7] Reiterating both American pride and the possibilities of growth of the town, neighborhood, or ethnic association, these productions presented an idealized vision of past and future through “the use of historical imagery to discover or invent an appropriate tradition in support of reform.” [8] In addition to Glassberg’s and Wilmer’s book-length studies on historical American pageantry, from early to mid-century American works, Richard M. Fried’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America examines national patriotic activity and efforts executed through theatrical pageantry and ritual, implemented through federal-level initiatives, as a means of reasserting national identity during troubling political times, particularly focusing in on Cold War-era “patriotic and civic pageantry.” [9] While the book does not focus closely in on them, Fried also acknowledges the plethora of more localized, group-specific pageant performance traditions from the turn-of-the-century onwards. Additionally, a number of articles focus specifically on minority-driven American political pageants, including those by Stephen J. Whitfield, Robert Skloot, and Lauren Love, that individually explore two of the pageants discussed within this article, examining the pageants’ “civic purpose” and ability to activate Jewish solidarity. [10] Likewise, in “Performing the Polish-American Patriot,” Megan E. Geigner similarly examines theatrical pageant performances that serve to reiterate hyphenated other-American identity as a means of galvanizing patriotic kinship. [11] In this same vein, Martha S. LoMonaco’s work on nineteenth-century Mormon pageants looks at historical pageantry as creating a foothold in American historical narrative through performance. [12] Taken together, recent scholarship displays a clear interest – albeit a diffuse one – in the performance practices of minority groups in America who used pageantry as a means of articulating their hyphenated American identity. While this article seeks to add to this body of literature, our goal is also to further that discussion by including the ways in which mid-century Jewish-American pageants built upon such an American tradition, while, conversely, discussing how we can use these past pageants as a way to explore the turns in performance practices in moments where Jewish and American-Jewish identity are in jeopardy. Our approach offers a macro view of how pageants were utilized as a means of identity production and group unification spanning three decades. Despite the overall decline in popularity of the pageant form across America, the mid-century Jewish pageants we discuss display a continuation of those same ideologies fostered by the American pageant tradition, but with particular, persuasive goals sensitive to the situation of American and global Jewry. While small towns no longer emphasized the performance of patriotism, this became increasingly important for urban Jews. For the Jewish community, the pageant both energized the community and spoke to the wider American public through the media representations of the large gatherings. Though the American pageant form by this point had morphed into the “folk play, the restored museum village, or the annual historical festival . . . depict[ing] the past as a separate world from the present,” Jewish American pageants before, during, and after the Second World War successfully bridged the gap between the ethnic enclave and the Christian public. [13] Employing familiar techniques and tropes that were long central to American civil religion, [14] these pageants continued the American pageantry legacy while utilizing the theatrical form as a successful way to assert an overtly didactic message: Jews are a unique and worthy people, they lack a homeland ( Romance of a People ), they are threatened with destruction from un-American enemies ( We Will Never Die ), and they share core American values while contributing to national history (the Tercentennial pageants). Each moment of pageantry had its own agenda, but the overall message—the insistence that Jews were worthy and patriotic Americans—remained throughout. By performing these Jewish narratives within but not eclipsed by an American narrative, these pageants performed Jewish difference, thereby drawing attention to specifically Jewish issues before Jewish and broader audiences. Furthermore, these pageants also represent a unique moment in the American pageantry legacy, as they also interpolate its historical tradition of ethnic subsumption into a homogenous (Anglo-)American, nationalist narrative. These three mid-twentieth-century pageants allow Jews to represent themselves (i.e. prominent Jews in American history) while still arguing for their Americanness and adopting a stance that hybridizes the American aesthetic and American nationalism. Additionally, we examine the ways in which these Jewish-American pageants are responsive to their contemporary moment in explicit and didactic ways that limit their potential for longevity but that offer themselves up to historians as illuminating points of reference into their cultural and political contexts. We examine each of these pageants, describing their content and how they situated the Jewish community in light of contemporary issues that a large, well-attended performance could address. 1933: The Romance of a People The Romance of a People was a three-hour pageant of epic proportions: a program “which symbolize[d] four thousand years of colorful history—history high in its drama, packed with pathos, terrible in tragedies, glorious in its victories.” [15] The pageant featured 3,500 cast members, including singers and dancers reminiscent of a Greek Chorus on a massive scale, nearly all of whom were local residents of Chicago and members of the Jewish community. [16] To prevent chaos and cacophony from the humongous cast, director Isaac Van Grove opted to amplify mechanically the speeches and songs of the cast from a room hidden beneath the stage. Covered in a Chicago Daily Tribune article that ran the day after the initial performance, columnist Virginia Gardner’s discussion of the methods utilized by Van Grove for the production, and the fact that it merited newspaper coverage at all, provides evidence of its remarkable execution. “The control room and amplifying system made possible what Van Grove described as ‘the effect of an intimate theater two blocks long.’” [17] The marriage of artistry and technology not only assisted in executing the mass theatre in which Van Grove openly believed, but also aligned with the Century of Progress mission to promote technology unimaginable in the previous hundred years. [18] Van Grove is credited for pioneering amplified sound for a theatrical production, as he did in The Romance of a People . [19] Across all press reports and published material about The Romance of a People , it is evident that the public reception was strong. The word “colorful” appears a dozen times throughout the pageant’s press coverage, as do accolades about the audiences’ upturned faces and positive Jewish attitudes and self-opinion, such as in David and Goliath allegories. [20] The positive perception of the extravagance at Soldier Field is clear but seems largely to pertain to the material only aesthetically. While the production aimed to educate for the purposes of the Zionist cause, Van Grove and his producers spared no expense to generate entertainment and to immerse the audience in the spectacle. Six months earlier in December 1932, Chicago audiences had an early taste when a massive Chanukah holiday pageant, also directed by Van Grove (and similarly produced by Meyer Weisgal), was staged at the Chicago Stadium, entitled “Israel Reborn.” [21] Though the cast size and audience numbers were more than doubled for The Romance of a People , the previous Jewish “theatrical spectacle” was heralded as a performance that “one sees once in a generation.” [22] Van Grove knew going into the colossal Soldier Field production what had worked so triumphantly only half a year prior for a similar Chicago audience. Van Grove was a staunch believer in the opportunity to create theatrical impact that “mass spectacle” afforded. [23] To Van Grove, the possibilities for emotional gravitas were substantially higher when utilizing pageantry and grand-scale spectacle, rather than realism that he considered “passé.” [24] It was the power of thousands of bodies in coordinated movement that Van Grove believed could elicit the vital response The Romance of a People needed. While the pageant aimed to garner support and attention for the Zionist cause, it also allowed an emotional appeal to non-Jewish audience members. The pageant strove to engage Jews and Christians alike, so much so that it was commented on in nearly all reviews of the pageant production. Perhaps the Chicago Daily News reporter, S. J. Duncan-Clark, put it most poignantly in his pageant review that ran 5 July 1933, highlighting the community forged through pageantry: There was laughter and weeping among the thronging spectators for the floodtide of emotion had been released. Christians and Jews grasped hands with a new sense of spiritual kinship. There were thousands of Christians present. All Christian creeds had joined in approving and promoting the magnificent project of their Jewish neighbors.[25] While Duncan-Clark recognizes the pageant’s message of Jewish distinctiveness in order to highlight the specific plight of its people, he rightly points to the pageant’s goal of community orientation—attempting to bring others into the fight for Jewish lives abroad. Regardless of, or perhaps due to, the diversity of the audience, the pageant itself was both a dramatic and edifying affair, chronicling notable events in Jewish history. The pageant depicted “forty centuries of religion” in the form of six episodes with two interludes, starting with a dramatization of the religion’s formation. [26] A 27-foot idol of the god Moloch surrounded by 500 slaves and worshippers set the scene for Judaism’s rejection of the false god, thereby depicting “the birth of true religious concepts.” [27] Furthermore, this attempt at monotheistic universality is mentioned in the pageant’s program “Greeting and Tribute” penned by producer and script-writer Meyer Weisgal. Hailing the presumed diversity of the crowd, Weisgal declaimed, “Among you are representatives of all the races and creeds which are incorporated in the structure of the American Republic. The composition of this assembly bears equal witness, therefore, to the spirit of fellowship and mutual respect among diversities of faith and race.” [28] While his program greeting closes with a reminder of the pageant’s Zionist cause, Weisgal’s preamble anticipates what would later be the American Jewish Tercentenary’s purpose: realigning Jewishness within an American historical context and within a multiethnic community. The pageant consisted of a prologue, six episodes, and two “interludes” (performed transitions) that outlined widely-known moments from “biblical and historical records,” from ancient to present times. [29] Beginning with “The Creation,” a scene depicted the first lines of the Torah (the Jewish Bible) and the creation of humanity, using chaotic lights and sound to represent “the morning of Creation, the freshness of the world as it came from the hand of the divine Artificer.” [30] This scene was followed by the aforementioned birth of Judaism and Abraham’s covenant with God after denouncing the impending sacrifice to a false god, the escape from slavery in Egypt, the building of the first temple and its subsequent destruction, exiles wandering in search of a new homeland, and finally, deliverance to a new Israel. Part of the pageant’s power comes not from the scenes depicted, but rather the sheer scale of the production itself. The thousands of bodies onstage before gigantic scenery, depicting, at turns, false idols, the temple in Jerusalem, and finally the future homeland, constituted a remarkable spectacle. The use of amplified sound enabled giant choreographed movement onstage to take place without worry about carrying noise, while the stereophonic voice-acting of forty or so actors depicting The Voice of God, Abraham, and other significant figures were hidden beneath the stage, merging media and performance technologies to enable unimpeded spectacle. The production set for the pageant was claimed to be “unquestionably the most elaborate stage ever built” at Soldier Field. [31] A “mammoth” four level, 200-foot long, 150-foot wide set filled much of the stadium. “Fashioned to look like stone, the set, on the one hand, suggested the use of ancient materials, substantial enough to endure for thousands of years into the future. On the other hand, solid but blank, this place’s history was waiting to be inscribed.” [32] The tiered stage accommodated a chorus of 1,500 and an orchestra on a single level, with ample room left for the action of the performance, [33] with the temple at stage center, adorned with a Star of David. [34] Advanced coverage in the Chicago Daily Tribune raved of the pageant’s precedent-breaking visual spectacle, including embedded floor lighting, four 35-foot lighting towers, and a giant glass “curtain” (35 feet long by 25 feet high) onto which colorful light effects would be projected. [35] These lights were used with great dramatic effect for the final stage picture: a single light blazed from darkness to illuminate the temple’s star, as the sung prayer “Shema Yisrael/Hear, O Israel” brought the pageant to a close. [36] The production’s playbill also reflected the high level of community interest and involvement. Featuring advertisements and well-wishes from organizations and businesses citywide (both Jewish and secular), the program itself enacted a coherent community voice vouching support of the production, albeit a commercially motivated one. [37] The program serves as a material testament to the city’s vested interest in the Jewish community’s patronage. The range of pageant-specific advertisements include a message in handwritten Yiddish from Sophie Tucker of The 225 Club, a note to the “Jews of Chicago” from D. L. Toffenetti of the Triangle Restaurants franchise, and an ad from Flashtric Sign Works, creators of “One of the Most Outstanding Features of Jewish Day,” the illuminated Star of David used in the production. [38] The playbill, therefore, performed the same integrated community mentality that the pageant itself asserted and reflected a desire for its success from community supporters. In his history of Soldier Field, Liam T. A. Ford notes that “rather than promoting assimilation into America’s melting pot, [ The Romance of a People ] helped make pride in being Jewish more acceptable to non-Jewish Chicagoans and at the same time, helped define what being Jewish would mean for generations of American Jews.” [39] Ford’s assertion as to the pageant’s reverberating impact on public performances of Jewishness in America in the generations to come certainly rings true when considering the next generation’s overlapping uses of spectacles for asserting Jewish-American acceptance. That said, the pageants in the decades that follow The Romance of a People differ in important ways, reflecting their altered political and cultural circumstances. 1943: We Will Never Die World War II created a new context for Jewish-American pageantry. A decade after The Romance of a People , the fate of European Jews was desperate, survival in the balance, while at the same time the might of the American military was arrayed against their tormentors. Though, perhaps, saving Jews was not a prime motivator of American military involvement, the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis was used to justify the war effort, leading to sympathy for Jews and a rejection of the more overt forms of prejudice in the United States.' The 1943 pageant, We Will Never Die , was produced at a moment in which wartime patriotism was linked to a hatred of anti-Semitism, and the pageant built on this connection. We Will Never Die premiered at New York’s Madison Square Garden, emphasizing that preserving Jewish culture and community was consistent with American values, and it featured a laundry list of theatre-celebrity involvement, including direction by Moss Hart, script by Ben Hecht, music by Kurt Weil, and was produced by Billy Rose. As their titles suggest, the decade between Romance of a People and We Will Never Die dramatically altered the substance of these theatrical narratives. While both pageants featured distinctly Jewish narratives, The Romance of a People represented hope and galvanization, whereas 1943’s We Will Never Die , facing the grim realities of Nazi crimes, presented a desperate plea for Jewish safety and mobilization to assure it. Both pageants were attended by both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, [40] and each addressed the future of Jewish inclusion and preservation. While We Will Never Die was more didactic, both pageants played off ethnic distinctiveness—Jews as a special category of “Americans”—in gaining the attention of an audience that accepted the legitimacy of that difference. Perhaps the pageants had limited effects in changing American policy, but in performance, they made the case that Jewish interests were American interests. We Will Never Die , performed on 9 May 1943 at the Chicago Stadium, proffered similar themes as The Romance of a People , but with darker, more somber tones. The pageant was a “memorial to the 2,000,000 Jews” that the producers stated had already been murdered in Europe, and was penned by acclaimed Jewish-American playwright and screenwriter, Ben Hecht. [41] We Will Never Die used vastly disparate tactics from The Romance of a People , and was credited as the first wide-scale dramatic presentation of the destruction of the Jews in Europe. [42] Contrary to the optimism of the 1933 pageant, We Will Never Die threw violent, gory details at audiences, hoping to make viewers incensed at the slaughter, rather than to convince the crowds of the goodliness and godliness of the Jewish people. We Will Never Die featured a cast of 1,000 and garnered a Chicago audience between 15,000 to 20,000. [43] It was treated as a critical step in advancing the cause of the Jewish people. The Chicago Daily Tribune titled their review, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow: Jew Must Live.” [44] Using high praise, the Tribune reviewer, Edward Barry, wrote, From a majestic stage flanked by representations of the tablets of the law and the star of David, 1,000 American Jews last night delivered a plea to an audience of 15,000, and thru these 15,000 to the world, to heed the plight of the Jews of Europe before the last remnants of the race there are sacrificed to the Nazi fury.[45] In contrast to the 1933 review by James O’Donnell Bennett, who reviewed The Romance of a People , Barry does not differentiate the Jews and gentiles in the audience, perhaps indicating the unifying, humanist appeal of the material. Unlike the historical epic of The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die opted for relative naturalism in the script. Though the production set consisted of “two towering Tablets containing the Ten Commandments loom[ing] at the back of the stage,” much of the dialogue is realistic and personable, albeit didactic, and often gruesomely so. [46] The show begins with the Kol Nidre chant from Yom Kippur, [47] a shofar is blown, and a rabbi emerges from between the two tablets to introduce and honor the plight of “the two million who have been killed in Europe.” [48] The rabbi gives the stage over to two narrators who begin a series of short episodes, each addressing the Jewish plight. The first of four episodes begins with a “roll call” of important Jewish contributors to American and global life—somewhat foreshadowing the Tercentenary narratives—including a disparate collection of individuals, such as Luis Ponce de Leon, Benjamin Disraeli, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Gompers. The second episode chronicles one Jewish-American soldier’s wartime experience and urgent telegraph home on the brink of his death during American defeat in the Philippines. Episode Three chronicles the struggle and uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, [49] and the pageant closes with an episode entitled, “Remember Us,” consisting of the dead announcing their gruesome ends at the hands of the Nazis, while beseeching the audience not to forget them. Closing with two narrators urging American involvement in the Jewish plight, the pageant used the rhetoric of the American ethic: We [Americans] have brave soldiers who are fighting to victory. But the massacre of the unarmed civilians is beyond the reach of their guns. The desert and the Mediterranean are the battle front and they are honorably engaged on it. The massacre in Europe is our battle front—and we are not honorably engaged on it.[50] Then, making a greater, global claim, a second narrator decries, “the crime of Europe calls for the mobilization of every shred of righteousness and spiritual power left in the world.” [51] While We Will Never Die offered a persuasive cry for a cohesive front and fight against the Axis and Nazism in order to rescue the remaining European Jewry, support from American Jewish organizations was spotty. Though Ben Hecht, the pageant’s scriptwriter, presented a work-in-progress to garner financial support from the Jewish community, “with representatives of nearly three-dozen Jewish organizations,” the groups “could not agree to work together in support of the forthcoming pageant. Even when Hecht . . . offered to withdraw the formal endorsement of the controversial Committee for a Jewish Army and to work only behind the scenes, the others declined to sponsor We Will Never Die .” [52] Furthermore, the pageant attempted not only “[t]o heighten concern for doomed coreligionists . . . it was also targeted at public opinion and at the nation’s capital. Hecht and his collaborators . . . wanted to stimulate a change in policy.” [53] This ambitious goal was also ultimately unattainable. As Whitfield argues in “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946”: Perhaps none of these pageants was great enough, soaring enough, memorable enough . . . but there is a more likely explanation. It asks too much of art to expect it to halt the juggernaut of tyranny. Nazism and fascism were too powerful for that. . . . Neither masterpieces nor spectacles could influence geopolitics; and the lesson that many Jews learned is that, while art can enhance and illuminate and expose power, only countervailing force can effectively confront it. . . . That realization meant consolidating a sense of peoplehood, instilling in American Jewish audiences a sense of transatlantic solidarity.[54] While transatlantic solidarity was important during the war years due to the threat to Jewry in Europe, other issues took priority during the 1950s as Jews attempted to demonstrate their bona fides as “Americans.” Whitfield points toward what would become the strategy of the yearlong American Jewish celebration to follow a decade after We Will Never Die . 1954-55: A Return to Different Roots After the war, like so much else, the politics of American-Jewish pageants were indelibly altered. During the 1950s, rather than reaching outward, emphasizing a “transatlantic solidarity,” the 1954-55 Jewish-American Tercentenary pageants focused inwards, emphasizing the particularly Jewish role in the development of American life and culture over the past 300 years. These pageants were intended to incorporate Jews into American collective memory, perhaps given the concern about seeing Jews as Communists. [55] With the existential threat to Jewish life resolved in Europe, the next challenge for American Jewry was to demonstrate to fellow citizens questioning their patriotism that Jews had long been integral to American life. American-Jewish pageantry turned to its local soil to advance a narrative of Jewish “Americanness,” which became further emphasized as the Cold War tensions increased and questions of loyalty became salient. Post-war Jewish-American pageantry presented a narrative of long-standing Jewish commitment to America since its founding, no longer suggesting that the United States must do something for Jews, but instead that Jews have done something for America. The culmination of this assimilationist, hybrid-identity of Jewish-American status was the year-long American Jewish Tercentenary celebration, occurring from September 1954 through May 1955. Celebrated nationwide, the 300 th anniversary of Jewish American presence was memorialized through publications, celebratory events, television and radio formats, and pageant spectacles. The Tercentenary was well-timed for this assertion of the embeddedness of Jews in American life. The specter of Communism conjured a need to perform a non-threatening—solidly American—Jewish identity, and a choice was made to create a celebration that publicly proclaimed this allegiance. Unlike the massive spectacles in the 1930s and ‘40s, these Tercentenary pageants were on a smaller scale, [56] a function surely of a decline in large-scale pageants, and perhaps a reaction to large-scale rallies in Germany and the Soviet Union. These pageants were performed in cities across the country but with more modest casts and in smaller venues. With their local orientation, these pageants had a different position in creating public awareness and perception than the highly successful mass pageants that had taken place previously and were centered mainly in Chicago and New York, with subsequent tour stops at other urban centers, including Detroit and Washington D.C. Although hints of the post-war assimilationist movement could be seen in sporadic pageants and publications from the immediate post-war years through the early nineteen-fifties, the Jewish Tercentenary was distinct: it hoped to include every Jewish community, large or small, in the national celebration of Jewish influence on American life and democracy. Founded in 1953, the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee (AJTC) was formed to promote and establish the commemoratory year of anniversary celebrations, building on the tercentennial theme of “Man’s Opportunities and Responsibilities Under Freedom.” To this end, numerous pamphlets were published under the auspices of the organization, created to aid and encourage Jewish communities and organizations taking part across the country. Explicit in their intended goals, the materials from the AJTC provided a clear set of instructions to follow for all manner of anniversary celebration attempts nationwide. In their clarity, these instructional booklets asked that a certain ideal narrative be followed and performed across all related performance platforms. That narrative not only asserted the early and unchanging importance of Jews in America but also their unceasing dedication to the American way of life, emphasizing democratic governance. In the numerous texts published by or with the support of the AJTC, American democracy is central. The texts didactically indicate Jewish involvement through centuries of American politics and patriotism, including one text referencing Oscar Straus’s contention that the “Hebrew Old Testament” influenced America’s foundational democratic ideals. [57] What is abundantly clear in this heavy-handed commentary is that the Jewish organization saw a need to counter the association of Jews and Communism, a perspective widely accepted in the Depression years but receding in the post-war period. [58] The culmination of the Tercentenary celebration contributed to delinking Jewishness from Communist associations in the minds of the American public, despite the continuing presence of Jews in the shrinking Communist movement. Even prior to the Tercentenary celebration, the American Jewish Committee was laying the groundwork for the later message of Jewish-American involvement in foundational American democracy. A pamphlet published in 1950, written by David De Sola Pool, chairman of the American Jewish Historical Society provisional committee for planning the tercentenary project, addresses these themes. In the pamphlet’s culminating page, De Sola Pool lists the “Fruits of the Tercentenary Celebration,” providing insight into his, and presumably the committee’s, goals for the tercentenary celebration year. Heralding the coming reinvigoration of Jewish presence within American society, De Sola Pool states that the tercentenary celebration “carried out in this broad national way will make vivid for all Americans, Christians and Jews alike, how deep and centuried is the stake of the Jews in the United States,” and furthermore, that the tercentenary “will further devotion to the Hebraic ideals of democracy that have helped to mold American democracy.” [59] In 1954, a reissue of the 1905 events of the 250 th anniversary was published by the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, seemingly as another means of naturalizing the occurrence of the 300 th . In 1905, the 250 th Anniversary of Jewish settlement in the US was celebrated on Thanksgiving Day, in an effort to “make the celebration a truly national event,” underscoring the centrality of American secular holidays and nationalism within Jewish-American identity. [60] The official celebratory proceedings for the opening event included addresses from the Catholic Bishop Coadjutor of New York, David Greer, as well as secular figures such as former president, Grover Cleveland, governor of New York State, Frank Higgins, and Mayor of New York City, George McClellan. The ceremony closed with an audience rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” [61] This pan-religious, nationalist service was designed to establish Jewish Americans’ place within the cornucopia of American identities. However, the vast historical distance between the 250 th anniversary and the tercentenary couldn’t possibly have been anticipated, and the Tercentenary events had to take into account the changes in America and globally that had occurred during the past half-century. Within her pamphlet outlining Tercentenary pageant guidelines, Adele Gutman Nathan echoes the linking of Jews and early American democracy: “From the time the Jewish pilgrims arrived in 1654 at the little port of New Amsterdam . . . Jews as individuals and as groups have participated dramatically in each step of the creation of our nation, in its never-ending search for true democracy.” [62] With one small exception, [63] she fails to mention the enormous Jewish pageants of the past two decades within her description of previous American pageantry, though she mentions other popular productions from the time. This lack of connection between the Tercentenary and earlier pageants highlights their profound ideological and aspirational differences. While The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die , and the Tercentenary pageants all fall into the pageantry category, utilizing particular features of narration, spectacle, anti-realism, and episodic structures, their similarities end with that. As Nathan’s pamphlet outlined, the Tercentenary pageants strove to integrate Jewish historical presence in the United States in the grander American narrative, therefore establishing loyal Jewish “Americanness” in the post-war period. Just as earlier American historical pageants, such as the 1914 Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, [64] aimed to create an optimistic future by crafting an idealized past, the Tercentenary pageants strove for the same goal. Conversely, The Romance of a People and We Will Never Die performed Jewish difference to assert their message, while the Tercentenary performed proudly assimilationist narratives. With communities permitted either to purchase ready-made scripts (offering titles such as Faith and Freedom , The Lamp of Liberty , and We Came to an Island [65] ) or to pen their own community-oriented pageants, towns and cities across America performed their own local renditions of American Jewish history. These pageants simultaneously asserted contemporary (and historical) Jewish presence alongside Jewish integrity and ingenuity throughout American history. The basic narrative entailed several narrators framing a number of short episodes that featured notable figures through introduction or initial verbal reenactment of the scene by the narrators. For example, the 1955 pageant, The Quilt , written by Mae Clement Perley for the Louisville, Kentucky Tercentenary celebration, includes episodes describing Jewish ties to Abraham Lincoln, community ties to Louis Brandeis, and dramatized peacemaking amongst Jews and the previous Native American dwellers of Kentucky, all being reenacted in order to educate two Louisville youth about their community’s illustrious history. [66] Highly didactic, the narrative of Jewish impact on American life and society is clear. Though specific to Kentucky history, Perley’s script bears strong resemblance to more generic pageant scripts available for purchase, written to be performed across the country, and available in formats either broad enough to suit any local setting, or able to be shaped to include local events and memories. The Golden Door , penned by Norman Corwin for the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, is an example of the former, that could be tailored to any community and offered an American narrative, depicting a broad Jewish-American history. Featuring numerous short monologues from notable public figures attesting to positive Jewish-American presence, the script is comprised of short, didactic vignettes. Monologues are delivered from figures as diverse as George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Levi Strauss, and the voice of God, among many others. Another alternative was a that enabled portions of the play script to be personalized for local performances. This was the case of Faith and Freedom , written by Marc Siegal for the Tercentenary committee. The script is comprised of the same narrated episodic format, and attends to both local and nationwide Jewish-American history, even including a pre-written but optional scene, available for use if the community possessed an esteemed member who had been “an eyewitness to the growth of [the] Jewish community since 1880.” [67] If so, such a person could have been featured in a scene in conversation with the narrator, Dr. Goldman, as an integral part of the plot and pageant’s mission. This potential character, “Mr. Blank,” could deliver a monologue on the hardships of early Jewish settlement in the local area, including needing to move frequently as the Jewish neighborhoods changed. Additionally, the character emphasizes the increased community engagement and local involvement in the present time: “Around (blank year) we elected our first (name of public office), (name of person). There was real excitement when he won.” [68] Much like The Golden Door , This is Our Home , written by I. Goldberg and Yuri Suhl for the Committee for the 300 th Anniversary of Jewish Settlement in the U.S., similarly enabled personalization, though also incorporated Yiddish into the core script, with nearly 50% of dialogue in Yiddish. Unlike other Tercentenary pageant scripts, this suggests a different Jewish community, one in which assimilation had not entirely erased Yiddish-language usage, potentially indicating a more recently immigrated community audience and/or one more interested in maintaining a more visible Jewish presence in a secularizing nation. In spite of its Yiddish components, however, This is Our Home almost verbatim follows the formulaic model of incorporating a Jewish thread into known nationalistic, American narratives. With four episodes and voice-overs by Albert Einstein, Chaim Zhitlowsky, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the play begins with a rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” followed by English and Yiddish preambles that echo each other’s statement of the shared heritage of American and Jewish-American beginnings. This performative tactic, which extends beyond the presentation of Jewish presence in early America, led to grander statements of Jewish exemplification of true American democratic ideals. This juncture was ripe for classic American pageantry techniques, “at the intersection of progressivism and antimodernism [that] placed nostalgic imagery in a dynamic, future-oriented reform context.” [69] As was the case with the two previous pageant moments, the Tercentenary responded to contemporary political conditions. Ultimately, while the American Jewish Tercentenary celebration seems to have aided the strengthening of Jewish public image in America, the festivities, tributes, and commemorations of 1954-55 were less frequently or substantially reported in newspapers and made a less significant mark on public memory. Unlike the earlier massive-scale pageants, the Jewish Tercentenary was about blending in to the standing American narrative, erasing radical associations, naturalizing patriotism and nationalist contributions, and asserting neighborliness. Politics of Pageants Each of the pageants we examine in this essay assert Jewish significance in their individual performances; either pushing toward redefining the group’s investment in broader Jewish issues, or by insisting upon Jewish importance in early and foundational American narratives. These pageants came about during such “times of crisis” in which the necessity of American interest and involvement in Jewishness needed to be emphasized, galvanized, and supported. [70] As previously discussed, each of these mid-century pageants did so in its own manner specific to the cultural and political contexts in which they emerged, but collectively they performed Jewishness in a broader American context and in that way similarly reinvented Jewish-Americanness in their respective decades. Furthermore, each performance discussed pageants as the appropriate mode of performance by building upon America’s long history of pageantry as a means for ethnic communities’ performed articulation and redefinition of their own hybrid identities. Pageants are both theatrically significant and historically situated. That is their purpose and their charm: they uncover the themes of a community and the challenges that are being faced. As performances, they attempt to persuade their audiences about those issues that are currently engaged. These three decades of pageants, produced at distinct historical moments, demonstrate that the idea of a “Jewish pageant”—or for that matter any pageant—must be contextualized. Even more than most forms of theatricality, the pageant attempts to inspire or to rouse a public that sees itself as belonging together and sharing common assumptions and desires. The pageant form is, in some sense, the most communal of all dramatic genres: this is true not only because of its massive production values, the fact that the performers are often members of the same community as the audience, and that the authors have deep local roots, but also because the themes and the morals build a sense of unity. The pageant provides a nexus of the study of theatre, history, and sociology. While these three mid-century Jewish-American pageants each present didactic accounts of ethnic history, they do so with markedly different agendas, each a presentation of and response to Jewish-American needs and interests at the time. Beginning with the start of the worldwide Jewish crisis in 1933 as Hitler took power in Germany and spanning through the post-war period of critical ethnic assimilation, each of these pageants served to both attract broad-scale interest through the mass-appeal of spectacle and sought to channel nationwide Jewish-American interest into a singular political performance (or set of performances), thereby powerfully enacting a desired outcome, from recognition to rescue to the reconstitution of Americaness. While each pageant utilized Jewish history and linked it to the present, each depended on a different set of values and historical events, shaping collective memory for specific purposes. For this reason, too, each pageant may itself offer fruitful insight into the moment in which it emerged. Because of their questionable literary authority and their focus on events of the moment, it is understandable that, unlike canonical drama, pageants will not be reprised over time, and, as a result, few scholars have focused on examples of the form as signals of current civic concerns and ethnic worries. These three Jewish-American pageants, however, demonstrate that such historically contingent productions have value as indicators of the state of society. The community provides a stage that these dramas fill. For all their local interest, pageants reveal the world. References [1] The authors thank Megan Geigner and Grace Overbeke for comments on an earlier version of this paper. [2] Earl Mullin, “Holiday Throng at Fair Nears Monday Record,” Chicago Daily Tribune (5 July 1933): 1. The current capacity is only 61,500. For the 1933 pageant, seating spilled from the stadium seating onto the stadium green, with makeshift seating filling the playing area all the way up to the stage. (Lauren Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood: The Romance of a People at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair,” TDR: The Drama Review 55, no. 3 (2011): 61.) [3] Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 196. [4] S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 108. [5] Esther Willard Bates, The Art of Producing Pageants (Walter H. Baker Company: Boston, 1925), 240. [6] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11. [7] David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4. [8] Ibid., 4. [9] Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122. [10] For reference, see Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” American Jewish History 84, no. 3 (September, 1996): 221-250.; Robert Skloot, “We Will Never Die”: The Success and Failure of a Holocaust Pageant,” Theatre Journal 37, no. 2 (May, 1995): 167-180.; and Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 57-67. [11] Megan Geigner, “Performing the Polish-American patriot: civic performance and hyphenated identity in World War I Chicago,” Theatre History Studies 34 (2015): 59-78. [12] Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17 (2009): 69-83. [13] Ibid., 288. [14] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no.1, (1967): 1-21. [15] “The Romance of a People.” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition Week Ending July 8 th (Chicago: The Cuneo Press Inc., 1933), 6. [16] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 63. [17] Virginia Gardener, “Unseen Actors Supply Sound at Jewish Pageant: Sing, Play and Speak in Hidden Room,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 4. [18] Ibid., 6. [19] Garfield discusses the use of amplified sound in The Romance of the People in his article about the pageant, arguing that Van Grove’s use of amplification in this context was totally unique for theatrical performances in the US. “The ‘binaural, electro-acoustical system,’ as it was called, was a highly innovative sound set-up – probably the first public use in the United States of what has since come to be known as stereophonic sound.” David Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” Educational Theatre Journal 24, no. 4 (1972): 440. [20] James O’Donnell Bennett, “125,000 Witness Jewish Spectacle: Mighty Drama Traces History Back 4,000 Years; Climax of Jewry’s Day at Fair,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 2. [21] “The Romance of a People,” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition , 6. [22] Ibid., 6. [23] Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” 436. [24] Ibid., 436. [25] S. J. Duncan-Clark, “Jewish ‘Romance of a People’ Kindles Thrill of Faith in 150,000 Spectators,” The Chicago Daily News (5 July, 1933). [26] Rev. John Evans, “Jewish pageant to depict 40 centuries of religion,” Chicago Daily Tribune (9 June, 1933): 10. [27] Ibid., 10. [28] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People” pageant program reprint from 1933 (Chicago: Chicago Jewish Historical Society, 2000), 1. [29] Ibid., 17. [30] Ibid., 18. [31] Liam T. A. Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 157. [32] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 60. [33] Edward Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History: Lighting Arrangements to be Feature,” Chicago Daily Tribune (17 June, 1933): 6. [34] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 18. [35] Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History,” 6. [36] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 19. [37] While the Pageant program includes Exposition-wide advertisements, it also contains numerous “Jewish Day” specific advertisements and messages from sponsors. [38] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 56. [39] Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City , 155. [40] While audience statistics are not known to be available, the sheer numbers of spectators that attended both events render ethnic and religious homogeneity highly unlikely. In the first performance, The Romance of a People performed in front of anywhere between 125,000 and 150,000 people, depending on the source. We Will Never Die performed before an estimated 15,000-20,000 (for the opening Chicago performance). Furthermore, We Will Never Die had a significant tour around the US, including a stop in Washington, DC, where President Roosevelt sent First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in his stead, as well as numerous cabinet, Supreme Court, and Congress members (See Medoff 2002). [41] We Will Never Die Official Program from Madison Square Garden 9 March, 1943 (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), cover. [42] certainyl ESexecuted this through loosa, 2002.”ers in attendance that night included First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, all the way Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), 85. [43] Edward Barry, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow Jew Must Live,” Chicago Daily Tribune (20 May, 1943): 1. [44] Ibid., 1. [45] Ibid., 1. [46] Ben Hecht, We Will Never Die: A Memorial Dedicated to the 2,000,000 Jewish Dead of Europe Pageant Script (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), 11. [47] The Jewish Day of Atonement. [48] Hecht, We Will Never Die, 11. [49] The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is generally considered to have begun on April 19, 1943. The original production of We Will Never Die occurred in New York on March 9 th prior to the start of the Uprising, as did the Washington DC performance on April 12 th , but Hecht later incorporated an additional scene entitled “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,” which was performed in Los Angeles on July 21, 1943. The date written in the script for the start of the uprising was March 17, 1943 (Hecht, We Will Never Die , 29). [50] Ibid., 39. [51] Ibid., 39. [52] Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” 239. The Committee for a Jewish Army had been proposed by the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was designed to create a fighting force against Hitler, but which would also support the aspiration for a Jewish-led Palestine. [53] Ibid., 239. [54] Ibid., 251. [55] Aaron Beim and Gary Alan Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice: Reputational Images of the Postwar Disjuncture of Jews and Communism,” The Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2007): 376. [56] On the larger-end of cast size, Chicago’s main Tercentenary pageant featured 1,000 performers, compared to The Romance of a People ’s 3,500. [57] David De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1950). [58] Beim and Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice,” 375. [59] De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 , 414. [60] Judith Friedman Rosen, “In Search of… Earlier American Jewish Anniversary Celebrations: 1905 and 1954,” American Jewish History 92, no. 4 (2004): 481. [61] American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Exercises in the celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States, 1655-1905 original pamphlet reprint (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [62] Adele Gutman Nathan, Producing Tercentenary Pageants (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954), 7. [63] Nathan mentions a single Jewish themed pageant/play from wartime, The Eternal Road (1937), though only to use it as an example of what not to do: don’t use “canned music” (Ibid., 9). [64] “St. Louis officials desperately sought to present a different civic image to the nation. They felt that a successful historical pageant would not only cleanse the city’s tarnished reputation nationwide, but also advance a single civic identity around which the various people sand classes could rally to enact reforms at home.” Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 159-60. [65] Listed in American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Program Materials for the American Jewish Tercentenary (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [66] Mae [Maie] Clement Perley, The Quilt (Louisville: Jewish Tercentenary Committee of the Conference of Jewish Organizations, December 1954). Written for presentation in Louisville on March 8, 1955. [67] Marc Siegel, Faith and Freedom: A Dramatic Presentation (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary, 1954), 20. [68] Ibid., 21. [69] Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 5. [70] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11 Footnotes About The Author(s) Rachel Merrill Moss is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University and a 2018-2019 Fulbright grantee to Poland. While earning her MA in Theatre History and Criticism from CUNY Brooklyn College, she worked in New York as a theatre critic and dramaturg. Rachel has presented work at the American Society for Theatre Research, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the Polish-Jewish Studies Working Group. Gary Alan Fine is James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, a member of the faculty of the Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre and Drama, and a former theatre critic. He is the author of numerous articles and book, including most recently, Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education . He writes extensively on reputations and scandals in art worlds and in politics. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

David Bisaha 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 Blue-Collar Broadway David Bisaha By Published on May 25, 2016 Download Article as PDF Blue Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater . By Timothy R. White. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; Pp. 275. Blue-Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater adds a refreshing urban studies point of view to the increasingly interdisciplinary body of work on Times Square, alongside Marlis Schweitzer’s When Broadway was the Runway , Lynne Sagalyn’s Times Square Roulette , and Steven Adler’s On Broadway . Timothy White’s study is a history of the “craftspeople and proprietors” of theater-related business from approximately 1875-1980, including in this categorization scenery and costume shop workers, dance shoe and wig vendors, and rehearsal space managers, among others. The book is most successful in its deployment of methods particular to urban studies. For White, economic development is best measured by the number and proximity of theater-related businesses, an argument supported by useful maps of such businesses over the decades (4-5, 75, 128-133). Using these maps, as well as directories, building ownership records, and business listings, White crafts an engaging history of Broadway’s blocks and the workers walking its streets. The first three chapters support later case studies by discussing foundational developments: the nineteenth-century road company, the consolidation of production under producer-managers such as David Belasco, the establishment of Times Square, the rise of labor unionism, and the effects of theater rental by radio and film companies in the 1930s and ‘40s. On the whole these chapters are more synoptic than argumentative. Nonetheless White uncovers meaningful patterns in details, for instance, in scene shop tenancy on the western side of 47 th street (49). The proximate locations of shops, suppliers, and their customers afforded the informal advantages of an industrial district, maximizing collaborative networks and minimizing transportation costs. Where White keeps focus on individuals’ strategies and practices, such as the then-fading procedure of renting out Broadway houses for auditions and rehearsals during the other productions’ runs (110), the ad-hoc but mutually supportive arrangements between producers/management and craft labor is clearest. Three case studies form the core of the book. In chapter four, Oklahoma! ’s 1943 premiere finds craft artists at peak efficacy, yet this also presages the doom of centralized craft production; the production’s multi-year run actually deprived costume and scenic shops of regular and diverse work, White notes (100). Further analysis of the musical’s development launches his discussion of the century’s trends, such as reliance on Broadway’s “angel” investors, negotiations within costumers’ unions over bought rather than built productions, and the effect of protectionist regulation of truck transportation by the Interstate Commerce Commission. This case study is the most extensive of the book, and effectively explains the obstacles surmounted by Broadway businesses when working within a robust, localized theatre district. Chapter six features a longitudinal case study of the decline in theatrical business activity on the 100 block of West 45 th Street, and the resulting increase in crime and adult-oriented businesses. Through the study of this block in detail, and similar ones in a subsequent summary, White argues that the loss of theatre businesses and their “casual enforcement of sidewalk safety” contributed to Times Square’s transition into a dangerous and licentious landscape. This chapter also calls attention to crime by unearthing obscure news stories from the seventies and eighties, such as the grisly murder of James Eng. Here the connection between business and decline is somewhat overstated. While larger changes to the city, such as its inequitable development priorities, the effects of immigration and white flight, and the end of the postwar boom may not be apparent given White’s more focused methodology, their absence from White’s analysis of the “slide from craft to crime” puts inordinate blame on the reorganization of the theatre economy toward a resident and regional model. Chapter seven’s case study of Evita ’s 1979 New York transfer illustrates a globalizing production market. This production encountered difficulties in securing audition and rehearsal space, mastering sound and lighting, and the increased burden of designing, ordering, and shipping production components from a distance, which White explains in detail. It also provided a model for funding a global hit musical at the expense of local craft laborers, breaking what White identifies as the “feedback loop” of Broadway. This concept connects the three studies. Intact, the loop incentivized local producers to support nearby businesses, and to occasionally invest capital in necessary offstage spaces, such as Michael Bennett’s purchase of the mixed-use rehearsal, studio, and office space at 890 Broadway (210). Strained by the regional theaters, the loop finally broke when the globalized musical ( Evita , Les Miserables , Cats ) pivoted to internationally constructed components. Worse, “absentee” producers’ profit would not return to Broadway’s shops. This broken loop became the new normal, White notes, citing Maurya Wickstrom’s observation that Disney has also not invested in independently managed space or support for craft (226). The most engaging portions of this book identify individual workers and use their actions as telling indicators of larger shifts. For example, costumer Barbara Karinska and lighting designer Eddie Kook’s salaried employment at Lincoln Center illustrates the blow dealt to the industrial district by hiring in-house labor, a reduction in workers’ flexibility only compounded as jobs arose in resident theatres outside of New York. Another valuable connection made by this book is its discussion of theatre’s relationship to city development plans, first the Regional Development Plan of the 1930s (67-74) and, later, Mayor Lindsay’s establishment of the “Special Theater District” in 1967 (194). While these ideas are mentioned in other histories, White’s approach foregrounds the ways in which municipal policy changes shaped the fates of theatre’s backstage workers. However, due to its emphasis on business listings, the book equates the success of craft workers with a healthy crop of independently owned theatre-related businesses. The workers themselves periodically become lost in this history of business ownership, which cannot effectively track labor performed in larger institutions like regional theatres. More troublingly, the book doesn’t fully interrogate the concepts invoked by its title, using “blue-collar,” “craft,” and “industry” more or less interchangeably. Further research would benefit from investigating the social networks and class position of specific theatre workers. Nonetheless, solid in its understanding of the period and its urban geography, Blue-Collar Broadway is a good resource for scholars interested in Times Square history. By appropriately positioning theater as a small but important part of New York City’s developing economic power, White establishes the usefulness of urban history methods for the study of American theatre’s most influential urban landscape. References Footnotes About The Author(s) David Bisaha Binghamton University, State University of New York 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.

HONORING PAULA COURT presents Prelude 2024 Opening Ceremony at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Prelude 2024 Opening Ceremony HONORING PAULA COURT 4:00 - 4:50pm Wednesday, October 16, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall Lobby RSVP Prelude 2024 begins with an opening ceremony to honor photographer Paula Court with the 2024 Franky Award. Please join us in the Elebash lobby as we toast Paula's work and legacy and kick off the festival! Light refreshments will be served. Named in honor of MESTC Executive Director and Prelude founder Dr. Frank Hentschker, the Franky Award was created to recognize an artist who has made a long-term, extraordinary impact on contemporary theater and performance in New York City. Paula Court has been documenting theater, dance, and music in New York City since 1976. Over many decades, she has photographed the work of the Wooster Group, John Jesurun, Eric Bogosian, Jo Andres, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Michael Smith, DANCENOISE, and Sarah Michelson. In a 2024 essay on Paula Court for Topical Cream , critic Stella Cilman astutely observed, “Court’s photos access a subterranean psychological space that transcends any particular aspect of a given scene—the single gesture of an actor or a particular architectural detail near them. Her purview emphasizes the gestalt, embracing all the coincidental, chaotic, and awkward natures of people and things as they happen to interact.” Her images can be seen in New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground 1978-88 ; PERFORMA: NEW VISUAL ART PERFORMANCE ; and the forthcoming Broken Clothing: the Costumes of Suzanne Bocanegra. Currently Paula is faced with very serious health issues that require immediate and ongoing assistance. A group of friends have joined with Paula’s family to raise the funds needed to provide Paula with excellent in-home care and the specialized physical therapy she urgently needs. Their goal was to raise $50,000 to support her initial recovery for six months, and they achieved this goal. They continue to fundraise to help see Paula through to the end of 2024 as they work on other ways to generate income from her life's work. As they rightfully note: “Paula has donated endless hours capturing New York’s underground art, dance and music scene, while tirelessly advocating for artists and documenting ephemeral moments to provide us with a collective memory.” If you are able to donate, please do so here . Your contribution is tax deductible and will be directed toward Paula's healthcare costs minus the fees charged through this platform. If you would like to provide a check or wire, please contact Esa Nickle at esa@performa-arts.org . Performa is a 501c3 non-profit organization and is acting as a fiscal sponsor of the preservation fund. 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). Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Ansley Valentine 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 Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Ansley Valentine By Published on April 15, 2023 Download Article as PDF Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when all of the theaters closed, many artists moved their work to digital platforms. While many disparaged these efforts, claiming that virtual performance was not legitimate performance, Pandemic Performance : Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times documents the work experience and creativity of primarily American theatre and dance artists who not only moved to digital and other platforms, but who also developed new methods of working through these platforms, thereby sustaining and growing craft through the pandemic. Pandemic Performance includes scholarship in a variety of modes—traditional research alongside artists’ reflections—which makes this book an important record of the field, as well as of myriad artists’ experiences in this time. The range and level of detail given will serve as an important historical record from the inside of the changes in process and communities that artists undertook to maintain their artistry. Pandemic Performance is one of the first books to chronicle “resilience, liveness and protest in quarantine times” so thoroughly. Editors Kendra Claire Capece and Patrick Scorese organize the book around three headings: PART I: America God Damn; PART II: Friction and Encounter; PART III: Building a New Future. In PART I: America God Damn , Capece and Scorese begin with the general societal upheaval that happened with the convergence of Black Lives Matter, Covid-19, and the death of George Floyd, framing how those critical events caused an awakening to systemic injustice in America in general and the performing arts, in particular. PART II: Friction and Encounter examines the difficulties artists and institutions faced as they tried to pivot to make art in different ways. PART III: Building a New Future shares views on how disruption and adaptation created models for sustained artist/community/institution realignment. This book focuses more on individual artists who document their reactions to disruption and how they’ve examined their own praxis. These artists developed performance models to supplement or replace their previous work, as the profession and society experienced crisis. Contributors focus on how artists shifted their relationships with institutions and ultimately became different artistically in light of the shifts in society. In fact, this book seems to be one of the first to gather a variety of sources that address the impact of marked societal shifts on the working artist from the perspective of artists documenting their metamorphosis. There are certainly other resources that highlight data such as the economic impact on the arts in the United States, the number of arts organizations that failed to reopen after the shutdown, and so on. What makes this book unique is its centering on artists’ voices relative to their work, whether written by the artists themselves as in (Re)current Unrest: The Fire This Time (Charles O. Anderson) or gathered through conversations such as Performative Allyship and the Foxes That Drool: In Conversation with Brittany Talissa King (Brittany Talissa King with Kendra Claire Capece and Patrick Scorese). Here, disparate artists share their individual responses to the shutdown, their reaction to the disruption to their work practices and places, but also how they pivoted to make art in a different way. For example, some detail how they discovered ways of making media practice a part of their performance model while trying to maintain the immediacy they found in their previous live performance work. While the idea of mediated live performance is not completely new, the ways these artists experimented with media are new, as are the contexts—and communities engaged, at times—demonstrating resilience. This book makes a cogent argument for the importance and practicality of these performances. Rather than simply being placeholder activities, Pandemic Performance makes a very clear argument for why these works actually discovered and explored new uses of performance theory. By necessity, the means of production were decentralized. In the absence of institutional support, the artists featured found new ways of creating their work. They also explored ways of working as collaborators while remaining in isolation. They took on new ways of using their work and artistry to support the change they saw around them. The result is a book that will appeal to anyone interested in how artists invested in community engagement and social justice, as well as the performing arts, struggled with and adapted to the Covid-19 challenges they faced. On one hand, it validates the experiences of thousands of performing artists who embraced this unstable time as an opportunity to create despite obstacles. On the other hand, this book can serve to challenge those who questioned the legitimacy of virtual performance and whether it was worthy of serious artistic consideration or critique. The volume’s case study chapters give detailed accounts of the processes and experiences of those who joined the digital performance space, determined to create and persevere. The research presented documents methods, analysis, and outcomes of the disparate projects. One should also note that Pandemic Performance shares perspectives of BIPOC artists who found new life and opportunities in the pandemic that had not existed for them before, reimagining the field’s practices and hierarchies. This book is important to the field because it captures in detail the seismic shifts that happened in performance. The writing is largely accessible and often very personal. Pandemic Performance can serve students, artists and scholars in performance studies, social justice, community development, and other disciplines. Some might question its scholarship because of the mixture of analysis and first-person accounts, however the volume is fascinating, instructive and can ground others’ future scholarship. Capece and Scorese critically frame the artists’ contributions effectively, moving from hypothesis to analysis via the Introduction and book structure. To an impressive degree, they also value the unfiltered voices of socially-engaged artists who helped to reimagine performance and work practices, making this an important primary source for scholars now and moving forward. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ANSLEY VALENTINE Indiana University Bloomington 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: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber By George Potter 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:

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article The 61st Theatertreffen was the first under the new artistic leadership of Nora Hertlein-Hull, who was appointed on Jan 1, 2024. Numerous changes had taken place in Berlin’s largest and most prestigious theatre festival between 2018 and 2022, including the 50% quota of female directors in 2020 and a complete conversion to mediated viewings during the COVID pandemic crisis. Under the leadership of Yvonne Budenholzer, the festival had achieved a greater sense of inclusion, not only in the nature and style of the productions, but also for those who created and presented the works as well as the characters realized in the works. The recently adjusted rules for selection allowed works that may not have been previously considered a chance to be one of the “Ten Remarkable Productions” chosen by the panel of jurors. The Theatertreffen once again used the Festspielhaus as the central location for the bulk of the performances, with the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz and the Hans Otto Theatre in Potsdam as the other locations for performances. Numbers of performances were kept relatively low again this year as only a few of the invited productions played more than five performances. For example, Nathan the Wise played only two performances and Overweight, Unimportant, and Out of Shape only had three showings. Several productions were seen as many as six times and media coverage aided in the visibility of the Theatertreffen. Four of the invited works were made available on ZBF, again providing a great deal of access to a large population outside of Berlin. Extra Life was a production of DACM/Company Gisele Vienne and listed a total of twenty-one producing partners from numerous countries including Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The only work to play in the Grosses Haus located on the Hans Otto Theatre “compound,” Extra Life centered around the lives of two siblings who recounted and relived critical moments of their lives, including episodes of sexual abuse by an undisclosed family member. Speaking mainly in non-sequitur and poetic reflection, they eventually emerged from their parked vehicle and began to advance into a dreamscape, created by abstract sound and lighting. At one point they were encountered by another figure – a barely visible and unidentified figure. As the work progressed the characters interaction with the third figure shifted into a slow motion, light enhanced movement sequence that defies verbal explanation. Vienne’s slow-motion choreography attempted to blend with numerous elements of light, stage fog, prisms and other elements designed to create new spaces on stage – spaces that (in her words) release the horror and pain experienced by the siblings. The intense slow-motion movement of the siblings was combined with a series of rotating laser style lights whose purpose was to redefine the interior space of the theatre. The lights created numerous internal partitions that became shared spaces between audience and the two performers in timed sequences. The effects used in this performance were extraordinary, but in many ways Extra Life was a highly unusual selection for this festival given the extremely minimal text and considerable focus on the creation of an internal space in which shattering life experiences can be manipulated and felt in theatrical space. An important layer to the production was the original musical design and soundscapes were provided by Caterina Barbieri and Adrien Michel. The resulting experience had the overall effect of a dreamscape defined by a mixture of movement, sound, lights and minimal text. Theater HORA actors and puppets join with actors from Schauspielhaus Zurich in Riesenhaft in Mittelerde Riesenhaft in Mittelerde , a devised retelling of The Lord of the Rings was presented by Theater HORA, Das Helmi Puppentheater and Schauspielhaus Zurich. Directed by a team of four – Nicolas Stemann, Stephan Stock, Florian Loycke and Cora Frost – the work was developed with a team of twenty-four actors and twelve onstage technicians (with about ten more offstage) as the work involved multiple cameras capturing the action and sending it to one of five projection screens. The entire space, the Second Stage of the Festspielhaus had been converted into a multi-stage performance site, featuring projection screens, three stages (one was movable), and numerous other pathways on which vehicles were used to move the action throughout the space. A small orchestra and chorus were included in the performance as were two functioning service areas for bar service and bathroom facilities. The duration of the performance was just under four hours. Co-director Stephan Stock was artistic director of HORA Zurich, Switzerland’s largest and most prominent inclusive theatre company. Twelve members of the inclusive theatre company were paired with twelve members of Schauspielhaus Zurich to form the company of Riesenhaft in Mittelerde . Though the mission of HORA had been slightly altered due to budget cuts, the nature of the student’s participation in HORA projects includes the study of many subjects that can be considered “pop-culture,” and because of the worldwide popularity of the Lord of the Rings films, the Tolkien legend was included in the curriculum. Many of the student actors in this production considered themselves to be experts or superfans in the realm of Lord of the Rings trivia. Prior to the performance each student performer gave a brief (and often moving) testimony regarding the twelve-month journey with their particular role, the skills they learned along the way, how the role had influenced their lives and what they would take away from the performance as they moved forward in their lives and careers. Captured on video and broadcast over all five screens this opening moment set the tone for the journey that would take place in the production. Naturally, only a fraction of the events from the epic story could be realized in this four-hour time span, but the company presented a sequence of scenes to establish the forces of good fighting the forces of evil, battle scenes of both triumph and loss and the all-important scenes regarding possession of the ring itself. Many scenes were highly physical in nature (with consideration for the actors’ limitations) and utilized a “Monty Python-esque” brand of physical comedy. Many prerecorded sequences were also employed to enhance the established visual aesthetic. Life sized puppets, often manipulated by the HORA students, added to the visual spectacle of the work. Riesenhaft in Mittelerde was without doubt a model performance for the 21st Century. The mixture of the HORA student population and seasoned actors from Schauspielhaus Zurich presented in festival atmosphere, and combined with the use of puppets and multimedia elevated the event to a grand spectacle rarely seen in the world of live performance. The individual performances given by all involved achieved a powerful level of authenticity as the highly physical demands of each scene were supplemented by the life investment of the HORA students, who had practically adopted the world of the play as their primary existence. The framing of the work, however, allowed them to step back outside of the play at the end and interact with the audience while saying goodbye to the onstage world of Tolkien. Vaterlosen , based on Chekov’s novel Platanov was produced by München Kammerspiele with stage direction by Jette Steckel, scenic design by Florian Lösche and costumes by Pauline Hüners. The production was realized on the Grosse Bühne of the Festspielhaus complex. Lösche’s vast stage design for Vaterlosen was dominated by the use of hundreds of flexible metal rods inserted into the stage floor in order to create the appearance of something like an immense field of grain. Rear lighting and projections supplemented by basic stage furniture elements made up the minimalist design as space was further defined by light and sound. The play takes place at Anna Petrovna’s country estate where Platonov, a retired school master, manages to awaken the sexual fantasies of three women in one setting. Steckel’s somewhat epic approach included a unique element borrowed from the world of network television. Combined live and video sequences entitled “Dad Men Talking” featured prominent Volksbühne dramaturg Carl Hegemann along with Martin Weigel, a university professor, who engaged in summarizing what had taken place in the work up to that point. Like shows such as “Dead Man Talking” and the similar commentary found for Netflx series Breaking Bad , the commentary really existed on the margins of what was taking place in the story and had more of the “trashy tabloid” feel. As is so often the case with exemplary works of the German stage, primary emphasis was on the human form. Steckel’s human compositions involved a number of scenes that involved Platonov and one of the three women engaged in simulated sex, stood naked in the rain and numerous other erotic moments. However the most memorable physical scene occurred as Platanov, alone on stage, began to uproot the steel rods used as scenery and thrust them underneath his clothing, attaching them to his body – first two poles inserted behind him into the legs of his pants, followed by a third and forth pole inserted across his back through his arm sleeves and then several more poles strategically aligned to exaggerate his physical body, yet at the same time placed severe movement limitations on his ability to engage in simple movements. Because the poles were somewhat flexible (though not limp by any means) some movement and bending was possible. After inserting around ten poles into various areas of his costumed body, Platanov attempted to move around the stage and engage in simple activities, all rendered nearly impossible by the poles. At one point he was able to actually bend over and pick up a glass of beer which resulted in enthusiastic applause from the highly engaged audience. This silent, movement only scene occurred midway through the work and appeared to serve as a visual metaphor for Platonov’s life circumstances and the romantic choices that began to ensnare him. Marina Galic, Stefan Hunstein and Jens Harzer in Schauspielhaus Bochum’s Macbeth . The fourth invited production was Shakespeare’s Macbeth , produced by Schauspielhaus Bochum. Directed by the acclaimed Dutch director Johan Simons, also the company’s artistic director, Macbeth was staged with only three actors – Marina Galic, Jens Harzer and Stefan Hunstein, and utilized a mixture of Shakespeare’s text, some freely adapted textual sequences and some areas of post dramatic narrative that commented on the play’s action from a contemporary perspective. The three actors were relentless in their approaches to over thirty characters. Naturally, the witch scenes provided the central framework for the piece while most other scenes were easily framed with one to three actors and with some exciting twists. For example, Lady Macbeth’s “Unsex Me” monologue was performed in the midst of what appeared to be a threesome; Macbeth’s well known “Dagger” speech done with bloody comic flair. Simons is well known for dark comedic interpretations and his work has been well represented at the Theatertreffen. Previous productions included München Kammerspiele productions of both Müller’s Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome (2004) and Holloubeq’s Elementarteilchen (2005) as well as Kasmir and Karoline AND from Schauspiel Koln in 2010. Artistic director since 2018, Schauspielhaus Bochum was recognized as theater company of the year by THEATER HEUTE in 2022. Simons work is generally characterized by a great deal of physicality and the use of dark clowning and makeup techniques. Falk Richter’s powerful autobiographical work The Silence was the first of two 2024 TT selections produced by the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin. The Silence is essentially a one man show as the narrator – playwright Richter as portrayed by Dimitrij Schaad – recounts his family life with particular emphasis on moments of “silence,” things that were not said, stories that could not be retold and memories that were too painful to recount. The Silence included video segments as Richter conducted interviews with several family members, including his mother. Also directed by Richter, most of the stories revolved around Richter’s relationship with his father, a prisoner of war from WWII and the difficulty of life with a father suffering from severe PTSD. As a young homosexual attempting to emerge from a closeted lifestyle, Richter’s sexuality had also drawn the ire of his father and greatly strained their already painful relationship. Richter noted how the difficulties he faced with his father were also present in his daily social life – he recounted being stalked by a gang of boys who were intent to harm him since his outer appearance suggested homosexuality to them. He recounted a difficult situation as he begged for help from an older woman as the gang moved in on him. He noted how the older woman turned away from him, refusing to offer any assistance for apparently the same reasons. Richter states in the text that he had only been able to break his own personal silence after the death of his father. Upon his death, all of the family silences were ended – the physical violence toward Richter and his mother, the many women (six total) with whom the father had past or ongoing relationships, and finally, the complete revelation of his sexuality. Playing the role of Richter, Schaad spent most of the performance speaking directly to the audience and successful revealed both the pain and humor of Richter’s life as portrayed in THE SILENCE. Including personal video sequences with actual family members added an element of authenticity to the work that approached docudrama. THE SILENCE, like several other works in the festival, included a solid mixture of actual real-life events (interviews) with simulated or “quoted” happenings. Richter has remained a key figure in the repertoire of the Schaubühne for more than a decade. Schlomi Shaban and musicians for Bucket List at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. Described by its creators as a “musical hallucination, Bucket List was another unique selection for the 61st Theatertreffen. Composer/Lyricist Schlomi Shaban and Director Yael Ronen had worked together for several years at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin before the development of Bucket List at the Schaubühne. Both Ronen and Shaban were established artists in Israel before their work at the Gorki and Bucket List was their first collaboration on a traditional book musical. The work featured a cast of four as well as a small combo of three musicians. Like Richter’s The Silence , Bucket List also dealt with painful memories as Daniel Regetz/Robert recounts his life, his childhood, love, and relationships all within the scope of an institutional study that is taking place regarding his case. Plagued by recurring PTSD-like symptoms Robert’s painful story was realized as series of vignettes; musical styles varied from standard musical theatre fare, tango, jazz and pop. The characters remained costumed in black throughout the work and numerous references to current and past Middle East clashes were included. One scene saw the characters bending over and pretending to lift and cradle imaginary babies who were casualties of world violence. Several performances of Bucket List were unfortunately marred by anti-Israel protesters as was the case with the pair’s previous collaboration THE SITUATION at Gorki Theatre in 2021. The seventh production, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s monodrama Laios , is the second of the playwright’s five-part series Anthropolis . Directed by Karin Beier with Voxi Bärenklau providing video sequences, Laios consists of a fictitious monologue (supported by ancient sources) by the father of Oedipus, Laios utilizes a complex dramaturgy based in the single perspective of a narrator who steps in and out of the role of Laius while describing the events leading up to his death at the hands of his son Oedipus. As the solo actor and narrator, Lina Beckmann flows in and out of various characters ranging from politicians and warriors to hunters and other figures. Characteristic of Schimmelpfennig’s style, the work was post dramatic narrative; masks were used to help define many of the characters but, as was the case with the hunter character, were also used as accessories to describie the often gory and horrific details of everyday life in Thebes. Beckman’s greatest skill lay in her ability to just describe the (often horrific) stories in a conversational manner and reserved special moments in the work to shift into “acting” or playing other characters than herself. As one of Germany’s most respected contemporary directors, Beier, invited to her third Theatertreffen, realized the work on a mostly bare stage with only Beckman and series of masks and musical instruments. Rarely produced on the German stage is Ubergewicht, Unwichtig, Unform ( Overweight, Unimportant and Out of Shape ) by Austrian playwright Werner Schwab. Since his death in 1996 there have been few realized stagings of Schwab’s controversial works due to extremely graphic content and questions regarding their suitability for live production. Directed by Rieke Süßkow and produced by Staatstheater Nürnberg, Ubergewicht is set in a rural bar as five locals and the bar lady engage in a regular evening of lower-class bar conversation when they all suddenly become fixated on a “beautiful couple” who refuse to engage in their pedestrian banter. After a series of minor verbal exchanges the scene turns physical and the locals eventually carve the couple up and consume them in a cannibalistic frenzy. Süßkow’s visual concept involved a quasi-dollhouse setting with the locals on the bottom floor and the beautiful couple above. The seven local characters were all aligned in frontal, single row display with no real scenery and very limited properties. The locals were costumed as inflatable sex toys, complete with active genitalia, which were used both in comic and serious (sometimes degrading or tortuous) moments. The cartoon like characters that populated Schwab’s world opening discussed their sexual ability and genitalia size, flashed and insulted other characters, and spoke in crude, nihilistic terms about life itself. For example, a married couple, Piggy and Bunny discuss their potential offspring. Piggy notes: “We’ll give the impression that the two of us (Piggy and Bunny) had been through a meatgrinder, and our little Piggybunny had been modeled out of the mincemeat.” Similar commentary, generally much more graphic, was scattered throughout the work but the delivery and style of the work. Company of Overweight, Unimportant and Out of Shape by Staatstheater Nurnberg. The ninth and final production included is Die Hundekot Attacke , a company developed work presented by Theaterhaus Jena in cooperation with Walter Bart and the theatre collective Wunderbaum from Rotterdam In the Netherlands. The devised work was company developed and based on a theme that they had used previously – a company of actors brainstorming about what might be good subject matter for a new work. The subject that was finally chosen by the company dealt with an actual incident involving artistic director Marco Goecke, Intendant of Hannover State Ballet who retaliated against Weibke Hüster, a Berlin critic who had written a scathing newspaper review about his work as a choreographer. The incident, that culminated with Goecke smearing dog faeces across the critics face, had electrified the German and European press. The suspension of the Intendant only further ignited free speech and violence prevention advocates Bart noted that the actual incident was one that was so controversial that many people refused to talk about it – he noted that these types of situations are actually perfect to use in the context of a devised play. The text of Die Hundekot Attacke was realized as a combination of text messages as well as personal conversations among the company – both as a collective and between individual members – that focused on the Goecke/ Hüster, incident. In the eventually realized stage play, the characters used the situation as a springboard to discuss other issues, like freedom of the press, societal as fiscal responsibility of state funded institutions, physical violence by males against females and other issues that were revealed through the process of devising. The formalized staging developed by the company required that the actors sit in a row of chairs lined across the stage with only spare movement used to connect certain characters with one another or to create mini sub-groupings. Die Hundekot Attacke ended with the characters joining together to perform a dance performance modeled on the work of Goecke. At the conclusion of the 61st Theatertreffen numerous awards were given – Die Hundekot Attacke garnered awards for “Production of the Year” as well as the “Best Young Actor” award that was given to Linde Dercon. Like Bucket List , Nathan the Wise , selected from the Salzbug Festival (also producer) was affected by the Israel/Hamas clash in Gaza and performances were limited to two considering the world tensions surrounding the play’s subject matter as well as the logistical problems of transporting Ulriche Rasche’s massive work to Berlin. Unfortunately, Berlin is a often utilized site for political displays and protests due in part to its long history of such events as well as its profile as an important world location in Europe. Still the majority of Theatertreffen performances played to completely or nearly full houses, making the television performances all the more necessary for Berliners unable to get a ticket (as was the case with Laios , which completely sold out). Around 16.900 visitors attended the 40 events hosted by the 19-day festival, the first edition under the direction of Hertlein-Hull. 13.869 people watched 29 performances of the ten remarkable productions at Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz and Hans Otto Theater Potsdam. The overall capacity utilization was 99,95 percent. Approximately 3040 visitors attended the free events: discussions, award ceremonies and the events of the conference BURNING ISSUES at the Festspielhaus. Via the media libraries of 3sat, ZDF and Berliner Festspiele, the recordings of the three “Starke Stücke“ and the further digital offerings achieved over 39,000 views in the period from 2 to 20 May. Under Hull’s leadership a new format has been proposed and the new title would be Ten Treffen (meetings or encounters); a series of ten different transdisciplinary formats of encounters which take place during the entire period of the festival in a variety of formats and include both new events and already existing elements of the festival. This new format would be in force for the 2025 festival and, while it would not affect the selection process of the productions, would help shape the nature of the overall event moving forward. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! By Amir Al-Azraki Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! By Amir Al-Azraki Introduction to Ya Rab! (O Lord!) Ya Rab! , written in 2013, premiered in 2015 at the Fine Arts Institute Theatre in Baghdad. It was subsequently performed at the Fine Arts College Theatre in Babylon and was later staged at the National Theatre in Baghdad in 2016. The year of 2013 was marked by the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), following the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in 2011. Between 2014 and 2016, ISIS rapidly expanded its control, seizing large swathes of territory, including the major cities of Mosul and Tikrit, as well as critical infrastructure such as hydroelectric dams and oil refineries. By June 2014, the group declared the establishment of a caliphate, with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed as its caliph, claiming leadership over Muslims globally. The group's actions resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians and precipitated a severe humanitarian crisis, displacing hundreds of thousands. That period was defined by escalating terrorism and violence, which incited widespread protests against death and injustice. The protests in Iraq, evolving from the Arab Spring in 2011 to the Tishreen Revolution in 2019, were sparked by issues that included terrorism, national security concerns, unemployment, corruption, displacement, and inadequate public services. Throughout this turmoil, women emerged as crucial figures, leading efforts to advocate for justice and human rights amidst the chaos. Ya Rab! depicts an Iraqi mother who breaches Tuwa Valley, sacred within Islam, to appeal to God; Moses (Musa) appears as an intermediary. The mother demands that God halt the violence and chaos in her country that is causing the death of children, and replace it with love and harmony. She vows that if her conditions are not met, she will put a stop to all prayer, fasting, and other acts of worship. Moses, as God’s intermediary, argues that the earth’s misfortunes are brought on humankind by its own acts, and that her proposition is equivalent to rebellion against God. The mother, however, convinces Moses to leave Paradise to join her on earth in protest against God. It is surprising that the play was staged in a prominent theatre, given its provocative subject; within the conservative religious political ecology of Iraq, the playwright and those involved opened themselves to accusations of sacrilege. More importantly, Ya Rab! critically engages with the role of “mother activism in Iraq,” intertwining Islamic theodicy and themes of divine justice and human suffering, while juxtaposing the sacred and profane within the revered context of the Tuwa Valley, ultimately challenging religious and political authority through the powerful confrontation of a grieving mother with God’s inaction. Mother Activism [1] Ya Rab! explores the emerging role of mother activism in Iraq in recent years. The mother-protagonist embodies a powerful form of mother activism that integrates maternal essentialism with emotionalism to challenge patriarchal, religious, and divine authorities while asserting her political agency. Her protest can be seen an example of “activist mothering”, “maternal activism”, and “political motherhood”. By taking her grief and turning it into a public plea for peace, she reconfigures her maternal identity from a passive, private role into a potent, public force. Her actions are characterized by a powerful performance of maternal dedication that extends beyond traditional caregiving to include political advocacy. Seen through Natalie Wilson’s notion of "activist mothering," the mother is depicted as reasonable, argumentative, outspoken, and confident. She uses her personal experiences of loss and grief as catalysts for political activism. Her public protest against violence demonstrates how personal and emotional experience can be transformed into powerful political statement. The mother’s refusal to accept traditional constraints of motherhood and her engagement in activism underscores the concept of activist mothering, where maternal roles are integrated with political advocacy. Islamic Theodicy Ya Rab! explores themes of divine justice, human suffering, and the relationship between the divine and human actions. Islamic theodicy, the discourse that addresses the paradox of a benevolent and omnipotent God who allows suffering and evil, typically emphasizes the notions of free will, the testing of faith, and the idea that suffering can be a means of spiritual growth or a consequence of human actions. By demanding an end to violence and chaos and threatening to cease all acts of worship if her demands are not met, the mother embodies a profound struggle with the problem of evil and divine silence in the face of suffering. Her insistence on justice and peace reflects a deep sense of moral outrage against the suffering inflicted on innocent lives. Her vow to halt worship signifies a radical protest against what she perceives as divine inaction or complicity in the suffering of her people. This stance brings her into direct conflict with the traditional Islamic understanding that suffering has a divine purpose, whether as a test of faith, a means of purification, or a consequence of human free will and sin. Moses's role as an intermediary is significant. In traditional Islamic theodicy, the belief is that human suffering is often a result of human actions rather than divine arbitrariness. Moses’s argument reflects this view, suggesting that the earth’s misfortunes are a product of human misdeeds rather than direct divine intervention. This aligns with the Islamic perspective that suffering is not always a direct punishment from God but can reflect human moral failings. The dramatic twist which occurs when the mother convinces Moses to leave Paradise and join her in protest challenges both the character's traditional role and the broader theological implications. By persuading Moses—a prophet and a figure associated with divine communication—to side with her protest, the play suggests a radical reinterpretation of the relationship between the divine and human spheres. It implies a form of divine dissatisfaction or disconnection, where even a prophet feels compelled to align with human suffering and injustice. The Sacred and the Profane Set against the backdrop of the Tuwa Valley, a revered site where Moses conversed with God, Ya Rab! portrays the dichotomy of the sacred and profane, in which protest serves as a critique of religious and political powers in Iraq. It challenges established hierarchies and confronts the sanctity of divine authority with compelling urgency and sociopolitical critique. At its heart are revered figures like Moses who, anchored by the omnipresent God, becomes a stage for profound theological inquiry and existential reckoning. The narrative's power lies in its exploration of the profane—the earthly and the maternal—as embodied by the mothers who dare to breach the sacred confines of Tuwa Valley, demanding an end to death and violence with the threat to cease worshiping. Their audacious intrusion disrupts the established order, symbolizing a defiance that challenges the very essence of religious authority. Mirroring Moses's barefoot approach to God as described in the Quran (20:12), the mother’s presence signifies a radical departure from conventional norms, asserting the mothers’ agency in the face of perceived divine injustice. Their dissent extends beyond mere rebellion to a direct confrontation with the divine. They engage Moses in heated dialogue, invoking Quranic verses to justify their grievances and asserting the primacy of their earthly suffering over the sanctity attributed to prophets. Their protest, situated within the socio-political landscape, critiques how those in power manipulate religious rhetoric to justify oppression and maintain control. Moses, embodying religious authority, uses familiar discursive platitudes, such as “God wishes to test your patience” and “death is a law of life” to quell the mother’s anguish and dissent amid violence and death. These statements not only normalize her suffering but also encourage passivity, framing any resistance as a challenge to divine will. By suggesting that her deceased sons are “in paradise,” he offers comfort while dismissing her grief, reinforcing the notion that enduring injustice is part of a divinely ordained fate. He advises her to be patient and strong, pray, and not revolt against God’s will. This rhetoric ultimately serves to maintain the status quo, silencing dissent under the guise of religious reassurance. Breaking Religious Taboos Ya Rab! stirs controversy primarily through its bold interrogation of religious taboos. The play directly challenges divine authority by depicting a grieving mother who confronts God’s perceived inaction regarding her suffering and that of her community. This confrontation is controversial because it deviates from traditional religious reverence, which typically holds God as an omnipotent and untouchable figure. By having the mother threaten to abandon prayer and fasting unless her demands are met, the play questions the efficacy of these sacred practices, which can be seen as an affront to deeply held beliefs. Another contentious aspect is the portrayal of the prophet Moses. Instead of representing Moses as a revered messenger of God, the play uses him as a mediator who struggles to address the mother’s grievances and answer her questions. This depiction potentially diminishes the sanctity and authority of prophetic figures, making it problematic for those who view such portrayals as disrespectful. By showing Moses as somewhat ineffective in negotiating with God, Al-Zaidi disrupts traditional views of the prophetic role and its perceived divine authority. The play’s depiction of divine inaction or detachment is also controversial. Islamic religious traditions teach that God is actively involved in human affairs and responsive to human suffering. Al-Zaidi’s portrayal of a seemingly indifferent or silent God challenges this belief, presenting a divine being that does not intervene in the face of injustice and violence. This representation can be perceived as offensive by those who see it as undermining the concept of a benevolent and involved God. Finally, the play’s reception reflects its controversial nature. Critics praised its daring approach and its critique of how religious and political authorities exploited sacred narratives. The play’s radical approach to sacred themes and figures provoked strong reactions, highlighting the tension between artistic expression and religious respect. [1] In this section, I draw upon the scholarship of Hadeel Abdelhameed and Ghyath Alkinani, who provide a performative model of mother activism in Iraq. For more details, see their work, "Mothering the Protest: Gender Performativity as a Communication Mechanism in the Iraqi Protest Movement," in The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Media and Communication in the Middle East and North Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Amir Al-Azraki is a playwright, literary translator, Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, and Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures Program at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. Among his plays are: Waiting for Gilgamesh: Scenes from Iraq , The Mug , and The Widow . Al-Azraki is the translator of Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary , author of The Discourse of War in Contemporary Theatre (in Arabic), co-editor and co-translator of Contemporary Plays from Iraq , “A Rehearsal for Revolution”: An Approach to Theatre of the Oppressed (in Arabic), and co-editor and co-translator of Arabic poetry in Consequence , The Common , Poetry Foundation and Talking Writing . Amir Al-Azraki, PhD, (he/him) Program Coordinator, Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures Associate Professor, Culture and Language Studies Renison University College, affiliated with the University of Waterloo aaliazraki@uwaterloo.ca 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 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from London (December 2022) Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF By Dan Venning Image Credits: Article My last theatre-going trips to London were in 2018 and 2019, before the COVID pandemic swept across the globe, shuttered theatres, and transformed theatre-going after the world began to reopen. In the reports I wrote for European Stages after those trips, I identified several major trends that ran through many of the productions I saw. In 2018, numerous productions engaged, in one way or another, with the global #MeToo movement, acknowledging the assaults and microaggressions faced by women and AFAB (assigned-female-at-birth) people. At the end of 2019, only a few months before the pandemic struck, Britain was gearing up for a national snap election that was, in some respects, a sort of second referendum on Brexit. In this particular moment, many of the productions I saw dealt with Britain’s place (often as a former imperial power) in global politics, or the marginalized people within British society. In December 2022, I once again spent nearly a month in London, taking twenty students from Union College in Schenectady, NY to see shows across the city. As in my previous trip, I selected shows eclectically to show my students just some of the many sorts of theatrical productions available in London: West End musicals ( Cabaret ), works at the National ( Hex and Othello ), shows in Shakespeare’s Globe’s indoor candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse ( Hakawatis and Henry V ), new works ( My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican, Baghdaddy at the Royal Court, The Doctor and Orlando on the West End), and long-running mainstays ( The Woman in Black and Heathers ). In addition to the productions I saw with my students, I separately attended As You Like It at the new @sohoplace theatre; my first West End panto, Mother Goose ; the long-running & Juliet on the West End in advance of its Broadway transfer; and A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida, which had sold tickets so quickly that I could not book for my large student group. While my previous London reports consisted of similarly diverse shows, in this iteration, I found few thematic links running through the content or staging of these works. If there was a link between these shows, it was the truism that artists and audiences are rediscovering how to engage with theatre in the post-COVID landscape. Indeed, COVID continued (and continues) to affect how theatre is made and seen. About half of the audience members were masked at every performance (I was always masked). Several members of my term abroad contracted COVID while in London and had to quarantine for five days and miss performances. I had booked tickets to Tammy Faye at the Almeida, a new musical (with music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears, and book by James Graham, featuring superstar Andrew Rannels among others, based on the life of evangelist Tammy Faye Messner), but several performances, including ours, were cancelled due to illnesses in the cast. I booked another show to make up for the cancellation: the solo piece One Night Stand with E.V. Crowe and friends at the Royal Court… and then that was also cancelled due to illness (thankfully Orlando , which I booked at that point, was not cancelled!). And yet throughout the theatres, there was palpable joy—even in the grimmest productions—that artists and audiences were once again able to come together in the same space. Because I found few concrete links beyond the ways COVID continues to inflect theatre-going, I discuss the productions irrespective of the order in which I saw them, but in ways that allow me to draw links between particular shows. Both the first ( Cabaret , 1 December 2022) and final ( A Streetcar Named Desire , 23 December 2022) productions I saw were directed by Rebecca Frecknall, Associate Director for the Almeida Theatre. Frecknall is an unabashedly feminist director who reimagines classic dramatic works—often American—for the contemporary stage and her work desperately needs to be seen on major stages in the United States. Her Summer and Smoke in 2018 was haunting in its simplicity and Patsy Ferran justifiably won the Olivier for her luminous performance; unfortunately Frecknall’s 2019 The Duchess of Malfi featuring Lydia Wilson was less so, sapping the play of its disturbing power in a bland, ultramodern staging that seemed to focus more on the men than the titular Dutchess. I’m glad to say that both of her productions I saw in 2022 were stellar. Cabaret was staged at the Playhouse Theatre on the West End, which was rechristened The Kit Kat Club. Audience members entered through the stage door and wound their way through the basement halls of the theatre, as if we were entering the venue depicted in the show. Stickers were placed over our cell phone lenses to prevent photographs and everyone was given a shot of vodka. Cast members of various genders dressed in vaguely BDSM sexual garb made eyes with us and danced provocatively. Three separate bars were set up in each lobby level and a half hour before curtain an elaborately staged dance number by the “boys and girls” of the Kit Kat Club was executed on the bar of the main lobby (Julia Cheng’s choreography was impressive throughout the show, but particularly here). The show had swept the 2022 Olivier Awards but by the time I saw it all the stars who had won acting awards had rotated out. The Emcee was played by understudy Matthew Gent at this performance and Sally Bowles by swing/alternate Emily Benjamin (both of whom would take over the roles as main cast in 2023), yet this cast was spectacular. Of particular note were Michelle Bishop as Frӓulein Kost (and the Kit Kat girl Fritzie), Vivien Parry as Frӓulein Schneider, and Benjamin as Sally Bowles. Parry seemed to channel the spirit of Lotte Lenya with her rendition of “So What” and Bishop, under Frecknall’s direction, brought genuine pathos to the role of Kost. As a prostitute at the bottom of the social hierarchy, we could understand how Kost would embrace Naziism to find anyone she could denigrate in response to the way society had rejected her. At the end of the show, Benjamin’s rendition of “Cabaret” was among the strongest musical numbers I’ve seen live, surpassing, to my mind, recordings of Liza Minelli: the upbeat lyrics paired with her personal despair had much of the audience in tears. Sid Sagar as Cliff Bradshaw was less successful, but this may be because he seemed to have been directed to be emotionless throughout, preventing any sort of audience empathy with the character who was the analogue of Christopher Isherwood, the queer author of the stories on which the musical is based. Tom Scutt’s stage was almost in the round and his costumes implicated the audience in the rise of fascism that Kander, Ebb, and Masteroff’s show depicts. The Emcee rose from the stage gleefully with a tiny party hat for “Wilkommen” as everyone reveled together in the celebration we were attending; by “Money” he was dressed in a neo-fascist demonic outfit, and at the end of the show he and the boys and girls of the Kit Kat Club wore simple, sexless brown outfits, evoking Hitler’s brownshirts a century ago in the 1920s. Yet in the final moments as they marched in a circle carrying suitcases, Isabella Byrd’s lighting turned the set to a stark gray, making them look like photos of men and women with suitcases on their way to trains to concentration camps. Collaboration would save no one. Thankfully, Frecknall’s production (with original star Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee) is transferring to Broadway in 2024, when the August Wilson Theatre will temporarily become the Kit Kat Club. Cabaret . Photo: Marc Brenner. Of all the shows I saw in London, Frecknall’s version of A Streetcar Named Desire was the strongest—easily the best Tennessee Williams I have ever seen—despite the fact that it was in previews with the actor playing Blanche holding her script throughout. The production sold out within hours of tickets going on sale, but Lydia Wilson, who had been cast as Blanche, dropped out of the production for health reasons two weeks before performances began. The first week of performances were cancelled and Wilson was replaced by Patsy Ferran, who had been such a revelation as Alma in Summer and Smoke four years earlier. On the preview I attended, after barely two weeks of rehearsal, Ferran carried her script, occasionally glancing quickly at it at the beginning of each scene, but never looking at it again. Also at the performance I attended on 23 December, Frecknall herself stepped into the role of Eunice (without a script). Seeing her onstage in her own production was a marvelous experience. Madeleine Girling’s set was a nearly bare square with a few scattered props (and periodic rain effects) and Frecknall’s production raced through the words at the beginning of Williams’s script at lightning pace so that the action could effectively open with Blanche’s arrival in New Orleans. Yet this production was less about the conflict between Blanche and Stanley than about toxic masculinity and patriarchal abuse. Blanche was certainly traumatized, but never for a moment portrayed as “crazy,” and Stanley’s violence towards her throughout the play had little to do with any hatred for her per se. Instead, Stanley wanted complete control over his victimized wife Stella—and his clearest path to getting this, as for any abuser, was to isolate Stella from anyone with whom she could find mutual love or care, particularly her sister. The actor who played Stanley, Paul Mescal, was not a hulking brute but appeared to be an attractive, soulful, young husband with a somewhat silly mullet. Yet in spite of this physical attractiveness, Mescal played Stanley as a profoundly ugly man on the inside: consumed with jealousy, self-pity, and white male rage, taking out his anger most clearly on his abused wife, her sister, and his supposed “friend” Mitch. In this color-conscious production, Stella was played by the British-Indian-Singaporean actor Anjana Vasan (so she and Blanche were clearly not full biological siblings, but loved one another no less) and Mitch by Black actor Dwane Walcott. Walcott’s scenes with Blanche and Stanley took on particular resonances—as Stanley viciously notes that Mitch will never achieve his own career successes, or when Blanche asks Mitch if he has been on the titular streetcar and Mitch does not respond. One of many revelations was that Frecknall’s production made it seem as if Mitch must have always been written for a Black actor. Her feminist version of A Streetcar Named Desire (which won an Olivier for Best Revival, and for which Vasan and Mescal also took home Oliviers), even in previews and with Ferran holding her book-in-hand, will make it hard for me to read or see Williams’s play in the same light again. A Streetcar Named Desire . Photo: Marc Brenner. Nearly as successful were two new adaptations of older works: Robert Icke’s The Doctor and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s My Neighbour Totoro . Icke, the former Associate Director for the Almeida (the position Frecknall now holds) created this production at that theatre before it transferred to the West End where I saw it on 8 December 2022. Like his earlier revelatory adaptations Oresteia and Hamlet , The Doctor has since been presented at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The Doctor is Icke’s loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Professor Bernhardi , a work about anti-Semitism in early twentieth-century Europe. While holding fast to most of the events in Schnitzler’s plot—which hinges on a leading doctor’s refusal to admit a priest to deliver last rights to a young girl dying of a botched abortion and the ways in which that Jewish doctor is punished by society—Icke’s adaptation is strikingly contemporary, engaging with identity and perception in today’s world. His script notes that “Actors’ identities should be carefully considered in the casting of the play. In all sections except for [an onstage debate], each actor’s identity should be directly dissonant with their character’s in at least one way […] the acting should hold the mystery until the play reveals it. The idea is that the audience are made to re-consider characters (and events) as they learn more about who the characters are” (viii). For example, when a priest (who we later learn is Black) enters in Act I, the stage direction reads “ The FATHER is played by a white actor .” Hardiman, a particularly chauvinistic white male doctor, was played by the female Afro-Jamaican actor Naomi Wirthner. The central character, Dr. Ruth Wolff, was played by Juliet Stevenson, an actress who does not “look Jewish” at all. Wolff claims to see only talent and facts, never race or sex, and the audience is forced to engage with what actually not seeing these palpable facts about identity would feel like. In one particularly affecting moment, Ruth’s neighbor Sami, played by cis woman actor Matilda Tucker, is revealed to be a trans girl who appears masculine to most people who can see her within the world of the play. We periodically see flashbacks to Ruth’s conversations with her deceased partner Charlie, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, the disease Ruth seeks to cure. Charlie was played by the Black woman actor Juliet Garricks, but Icke never lets us learn Charlie's “actual” gender or race within the world of the play. Hildegard Bechtler’s simple and evocative set and costumes (the set was simply a slowly rotating white room) contributed to all these effects. Icke’s challenging production forced audiences to engage with what they can, cannot, or will not see. The Doctor . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The RSC’s My Neighbour Totoro (7 December 2022) was another stellar adaptation. It won Olivier awards for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play as well as for Phelim McDermott’s direction, Joe Hisaishi’s music as orchestrated and arranged by Will Stuart, Jessica Hung and Han Yun’s lighting design, Tony Gayle’s sound design, Tom Pye’s set design, and Kimie Nakano’s costume design. Also certainly deserving of an award—although an Olivier category does not exist—were Bail Twist’s puppet designs, which were created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, Significant Object, and Twist’s own Tandem Otter Productions. The production was a faithful adaptation by Tom Morton-Smith of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 Studio Ghibli animated film My Neighbor Totoro , about two sisters who move with their father to the rural Japanese countryside in 1955 so that they can be closer to their mother who is in a specialized hospital. In the countryside, the sisters—Mei, aged four, and Satsuki, aged ten—discover mythical creatures from Japanese folklore, including soot spirits, “Totoros” (kind and intelligent furry forest creatures varying in size from tiny to immense), and a giant cat that is also a bus in which the creatures ride. The sisters see tiny sprouts grow into giant trees overnight. Miyazaki’s masterful animated film is a paean to childhood, Japanese folk culture, and imagination, made even more powerful through Hisaishi’s unforgettable score. A cartoon, with all its impossible magic and music, was brought to life onstage through astounding performances by an entirely Asian cast, including twenty puppeteers in Bunraku-style black outfits, singer Ai Ninomiya, and the award-winning designers. Adult actors Mei Mac (Mei), Ami Okumura Jones (Satsuki), and Nino Furuhata (Kanta, a young neighbor boy) empathetically played young children in a way that contributed to the affective power of the production. During the curtain call, the puppeteers swiftly demonstrated how they had manipulated some of the puppets, from the hand-and-rod chickens to the immense King Totoro and Cat-Bus. Notably, production press photos never show the Totoros; they have to be seen to be believed (the production is being revived in 2023 in London and I have no doubt it will tour worldwide considering its success there). My Neighbour Totoro . Photo: Manuel Harlan. Coincidentally, another production I attended was also an adaptation of a film released in 1988: Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s Heathers , based on the cult film written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehmann (13 December 2022). The musical adaptation of Heathers has similarly achieved cult status with young musical theatre aficionados, despite never having been staged on Broadway. It opened off-Broadway in 2014 at New World Stages, then premiered in the UK (with a few rewritten songs) at the off-West End venue The Other Palace in 2018, transferred to the West End later that year, transferred back to The Other Palace after the pandemic in 2021, and closed in 2023. All of these productions were directed by Andy Fickman. Heathers is set in Westerberg High School in the 1980s and centers on Veronica, a girl who manages to gain acceptance from the popular clique of Heather Chandler, Heather McNamara, and Heather Duke, at the cost of her friendship with the unpopular Martha Dunnstock. Veronica begins a relationship with a new boy at school, the soulful outsider J.D., who reveals himself as a full-fledged sociopath, poisoning the lead Heather and murdering two jocks who try to sexually assault Veronica. Veronica goes along at first—penning a fake suicide note from Heather Chandler that takes the school by storm and later helping to stage the killings of Ram and Kurt as a murder-suicide as if the two were closeted gay lovers. But when J.D. decides to blow up the entire school, Veronica finally takes the initiative and stops his murderous rampage. At the off-West End Other Palace, Fickman’s production as designed by David Shields lacked any technical spectacle but the energetic performances by young actors Erin Caldwell (Veronica), Nathanael Landskroner (J.D.) and Maddison Firth (Heather Chandler) brought the mostly young audience to their feet. O’Keefe and Murphy’s songs from the show are superb, particularly Veronica’s joyously sexual “Dead Girl Walking,” Kurt and Ram’s Dads’ “My Dead Gay Son,” J.D.’s “Our Love is God,” the Heathers’ show stopping poppy “Candy Store,” and the eleven o’clock number “Seventeen,” an ode to high school life. While Heathers had a significant run on- and off- the West End, it pales in comparison to The Woman in Black , which opened in London in 1989 (only one year after the original films of Heathers and My Neighbor Totoro were released), closing in March 2023 after running thirty-three years on the West End. Scores of actors have played the roles of Arthur Kipps and the young unnamed Actor who endeavors to bring Kipps to life (as well as the uncredited ghost role) and playwright Stephen Mallatratt died in 2004 less than halfway through the show’s immensely long run (Dame Susan Hill, from whose 1983 novel Mallatratt adapted the play, is still alive and still writing). I was especially glad to see the show on 6 December 2022 only months before it ended its historic run. It has made its way into numerous British school curriculums and part of the audience was filled with teenagers in school uniforms who had been bussed in to see the show on the West End. Robin Herford’s production, simply designed by Michael Holt, takes place “in this Theatre in the early 1950s” and begins when Arthur Kipps (Julian Forsyth, when I saw it) attempts, poorly, to tell his haunted ghost story for the stage. With a few simple props, the young Actor (Matthew Spencer) takes on the role of the young Kipps, while Kipps himself plays every other character (save the ghost) from his past. Through the power of the imagination, affecting performances, one uncredited woman actor, and a few carefully placed jump scares facilitated by Kevin Sleep’s lighting design and Sebastian Frost’s sound design, the audience is transported from a bare stage into a small seaside town and its haunted house on the moors. Rumors abound of ghosts in London’s theatres—including the murdered actor William Terriss at the Adelphi and the 18 th Century “Man in Gray” at Drury Lane—and if such ghosts do exist, I expect the Fortune Theatre will be a stage haunted by The Woman in Black for some time to come. The Woman in Black . Photo: Mark Douet. In contrast to the simplistic power of imagination celebrated in that show, Hex at the National Theatre (5 December 2022) demonstrated the ways in which spectacle—and powerful performances—cannot save a thoroughly misconceived production. Staged in the National’s massive Olivier Theatre, with its marvelous gigantic drum revolve stage, Hex , a musical adaptation of the Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, is obviously a pet project for Rufus Norris, the artistic director and chief executive of the National. Norris, who directed the production, also wrote the lyrics and developed the concept along with Katrina Lindsay. The convoluted book for Hex is by Tanya Ronder and music is by Jim Fortune. Lindsay’s set and costume designs are spectacular, including a castle that descends from the upstage wall, three flying fairies who deliver their performances while suspended midair, and numerous other delightfully staged creations, including bumblingly misogynistic princes who wish to wake the sleeping beauty, a chorus of poisonous thorns, and many more fantastical effects. The plot centers on the “low” Fairy (the marvelous singer Lisa Lambe), who loses her powers after accidentally “hexing” the young princess Rose (Rosie Graham) and putting her into a sleep until she can find a true love’s kiss. Fairy wants to regain her powers and join the effervescent “High Fairies” (Kate Parr, Olivia Saunders, and Rumi Sutton), so seeks a prince to undo the curse; she finds him in Bert (Michael Elcock), the half-human son of Queenie (another superb singer, Victoria Hamilton-Barritt), an ogress who has turned vegetarian in order to resist her urges to consume human flesh. After a convoluted plot that also involves generations of stewards named Smith and Smith-Smith (Michael Matus), Fairy sneakily preventing Queenie from eating her grandchildren (Rose and Bert’s children Duncan and Dyllis), and much more, Fairy succeeds and is elevated to “high fairy” status—renouncing her lifelong goal only seconds later to rejoin her earthbound friends. Tone shifts abound—the show was billed for ages eight and up, but in addition to fairy-tale hijinks it includes a baby-eating ogress, graphic descriptions of animal slaughter, and a “comic” song from the princes about sexual coercion. Even worse is the music: Fortune’s tunes and Norris’s lyrics are sometimes earworms precisely because of their banality (Bert cannot stop singing about his name in “Prince Bert,” impressively and athletically choreographed by Jade Hackett; Rose and Bert’s romantic duet “Hello” consists mainly of the words “Hi, Hi, Hello”). Of the twenty-eight songs, eight are reprises (with one song reprised twice). Hex aspired to be a creative retelling of fairy tales along the lines of Sondheim’s Into the Woods , instead it demonstrated what happens when an artistic director of a major theatre is too enamored of his own project. Hex . Photo: Johan Persson. The other production I saw at the National, Clint Dyer’s staging of Othello (16 December 2022), was far more successful. Othello is a deeply troubling play, written by a white man over four hundred years ago but engaging with the charged issues of racism and spousal abuse and murder. Probably my favorite analyses of this play come from the Black British actor Hugh Quarshie (see “Is Othello a Racist Play on YouTube).and Ayanna Thompson’s new intersectional feminist introduction to Arden revised edition (2016)both of which acknowledge the ways in which the play remains strikingly painful today, especially for Black or woman/AFAB readers and audiences. Dyer’s production, in the National’s smaller proscenium Lyttelton Theatre, with a set designed by Chloe Lamford that looked like some sort of public forum, began with a stagehand sweeping the stage as images were projected on the upstage wall showing the long and troubling production history of this play. In Dyer’s production, almost every character, from ensemble members to Cassio (Rory Fleck Byrne), Bianca (Kirsty J Curtis), Montano (Garteth Kennerley), or the Duke of Venice (Martin Marquez) was also credited as “System”—in other words, these people were part of a system of oppression that would lead to Othello and Desdemona’s deaths. Only three characters were not also listed as “System”: Othello (Giles Terera), the Black man oppressed by systemic racism, Desdemona (Rosy McEwen), his white wife who rejects the system to love a Black man, and Iago (Paul Hilton, who was as superb in this as he had been in the benevolent roles of Walter and Morgan in The Inheritance ), who manipulated the system to destroy Othello and Desdemona. Notably, during the trial in Act I, Iago sat to the side alongside Roderigo/System (Jack Bardoe), making a noose out of a long rope. Iago and Roderigo assumed that the trial would be perfunctory and Othello would be executed—and they might have been right, had the Turkish invasion of Cyprus not required Othello’s military leadership. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the production was how Dyer conceived of the role of Emilia/System (Tanya Franks): throughout the production, one of her arms was in a cast and she had a massive black eye. She was obviously being abused by her husband Iago, yet no one commented or even subtly acknowledged this fact. Dyer effectively communicated that systems encourage horrific cruelties (towards women by men, towards Black people by white society) and react violently not to abuse but instead to those who dare to oppose these oppressions. Othello . Photo: Myah Jeffers. Another successful and contemporary staging of a Shakespearean play was Josie Rourke’s gorgeous intersectional production of As You Like It (15 December 2022), the second play to be staged at the new @sohoplace theatre, an ultramodern complex that is London’s first purpose-built West End theatre to open in fifty years. Staged in the round, Robert Jones’s set consisted mainly of a large piano center stage where Michael Bruce played underscoring for the action and accompaniment to the songs (Bruce also composed all the music) throughout the show. When the characters entered Arden, leaves fell from above, covering the stage in an autumnal tapestry. At that point, Jones and Poppy Hall’s Elizabethan-style costumes gave way to more contemporary, rustic attire. Particularly noteworthy was the casting: Leah Harvey (a Black nonbinary female-presenting actor who uses they/them pronouns) played Rosalind—and Harvey was not the only nonbinary actor in the cast: Cal Watson (they/them) played Le Beau and the second de Bois brother. Several of the actors and their characters were deaf, including Rose Ayling-Ellis, who played Celia, and Gabriella Leon, who played Audrey. These identities mattered in the play: Celia and Audrey communicated using a mixture of British Sign Language (BSL) and sign-mime, and most of the characters communicated with them in this way. But the vicious Duke Frederick (Tom Edden) refused to communicate with his daughter in sign, forcing her to lip read and to speak orally to him. Duke Frederick also used his daughter’s disability against her: turning his back to her as he spoke in anger, so that she could not read his lips and understand what he was saying. The play’s scenes of reconciliation and love at the end were particularly moving because of these intersectional identities. Instead of returning in “women’s weeds,” Harvey’s Rosalind simply walked offstage and back on, and then Alfred Enoch’s Orlando recognized them. Ben Wiggins’s Oliver demonstrated his reformation by struggling to learn BSL so that he could communicate with Celia, with whom he had fallen in love. In fact, the American actor Martha Plimpton, always excellent in Shakespeare, despite a solid performance as a female Jacques, with the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, was one of the least compelling parts of the production. Rourke’s staging demonstrated that Shakespeare’s fictionalized Forest of Arden can allow us to imagine and visualize a world where everyone can be celebrated, no matter their race, gender identity or expression, or disabilities. As You Like It . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The same day I saw Othello at the National in the evening (16 December 2022), I had also attended a matinee of Henry V at the nearby Shakespeare’s Globe, meaning that I saw three Shakespearean productions in London within two days. Unfortunately, Holly Race Roughan’s staging of Henry V was the least inspiring of any of the productions I saw during my time in London, including the misconceived Hex . Roughan had a clear concept: that war and power could corrupt even the most well-intentioned leader and that brutally violent men can come to be revered as heroes. Over the course of the play, her Henry (Oliver Johnstone) transformed from an optimistic, well-intentioned ruler to a dangerous psychopath, raging at his people, ordering executions without a second thought, and killing the Dauphin at Agincourt in retribution for the insult that helped spark his war. Henry’s scene with Katherine had not a single spark of romance, but was the culmination of his violence as he demanded her hand in an overtly political marriage, and then the play ended with the scene (usually much earlier in the play; Act 3, scene 4) between Katherine and Alice (Eleanor Henderson) as Katherine began to learn English in preparation for her forced marriage. Perplexingly, this was followed by an epilogue where the actress who had played Katherine, Joséphine Callies, transformed into a modern immigrant, responding to a British naturalization exam; perhaps a comment, albeit unrelated to the earlier action of this production, on the fact that England, which had once had imperialist dreams of conquering foreign lands, after Brexit now places major barriers against Europeans who wish to become British citizens. While Roughan’s concept was clear, everyone spoke Shakespeare’s verse excellently, and the production was one of the best lit I’ve seen in the indoor Wanamaker Playhouse (designer Moi Tran’s metallic upstage wall reflected the candlelight that serves to light productions at this indoor recreation of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars playhouse), little else made sense. Except for Johnstone as Henry, the nine remaining cast members played all the other roles in the play, often with only the smallest costume or accent change meant to indicate a change in character. However, sometimes this convention wasn’t followed: an actor removing a coat might mean a change in character, or simply that character removing their coat. Even for a Shakespeare scholar, it was often unclear to whom Henry was speaking; I could tell that my fellow audience members were totally befuddled. This is the sort of misconceived production that sadly leads modern audiences to feel that they “just don’t understand” (or like) Shakespeare. Henry V . Photo: Johan Persson. Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights , a new play by Shakespeare’s Globe writer-in-residence Hannah Khalil, which I had seen two days earlier at the Wanamaker (14 December 2022) was far more successful. A testament to women’s empowerment, storytelling, and collaborative creation, the play follows five women (Wahida the Dancer, played by Houda Echouafini; Fatah the Young, played by Alaa Habib; Zuya the Warrior, played by Laura Hanna; Akila the Writer, played by Nadi Kemp-Sayfi; and Naha the Wise, played by Roann Hassani McCloskey) who are imprisoned and awaiting their marriage to, sexual assault by, and subsequent execution at the orders of the unseen King, who is currently married to (the also unseen) Scheherazade. In contrast to the original version of the tale, it is not Scheherazade but these women who come up with the stories that Scheherazade will tell her husband, saving all their lives. The play includes riffs on classic stories from the 1001 Nights along with new tales, as if they are stories from these women’s lives, or ones told to them by their mothers, sisters, cousins, or female friends. At one point, they argue about a story that Zuya tells, which metaphorically depicts male violence and women cleverly overcoming it: Akila realizes that it will enrage the King and might lead to everyone’s death, and that this is not the moment to share that particular tale. The women argue about self-censoring, but ultimately agree with Akila that “there is a power in words. Stories. They must be told in the right way and at the right time” (61). The five very different women, placed in the same dire situation, forge close relationships, and earn their freedom, but, as they leave after 1001 nights, they vow to find some way to free Scheherazade (who had shared their stories) from her vicious husband. The moving play, presented with an Arab cast, was aided by the material conditions of the Wanamaker playhouse, where the candlelight (actors had to hold light sources at the same time as playing their roles) enhanced the sense that Rosa Maggiora’s set was indeed a dank prison room, one of the many sorts of cages (metaphorical or literal) throughout history from which women have had to escape. Hakawatis . Photo: Ellie Kurttz. Like Hakawatis, Baghdaddy at the Royal Court (8 December 2022) was a new feminist Arab play—but in every other respect the works could not have been more different. Written by Jasmine Naziha Jones, who also performed the central character, Darlee, a second-generation British-Iraqi girl from age eight to twenty, the play, which is dedicated to Jones’s father, delves into the relationship between Darlee and her Iraqi Dad as the girl comes of age during wars between the West and Iraq. The expressionist play was staged by Milli Bhatia on a set of stairs designed by Moi Tran—similar in some respects to Chloe Lamford’s set for Othello —and also featured a chorus of “Quareens”—“spiritual companions from another dimension,” two female and one male, helping Darlee “reconcile her childhood memories with Dad’s story” as an immigrant (2). Part clown show and part fictionalized reconstruction of a traumatic childhood, the show built up to two monologues: Darlee’s railing against a so-called democratic Western society that has never fully accepted her and Dad’s lament for his family who died in the Iraq war after he came to the UK. The play—and Jones’s performance as a fictionalized version of her younger self—was deeply painful but felt only half-formed, perhaps as do any of our half-remembered recollections of childhood. Baghdaddy . Photo: Helen Murray. Orlando (17 December 2022), as adapted by Neil Bartlett from Virginia Woolf’s novel and staged by Michael Grandage at the Garrick Theatre on the West End, featuring the nonbinary actor Emma Corrin as its titular immortal gender-defying character, was another sort of coming-of-age story. Of course, Orlando comes into his/her/their own over the course of centuries (and also it’s no coincidence that Orlando shares the same name as one of the romantic leads in the gender-bending As You Like It ). Excepting Corrin and Deborah Findlay, who played Mrs Grimditch, a very long-serving confidant to Orlando and the audience, the remaining cast (consisting of one man and eight women or nonbinary performers) all played both a chorus of Virginia Woolfs and Orlando’s many, many loves. When Orlando appears, the audience briefly sees him frontally naked (Corrin wore a prosthetic penis for this moment) and when Orlando transforms into a woman, she is once again naked (although this time only seen from the waist up). The play was a celebration of transformation and potentiality, ending by acknowledging that Orlando might thrive in the world today (or an approaching future, signified by an intensely bright door at the top of Peter McKintosh’s set that Orlando passed through at the end of the play) in a more accepting world that Woolf herself, who committed suicide in 1941, could only dimly imagine. The play was especially moving to my students on the mini-term, several of whom are trans and/or nonbinary; one said she was going to get a tattoo of that bright door that signified the possibilities of the future if we are willing to “try courage” (78). Orlando . Photo: Marc Brenner. Less successful in its feminism but still a delightful spectacle onstage was the jukebox musical & Juliet (20 December 2022), directed by Luke Sheppard with a book by David West Read and featuring over two decades of pop songs written by Max Martin. It’s hard to believe that Martin wrote so many of the best-known hits for artists including Bon Jovi, The Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Britney Spears, Robyn, Kelly Clarkson, Kesha, Justin Timberlake, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, The Weeknd, and more. The show bills itself as a feminist revision of Romeo and Juliet , in which Anne Hathaway, in a frame story, accuses Shakespeare of not giving his doomed heroine enough of a voice or agency and imagines a new ending in which Juliet doesn’t kill herself after awakening to find Romeo poisoned. Taking off from that premise, Juliet (still played, when I saw it years after it opened on the West End, by Olivier-winning Miriam-Teak Lee) goes on an adventure across Europe, along with her friends including the trans character May (now played by nonbinary actor Joe Foster). The show is raucously self-aware (a jukebox sat visibly near the center of Soutra Gilmour’s set and the spectacularly lit titles that descended from the flyspace at the opening, interval, and close resembled nothing more than a West End/Broadway marquee) and builds to Juliet’s rendition of Katy Perry’s “Roar,” which indeed stopped the show for at least a minute of applause after Lee’s performance of the song. The show has since transferred to Broadway, where Justin David Sullivan, the nonbinary actor who played May, declined to be considered for Tonys since the awards continue to require actors be nominated in binary gender categories for men and women. Thankfully, the production has fixed its original gaffe of casting a cis man as a trans character (Arun Blair-Mangat originated the role of May on the West End), but the supposed feminism continues to ring a bit hollow even as Anne, Juliet, and her friends sing about women’s empowerment. Perhaps this is because all of the authors and the director of the show were men: as noted in Hamilton (another musical created almost entirely by men that was intended to reimagine the past more inclusively), “who tells your story” matters and it’s too bad that the producers of & Juliet didn’t find a woman to write the book or direct. Just as much frothy fun, but with a lot less pretense, were two holiday shows I saw towards the end of my trip. Who’s Holiday! at the tiny Southwark Playhouse (19 December 2022) was a solo holiday drag show which was the final work to which I brought my students. Written in 2017 by Matthew Lombardo in the comic verse of Dr. Seuss, the play imagines Cindy Lou Who from How the Grinch Stole Christmas! all grown up, bleached blonde, hard drinking, foul mouthed in rhyme, having escaped a relationship with the Grinch, and planning a Christmas celebration despite constant cancellations from her friends. The play is thoroughly dirty and definitely not for the young children who might still read Dr. Seuss. But, as directed by Kirk Jameson, it is perfect for camp as performed by Miz Cracker, an American drag queen who gained fame on the television show Ru Paul’s Drag Race , and in the end Who’s Holiday! still celebrates the joy and spirit of Christmas every bit as much as its less transgressive source material. Who’s Holiday!. Photo: Mark Senior. My first West End panto was equally delightful, if far more spectacular. Jonathan Harvey’s Mother Goose , directed by Cal McCrystal at the Duke of York’s Theatre (20 December 2022), the same theatre where I had seen The Doctor a few weeks earlier, featured stand-up comedian John Bishop as Vic Goose and the legendary Sir Ian McKellen in drag as Mother Goose (the panto Dame), using wit and constant references to contemporary British politics to facing down holiday financial struggles from exorbitant energy bills. Their struggles are abated by the arrival of a goose (Anna-Jane Casey) who starts laying golden eggs and gives Mother Goose the chance to achieve her dreams of stardom. The songs, dances, and audience participation were all delightful—when one nearby audience member heard that Mother Goose was my first panto, she let me know she had been to hundreds and that this was among the very best she’d ever seen. Yet no one was enjoying themselves more than Sir Ian, obviously gleeful at the chance to ham it up in the sort of work he had adored in his youth. As he delivered key lines from Gandalf in Lord of the Rings or Portia’s “The quality of mercy” speech in the tenor of Mother Goose, his wry smile was infectious and had the audience grinning just as much as he was. On our feet at the end, we were all celebrating the holiday spirit together again, in the theatre. Mother Goose . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The holiday spirit that suffused Mother Goose and Who’s Holiday! in some ways ran through all these productions, even the darkest like Othello, Henry V, The Doctor , and A Streetcar Named Desire , since we were, once again, able to be in London’s excellent theatres together. COVID will remain part of our world for some time to come: many audience members remain masked, theatres have to cancel performances and hire more understudies (or even have the director go on for a role in a pinch!), and more. This is probably a good thing: it has led to conversations about how the arts can be safer and more equitable for everyone. I expect to return to London at the end of 2025 and I am excited to discover what will suffuse the city’s theatrical scene then, when it will have been half a decade since the height of the pandemic. References References About the author(s) Dan Venning is an associate professor in the department of Theatre & Dance at Union College (Schenectady, NY), where he also teaches in the English department and the interdisciplinary programs in American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies. He has published numerous chapters in scholarly edited collections, book reviews, and performance reviews in a broad range of scholarly journals, including several overviews of theatre in London for European Stages . He is currently working on a book about Shakespearean performance and nation-building. 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 Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Frank Hentschker, Jane House | A story of basic and perverse family dynamics, the play is an all-female human comedy in three acts. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, please contact us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu or find it on Amazon. New Plays from Italy Vol 1: The Origin of the World Frank Hentschker, Jane House Download PDF The Origin of the World: Interior Conversation Piece by Lucia Calamaro. Edited by Frank Hentschker. Translated by Jane House. A story of basic and perverse family dynamics, the play is an all-female human comedy in three acts. The Mother Daria lives with her Daughter Federica among bulky modern appliances, godlike monumental figures; they confront reality as they eat, chat, and get dressed. Sometimes other characters in the family constellation, such as the Analyst, join them. The womb of domestic life is staged in chapters, which lead not towards an ending but towards an origin. The play portrays the indifference, rage, and helplessness of those who live with depression. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. By Dia Barghouti Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF The air rose against the door And I thought the wind carried news Oh heart have patience [to endure] the separation From our loved one s [ 1 ] Since Israel began its violent attacks on Gaza and the West Bank over a year ago, Palestinian musicians and performers have been faced with the difficult question of what the role of art is in the midst of a genocide. This was the question with which Palestinian musician and composer Maya al-Khaldi began her performance, titled Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience . She explained that the question of how artists can help their communities survive in the face of such extreme violence was at the heart of her research on Palestinian wailing songs, on which her performance was based. Al-Khaldi’s performance draws on written sources, the sound archives at the Popular Art Center ( Markaz al-Fan al-Sha‘bi, مركز الفن الشعبي) , and her own interviews with women . Based on this research, al-Khaldi composed the music for a collection of songs , the lyrics of which were derived from extinct Palestinian rituals of mourning. In her introduction, she explained that many of these songs disappeared due to the cultural loss incurred with the mass displacement of Palestinians by Zionist forces in the 1948 Nakba ( Catastrophe) and the rise of Wahhabism, which considered such practices to be sacrilegious. Indeed, even during interviews, several of the women reciting the lyrics of these songs would pause for a moment to ask God for forgiveness. Yet the loss, pain, and feelings of longing embedded in these songs are more relevant to Palestinians than ever. By returning to these extinct practices, al-Khaldi is creating a space for Palestinians to come together to mourn the loss and grapple with the immense pain they are enduring. These songs of mourning, and Palestinian wailing practices more generally, used to be performed by women. Citing the lyrics of a song that says “I cry for my soul and most of my wailing is for my wounds,” al-Khaldi explained that such songs can only be performed by those who have endured the pain of loss and that these mourning rituals were a means for people to guide others through the process of grieving. According to al-Khaldi, this is the part played by the nawa ḥ a ( نواحة , the woman who performs mourning songs) in society, a feminist role that continues to have revolutionary potential in the present. During her performance, al-Khaldi explained that the significance of the nawa ḥ a is that they create the space for us to collectively feel our pain as a community, pain we are often denied because of the urgency of needing to find a way to survive. Photo by Soraya El Kahlaoui Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience is part of a series of performances organized by Gradus-العتبة , an initiative started by musician and composer Dina Shilleh to create space for musicians to artistically innovate and collaborate. It was performed twice on the 2nd and 3rd of February 2025 at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah and Wonder Cabinet in Bethlehem. Accompanying Maya in her performance were Sarouna on the Qanun, Faris Amin on the cello, and Zeina Amro as a vocalist. The performance began with a song about a host asking visitors for forgiveness as she is unable to celebrate the Eid (the Muslim feast) because she is in mourning. In a culture that places so much emphasis on hospitality, not being able to celebrate or properly host a guest during the feast represents an immense state of sadness. But it is perhaps also worth mentioning that Eid is also a time of remembering the deceased as it is customary for family members to visit the graves of their loved ones during these times. By the time the first song had finished, an atmosphere of sadness had already overtaken the room. I wondered who the other audience members were thinking of, those who had been martyred in Gaza? Did they have family in Gaza? I thought of a close friend who lost twenty-two family members on the same day as a result of Israeli bombing. Or were they thinking of those who have been killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank? Or those murdered by the Palestinian Authority in Jenin? Perhaps others remembered those who have passed from disease, but is stress and grief not the cause of disease? The second song, an adaptation from a poem from the Ottoman era, then began. [ 2 ] Its slow pace and the repetitive melodies of the cello and qanun were a meditation of the tragedy of loss. Yet it also emphasised Palestinian agency with the alteration of the lyrics to include a verse about a clementine that ‘heals sadness,’ the clementine here being a symbol of resistance. And although there was an element of otherworldliness in the first, it was this second song that made me feel we were on a journey to another time and space. The qanun, cello, singing, and repetition had a mesmerising effect. Along with the surreal aspect of this song, there was almost a hint of the beautiful, as if Khaldi was trying to remind us that there is beauty even in grief. The third song was a supplication to the grave, written in the voice of the deceased. It was mainly composed of repetitions of the verse “oh grave, feel my mother calling, open for her an opening so that she may come and go,” with a deep sense of pain and anguish. It is difficult to describe what occurred with al-Khaldi and her collaborators during this song. It was not only that I felt them feeling their grief in that moment, not only that I saw four individuals come together in a unison that all great performers aspire to, but it was that I felt the room being overtaken by the power of the sound. It was a grief intertwined with anger, as if it were a defiance of death itself. It was at that point that I began to cry. I thought I glimpsed the qanun player tearing up, and then I noticed several members of the audience were also crying. This song embodied the power of grief ; it was simultaneously mourning the dead and challenging the injustice that took them away from their loved ones. The following song began with equal intensity, protesting against the injustice with a demand to be heard: “I yell with a sound with which they will hear me.” It ended with the following verses: You ask for your rights And you are told they are lost My rights have been lost And the one who has wronged me walked away Where are my loved ones? Oh my loved ones, where am I? I wandered in the night With moon and light absent We crossed the flowing sea With no water Gardens in bloom With no fruit Oh people of knowledge Give me an answer The song is not only a poetic commentary on the injustice in which Palestinians live and the pain they are forced to endure but also an act of protest. This sense of defiance permeated the entire performance as if crying were an act of rebellion in itself, for we, too, have the right to feel pain. Perhaps al-Khaldi is right ; perhaps we cannot continue our struggle to survive without taking a moment to mourn the loss. The final song was about a woman’s longing for her martyred son, describing death as “ ghurbih , غربة” or a prolonged journey. And I wondered how many audience members were coming to terms with the reality of never being able to see their loved ones again. The term ghurbih is also used to describe exile and evokes the experiences of Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Nakba as well as Gazans fleeing the genocide. Al-Khaldi’s work is a pertinent reminder of the power of extinct indigenous performance traditions, such as wailing rituals, and their ability to create spaces for people to come together and heal from the ongoing traumas inflicted by Israel’s genocide. However, this return to the past is not about creating static versions of lost forms, for the power of al-Khaldi’s work is her ability to innovate to defy Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid in the present. And as these wailing women guided mourners in the past, al-Khaldi too guides us through an overwhelming pain in a sonic journey that implores us to survive. Research for this article was supported by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities and the Palestinian American Research Center. The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Palestinian American Research Center. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [ 1] Quotation from the second song performed at Maya al-Khaldi’s Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience. [ 2 ] The original song can be found in ‘Ali Hasan Bawab, Mawsu‘at Haifa al-Karmaliya (Amman: Al-Matba‘a al-Wataniyya, 2009), p. 112. The adaptation is from the play Journey to the Third Dimension of a Clementine (Tunis: Dar al-Kitab, 2025), p.79. The song is a collaboration between al-Khaldi and the author. References About The Author(s) Dia Barghouti is a Palestinian playwright and researcher. She holds a PhD in Drama and Theatre Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London (2021) and is currently a Research Fellow at the European University Institute. Her research explores indigenous performance traditions in Tunisia and Palestine, with a special focus on Sufi rituals. Her writings have appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, Performance Research, Theatre Research International, Jadaliyya, Bab el-Wad (Arabic), The Markaz Review, among other academic and cultural journals. She is also the author of several plays, her most recently completed work, Journey to the Third Dimension of a Clementine (Arabic, رحلة للبعد الثالث لكلمنتينا), was published by Dar al-Kitab in Tunis (Maison du Livre, 2025). 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 Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Vanessa Campagna Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 3 Visit Journal Homepage Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives Vanessa Campagna By Published on November 16, 2014 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. by Courtney Ferriter The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 2018) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2018 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center In his recent book Democracy in Black (2016), Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. argues that for Americans, “collective forgetting is crucial in determining the kind of story we tell ourselves. Ours is the chosen nation, the ‘shining city upon a hill,’ as Ronald Reagan called it. America is democracy. . . . To believe this, we have to forget and willfully ignore what is going on around us.”[1] While Glaude is particularly concerned with the distortions and fairy tales Americans continue to tell ourselves about race, Tony Kushner’s epic two-part play Angels in America tackles this same theme of conveniently forgetting and willfully ignoring so as not to disrupt the American self-image with respect to sexual orientation and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play received much acclaim from critics and scholars alike for many years following its initial publication—resulting in initial runs on Broadway and the National Theatre in London in 1992-1993 and an award-winning 2003 HBO mini-series starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson—but more recently, it seems to have fallen out of favor among scholars, despite a successful 2010 revival at the Signature Theatre and a 2017 production at the National Theatre that transferred to Broadway in February 2018. Indeed, many (although not all) scholarly articles that discuss Kushner and Angels in recent years focus on how AIDS functions in the play,[2] with scant consideration of Kushner’s portrayal of democracy. I argue that Kushner is especially relevant in the socio-historical moment in which Americans currently find ourselves—one marked by political polarization and distrust of those who think differently than we do. The 2016 election was symptomatic of these problems and brought them into full view for any who still harbored doubts about how deep this divide runs, but Kushner’s play proves instructive for how to build an engaged democratic citizenry. In the epilogue to Part Two of Angels in America, Prior leaves the audience with an optimistic vision for the future, stating, “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.”[3] He then offers a blessing of “more life,” and the play concludes with the same phrase that appears at the end of Part One: “The Great Work Begins” (Perestroika, 146). As David Kornhaber has observed, many scholars and critics are dissatisfied with the play’s conclusion due to “the reconciliationist politics it seems to espouse,”[4] which for them provides “a too-easy gloss on more intractable problems”[5] that continue to plague society. Thus, Kornhaber reasons, “a lot must depend on how one figures what seem to be the two key concepts of Kushner’s conclusion: citizen and blessing.”[6] Like Kornhaber, I believe that individual understanding of the term “citizens” as well as broader notions of what constitutes citizenship figure heavily in interpretation of both the epilogue and Angels as a whole. Furthermore, I contend that Kushner’s idea of citizenship is necessarily linked to the beginning of the “Great Work” invoked at the end of both parts of the play. In Angels, “citizens” are those who are part of a Deweyan community, made up of diverse people with sometimes conflicting opinions who listen to each other and who are nonetheless connected by their desire to enact positive change in the world, to progress toward a more ideal and inclusive democracy. This is what Prior (and by extension, Kushner) means by “Great Work.” Individualism and undemocratic communication—represented by Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt—fall away by the end of Angels in America, making room for what Atsushi Fujita calls a “a new model of community,”[7] consisting of Belize, Hannah, Louis, and Prior, who value inclusivity and democratic communication. John Dewey argues in Freedom and Culture (1939) for a distinction between “society” and “community.” Society arises from the politics of individual nations, how a particular country governs, and what policies are enforced, whereas community is unrestricted and made up of individuals or groups who share a common solidarity. He explains, “[F]or a number of persons to form anything that can be called a community in its pregnant sense there must be values prized in common. Without them, any so-called social group, class, people, nation, tends to fall apart into molecules having but mechanically enforced connections with one another.”[8] Thus, for Dewey, one characteristic of community lies in shared values. Furthermore, Dewey adds democratic communication to his idea of community, arguing that “there is a difference between a society, in the sense of an association, and a community. . . . Natural associations are conditions for the existence of a community, but a community adds the function of communication in which emotions and ideas are shared as well as joint undertaking engaged in.”[9] In the case of Americans, our joint undertaking is the democratic experiment, and for this reason, we should likewise strive to embody democratic ideals of communication. In the vein of Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy, Kushner emphasizes the importance of inclusive, democratic community in Angels in America. The play models Deweyan communities while also highlighting models that are anti-Deweyan: there is no great community—no solidarity between different groups of Americans—and thus, there is no realized democracy. Kushner writes in the Afterword to Perestroika that Americans “pay high prices for maintaining the myth of the Individual,”[10] which he contrasts with the idea that “the smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.”[11] This juxtaposition of individualism with community, illustrated in the play by Roy and Joe as opposed to the community envisioned in the epilogue, is central to Kushner’s understanding of democratic progress and what it means to be a citizen. Some leftist critics may bemoan the ending of Angels as “turn[ing] away from the kind of collective action demanded by Marx and staged by Brecht,”[12] but as Hussein Al-Badri has observed, the play’s main flaw in this regard is merely presenting “a different politic[s] than its detractors would like it to be.”[13] Kushner is ultimately more concerned with how to enact Deweyan democracy and community—which he believes will lead to real and lasting social change—than he is with envisioning an America based around socialism or Marxism. In recent years, John Dewey’s notions of community and his pedagogy have come under scrutiny from critics who rightly cite the ethnocentrism that undergirds much of his early philosophy in these matters.[14] Thomas Fallace notes that because pragmatism is “a self-correcting theory of knowledge,”[15] by 1916, Dewey understood that “a plurality of cultures was necessary for democratic living and intellectual growth.”[16] Nevertheless, Fallace argues, “ethnocentrism was built right into Dewey’s early pedagogy and philosophy.”[17] This ethnocentrism troubles Dewey’s notion of community; he conceived of community as “not merely a variety of associative ties which hold persons together in diverse ways, but an organization of all elements by an integrated principle.”[18] If Dewey believed that white people represented a more advanced form of civilization that people of color had not yet achieved, then how would it be possible to form a community in which “all elements” are organized by the same principle? As Glaude has noted, democracy for Dewey “is a form of life that requires constant attention if we are to secure the ideals that purportedly animate it.”[19] Likewise, Scott Stroud emphasizes that a “real amount of openness is implicated in the [pragmatist] habits of democracy.”[20] In other words, democracy is a process, one which must continually be reexamined to ensure that we are increasing democracy and participation among citizens, creating a more inclusive community rather than excluding or marginalizing certain voices, as Dewey was guilty of doing in his early career. As Dewey himself put it, “only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach an idea of democracy which is not [merely] utopian.”[21] One particular benefit to considering the vision of Deweyan community and democracy in Kushner’s Angels is that, several generations removed from Dewey, he is interested in how to incorporate citizens from different backgrounds with vastly different life experiences into the great community Dewey envisioned, particularly African Americans and people who identify as queer. Thus, Kushner’s reexamination of community and inclusive democracy as demonstrated in Angels is itself pragmatic in its consideration of the conditions and context of American life and democracy in the 1980s and ‘90s, revising Dewey’s idea of community by incorporating more and varied groups and voices into it. Fallace argues that an important part of Dewey’s pragmatism was context: “all knowledge was context-bound; it served a purpose in a particular situation and its usefulness was dependent upon that context.”[22] Kushner speaks to a particular historical moment in his work on community, examining the anxieties and shortcomings of American democracy in light of black/white and gay/straight relations. Thus, reading Kushner as a pragmatist increases our understanding of what an ideal community might look like, taking into account the experiences of those who are often pushed to the margins of society by the not-so-silent majority. A consideration of how Kushner treated the power disparities he observed at work in society may also prove instructive for how the U.S. might address current forms of oppression and marginalization in society. I argue in the remainder of this essay that the “Great Work” to which Kushner refers at the end of both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika is, in part, a call to the greater democratic community reflected in the play’s epilogue, which is championed over the closed views of community embodied in Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt. Kushner’s vision of Deweyan community emphasizes inclusion and listening to marginal voices, for characters in Angels in America who ignore the voices of the other do so at their peril. Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt are representative of undemocratic communication in the play—Roy because he dominates those around him, and Joe because he cannot be truthful with others or see beyond himself. Dewey writes that in a democracy, “both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express itself, instead of having one party conquer by forceful suppression of the other.”[23] For Roy, suppression of the other in communication is par for the course. One early example of this occurs in Act One, Scene 9 of Millennium Approaches when Roy’s doctor Henry diagnoses him with AIDS. Roy then tries to force Henry to call him a homosexual, finally threatening, “No, say it. I mean it. Say: ‘Roy Cohn, you are a homosexual.’ And I will proceed, systematically, to destroy your reputation and your practice and your career in New York State, Henry. Which you know I can do” (Millennium, 44). When Henry gives him the diagnosis of AIDS, Roy counters, “No, Henry, no. AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (Millennium, 46). Roy forcefully suppresses Henry from telling anyone that Roy is gay by threatening his career, and he even manages to suppress the diagnosis of AIDS. The next time Henry appears is in Perestroika to facilitate Roy’s admission to the hospital, where even his medical charts, as Belize reads them, say “liver cancer” (Perestroika, 21). Roy’s relationship with his nurse Belize in Perestroika is similarly domineering, as Roy makes racist and homophobic remarks, goads Belize into using an anti-Semitic slur in one scene, knocks over pills he is supposed to take, and generally proves to be an insufferable patient. Roy also makes it clear that even though he is somewhat dependent on Belize, he does not consider him an equal in any way. Bemoaning his imminent disbarment in Act Four, Scene 1 of Perestroika, Roy says, “Every goddam thing I ever wanted they have taken from me. Mocked and reviled, all my life” (Perestroika, 87). When Belize identifies and responds, “Join the club” (Perestroika, 87). Roy says, “I don’t belong to any club you could get through the front door of. You watch yourself you take too many liberties” (Perestroika, 87). Shortly after Roy has a series of violent spasms, Belize says that he almost feels sorry for him. Roy is quick to remind him, “You. Me. No. Connection” (Perestroika, 88). Thus, Roy suppresses Belize any time Belize attempts to identify with him in the slightest. If democracy is characterized in part by open communication, then Roy’s constant desire to “win” or conquer in conversations with others exposes him as a totalitarian at heart. Roy’s totalitarian communication is a natural result of his individualism. He relishes his status as “the dragon atop the golden horde” (Perestroika, 55), maintaining that “Life is full of horror; nobody escapes; nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you” (Millennium, 58). This philosophy clearly runs counter to Kushner’s belief in the smallest indivisible unit as two people. Nevertheless, Kushner includes Roy in the play, explaining in an interview that he is “a part of the gay and lesbian community even if we don’t really want him to be a part of our community.”[24] This indicates a capacity for inclusivity in his democratic vision that Roy himself disdains in the play. This inclusive community is similarly emphasized when Louis, aided by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, recites the Mourner’s Kaddish for Roy, thus accepting him into the greater Jewish community of which they are part (albeit in death). While Joe is not like Roy in his communication in the sense that he has to win or dominate others in conversation, his general dishonesty and unwillingness to take responsibility for his actions make him undemocratic in his dealings with other characters in the play. Kushner has sometimes been criticized in scholarship on Angels in America for being too hard on Joe. Hussein Al-Badri, for example, asserts that Kushner’s omission of Joe from the community included in the epilogue runs counter to Kushner’s “own political ideology of inclusion and inclusiveness.”[25] However, this dramatic punishment seems more fitting when Joe’s undemocratic communication and individualism are taken into consideration, for then it is clear that like his mentor Roy, Joe too spurns community and democratic communication. Dewey argues for truthful communication in “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” writing, “knowledge of conditions as they are is the only solid ground for communication and sharing.”[26] Joe lies about his identity as a gay man to his wife Harper, he keeps from Louis the fact that he is a Mormon, and he repeatedly tells Harper that he is not going to leave her, only to abandon her anyway. Because Joe lacks a foundation of truthfulness with people who are important to him, open, democratic communication is not possible. Like Roy, Joe also acts with the individual—himself—in mind, rather than considering community or the circumstances and experiences of others. Following an irreparable fight with Louis in Perestroika, Joe tries to return to Harper, not because she needs him but because he is thinking of himself. He tells her, “I don’t know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world. . . . Please, please, don’t leave me now” (Perestroika, 139). Joe is unable to sustain a community or communicate democratically with others because he never considers the experience of the other person and only considers his own needs and desires. In fact, Joe even tells Louis that “sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be,” (Perestroika, 73) a notion that serves as Joe’s modus operandi throughout the play. Deweyan communication requires what Hongmei Peng calls sympathetic thinking, the ability to “step outside of [one’s] own experience and see it as the other would see it by putting [oneself] in the place of the other and using imagination in order to assimilate the other's experience.”[27] Since Joe proves incapable of imagining the other’s experience, he necessarily excludes rather than includes others in his would-be community, particularly Harper and Hannah. His unwillingness or inability to change in this regard is why he is not included among the democratic “citizens” in the epilogue, since undemocratic communication and exclusive community building stand in opposition to Kushner’s Deweyan model of community. Although Roy and Joe form a community of sorts in Angels, it proves to be undemocratic and representative of anti-Deweyan communication. In spite of the father/son-type relationship that Roy and Joe maintain throughout most of the play, there is much that they keep from one another, and their relationship is marked as much by silence as it is by the closeness and warm feelings for one another as mentor and mentee. This silence comes to a head in Act Four, Scene 1 of Perestroika, when Joe visits Roy in the hospital. When Joe reveals that he left his wife Harper and has been living with Louis, Roy forcefully silences Joe: JOE: Roy, please, get back into… ROY: SHUT UP! Now you listen to me. [. . .] ROY: I want you home. With your wife. Whatever else you got going, cut it dead. JOE: I can’t, Roy, I need to be with… ROY: YOU NEED? Listen to me. Do what I say. Or you will regret it. And don’t talk to me about it. Ever again. (Perestroika, 85) Roy not only silences Joe in this particular moment of the play, but he commands him never to speak of his relationship with Louis or to make any allusion to homosexuality again. Thus, Roy’s silencing of Joe is distinctly undemocratic and unrepresentative of the kind of communication expected in a democratic community. Far from being an outlier, this is not the first time Roy has stifled Joe’s communication with him. Rather than being open to hearing what Joe wants to express (even if he disagrees with it), Roy chastises him in Millennium Approaches for having ethical reservations about interfering with the disbarment committee hearing, calling Joe “Dumb Utah Mormon hick shit” (Millennium, 106) and “a sissy” (Millennium, 107). As for Joe, he claims to love Roy, but is unwilling to go to bat for him when the chips are down. Although this is a legal as well as an ethical quandary, it demonstrates that Joe’s love for Roy is more theory than practice. He asserts, “I’ll do whatever I can to help,” (Millennium, 66) but those are empty words, since he ultimately refuses the job in Washington he is offered and fails Roy. Joe and Roy cannot agree on a shared ideal toward which they can work together, and thus, their efforts at community building are doomed to fail. Given Dewey’s assertions that community involves “communication in which emotions and ideas are shared”[28] and that such community is “a pressing [concern] for democracy,”[29] Roy and Joe fail at both democratic communication and maintaining a community even with one another. In addition to their undemocratic communication, Roy and Joe are devoted to exclusion rather than inclusion and to individualism rather than community, qualities that are distinctly anti-Deweyan, and for which (along with their undemocratic communication) they are dramatically “punished” by Kushner. Roy succumbs to his illness, while Harper leaves Joe for good and Joe is nowhere to be found in the democratic community of the play’s epilogue. Unlike Roy and Joe, Louis is able and willing to change, demonstrating by the end of the play a commitment to open communication and revising harmful beliefs and actions. While Louis initially abandons Prior when the effects of AIDS become more than he can handle, he eventually sees the error of his ways and atones for his past misdeeds. Prior tells Louis when they meet after Louis’s month-long absence in Perestroika that when he cries, he “endanger[s] nothing. . . . It’s like the idea of crying when you do it. Or the idea of love” (Perestroika, 83). Similarly, Belize remarks to Louis in Millennium Approaches, “All your checks bounce, Louis; you’re ambivalent about everything” (Millennium, 95). For much of the play, Louis claims to support things in theory, but his practice reveals his own ambivalence on the subject, from his alleged love for Prior to his support of the Rainbow Coalition. However, following a conversation with Belize in Act Four, Scene 3 of Perestroika in which Belize observes that Louis is “up in the air, just like that angel, too far off the earth to pick out the details. Louis and his Big Ideas. Big Ideas are all you love,” (Perestroika, 94) Louis realizes that theory and practice must be joined, both in love and in democracy. This is confirmed for him when he researches Joe’s legal decisions written on behalf of Justice Wilson and finally understands that Joe, who wants to be “a nice, nice man” (Millennium, 107)—as Roy aptly puts it—has rendered legal decisions that have real and damaging consequences for children and gay people. Dewey argues for praxis in democracy, asserting that democracy is “a personal way of individual life. . . . Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections, and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes.”[30] Joe thus expresses a clearly undemocratic viewpoint when he tells Louis of his legal decisions, “It’s law not justice, it’s power, not the merits of its exercise, it’s not an expression of the ideal” (Perestroika, 109). The discrepancy between Joe’s theory and practice in multiple areas of life, including love and democracy, causes him to think that he must accommodate himself to institutions—like “legal fag-bashing” (Perestroika, 109) or heterosexual marriage, for example—rather than viewing such institutions democratically, as potential sites for expressing his own experiences and habits. Louis recognizes his own behavior in Joe’s habits, and after their fight, Louis finally understands the extent to which he has failed Prior. He later asks to come back to Prior and tells him, “Failing in love isn’t the same as not loving. It doesn’t let you off the hook, it doesn’t mean you’re free to not love,” (Perestroika, 140) indicating a respect for praxis that he previously lacked. In addition, Louis gains “expiation for [his] sins” (Perestroika, 121) through his recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish for Roy Cohn. Although he had previously refused to identify with Roy in any way, calling him “the polestar of human evil … the worst human being who ever lived, he isn’t human even,” (Perestroika, 93) with some coaxing from Belize and help from Ethel Rosenberg’s ghost, Louis recites the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, thus affirming Roy as part of the Jewish community. Framji Minwilla argues that the coming together of Belize, Ethel, and Louis to say Kaddish for Roy “invent[s] a more complex yet exact sense of self and a more expansively conceived idea of community.”[31] This community is a democratic one, in which people who have ideas and beliefs differing from the mainstream (like Roy, for whom this is the case not in life nor in the Reagan years of the play, but within the politics espoused by Kushner and the characters in the epilogue of Angels) are nevertheless included and acknowledged as part of the larger community. Based on his joining together of theory with practice and expanding his idea of community by praying for Roy, Louis is able to participate as a “citizen” in the epilogue: he argues at points with Belize about politics, but he is ultimately able to listen and value the presence of differing opinions in his community. Prior also makes a few missteps, but like Louis, he ultimately “succeeds because he is willing to change,”[32] to become more democratic in his communication with others and his vision of community. For instance, when he first meets Joe’s mother, Hannah, he assumes that because she is Mormon, she must be trying to convert him when she helps him to the hospital. After they arrive at the hospital, Prior tells Hannah about his visit from the Angel, and she says he had a vision, drawing a comparison with Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and Prior once again rushes to make assumptions about her because of her Mormonism: PRIOR: But that’s preposterous, that’s… HANNAH: It’s not polite to call other people’s beliefs preposterous. He had great need of understanding. Our Prophet. His desire made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real. I believe that. PRIOR: I don’t. And I’m sorry but it’s repellent to me. So much of what you believe. HANNAH: What do I believe? PRIOR: I’m a homosexual. With AIDS. I can just imagine what you… HANNAH: No you can’t. Imagine. The things in my head. You don’t make assumptions about me, mister; I won’t make them about you. (Perestroika, 102) This is the first moment of democratic communication between Prior and Hannah. He acknowledges her point, listening and taking to heart her experiences. This openness serves him well when Hannah advises, “An angel is just a belief, with wings and arms that can carry you. It’s naught to be afraid of. If it lets you down, reject it. Seek for something new” (Perestroika, 103). Prior takes her advice, struggling with the Angel of America and returning the Book of the Anti-Migratory Epistle to Heaven. He previously identified with the Angels—their abandonment by the Almighty and desire to go back—but ultimately he insists upon progress and forward movement. Additionally, Prior’s vision of community becomes more expansive and inclusive by the end of the play. He tells Louis in Millennium Approaches that if Louis walked out on him, he would hate him forever. While he does not take Louis back as a partner in Perestroika, he forgives him, tells him he loves him, and Louis remains an important presence in Prior’s life based on their interaction in the epilogue. In Hannah’s first appearance, she does not seem particularly inclusive or capable of democratic communication given her outrage at Joe’s admission that he is gay, however she experiences a transformation in Perestroika and shows more concern for others, particularly Prior and Harper. Despite Hannah’s somewhat gruff manner—she is described by Sister Ella Chapter in Millennium Approaches as “the only unfriendly Mormon [she] ever met” (Millennium, 82)—and her claim that she “[doesn’t] have pity,” (Perestroika, 101) she tends to both Prior and Harper, both of whom have been abandoned by the person closest to them. Hannah explains her actions by claiming, “I know my duty when I see it,” (Perestroika, 66) which suggests that unlike Joe, she is willing to take the needs and experiences of others into consideration before acting. Much like Dewey, Hannah acknowledges that communication and community require cooperation, “understanding, learning, [and] other-regarding thinking.”[33] Given her sympathy and concern for Prior and Harper as well as her advice to Joe to reflect on his actions and beliefs by asking himself “what it was [he was] running from,” (Perestroika, 96) Hannah has become a Kushnerian “citizen” in the epilogue, musing about the “interconnectedness” (Perestroika, 144) of people in the world and providing hope for Prior to keep moving forward. Her advice to Prior that he should “seek for something new” (Perestroika, 103) if his beliefs fail him demonstrates her own willingness to revise previous assumptions and incorporate new knowledge into her experience, an essential quality in a member of a democratic community. As for Belize, who has been described in scholarship as the moral center of Angels in America,[34] his actions toward Roy and Louis show a commitment to inclusivity in line with Deweyan democratic community. Belize empathizes with Roy and Louis as fellow gay men, despite his outright hatred for some of their actions and ideologies. He advises Roy about the best course of treatment for late-stage AIDS, contra the opinion of Roy’s “very qualified, very expensive WASP doctor,” (Perestroika, 26) and warns him about the double-blind AZT trials. Despite the fact that Roy is a terrible patient and person who, as mentioned previously, takes every opportunity to remind Belize that Roy considers him beneath him, Belize feels, as he puts it, a sense of “solidarity. One faggot to another,” (Perestroika, 27) and reminds Louis that Roy “died a hard death” (Perestroika, 122). With Louis, Belize embodies the democratic value of believing in human nature’s capacity for change. Dewey argues in “Creative Democracy” that democracy is “a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature.”[35] Although Belize disdains Louis for his abandonment of Prior, he meets with Louis in both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika and offers him some moral guidance, indicating that he has not given up on Louis and retains some hope that he will change for the better. Belize’s inclusivity is unsurprising considering his description of Heaven as encompassing “voting booths … everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion” (Perestroika, 76) with gods who are all “brown as the mouths of rivers” (Perestroika, 76). This utopic vision eradicates all of the obstacles to justice and democratic participation of marginalized groups in the United States; everyone has gained suffrage, wealth inequality has been destroyed, and racism, sexism, and transphobia have all been tempered by mixed-race divinities and blurred gender boundaries. Belize’s idea of Heaven is aligned with Kushner’s philosophy on freedom; he argues that freedom “expand[s] outward”[36] and the most “basic gesture of freedom is to include, not to exclude.”[37] This sounds remarkably like Dewey, who concludes in “Creative Democracy” that the task of democracy is always to create “a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.”[38] Belize’s vision of Heaven and Kushner’s understanding of freedom express Dewey’s practical ideal for democracy. The four characters included in the epilogue to Angels in America—Belize, Hannah, Louis, and Prior—represent democratic community either because they have demonstrated a willingness to change, listen to others, and revise previous beliefs/actions in the course of the play, or (in Belize’s case) because that kind of inclusivity and democratic communication had already been attained. Michael Cadden argues that the epilogue to Angels “leaves us with the image of four individuals who, despite their very real differences, have chosen, based on their collective experience, to think about themselves as a community working for change.”[39] Similarly, Ron Scapp suggests that Kushner’s ending embraces “the hope of democracy.”[40] For Kushner, the “hope of democracy” is embodied in these characters who have become “citizens” (Perestroika, 146) with differing thoughts and opinions who are nevertheless capable of working together to accomplish the “Great Work” (Perestroika, 146) of expanding democracy. Roy and Joe, who were neither inclusive of dissenting voices nor able to form democratic communities, are incapable of acting as citizens and thus omitted from the epilogue, even as Kushner includes them in the greater community of the play itself. The epilogue to Angels in America ultimately advocates for a more ideal democracy, which must begin with individuals who act as citizens. This is the kind of democracy envisioned by Dewey, where all citizens believe “that even when needs and ends or consequences are different for each individual, the habit of amicable cooperation … is itself a priceless addition to life.”[41] Such a community stands in stark contrast to the exclusive, undemocratic, and homophobic legislation and political rhetoric of the Reagan years as portrayed in the play and embodied by Roy and Joe. Kushner’s small democratic community at the end of Angels reminds the audience that democracy is a process, one toward which we must constantly work to ensure we are applying the democratic method of expanding rights and freedoms outward, revising beliefs or actions based on experience and new information, and opening ourselves to democratic communication with others. Kushner begins from the premise that including marginalized voices is not only beneficial but essential to democracy. This revises some of Dewey’s early notions, which had been grounded in ethnocentric thinking, and provides a foundation for what including others in a democratic community looks like. The inclusivity Kushner portrays in Angels in America demonstrates that democracy does not mean that all voices are considered to be equally valid; rather, Kushner highlights voices that are similarly committed to democracy as method. Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt provide examples of voices that are too partisan and too committed to their own individualistic and undemocratic ways of thinking. However, it is important to note that such people are not irredeemable; they have the capacity to change, as we see Louis do over the course of the play. As a result, such individuals deserve to be included in the larger community (as Kushner includes Roy) even if their ideology is itself anti-democratic. Kushner cautions, however, that such individualism and anti-democratic thinking is harmful to democratic inclusivity and communication. Thus, anti-democratic ideology must not be allowed to dominate at a legal level, as we see its harmful consequences in the exclusive, homophobic legislation of the Reagan administration. In addition, democratic communication is encouraged on a personal level, too, otherwise relationships and communities run the risk of being torn apart, as evidenced by Roy and Joe or Joe and Harper. Like Dewey, Kushner believes that it is necessary to revise our methods to become always more democratic and more inclusive—like the “citizens” referred to in the epilogue—progressing slowly but ever closer to true democratic communication and community with one another. In our present political moment in the United States, democratic communication and community seem like essential tools to cultivate as we work together toward a future like the one Kushner envisions in his epilogue rather than resigning ourselves to undemocratic rule by the Roy Cohns of the world. Courtney Ferriter is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. Her research interests include American pragmatism and 20th century Jewish and African American literature. She has published articles in James Baldwin Review and Education & Culture. She is currently at work on an article about Harryette Mullen’s poetic wordplay as a form of resistance against white supremacy. [1] Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Broadway Books, 2016), 48. [2] See, for example, Alexander Peuser, “AIDS and the Artist’s Call to Action,” Lucerna 11 (2017): 10-22; Dennis Altman and Kent Buse, “Thinking Politically about HIV: Political Analysis and Action in Response to AIDS,” Contemporary Politics 18, no. 2 (2012): 127-140; Laura L. Beadling, “The Trauma of AIDS Then and Now: Kushner’s Angels in America on the Stage and Small Screen,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 5, no. 3 (2012): 229-240; and Claudia Barnett, “AIDS = Purgatory: Prior Walter’s Prophecy and Angels in America,” Modern Drama 53, no. 4 (2010): 471-494. [3] Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika [1992] (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004), 146. All subsequent references to the play will be indicated parenthetically, e.g. (Millennium, 64) or (Perestroika, 75). [4] David Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 728. [5] Ibid. [6] Ibid, 729. [7] Atsushi Fujita, “Queer Politics to Fabulous Politics in Angels in America: Pinklisting and Forgiving Roy Cohn,” in Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays, ed. James Fisher (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), 125. [8] John Dewey, Freedom and Culture [1939] in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 13: 1938-1939, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988): 71. [9] Ibid, 176. [10] Tony Kushner, “With a Little Help from My Friends,” [1993] in Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004), 149. [11] Ibid, 155. [12] Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus,” 736. [13] Hussein Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre: A Study of Political Discourse (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 73. [14] See, for example, Shannon Sullivan, “From the Foreign to the Familiar: Confronting Dewey Confronting Racial Prejudice,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2004): 193-202; Frank Margonis, “John Dewey’s Racialized Visions of the Student and Classroom Community,” Educational Theory 59, no. 1 (2009): 17-39; and Thomas D. Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895-1922 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011). [15] Thomas D. Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895-1922 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 4. [16] Ibid. [17] Ibid. [18] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927), 38. [19] Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 6. [20] Scott R. Stroud, “The Challenge of Speaking with Others: A Pragmatist Account of Democratic Rhetoric,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29, no. 1 (2015): 100. [21] Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 149. [22] Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race, 9. [23] John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” [1939] in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 14: 1939-1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988): 228. [24] Charlie Rose, “Tony, Tonys, and Television,” in Tony Kushner in Conversation, ed. Robert Vorlicky (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998): 46. [25] Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre, 93. [26] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 229. [27] Hongmei Peng, “Toward Inclusion and Human Unity: Rethinking Dewey’s Democratic Community,” Education & Culture 25, no. 2 (2009): 82. [28] Dewey, Freedom and Culture, 176. [29] Ibid, 177. [30] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 226. Emphasis in original. [31] Framji Minwilla, “When Girls Collide: Considering Race in Angels in America,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 110. [32] Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre, 101. [33] Peng, “Toward Inclusion and Human Unity,” 82. [34] See, for example, Minwilla, “When Girls Collide,” 104-105; or Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre, 96. [35] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 226. [36] Tony Kushner, Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 6. [37] Ibid, 7. [38] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 230. [39] Michael Cadden, “Strange Angel: The Pinklisting of Roy Cohn,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 88. [40] Ron Scapp, “The Vehicle of Democracy: Fantasies toward a (Queer) Nation,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 98. [41] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 228. "Are We 'Citizens'? Tony Kushner's Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America" by Courtney Ferriter ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 2018) ©2018 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "'Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something': Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama" by Rosa Schneider "Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging" by Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine "Are We 'Citizens'? Tony Kushner's Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America" by Courtney Ferriter "Edward Albee's Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" by Tison Pugh www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2018 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rahul K Gairola Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Rahul K Gairola By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Kareem Khubchandani’s Ishtyle is an innovative and refreshing critical survey of gay Indian nightlife cultures in diaspora that anchors its theoretical trajectory around the monograph’s title. The book’s originality is announced from its very start, when readers encounter the front matter. The Acknowledgments section is cleverly organized as a playlist of songs that correlate to those who have helped to shape the book’s contents, thus immediately positing readers into a nostalgic past wherein we ourselves used to make mix tapes for friends and lovers. In the Preface, Khubchandani proclaims, “I fucking love drag queens…Drag artists assemble cultural meanings of race, gender, and class on their bodies, relocating us to worlds beyond the club. They make apparent tools – dress, makeup, hairstyle, body modification, comportment, gesture, pose – we can use on and off the dance floor, in and out of the club, to reinvent ourselves, our worlds. Drag offers respite from the night, giving us instruction, emplacement, and orientation in the darkness and din” (xiii). He further details that, years later, in the geographical and untimely “absence of drag, I turned to social dance floors to examine danced styles, what I call ‘drag labor,’ that engendered the socialities described above” (xiv). These ruminations coalesce around the author’s diverse experiences and field work at the Desilicious dance parties in New York City as well as Bollywood cultures, and, as such, the book is an important mash-up between gay cultural studies and South Asian diasporic studies. Khubchandani then gets to the heart of his scholarly intentions: “I am eschewing identity politics, attending instead to aesthetics and performance, to ask: what styles are given value; what are the politics, histories, and circulations of these styles; how do people perform in line with and against dominant stylistic codes; what new forms of relation are made when performances grind against the dominant aesthetics of nightlife?” (xxiii). Khubchandani’s deviation from identity politics, a realm wherein hegemonic queer cultural studies wallow, is an exciting one as it seeks to empower practice over representation while also eschewing the racism, sexism, classism, and queerphobia that often attend, and unintentionally nourish, that critical realm. Rather, Khubchandani’s methodology presents an intersectional heuristic that demands attention to style and performance over appearance and dress, thus flinging the very real materiality of identity politics into kinetic moments that transform cultural meanings with every second. To this end, the author defines the meaning of “Ishtyle” as: “a playful and common South Asian (more particularly North Indian, and even more specifically Bombay) accenting of the English word ‘style’… I mobilize Ishtyle to work beyond its vernacular use and serve as shorthand for ‘accented style.’ Thinking broadly with accents allows me to analyze differences across borders and scales, but also to ask how brown bodies, regardless of cultural performance, are rendered accents” (6). Framing the embodied critical and political stakes of his research, he concludes, “I developed new intimacies with places I already called home, made new friends, and fell in love several times over. Nightlife, proximal to and imbricated in spaces of work, home, protest, and violence, feels present all the time” (27). To this end, the author organizes Ishtyle into three parts, which each contain two chapters. The first part’s two chapters take place and seize space in India’s tech hub, Bangalore. The first chapter, “BInaryC0des: Undoing Dichotomies at Heatwave, ” aims to demonstrate how attendees to Heatwave parties effectively resist binary identities that codify these parties in India’s “Silicon Valley.” Rather than defaulting to Western aesthetics (white, gay, cisgender, masculine, and middle-upper class), attendees resist, argues Khubchandani, corporatized gay culture in favor of accented stylistics of queer nightlife cultures. Its second chapter, “Dancing Against the Law: Critical Moves in Pub City,” focuses on legal restrictions of gay nightlife in Bangalore constellated around the postcolonial country’s notorious, Victorian-era Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This chapter speaks to the ways in which women, trans people, and other queer folx practice ishtyle despite the city’s 2006-2014 ban on social dance – exploring how these ishtyle agents of queerness “dance” around the law. Part II’s two chapters: — “Desiring Desis: Race, Migration, and Markets in Boystown” and “Slumdogs and Big Chicks: Unsettling Orientations at Jai Ho! ” — shifts Khubchandani’s ruminations on ishtyle to the gay environs of Chicago in the United States. Chapter three thus examines the LGBTQI+ neighborhood of Boystown as a marketplace for desi bodies where white gay men view them as ornaments for homonormative whiteness. Leveraging compelling interviews and field research, Khubchandani apprises readers on how “(c)olonial legacies have affixed race, gender, sexuality, linking hyperfemininity and Asiannness, hypermasculinity and Blackness, and passion and Latinidad;” this brings the gay desi male’s “brown migrant body into a kind of good gay gender” (85). In the fourth chapter, the author demonstrates accented cultural elements of Trikone-Chicago (a nationwide, pro-LGBTQI+ South Asian organization), which hosts a quarterly Bollywood dance party called Jai Ho! that definitively challenges the overt orientalism and subtle white supremacy of commercial bars and clubs. Part III examines nightlife choreographies as global accentuations that undergird resistant practices Khubchandani described in Bangalore and Chicago earlier. Yet the author extends analysis by delving into fieldwork that centers, in Chapter five, interviewees’ memories of nightlife, childhood, and, cumulatively, different articulations of “home” and ishtyle as cultural strategies of homemaking. This homemaking occurs in the context of popular Bollywood song-and-dance numbers like those of Hindi film sirens Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit. Chapter six critically ruminates on ishtyle, analyzed through the intersectionality of class, caste, region, and, of course, gender and sexuality. Here, Khubchandani traces dappankoothu music and dance from Dalit communities, threading them through Tamil films and into a queer dance party called Koothnytz— wherein dappankoothu rejects both hetero and homonormative “respectability” by subverting propriety as another strategy of ishtyle. An award-winning volume, Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife is as provocative as the cultural artifacts and films it analyses. The book is at once a glamourous explosion of queer critical cultural analysis that, like a pink-powdered Holi party, at the same time remains down to earth and exceptionally honest, based in Khubchandani’s painstaking field work and ethnographic recordings. Khubchandani has forged a fabulous, compelling comparative study of queer Indian subcultures that deploy ishtyle to subvert the normalized ways in which colonialist and white supremacist gay culture fetishizes Black and Brown bodies, as well as the English language, while lording over them in consumer cultures. While these consumer cultures are staged as celebratory steps towards gay visibility, Khubchandani convincingly urges readers to recognize that any study of non-white, contemporary queer culture is incomplete without a sober reckoning of ishtyle today. This study will be formative for students, teachers, cultural analysists, South Asianists, and general readers alike for the ways in which it encourages us to locate the inflected accents that reimagine ourselves and the daily environs that surround us. References Footnotes About The Author(s) RAHUL K GAIROLA Murdoch 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 “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.